30 pages • 1 hour read
Fyodor DostoevskyThe Dream of a Ridiculous Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1877A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context: Psychological Realism and Fantastic Realism
A prominent artistic and literary movement of the 19th century, realism seeks to depict objective reality and describe people, events, and other subjects accurately, as they occur in real life. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work falls under this movement, and with a particular focus on the human experience, he portrays his characters through a psychological lens. As is the case with the narrator of “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” psychological realism delves into the inner world of the character and portrays what they experience on the level of emotions, thoughts, and perspective, examining the wider concept of human condition through one character. Exploring the mental world of the character becomes therefore the central point of the story and the driving force of the plot.
Dostoevsky recognized his affinity with realism but added his own qualifier in a famous letter explaining his view: He called his approach “fantastic” realism. He claimed that the extreme, eccentric characters and events that appear in much of his fiction are fantastic when compared to most realist novels. This is necessarily the case, he said, because he is trying to describe a “higher” reality and thus to achieve a higher form of realism.
“The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” exemplifies both aspects of Dostoevsky’s realism and the relationship between them. First, Dostoevsky depicts with great subtlety the mind of the narrator as he vacillates between self-contempt and pride, as well as feelings of contempt for others and the pain that arises from their rejection of him. His nihilistic state of mind and suicidal thoughts dominate the first part of the story. On a narrative level, the story is entirely monologic with no viewpoints from other characters. This puts the attention squarely on the narrator’s own mind and thoughts. Overall, too, a psychological conflict lies at the center of the story—namely, the narrator’s melancholy and self-contempt caused by lack of meaning.
Psychological realism is pushed to the limit, however, when the narrator has an experience of the transcendent in his dream. Fantastic realism takes over as the story’s primary mode, and Dostoevsky explores the narrator’s transformative experience of an imaginary land and a kind of salvation, yet without abdicating the psychological.
Philosophical Context: The Idea of Existentialism
Even though Dostoevsky lived long before the term “existentialism” was created in the 1940s, he is often considered one of the first to explore ideas linked to this philosophical school. Existentialists are concerned with the question of human existence and contemplate the meaning possible for an individual in a world seen as harsh and absurd—if there is any meaning to be found at all. For many existentialists, the concept of free will is important: Human beings are not bound by any universal laws but have the freedom to make choices aligned with one’s own personal values. This means that we can also be held responsible for our actions and that we are responsible for our lives, which can be a fearful realization. Existentialist philosophy therefore frequently covers questions related to morality, values, and what defines a good life.
In Dostoevsky’s work, the characters often struggle with some sort of existential torment; unable to resolve it, they resort to violence or other radical actions. In “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man,” the narrator describes how he was a nihilist, incapable of finding any meaning in life, before his transformative experience. Nihilism is a doctrine that claims life is meaningless and, in some variants, that nothing really exists. Russian nihilism in Dostoevsky’s day was a social movement popular with students and intellectuals who lacked faith in either Russian traditionalism or modernization with its ideas of progress and the perfectibility of man, imported from the West. Dostoevsky’s ridiculous man has fully embraced nihilism in a strong version, with its attendant skepticism and carelessness regarding the lives of others. Dostoevsky uses the character to show the untenability of the position.
Where Dostoevsky and most but not all 20th-century existentialists part ways is in their understanding of how to overcome nihilism. For Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, for example, nihilism is a given: Life is objectively meaningless. The human condition demands both the recognition of this fact and a commitment to creating meaning and thereby overcome nihilism. Only in this way can one be truly free. For Dostoevsky—as well as the other 19th-century founder of existentialism, Kierkegaard—the problem of nihilistic despair is really the problem of Christian sin. As such, nihilism demands a spiritual solution.
Dostoevsky felt that the important things of human existence—truth, beauty, love, and genuine freedom—were only reached in a superficial way by styles of thinking and modes of life that were “trending” in the 19th century, such as utilitarian rationality, self-interested ethics, and scientific determinism. His novels and stories are deeply philosophical engagements with these trends from his own spiritual point of view, which was informed by his Eastern Orthodoxy.
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