Émile Zola (1840–1902) — one of the pillars of world realistic literature, leader and theorist of the literary movement of naturalism, passionate researcher of everyday life, ardent publicist and human rights defender. His most famous work is the epoch-making twenty-volume cycle "The Rougons-Macquarts," which opens before the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire, an encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces based on several generations of one family, which bore the strangest fruits, and "The Career of the Rougons" (1871) — the first volume of this saga. Greed, pride, love of one's neighbor, cruelty, violence, madness, faith in revolution, struggle for power, the rise of scoundrels, the demise of pure souls: this story is as old as the world — and, like the world, eternal.
