The novel «Salambo» was published in 1862, when the name of its author — Gustave Flaubert — had already gained wide recognition thanks to his previously published novel «Madame Bovary». Working on «Salambo» required Flaubert to travel to the East and North Africa — he spent three months in Tunisia studying historical sources. «Salambo» was enthusiastically received by the public, which was saturated with the prevailing literary realistic trend: dresses in «Punic» style became fashionable, and just a year later, the second French edition of the novel was released. In 1862, the first Russian translation of «Salambo» appeared. In 1877, Flaubert published a cycle of three stories, each of which can be related to one of the previously published works: «The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitable» — with «The Temptation of Saint Anthony», «Simple Soul» — with the novel «Madame Bovary», and «Herodias» — with the novel «Salambo», which makes the cycle perceived as a kind of anthology summarizing the writer's work. For the Russian-speaking reader, these small works by Gustave Flaubert are noteworthy also because the translation of two of them was carried out by I. S. Turgenev.
