Simple soul. Flobert G.

The novel “Salambo” went out of the press in 1862, when the name of its author - Gustav Flaubert - was already widely known thanks to his previous published novel “Madame Bovary”. Work on Salambo demanded a trip to the East and North Africa from Flaubert - he spent three months in Tunisia, studying historical sources. Salambo was enthusiastically adopted by the public, saturated with a dominant realistic direction in the literature: dresses in the “pure” style came into fashion, and a year later the second French edition of the novel was seen.

In 1862, the first Russian translation of Salambo appeared. In 1877, Fleber published a cycle of three stories, each of which can be correlated with one of the previously already published works: “The Legend of St. Julian Graint” - with the “Terry of St. Anthony”, “Simple Soul” - with the novel “Madame Bovari” , and “Herodiada” - with the novel “Salambo”, thanks to which the cycle is perceived as a kind of anthology, summing up the writer's work.

For the Russian -speaking reader, these small works of Gustav Flaubert are also noteworthy by the fact that the translation of two of them was carried out by I. S. Turgenev.