The novel “Creativity” is included in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume series “Rougon-Macquart,” in which the author captured life in France during the era of the Second Empire.
“Creativity” is a novel about the fate of an artist in a bourgeois world, while at the same time raising the fundamental aesthetic issue of the relationship between art and reality.
Some real events related to the controversy that É. Zola waged in defense of a group of Impressionist artists in the 1860s form the basis of its plot.