Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realist literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, an avid explorer of everyday life, a passionate human rights activist, and a publicist who influenced the entire realist movement in 20th-century literature. His most famous work is the epochal twenty-volume cycle "Les 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, seen through the lens of several generations of a single family that bore the strangest fruit.
This illustrated edition includes the novels that occupy, according to the reading order prescribed by the author, the thirteenth and fourteenth places in the cycle.
The novel "L'Assommoir," first published in 1876, shocked the writer's contemporaries. In a poor neighborhood, far from the eyes of the successful and prosperous upper echelons of Second Empire society, life is a struggle for existence that can only be secured through daily, grueling labor. And everyone living here constantly walks on the edge of a demonic trap that consumes the destinies of ordinary Parisians, stripping them of their humanity and human aspirations...
The novel "The Masterpiece," published ten years later, is imbued with a different mood. It is a kind of manifesto of the great transformations in visual art brought about by the Impressionists. At the author's will, Claude Lantier, the son of the heroine of "L'Assommoir," Gervaise Macquart, embodies the romantic image of an artist-reformer who does not bow his head under a hail of ridicule from the adherents of traditional painting and is ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of art...
Author: Émile Zola
Illustrations: Grigory Filippovsky and others
Translation: E. Yakhnina, E. Shishmareva, O. Moiseenko, T. Kashirina-Ivanova
Pages: 800 (offset). Hardcover
Dimensions: 216x145x40 mm
Series: Foreign Literature. Big Books
