Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) is a famous French writer, winner of the prestigious French literary Prix Goncourt. Published in 1908, Inferno is his first novel. It has not yet been translated into Russian, although it has been translated into many languages. When it was published, this novel was a great success among readers in France, and to this day continues to be regularly republished there. The novel is more than a hundred years old, but it includes many of the most pressing and pressing human problems that exist today. The novel presents all the main events and aspects of human life: birth, death, love in its various manifestations, creativity, scientific and philosophical reflections on the essence of life and the universe, nobility and baseness, human weaknesses. The novel is distinguished by extreme naturalism in the description of many episodes, especially love ones. The main character believes that around a person there is an incomprehensible crazy world, full of contradictions at all its levels: from the simplest everyday to the sublime intellectual with reflections on the issues of the universe. According to him In my opinion, the real world around us is a mirage, a hallucination. Man in this world is Nothing. This means that he must be focused only on himself, because everything exists only in himself.