Salambo by gustave flaubert biography

Flaubert began work on the novel “Salambo” immediately after the completion of “Madame Bovary,” exhausting him with descriptions of the French routine and lowland provincial customs.

The writer turned to an oriental, exotic topic for Europe in order to improve his talent, which requires comprehensive artistic development.

For five years of work, from 1857 to 1862, Flaubert managed to study about a hundred works of ancient authors, create a draft version of the work and completely destroy it after a trip to Tunisia, for the sake of a more perfect, historically truthful text.

The novel “Salambo” is historical.

Both realistic, in many ways even naturalistic, and romantic literary trends embodied equally well in it. The plot of the work is taken from life: it was the uprising of the mercenaries hired by Carthage for the war with Rome.

The duration of the novel is about 240 BC.

In the middle of the XIX cen