In August 1871 the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev went to Pitlochry, in Perthshire, to join a shooting party on some Victorian magnate’s estate. This is one of the multitude of fascinating pieces of information gleaned from Orlando Figes’s majestically wide-ranging book THE EUROPEANS.
Another intriguing observation is while he was in Pitlochry, Turgenev met the poet Robert Browning whom he, wrote to a friend, was extremely vain and not at all amusing. His son gave the impression of being a very nice boy with a large wart on the end of his nose.
Turgenev is at the centre of this book as are two other people he was intimately connected to – the famous Opera singer Pauline Viardot and her husband, Louis. This menage a troise was a linchpin to Turgenev’s 19th century European cultural history and the course the continent undertook, transforming itself, through new technologies, in to the collective that we see today. Turgenev was smitten by the ebullient Pauline who was hugely successful as an opera singer, connoisseur, art dealer, political agitator and successful author of travel guides.She was in all essence a Renaissance woman.
Turgenev became part of the Viardot household, living with, or nearby almost all his life . Louis, the husband tolerated this arrangement, always looking the other way, the ultimate mari complaisant, becoming close friends, providing Turgenev with financial and emotional support. Pauline was the Maria Callas of her era with a circle of friends and acquaintances that read like the Who’s Who of 19th century culture: George Sand, Rossini, Delacroix, Berlitz, Clara Schumann, Dickens, Wagner, Saint-Saens, Chopin…and so on. Henry James described her “as ugly as eyes in the sides of her head”. Yet she had tremendous allure.
The book reveals that Turgenev, an aristocrat chose to become a writer, rejecting his position as a noble. He was 6 foot 3 inch which in 19th century Europe made him a giant and a passionate Europhile. As well as Russian, he spoke fluent French, German and good English. He travelled a lot and published the acclaimed Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Fathers and Sons and Smoke, becoming a leading figure of Russian literature, the precursor of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov.
Figes not only charts the interwoven lives of Turgenev and the Viardots but through their professions and travels around Europe, he is able to depict the history of a continent in constant change. The technological advances of the era – telegraphy, railways, improved printing, photography, lithography, mass production of pianos and universal copyright legislation, not to mention steamships and aeroplanes.
Stretching from St.Petersburg to Paris, Berlin, London, Baden-Baden, Dresden, Rome, Vienna, in fact all continental Europe became available geographical propositions. Books were widely translated; music flourished beyond boundaries and frontiers; impresarios put on operas and ballets in a dozen countries; pictures could be bought in Italy and sold in London and, importantly, artists could make serious money! Financial opportunities catapulted art as a commodity. By the late 19th century all the arts were booming in Europe.
THE EUROPEANS also catalogues the rise of the Public Library, the cafe-concert, casinos, soa vacations, travel industry, the museum guidebook. Figes argues that,
with celebrity branding and corporate sponsorship, composers like Franz Liszt became the big hitters of the times.. The modern system of selling books by mail or telegraph order was the precursor of modern day Amazon. All of these integrated platforms contributed to the formation of a standard Western Canon of classic books, artworks, musical compositions. They played a vital role as well in commodifying high-low cultural material and the globalisation of the art and entertainment markets – two phenomena that persist to this day.
Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album is credited with having a huge impact in swaying Russian views against Serfdom, as did Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published the same year, had on the Anti Slavery movement in America. It cemented Turgenev’s Sketches as distinctly ‘Western’ – as opposed to Russian- earning him an international following, after his thoughts on “moral progress, freedom and democracy”. He championed the writing of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in France, also introducing the works of his friend, Gustav Flaubert to the Russian reading public. In a related effort, Turgenev and Pauline acted as conduits connecting people in the European music world with composers in Russia.
Although he felt himself Russian, Figes adds, he was opposed to nationalism in all its forms. This complicated his cosmopolitan profile because as a German his German identity was bound up with fierce Nationalist agendas, where he found Wagner, the leading advocate of antisemitism and calls fore purity in German art, scolding Turgenev of his relationship with Pauline and her connections with Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer. Over the course of the 1860s, Wagner’s vitriolic brand of national pride fused with the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck which culminated in the Unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War.
This war spelt catastrophic bearings for liberal, pluralistic culture that Turgenev did so much to advance. The war of civilisation against barbarism had only just begun.
Figes shows an unerring ability to weave together the political and personal, telling the tale with viguor and sensitivity. He also says in his introduction that he hopes his book will be a reminder of the cohesion of European civilisation, which nations will ignore at their peril.
One has little confidence that the current union of egomaniacs, self-serving charlatans, idiots and spittle- flecked Europhobes that run our politics, would read a book as relevant, and searing as this one.
