Brave Gavroche and the orphan Cosette, the beautiful Esmeralda, and the unhappy hunchback Quasimodo… These are characters created by Victor Hugo, a writer whose contribution to French and world literature is impossible to overestimate. Hugo became the creator and ideologist of romanticism as a literary movement, which dominated European art of the 19th century. In his books he built a whole world—ideal, just, merciful—and it found a response in people’s hearts. Even now, Victor Hugo’s novels attract the reader, above all because they offer a chance to step into another world: one of turbulent passions, noble heroes, and events full of drama. “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” is the greatest historical novel of French-language prose. A book where the exciting, peculiar plot is only a wonderful frame for astonishing, mind-blowing author’s excursions into the past of Paris. A book in which every reader will find something of their own… “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” has been filmed and staged dozens of times, yet none of the productions managed to fully convey the scale and grandeur of Hugo’s novel.