The Europeans Three Lives And The Making Of A Cosmopolitan Culture

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during the course of the 19th century - and so much more. -- Peter Frankopan
Magnificent and utterly gripping: European identity, culture and commerce through the lives of three remarkable individuals, the book for our times. -- Philippe Sands
It plunged me into another world. I learned so much and was carried away by the intelligence and fluidity of the style - a combination which is unbeatable. -- Antonia Fraser
A timely, brilliant and hugely enjoyable book ... A magnificently humane book, written with supple grace but firmly underpinned by meticulous scholarship. -- Rupert Christiansen * Sunday Telegraph *
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
[There are] a multitude of fascinating pieces of information to be gleaned from Orlando Figes's magisterial and wide-ranging book The Europeans ... Relevant, trenchant and searching. -- William Boyd * The Guardian *
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
Meticulously detailed, exhaustively researched and written with Figes's characteristic verve, The Europeans is a sweeping tour de force and a monumental work of historical synthesis. -- Julian Coman * The Observer *

Author Biography: Orlando Figes is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of Peasant Russia, Civil War, A People's Tragedy, Natasha's Dance, The Whisperers, Crimea and Just Send Me Word. His work has won a number of major prizes and been translated into some twenty different languages.

Description

From the "master of historical narrative" (Financial Times), a dazzling, richly detailed, panoramic work--the first to document the genesis of a continent-wide European culture.The nineteenth century in Europe was a time of unprecedented artistic achievement. It was also the first age of cultural globalization--an epoch when mass communications and high-speed rail travel brought Europe together, overcoming the barriers of nationalism and facilitating the development of a truly European canon of artistic, musical, and literary works. By 1900, the same books were being read across the continent, the same paintings reproduced, the same music played in homes and heard in concert halls, the same operas performed in all the major theatres. Drawing from a wealth of documents, letters, and other archival materials, acclaimed historian Orlando Figes examines the interplay of money and art that made this unification possible. At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange--they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures. As Figes observes, nearly all of civilization's great advances have come during periods of heightened cosmopolitanism--when people, ideas, and artistic creations circulate freely between nations. Vivid and insightful, The Europeans shows how such cosmopolitan ferment shaped artistic traditions that came to dominate world culture.