The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture by Orlando Figes
An absorbing chronicle of the genesis of a shared European culture in the course of the 19th century, showing how the arts (painting, music, literature) became a unifying force between the nations.
Figes has constructed his large and detailed book around three central personalities of the age: the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), who was a true cosmopolitan and whose work (although eclipsed by overblown attention to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy) is still very much worth reading; Louis Viardot (1800–1883), a French scholar of Spanish art, who was not only an art expert and collector, but also writer of art books and travel guides, a literary translator, and a director of opera; and the famous singer Pauline Viardot (1821–1910), who stemmed from an artistic family and became the wife of the much older Louis; she shone in works by Meyerbeer and Gluck, but was also an important teacher and pedagogue, a composer, and the organizer of a musical salon where the greats of the 19th c. rubbed shoulders.
Turgenev was in love with Pauline from the first time he saw her, and for decades he traveled in her wake through Germany and France, himself never marrying, living next door or later even in the same house as the Viardots, going from romantic involvement (he may have been the father of Pauline's son) to more quiet friendship, a relationship ignored or even condoned by her husband Louis - in fact, Ivan Turgenev and Louis Viardot were good friends who liked to hunt together. It is the most famous ménage à trois in history!
The three of them seem to have known everyone of cultural importance in 19th c. Europe (from Schumann and Brahms to Wagner, from Dickens to Henry James).
Some of the important changes described in the book are:
- the rise of mass tourism thanks to the development of the railways since the 1840s; guidebooks were written and guided tours to Europe's cultural monuments became popular.
- not only tourists, also writers and artists, books and paintings, operas and orchestras traveled easily across the continent.
- the cosmopolitan atmosphere led to the establishment of one "canon" across Europe, in the fields of music, of paintings and of literature.
- a canon of light music was also formed across Europe - Offenbach was everywhere popular, as was Johann Strauss II.
- photography and other reproduction techniques brought famous art works into everyone's reach.
The first shock to this cosmopolitan system was dealt by the war between France and Germany of 1870; the death blow came with the "Great European War" in 1914. In the last 50 years or so a second cosmopolitan Europe has appeared, but that, too, is again under siege...
Turgenev is a truly great writer of stories like "First Love" and "Spring Torrents," and novels like "Fathers and Sons." Much of his work is not in print at present, but can be enjoyed freely at Project Gutenberg and Archive.org.
See the overview of his stories on my website:
Turgenev (1): Early Stories
Turgenev (2): Lyrical Stories
Turgenev (3): Late Stories(Some music by Pauline Viardot can be found on Youtube and books by Louis Viardot are available on Archive.org)
My rating: 5 of 5 stars at Goodreads.