Victor Hugo is one of the most famous personalities of the 19th century, one of the most prominent figures of French romanticism. In the first volume of Les Misérables, the reader meets the main characters. One of them, Jean Valjean, is at first glance an unremarkable poor man, embittered by the whole world. He spent most of his life in hard labor for trying to feed his sister’s hungry children with stolen bread.
“Human society only caused him harm. He always saw only that angry face, which it calls its justice and reveals only to those it beats. People always approached him only to hurt him. Any contact with them meant a blow for him. After he parted with his childhood, with his mother, with his sister, he never, not once, heard a kind word, did not meet a friendly glance. Moving from suffering to suffering, he gradually became convinced that life was war and that in this war he was one of the vanquished. His only weapon was hatred. He decided to sharpen this weapon in hard labor and take it with him when he gets out of there.”...
Author: Victor Hugo
Translation: Nadezhda Kogan, Deborah Livshits, Natalia Efros, Konstantin Loks, Maria Vakhterova, Wilhelm Levick
Pages: 1248 (offset). Hardcover
Dimensions: 215x147x56 mm
Series: Foreign literature. Big books
