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"Father Goriot" is one of Balzac's most famous novels, which are included in the cycle "Human Comedy". The main events of the novel take place in Paris, in the boarding house of Madame Voque, tucked away at the bottom of the street Nev-Saint-Genevieve, where for a small fee live inconspicuous, shabby lives of life. In the attic of this boarding house otest trades its miserable existence the protagonist of the novel Papa Goriot - once a successful bread merchant. Like King Lear, he spent almost all of his fortune raising his beloved daughters. Having provided each rich dowry, he left himself only a small sum, in the hope that he would always be able to find their love and support. But his hopes were sent to dust. Having successfully married and became secular ladies, the daughters began to be ashamed of their father and remembered him only when they needed money. Gradually, Papa Goriot gave them everything he had and was left with nothing. He became the laughing stock of the whole guesthouse, the tenants despised him, and only one, poor student Eugene de Rastignyak, looked at the old man with sympathy...

Vanity Fair is a classic novel about the Napoleonic Wars, where the reader is presented with a vivid panorama of the life of England in the early 19th century. This is a real epic, in which not only unfolds a whole layer of history, but also reveals the life of various social strata: aristocrats, officials, members of parliament, landlords and others. Their lives resemble a fair where everything can be bought and sold, and the laws of morality and honor are not respected. William Thackeray talks about the struggle between the literary author and the characters leading a parasitic and hypocritical way of life. Subtle observations of the life of that time are riddled with irony and sarcasm. Vanity Fair has been filmed more than ten times, and its adaptation for the theater is still widely used by the best directors in Europe.