Trap. Creativity

The next volume of the illustrated edition of the complete cycle "Rogues-Macquarie" in the ILL series. Large books. Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realistic literature, the founder and theorist of naturalism, an eager researcher of everyday life, a passionate human rights activist and publicist, who influenced all realistic directions of literature in the 20th century. His most famous work is the epoch-making twenty-volume cycle "Rogues-Macquarie," which reveals to the reader an endless panorama of human vices and virtues against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is a true 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 the thirteenth and fourteenth places in the cycle, according to the order of reading prescribed by the author. The novel "Trap," first published in 1876, shocked the writer's contemporaries. In a poor neighborhood, away from the eyes of the prosperous and thriving upper crust of society during the Second Empire, life is a struggle for existence, which can only be ensured through daily, exhausting labor. And each of those living here constantly walks the edge of a demonic trap that devours the lives of ordinary Parisians, stripping them of their human form and human aspirations… The novel "Creativity," which saw the light ten years later, is permeated with a different mood. It is a kind of manifesto of the great transformations in visual art brought about by the Impressionists. At the will of the author, Claude Lantier, the son of the heroine of the trap, Gervéza Maccaire, embodies the romantic image of the artist-reformer, who does not bow his head under the rain of ridicule from the adherents of traditional painting and is ready to sacrifice everything for the sake of art…