EUROPEANS: Three Lives

The 19th century in Europe was the first age of cultural globalisation creating a truly pan European Canon of artistic musical and literary works. By 1900 people across the continent were reading the same books, looking at the same art, and attending the same opera performances. The Europeans is a richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of 19th century Europe, told through the intertwined intimate love lives of three remarkable people: a Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, the great Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur and political activist, Pauline's husband Louis. Orlando Figes describes huge changes through intimate details, little-known stories and through the lens of Turgenev and the Viardots' touching, strange love triangle. He moves from Parisian salons to German spa towns to Russian country houses exploring the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. His subjects' ambitious and passionate lives caught up an astonishing array of artists and princes, poets, composers and impresarios - Delacroix, Chopin, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens and Dostoevsky among them. Events which we now see as central to European high culture are made completely fresh, allowing the reader to revel in the sheer precariousness with which the great salons, premieres and bestsellers came into existence. Remainder mark, 576 deckle edge pages.