Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realist literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, a passionate researcher of everyday life, and a fervent human rights activist and publicist who influenced the entire realist trend of 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 the experiences of several generations of one family that bore the strangest of fruits.
This illustrated edition includes the novels "The Debacle" (1892) and "Doctor Pascal" (1893), which, according to the reading order prescribed by the author, occupy the nineteenth and twentieth positions, bringing the "Rougon-Macquart" cycle to a close.
Jean Macquart, already known to readers from the novel "Earth," becomes disillusioned with rural life and returns to the army, where he helplessly observes the collapse of the Empire and the defeat of its armies. The dramatic events of the Paris Commune period turn Jean’s life upside down; however, the fall of the Empire, that colossus with feet of clay, offers hope for a new beginning.
The action of the novel "Doctor Pascal" takes place in the early 1870s, after the fall of the Second Empire, the historical background against which the cycle unfolds. The research of Doctor Pascal Rougon, who leads a quiet life as a scholar in Plassans and studies the heredity of his family line, summarizes the grand chronicle of the Rougon-Macquart family, on which Émile Zola labored for more than twenty years.
Author: Émile Zola
Translator: Evgeniya Yakhnina, Valentin Parnakh
Pages: 832 (offset). Hardcover
Dimensions: 218x150x43 mm
Series: Foreign Literature. Big Books
