The Belly of Paris. The Joy of Life

Emile Zola is one of the pillars of world realistic literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, an avid researcher of everyday life, a passionate human rights advocate and publicist, who influenced all the realistic trends in 20th-century literature and, above all, the school of "new journalism": Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer. 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 against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is a genuine encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces through the lens of several generations of one family, which bore the strangest fruits. This illustrated edition includes the novels that occupy, according to the order prescribed by the author, the eleventh and twelfth places in the cycle. "The Belly of Paris" is one of the most famous novels in the cycle. Written in 1873 and published in Russia the same year, the novel effectively marked the beginning of Emile Zola's popularity among Russian readers. The enormous Central Market, the Belly of Paris, sprawling in the midst of the French capital, a source and symbol of satiety and contentment—the main virtues of the Second Empire, which viewed hungry idealists with suspicion... For young Pauline Kenu, the heroine of one of the main masterpieces of naturalism—The Joy of Life (1884)—parting with the Central Market signified the end of a serene childhood under the protection of prosperous parents. Pauline inherited a considerable fortune, but along with it, this good child did not inherit the worldly wisdom or practicality of her Macquart ancestors...