James Joyce, who left Ireland in 1902 and lived as an exile in Paris, was a genius and ambitious man who set himself tasks larger and more difficult than most of his contemporaries. Joyce, who received a Catholic education, felt with special force the falsity of modern life, of humanistic norms, which in the twentieth century are trying to adapt to the sanctification of violence and murder. His first publications testify to the magnificent skill of the storyteller, placing him on a par with A.P. Chekhov and G. de Maupassant. He portrays the Irish capital Dublin as a city seized with spiritual paralysis, a city of the dead, where people only pretend to be alive. Joyce proves himself to be a subtle master who has found absolutely adequate artistic means to convey the ugliness of modern life. But if in his early work Joyce acted as the finalizer of the realistic-naturalistic tradition, in his mature years he became its main overthrower.

Work on his major novel, Ulysses, lasted from 1914 to 1921, when Joyce lived in Trieste and Zurich. The novel was published in 1922. “Ulysses” is a variant of the name “Odysseus,” and the title of the novel itself indicates Joyce’s intention. He made the rarest attempt in modern literature to create an epic like Homer’s Odyssey. Homer, Dante, Shakespeare – these are his samples, this is with whom he enters into creative competition, but, of course, the modern epic can only be the genre that dominates modern literature – the novel.