The belle epoque reception in the Julian Barnes’s book “The man in the red coat”

This paper is dedicated to reviewing the features of the Belle Epoq reception in one of the latest Julian Barnes's books: “The Man in the Red Coe (2019). The main purpose of the article is to reveal and describe the specifics of the Belle Epoque image and identify the role of the writer's aesthetic concept in the construction of this image. The conclusion is that, in the Barnes reception, the Belle Epoque is an era of acute contradictions. In this time, the desire to preserve the old coexists with the tendency to destroy norms, and love for excessiveness matches with chauvinism and closeness. The importance of the “old and new” conflict is emphasized both in the social and political life of France (e.g.: the desire to preserve the institution of aristocracy, colonial ambitions, and public resonance about the Dreyfus affair) and in the art of Belle Epoque. The “old” in this context means the artist's interests in the past and the exotic (e.g.: decadent's prose, G. Flaubert's “Salambo”, G. Moreau's paintings), the “new” is the art of modernism, primarily impressionism and post-impressionism (K. Monet, E. Degas) that considered by Barnes as the true heyday of Belle Epoque. The findings of the research show the importance of two heroes of the age: the dandy and the aesthete represented by des Esseintes (the main character of “Against Nature” by J.-K. Huysmans) and Count de Montesquiou. The conclusion is about Barnes's critical attitude to life creation and his rejection of the assimilation of life into art. Special attention is paid to the new type of hero as opposed to the dandy: he is open-minded, active, and free from prejudice, like the main character of the book doctor Pozzi.