A ménage a trois that transformed European culture

Rupert Christiansen reviews The Europeans by Orlando Figes

At the heart of this timely, brilliant and hugely enjoyable book is a spirit of liberalism that spread across Europe during the second half of the 19th century, opening “a space for cultural transfers, translations and exchanges crossing national boundaries”. That may make it sound like tough reading, which it isn’t: this is no dry as dust thesis with blunt axes to grind. Figes is too good a historian to schematise complexity or draw glib parallels, and the reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions without being told what lessons can be drawn in relation to contemporary crises on the continent.

Its deeper context is a new relationship between the arts and capitalism, but what enlivens the book so enthrallingly is that it creates its argument by tracing the lives and experiences of three interlocking personalities working in the vanguard of music, art and literature: the Spanish singer Pauline Viardot; her French art critic and translator husband Louis Viardot; and her long-suffering secret lover, the Russian novelist and essayist Ivan Turgenev.

Individually, all three were people of great achievement. Scion of a great musical dynasty that included other opera stars, Pauline Viardot, née Garcia, was a mezzo-soprano with a voice like “bitter oranges”, blessed with enormous intelligence and acting abilities who gave legendary performances in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète and Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice. Revered by Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Gounod, Wagner and Brahms, a friend to writers such as Dickens and George Sand, she was also an accomplished composer and singing teacher as well as a champion of Russian music.

Louis Viardot started his career as an opera-house administrator in Paris, but later became a campaigning journalist and pioneering translator of Cervantes, Gogol and Pushkin into French. He also wrote a hugely successful and influential series of guides to major art galleries – it is largely to him, Figes claims, that we owe the curatorial habit of displaying and classifying painting and sculpture according to national schools and in chronological order.

Ivan Turgenev is still widely known as the author of A Sportsman’s Sketches (a book of short stories which turned the tide in the campaign to emancipate the serfs), A Month in the Country and Fathers and Sons. Henry James, who adored him personally, thought him “the first novelist of the day”, but Figes also emphasises his tireless work as a critic, mediating the literatures of France and Russia as he promoted War and Peace in Paris and Madame Bovary in St Petersburg.

There is much that can never be known about this trio’s ménage, but what evidence there is suggests that it was governed by intellectual compatibility, warm respect and a discreet latitude in matters sexual.Pauline and Viardot were match-made by George Sand in 1840: 22 years older than his wife, a liberal and a feminist, kind, honest and patient, he became her business manager and fathered three of her children. She remained steadily devoted to him, and he appears to have silently condoned, ignored or endured her more passionate involvement with Turgenev, which probably resulted in the fourth of her children. Other lovers came and went: it was all very civilised and Bloomsburyish. When Viardot and Turgenev died within months of each other in 1883, Pauline attempted suicide. Being a tough nut, however, she lived on for a further quarter century, surviving into the Paris of Diaghilev and Proust.

All three were polyglot – even in the delirium of his final illness, Turgenev raved in a macaronic of Russian, English, French and German – and took full advantage of the ever-expanding railway and telegraph network to live in constant motion. Paris, the era’s supremely cosmopolitan city, was their hub, but they also spent considerable periods based in St Petersburg, London and Baden-Baden (a spa resort of which Figes paints a marvellously vivid portrait). Turgenev wrote his masterpiece Fathers and Sons in Ventnor; Pauline’s career took her on self-managed tours, often whistle-stop, extending from Warsaw and Budapest to Wolverhampton and Liverpool; Viardot was an enthusiastic Hispanophile, who wrote a history of the Moors in Andalucia.

Around them culture was changing radically, not least in becoming big business. The art market boomed as lithographic and photographic reproduction brought framed pictures into every middle-class home. Mass-produced pianos fed the demand for sheet music. Railway bookstalls thrived on cheap paperback editions. The appetite for light entertainment was insatiable.

A thread running through Figes’s narrative is the struggle of writers, artists and composers to profit from this by establishing themselves as independent professionals, protected by laws of intellectual property and an internationally recognised system of copyright that prosecuted piracy and yielded royalties. A turning point here was the Berne Convention of 1886 that brought 10 nations into a ground-breaking agreement over published books and now obtains worldwide; and a case study is Verdi’s contract with the publisher Ricordi, empowered not only to collect dues and print scores but also to ensure via agents that his operas were performed according to his wishes.

A process of what we now call globalisation was most evident in three phenomena. One was the series of international exhibitions that followed in the wake of London’s Crystal Palace extravaganza of 1851: these stimulated tourism as well as trade, broadening mental horizons and giving artists a new shop window. Another was the demand for translated fiction, with novels such as Les Misérables and David Copperfield establishing themselves as instant classics, albeit outstripped by a country mile in the sales league by Jules Verne’s Le Tour du monde en 80 jours, a yarn that within months of its publication in 1873 could be read in 57 different languages. A third growth area was the export of opera, as a network of opera houses spread across Russia and America to Hanoi and Manaus. Meyerbeer’s spectacles, Verdi’s dramas and Wagner’s sublimities became a lingua franca and fortunes were made by those like Pauline Viardot who commanded the stages.

All these trends ministered to a European sensibility fuelled by an ideology of liberal fraternity and progressive idealism that had its roots in the Enlightenment, the writings of Goethe and Napoleonic reforms. Periodically it has continued to prevail, but only against the counterforce of the aggressively defensive nationalism that set in as Bismarck’s united Germany upset the balance of power after the Franco-Prussian War.

In many respects the Victorian British stood slightly apart from the cultural free-flow. In literary terms, Figes says, they constituted “the most insular nation in Europe” – and one also considered (perhaps in envy of our economic prosperity) the most Philistine too. The Germans called us “The Land without Music”; and we were latecomers to the Impressionist revolution in painting. Turgenev and the Viardots certainly made money out of the British market, but they didn’t look to it for aesthetic inspiration. We may have done better since, but how our culture will mutate as we again move away from Europe is a fascinating and unsettling question.

A professor of history at Birkbeck College best known for his work on modern Russia, Figes was disgraced a decade ago when he was exposed and sued for posting hostile pseudonymous reviews of rivals’ books in Amazon. With this magnificently humane book, written with supple grace but firmly underpinned by meticulous scholarship, he has surely redeemed himself.