The Europeans : Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture

‘Magnificent. Beautifully written, immaculately researched and thoroughly absorbing from start to finish. A tour de force that explains how Europe’s cultural life transformed during the course of the 19th century – and so much more.’ Peter Frankopan’The Europeans is a massively impressive work, as enjoyable as it is knowledgeable, full of insights into the mechanisms of history and in the people who make it.

It is a book about the making of Europe, and this description, wonderful as it is, has now, in these days, sadly, also almost a utopian quality to it. Orlando Figes is an outstanding historian and writer, he brings distant history so close that you could feel its heartbeat. He did it with the Russian Revolution in A People’s Tragedy, and he does it again in The Europeans.’ Karl Ove Knausgaard ‘Timely, brilliant and hugely enjoyable …

A magnificently humane book, written with supple grace but firmly underpinned by meticulous scholarship.’ Rupert Christiansen’I loved the book. I read it in every spare moment, fascinated and sometimes surprised. […] I have been speaking about the book to everyone I know: it is clearly not just a book for musicians but for the widest audience interested in literature, music and art.’ Barbara Hannigan’Magnificent and utterly gripping: European identity, culture and commerce through the lives of three remarkable individuals, the book for our times.’ Philippe SandsFrom the bestselling author of Natasha’s Dance, The Europeans is a richly enthralling, panoramic cultural history of nineteenth-century Europe, told through the intertwined lives of three remarkable people: a great singer, Pauline Viardot, a great writer, Ivan Turgenev, and a great connoisseur, Pauline’s husband Louis.

Their passionate, ambitious lives were bound up with an astonishing array of writers, composers and painters all trying to make their way through the exciting, prosperous and genuinely pan-European culture that came about as a result of huge economic and technological change. This culture – through trains, telegraphs and printing – allowed artists of all kinds to exchange ideas and make a living, shuttling back and forth across the whole continent from the British Isles to Imperial Russia, as they exploited a new cosmopolitan age. The Europeans is Orlando Figes’ masterpiece.

Surprising, beautifully written, it describes huge changes through intimate details, little-known stories and through the lens of Turgenev and the Viardots’ touching, strange love triangle. 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.