Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realist literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, a keen observer of everyday life, and a passionate human rights activist and publicist who influenced the entire realist movement in 20th-century literature. His most famous work is the epochal twenty-volume cycle "The Rougon-Macquart," which reveals to the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues set against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is a true encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces, told through several generations of a single family that bore the strangest of fruits.
This illustrated edition includes the novels that occupy the fifteenth and sixteenth positions in the cycle, following the order prescribed by the author.
The protagonist of the novel "The Beast Within," Jacques Lantier—son of Gervaise Macquart from "The Dram Shop"—becomes an involuntary witness to a brutal murder. The events that follow not only change the course of his life but also awaken a grave moral affliction inherited from previous generations of his family.
Another of Gervaise's sons, Étienne Lantier, is destined for a different fate. Sent by the author's will to a mining town in northern France, he becomes the central character of the novel "Germinal"—one of the most poignant and revolutionary statements on the lives of the working class in the history of world literature.
Author: Émile Zola
Translation: Natalia Nemchinova, Yakov Lesyuk
Illustrations: Grigory Filippovsky
Pages: 864 (offset). Hardcover
Dimensions: 217x150x42 mm
Series: Foreign Literature. Great Books
