What is Zola's life like?

Zola, 1840 was born in Paris in April. My father is Italian and my mother is Greek. At the age of seven, his father died, and he and his mother lived with grandpa's help. When he was studying in middle school, he showed his literary talent and tried to write a historical novel, some poems and a comedy. 1857, he moved to Paris with his grandfather and mother, and finished high school with a grant. 1862 joined Astor Bookstore as a packer, and was soon promoted to the director of advertising department because of his excellent poetry. During this period, he published his works in newspapers and periodicals.

In the first few years, Zola published a collection of short stories "A Story for Yi Ni" (1864), as well as novels "Claud's Confession" (1865), "A Woman's Legacy" (1866) and "The Mystery of Marseilles" (/kloc- At that time, Zola had a strong interest in social themes. Claud's Confession describes a woman's depravity and repentance, and naturalistic creative methods have emerged. The police investigated the book on the grounds of "indecency" and found that Zola wrote for the opposition newspaper of the Second Reich and had close ties with progressives, forcing Zola to resign from the publishing house on 1865.

Zola admired Balzac, the author of Human Comedy and a master of realism, but he was not satisfied with imitating his predecessors. He is determined to create his own style in literature. In 1960s, with the rapid development of science and technology in France, Tanner, a literary theorist, used scientific methods to study literary problems in his works such as Philosophy of Art, pointing out that race, times and environment have great influence on writers and their works. In Introduction to Experimental Medical Research, physiologist Bernard advocated the application of scientific experimental methods in biology and medical research, and made important contributions. Novelists Gong Gul brothers published several novels featuring pathological analysis of characters. Under their influence, Zola put forward his naturalistic literary theory.

Zola's naturalism theory holds that since we can understand the material world by experiment, we can also understand "emotional and spiritual life"; He advocates that novelists should be based on facts and become "interrogators of human beings and their passions"; He attaches importance to collecting information and being a "scientist" without making political, moral and aesthetic comments on what he writes; He particularly emphasized the determinism of biology and believed that human biological instinct dominated their social behavior.

According to his naturalistic literary thoughts, Zola wrote two novels, Darius Lagan (1867) and Madeleine Phila (1868). The former is called "an interesting study of a physiological condition" by the author, while the latter is a study of the influence of atavism on people. These two novels didn't interest the readers.

Starting from 1868, Zola is going to write a large-scale continuous work in the form of "human comedy"-"Natural History and Social History of Lugongmaca Family". He first studied physiology, studied a large number of cases and historical materials, and drew a branch map of Lugongmaca family lineage. According to Zola's expectation, this masterpiece will be "the natural history and social history of a family in the era of the Second Empire", firstly "studying the lineage and environmental problems of a family", and secondly "describing the social features of this era with facts and feelings, and depicting this era in the subtle details of various customs and events".

From the age of 28 to 53, it took Zola 25 years to finally complete this masterpiece. It consists of 20 novels, 1000 words. The theme covers almost all aspects of French society during the Second Empire and the Third Republic of France, such as politics, military affairs, religion, commerce, science, art and so on, and describes the upper class, workers, peasants and other figures and their lives. The ideological value and artistic style of these novels are quite different. Naturalism theory has influenced the creation of these works to varying degrees. However, in some excellent works, there is no doubt that pathological research gave way to social research, biological determinism gave way to social environmental determinism, and "family history" gave way to "social history", and realism finally gained an advantage.

In the book 1 The Fate of Lugongmaca Family (187 1), Zola originally wanted to show that the descendants of mental patients and alcoholics were greatly influenced by heredity, but in fact it was the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggle during Napoleon's third coup that dominated the novel, which effectively revealed the unpopularity of this coup and the faces of its supporters. Some descendants of Lugongmaca family played an important role in both opposing camps.

Typical speculators and adventurers who ran amok everywhere during the Second Empire made their debut in Eat Meat (187 1). Aristide, the third generation member of the Lugong family, used his power as the younger brother of an imperial envoy to become the deputy Commissioner of the Highways Department, and finally engaged in real estate speculation and went bankrupt. This person reappeared in money (189 1) and engaged in stock speculation. The ugly faces of bourgeois speculators and adventurers are deeply portrayed in his works.

The novel Hotel, published in 1877, is Zola's first serious attempt to express contemporary workers. In his writing plan, he clearly pointed out that this is a novel about workers, "explaining people's fashion, sin, depravity, mental and physical deformities", all of which are "caused by the living environment and conditions of workers in modern society" This novel describes the inhuman living conditions of the oppressed and exploited workers, and this work fully exposes the ugly face of the capitalist system.

"Germination" (1885) was written in 1880 under the situation of the revival of the workers' movement after the Amnesty, showing Zola's stronger interest in social and political issues. As he said in his writing outline, this work is about "the rise of wage labor" and "the struggle between capital and labor" Based on a mining area, the novel describes the life and struggle of French industrial workers, reflecting the depression of a few workers and the forge ahead of most workers, which eventually led to a large-scale strike and bloody suppression by the military and police. This is the history of French literature and even the history of world literature. For the first time, he successfully portrayed the image of revolutionary proletarians in his novels. Germination is the representative work of Zola's realism.

The novel "Collapse" (1892) describes the fiasco of the French army in the Battle of Sedang in the Franco-Prussian War, and shows this historical fact as the inevitable result of the vicious social development described in the previous volumes, thus completing the social history of the whole Second Empire.

After this masterpiece, Zola wrote the novel trilogy Three Cities. Among them, Lourde (1894) wrote that Pierre, as a priest, accompanied his girlfriend to the sacred cave for medical treatment. It turned out that the so-called apparition of the Virgin Mary was a scam. Rome (1896) wrote Pierre's book in an attempt to reform Christianity, which was rejected by the Pope. These two novels are the liquidation of the church, debunking the falsehood of religion and drawing the conclusion that only scientific knowledge can save society. Paris (1898) tells the story that Pierre's younger brother, Guillome, an anarchist, gave up blowing up the Sacred Heart Church, and expounds the author's idea of improving society by using scientific inventions.

In 1894, when Zola wrote "Three Cities", there was an unjust case in which the French military framed Dreyfus, a Jewish officer. Zola got the relevant information very late. He immediately rehabilitated Dreyfus and published a series of speeches and articles, especially the famous "Open Letter to the President of the Republic of China" published in1898+1October, entitled "I Complain", which effectively promoted this struggle. But at the same time, they were persecuted by reactionary forces. 1898 In July, he was unjustly sentenced to one year's imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. He fled to Britain on the day of sentencing and returned to China in July of the following year.

During his exile in England, Zola began to write four gospels. Among them, reproduction (1899) eulogized the family and its happiness, and labor (190 1) expressed the ideal of realizing human harmony through the socialization of labor according to Fourier's utopian socialist thought. Truth (1903) is the artistic representation of Dreyfus incident; The theme of "justice" in the plan is to promote the unity and cooperation of all ethnic groups and let fairness and justice dominate mankind, but he did not finish this work in his lifetime.

In addition to novels and naturalistic theoretical works, Zola's important works include collections of short stories, New Stories for Yi Ni (1874), Captain Burla (1882) and Ness Mikulan (1884), among which The Battle of the Mill. He also wrote plays The Heir of Labdan Family (1874), A Page of Love (1892) and Gael (65438+ 1088) to criticize my works (1866).

Zola's achievement lies in his description of a large number of works in various classes and fields, which quite truly reproduces the social scene of France's transition from capitalism to imperialism in the second half of the19th century, and basically correctly reflects a series of major historical events and social contradictions from Napoleon's third coup to the Battle of Sedan and even the Dreyfus incident. He came into contact with many important social problems such as the poor working and living conditions of laborers, the workers' movement under the capitalist system and so on. In his novels, he condemned the crimes of the bourgeoisie with unique artistic style and momentum, and gave extreme sympathy to the people.

Zola's novel creation and naturalism theory deeply influenced the French literature in19th century and 10 years later. In his speech at Zola's grave, France not only praised his personality, calling his performance in the Dreyfus incident a "moment of human conscience", but also highly praised his literary achievements, believing that only lev tolstoy could compare with him in the world literary world at that time. Engels thinks that from the perspective of realistic novels, Zola is far less than Balzac. On the other hand, Lenin loved Zola and his works. Zola is one of the French writers familiar to readers in China. His important works such as Hotel, Germination and Nana have long been translated into Chinese.

1902 Zola died on September 29th.