The primary reason for this is the meticulously edited and annotated publication of his letters. The respect and understanding of French culture towards the classics and its tradition of preparing critical editions has resulted in the "Flaubert idea" today and in the sincere respect and admiration garnered by this great writer throughout the world. 

The requisite feeling of "identification" needed to live in accordance with the modernist literary morality is still alive in full force thanks to these letters. Many writers, myself included, have wanted to be Flaubert during a period of their lives. It would be no exaggeration to state that Sartre's Flaubert biography, L'Idiot de la Famille (The Family Idiot, 1971-2) was written to grapple with this feeling or that Julian Barnes brilliant novel Flaubert's Parrot was written in order to prolong endlessly the pleasures of "being Flaubert". 

I've always noticed two basic tendencies among those who wanted to be Flaubert. Allow me to simplify and summarise for the sake of discussing this distinction, which points out two fundamental characteristics of the art of the novel. 

The first type of Flaubert enthusiast admires the author's characteristic venom and voice. I refer to Flaubert's angry, mocking and intelligent voice rising against the ordinary, against average bourgeois life, superficiality and stupidity. At the end of the letter he writes to his mother from Istanbul, we immediately recognise this tone: Flaubert explains mockingly that his soon-to-be-wed friend will fast become a perfect bourgeois gentleman. Ernest will from now on be the defender of the established order, the family and private ownership. He will most certainly declare war against the socialist thinking of his youth. According to Flaubert, his friend's fault is that he takes himself too seriously. His dear friend, who at one time would get drunk and dance the cancan in nightclubs, has become bourgeois first by purchasing a pocket watch and later losing his imagination. With increasing anger towards his old friend now turned bourgeois, Flaubert adds in his letter that he's also certain soon to be made a cuckold by his wife. The authorial voice here is quite close to that of Flaubert's Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881 posthumous) or Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues (Dictionary of Received Ideas, 1911 posthumous). This derisive tone, fed up with the foolhardiness of humanity and especially the bourgeois, gets its strength from Flaubert's intelligence and extraordinary knack for parody. The training of his intellect and humour, which emerges frequently in his letters, upon the target of middle-class values, from which he tried to keep distant throughout his life, and upon the new, comfortable and peaceful daily life created by modernity and industrialisation, gives Flaubert's voice a power with which many writers today enjoy identifying. 

In the 20th century, Flaubert admirers, especially young writers, attached great importance to identifying with this voice and to taking the mask of mockery, cynicism and intelligence from Flaubert and placing it over their own faces. Reading Nabokov's Lolita, one senses a Flaubertian-inspired sensibility behind his scorn of American middle-class life. We all regard an eminent author's derision of human foolishness and mediocrity as appealing. 

We read their books and novels in some respects to hear these voices and live among them. However, should this voice of ridicule become a novel's sole strength, wit and cynicism can in no time become a condescending voice belittling middle-class life, the uneducated, different cultures, and people whose customs vary from our own and are deemed inadequate. In particular, the way European modernism developed outside the West should be seen in the context of this ethical problem.