Émile Zola: Nana. La Terre

Émile Zola is one of the pillars of world realist literature, the founder and theoretician of naturalism, a devoted researcher of everyday life, a passionate human rights activist and publicist who influenced the entire realist movement of 20th-century literature. 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 set against the backdrop of the Second Empire. It is a true encyclopedia of life in Paris and the French provinces, told through the story of several generations of a single family that bore the strangest fruits.
This illustrated edition includes the novels "Nana" and "La Terre," which, according to the reading order prescribed by the author, occupy the seventeenth and eighteenth places in the cycle.
Nana, the heroine of the novel of the same name (1880), first met readers as a little girl in the novel "L'Assommoir" (1877). Years have passed, and this girl has turned into a gorgeous blonde beauty, embodying the standard of triumphant femininity of the turn of the century. The past is forgotten, gold flows like a river through the fingers of this depraved daughter of the Parisian streets, and the powerful of this world consider it a privilege to bow at her feet...
The novel "La Terre" takes place in a rural community where another descendant of the family, Jean Macquart, attempts to settle down. The people who live here are true laborers who toil tirelessly to work their land and return to it when their time comes. However, even this small world, located far from the bustling life of Paris, proves to be subject to the universal vices of human society...

Author: Émile Zola

Translation: Nadezhda Zharkova, Boris Gornun

Illustrations: Charles Albert Bertall, André Gill, Georges Bellenger, Henri-Gabriel Ibels

Pages: 960 (offset). Hardcover

Dimensions: 218x149x46 mm

Series: Foreign Literature. Big Books