In the US today, the commercial success of a novel does not necessarily imply any lessening of its artistic value. In Europe, however, the fact that an author's works are commonly read makes critics approach the writer with suspicion. In small literary centres outside the West, should an elusive and improbable commercial success actually materialise, the author would be likely to live out his days as a wise recluse. In 1960s and 1970s Turkey, it would actually diminish rather than increase a poet's respect to write poems that were widely understood and enjoyed. The streets of small and obscure countries, where books do not sell and no platform is given to authors by newspapers or television programmes, are full of poets and writers espousing literary morality and boasting that their books don't sell and aren't mentioned in the press. Even in America, I've come across many who felt a special awe for writers like J. D. Salinger (another Flaubert admirer) and Pynchon because they never appeared in the media, rather than for their works. 

The true problem with the enthusiastic appropriation and internalisation by literati in Istanbul or other non-Western writer-havens of the modernist literary morality expressed by Flaubert in his 1850 Istanbul letter is that 100 or more years later, literature is still regarded as a genre that only addresses the elite. For the poets of the Ottoman court tradition, literature only concerned well-educated elites and readers of a similar education and status. Perhaps Flaubert, who couldn't spend a single day without mocking ordinary bourgeois life, would share this perspective. There are plenty of Flaubert enthusiasts who have more conviction in this perspective than Flaubert himself had and therefore have appropriated him and his literary ethics, and I would now like to turn to them.

In the history of literature, writers have given Flaubert pride of place among venerated authors. From Maupassant to Tolstoy, from Henry James to Nabokov, from Conrad to Mario Vargas Llosa, a horde of writers have been excessively preoccupied with Flaubert, writing about him, nurturing open or hidden deep affection for him, and candidly or furtively identifying with him. Madame Bovary (1857) became a model in Russia for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1874-6) and in Germany for Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894). In Portugal, the representative of such novels that described a woman's extramarital affair in oppressive, closed contexts was Eça de Queirós's O Primo Basílio (Cousin Basilio, 1878). In this novel, as with Madame Bovary, the heroine is led astray by reading romances and just as in Ashk-ı Memnu (Forbidden Love, 1900), by Halit Ziya Ushaklıgil, Turkey's literary equivalent of Madame Bovary, the love and infidelity occurs within the family context though the heroine is of a higher class than Emma Bovary. Ashk-ı Memnu, written near the end of Sultan Abdülhamit's autocratic reign, is among the handful of novels the Turkish National Education Ministry recommends to high-school students in addition to Madame Bovary. 

It is clear that over subsequent generations, the admiration felt towards Flaubert in the 20th century rested, as much as on his novels, on his letters, the lifestyle revealed in the letters and on his being a literary recluse of sorts. In an essay Georges Perec wrote 15 years after he'd lifted 13 sentences from my favourite Flaubert novel, L'Education Sentimentale (A Sentimental Education), and included them in his own work, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties), he stated that he'd done so because he wanted nothing more than to be Flaubert. 

To be Flaubert! The reverence of his contemporaries Turgenev or Henry James, Tolstoy or Theodor Fontane, focused on his novels. Conrad was concerned with Flaubert's literary technique. Later generations, however, especially during the last half a century of Flaubert devotion, have focused on the writer himself, his life, the subject of his letters and even on the conjecture surrounding him.