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| How Modernity Came to Europe | How Modernity Came to Europe |
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| THE EUROPEANSThree Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan CultureBy Orlando Figes | THE EUROPEANSThree Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan CultureBy Orlando Figes |
| Imagine a society where, within the space of a single generation, human innovation all but collapses the most formidable geographic distances, allowing individuals and information to travel the globe with unprecedented swiftness and ease. Where new platforms radically transform the ways in which news, music, books and art are created and consumed. Where media-driven celebrity trumps older modes of authority and forms new elites, endowing famous artists and performers with peerless cachet. Where audiences converge in a worldwide culture of “sharing,” and diversity and connectedness join equality and freedom as the shibboleths of Western liberalism. Where, at the same time, legislation struggles to keep pace with technological change; capitalism and consumerism destroy even as they enrich; and nationalism, racism and xenophobia poison the public discourse, threatening disaster. | Imagine a society where, within the space of a single generation, human innovation all but collapses the most formidable geographic distances, allowing individuals and information to travel the globe with unprecedented swiftness and ease. Where new platforms radically transform the ways in which news, music, books and art are created and consumed. Where media-driven celebrity trumps older modes of authority and forms new elites, endowing famous artists and performers with peerless cachet. Where audiences converge in a worldwide culture of “sharing,” and diversity and connectedness join equality and freedom as the shibboleths of Western liberalism. Where, at the same time, legislation struggles to keep pace with technological change; capitalism and consumerism destroy even as they enrich; and nationalism, racism and xenophobia poison the public discourse, threatening disaster. |
| This is the society Orlando Figes examines in “The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture,” and it is the world of mid-19th-century Europe, “an international culture that vanished on the outbreak of the First World War.” | This is the society Orlando Figes examines in “The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture,” and it is the world of mid-19th-century Europe, “an international culture that vanished on the outbreak of the First World War.” |
| “The Europeans” is the much-anticipated follow-up to Figes’s acclaimed history of Russian culture, “Natasha’s Dance,” and like that book, it tells the story of a society in radical transition from tradition to modernity. In the introduction, Figes calls his project “an exploration of the railway age as the first period of cultural globalization,” an international history that “looks at Europe as a whole, not divided into nation-states or geographic zones,” and considers “the arts as a unifying force between nations.” His overarching concern is to show how, “in ways beyond the political control of any nation-state, the great technological and economic transformations of the 19th century … were the hidden motive forces behind the creation of a ‘European culture.’” | “The Europeans” is the much-anticipated follow-up to Figes’s acclaimed history of Russian culture, “Natasha’s Dance,” and like that book, it tells the story of a society in radical transition from tradition to modernity. In the introduction, Figes calls his project “an exploration of the railway age as the first period of cultural globalization,” an international history that “looks at Europe as a whole, not divided into nation-states or geographic zones,” and considers “the arts as a unifying force between nations.” His overarching concern is to show how, “in ways beyond the political control of any nation-state, the great technological and economic transformations of the 19th century … were the hidden motive forces behind the creation of a ‘European culture.’” |
| In the age of Brexit and social media, the contemporary relevance of “The Europeans” is obvious. But Figes wisely leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions about the parallels between then and now. By the same token, he takes a position on the cosmopolitan ideal of Europe, which he casts in inspiring terms. “As Kenneth Clark once said,” he writes, “nearly all the great advances in civilization … have been during periods of the utmost internationalism.” | In the age of Brexit and social media, the contemporary relevance of “The Europeans” is obvious. But Figes wisely leaves his readers to draw their own conclusions about the parallels between then and now. By the same token, he takes a position on the cosmopolitan ideal of Europe, which he casts in inspiring terms. “As Kenneth Clark once said,” he writes, “nearly all the great advances in civilization … have been during periods of the utmost internationalism.” |
| “The Europeans” begins by discussing the inauguration in the 1840s of Europe’s first international railroad lines. Figes argues that “the speed of railway travel was experienced as a revolution,” and he quotes a remark from the German poet Heinrich Heine. “Space is killed by the railways,” Heine wrote in 1843. “I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris.” | “The Europeans” begins by discussing the inauguration in the 1840s of Europe’s first international railroad lines. Figes argues that “the speed of railway travel was experienced as a revolution,” and he quotes a remark from the German poet Heinrich Heine. “Space is killed by the railways,” Heine wrote in 1843. “I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris.” |
| According to Figes, this “revolution in movement” promoted a heightened sense of common identity across the European continent: “The railways enabled people across Europe to see themselves as ‘Europeans’ in ways that they had not done before.” | According to Figes, this “revolution in movement” promoted a heightened sense of common identity across the European continent: “The railways enabled people across Europe to see themselves as ‘Europeans’ in ways that they had not done before.” |
| This worldly sensibility found expression in an outpouring of remarkably vibrant and innovative works of literature and art, which in turn heralded “a revolution in the cultural marketplace.” In relating this efflorescence, Figes does not acknowledge its kinship with another foundational moment in the history of Western cosmopolitanism: the humanist Renaissance of the 14th through the 16th centuries. Nor, beyond the occasional nod to “Enlightenment ideals” and “the Republic of Letters” — the network of potent intellectual exchanges that connected freethinkers in 18th-century England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Prussia, Russia, Scotland and the New World — does he consider the relevance of that watershed epoch. Even a condensed discussion of this context would have been useful in a work of this scope. | This worldly sensibility found expression in an outpouring of remarkably vibrant and innovative works of literature and art, which in turn heralded “a revolution in the cultural marketplace.” In relating this efflorescence, Figes does not acknowledge its kinship with another foundational moment in the history of Western cosmopolitanism: the humanist Renaissance of the 14th through the 16th centuries. Nor, beyond the occasional nod to “Enlightenment ideals” and “the Republic of Letters” — the network of potent intellectual exchanges that connected freethinkers in 18th-century England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Prussia, Russia, Scotland and the New World — does he consider the relevance of that watershed epoch. Even a condensed discussion of this context would have been useful in a work of this scope. |
| That said, Figes is impressively thorough when it comes to cataloging the railway era’s many notable achievements. For the most part centered in cosmopolitan Paris, these advances include the emergence of portrait photography; plein-air painting; Impressionism; Orientalism; the world’s fair; the one-man art exhibition; the realist novel; the penny dreadful, short story and serialized roman feuilleton (three forms particularly well suited to consumption on train trips); the railway station bookstore; the grand opera (“a revolution on the stage”); and the Gesamtkunstwerk (a countervailing “revolution on the operatic stage,” begun by Richard Wagner to free German music and drama from the “monstrosities” of French civilization in general and the grand opera in particular). | That said, Figes is impressively thorough when it comes to cataloging the railway era’s many notable achievements. For the most part centered in cosmopolitan Paris, these advances include the emergence of portrait photography; plein-air painting; Impressionism; Orientalism; the world’s fair; the one-man art exhibition; the realist novel; the penny dreadful, short story and serialized roman feuilleton (three forms particularly well suited to consumption on train trips); the railway station bookstore; the grand opera (“a revolution on the stage”); and the Gesamtkunstwerk (a countervailing “revolution on the operatic stage,” begun by Richard Wagner to free German music and drama from the “monstrosities” of French civilization in general and the grand opera in particular). |
| “The Europeans” also chronicles the rise of the public library; the café-concert; the casino; the international spa vacation; the travel industry; the tourist guidebook; the museum guidebook; the celebrity biography; celebrity branding (which began, Figes argues, with corporate sponsorship for the tours of virtuoso pianist-composers like Franz Liszt); “the modern system of selling books by mail or telegraph order (a sort of 19th-century Amazon)”; the piano as a ubiquitous home-entertainment fixture (“no other medium was so important to the dissemination of the opera, choral and orchestral repertory until the invention of the phonograph and the radio”); the Grand Tour “as a means of intellectual betterment”; “writers’ homes and literary landmarks” as tourist attractions; and artists and writers as national heroes and international superstars (not to mention canny entrepreneurs and tireless self-promoters). | “The Europeans” also chronicles the rise of the public library; the café-concert; the casino; the international spa vacation; the travel industry; the tourist guidebook; the museum guidebook; the celebrity biography; celebrity branding (which began, Figes argues, with corporate sponsorship for the tours of virtuoso pianist-composers like Franz Liszt); “the modern system of selling books by mail or telegraph order (a sort of 19th-century Amazon)”; the piano as a ubiquitous home-entertainment fixture (“no other medium was so important to the dissemination of the opera, choral and orchestral repertory until the invention of the phonograph and the radio”); the Grand Tour “as a means of intellectual betterment”; “writers’ homes and literary landmarks” as tourist attractions; and artists and writers as national heroes and international superstars (not to mention canny entrepreneurs and tireless self-promoters). |
| Many of these advances were underpinned not only by the railway revolution, but by a parallel “revolution in the publication of books,” music and images, fueled by cost-efficient new methods of mechanical reproduction. These methods were central to the elaboration of 19th-century cosmopolitan culture. They fueled and met a growing demand for translated foreign writing, sparked rampant piracy and copyright laws to curb it, and contributed to the formation of a standardized Western canon of classic books, artworks and musical compositions. They played a vital role as well in the commodification of high- and low-cultural material and the globalization of the art and entertainment markets — two phenomena that persist to this day. | Many of these advances were underpinned not only by the railway revolution, but by a parallel “revolution in the publication of books,” music and images, fueled by cost-efficient new methods of mechanical reproduction. These methods were central to the elaboration of 19th-century cosmopolitan culture. They fueled and met a growing demand for translated foreign writing, sparked rampant piracy and copyright laws to curb it, and contributed to the formation of a standardized Western canon of classic books, artworks and musical compositions. They played a vital role as well in the commodification of high- and low-cultural material and the globalization of the art and entertainment markets — two phenomena that persist to this day. |
| The three lives in the book’s subtitle were variously catalysts, beneficiaries and exemplars of these watershed changes. Two members of the trio have ceased to be household names: the Spanish-born soprano Pauline Viardot (née Garcia) and her husband, Louis Viardot, a French “journalist and man of letters, art collector and critic, Spanish expert and historian.” In her prime, Pauline was a renowned opera diva who, with her idiosyncratic sound (Camille Saint-Saëns likened it to “the taste of ‘bitter oranges’”), her jolie-laide appearance (Heine joked that her ugliness made her “almost beautiful”) and her “exotic Spanish origins,” captivated audiences the world over. In addition, she won the hearts of such great Gallic geniuses as the poet Alfred de Musset, whose advances she spurned, and the composers Charles Gounod and Hector Berlioz, both of whom were her lovers. (Her husband, 21 years her elder, knew of her dalliances but did not try to stop them.) Her most consequential affair, though, was with the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, and his is the third of Figes’s titular lives. Turgenev and Pauline first met at a party in St. Petersburg in 1843, when he was 25 and she 22. He fell for her at first sight, and the two of them struck up a romance that lasted, with various ups and downs, until his death in 1883. | The three lives in the book’s subtitle were variously catalysts, beneficiaries and exemplars of these watershed changes. Two members of the trio have ceased to be household names: the Spanish-born soprano Pauline Viardot (née Garcia) and her husband, Louis Viardot, a French “journalist and man of letters, art collector and critic, Spanish expert and historian.” In her prime, Pauline was a renowned opera diva who, with her idiosyncratic sound (Camille Saint-Saëns likened it to “the taste of ‘bitter oranges’”), her jolie-laide appearance (Heine joked that her ugliness made her “almost beautiful”) and her “exotic Spanish origins,” captivated audiences the world over. In addition, she won the hearts of such great Gallic geniuses as the poet Alfred de Musset, whose advances she spurned, and the composers Charles Gounod and Hector Berlioz, both of whom were her lovers. (Her husband, 21 years her elder, knew of her dalliances but did not try to stop them.) Her most consequential affair, though, was with the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, and his is the third of Figes’s titular lives. Turgenev and Pauline first met at a party in St. Petersburg in 1843, when he was 25 and she 22. He fell for her at first sight, and the two of them struck up a romance that lasted, with various ups and downs, until his death in 1883. |
| Initially presented to Pauline as “a good hunter and a bad poet,” Turgenev rose to celebrity in 1852 with the release of his “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” — a book Figes credits with having “as big an impact in swaying Russian views against serfdom” as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published that same year, “had on the antislavery movement in America.” The “Sketches” announced the author’s distinctly “Western” — as opposed to Russian — belief in “moral progress, freedom and democracy,” and earned him an ardent international following. Turgenev thus preceded Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as “the best-known Russian writer in the West,” though he championed both of them in France. He also introduced the writings of his great friend Gustave Flaubert to the Russian reading public, even translating “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” into Russian. In a related effort, Turgenev and Pauline acted as “go-betweens, connecting people in the European music world” with composers in Russia. | Initially presented to Pauline as “a good hunter and a bad poet,” Turgenev rose to celebrity in 1852 with the release of his “Sketches From a Hunter’s Album” — a book Figes credits with having “as big an impact in swaying Russian views against serfdom” as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” published that same year, “had on the antislavery movement in America.” The “Sketches” announced the author’s distinctly “Western” — as opposed to Russian — belief in “moral progress, freedom and democracy,” and earned him an ardent international following. Turgenev thus preceded Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy as “the best-known Russian writer in the West,” though he championed both of them in France. He also introduced the writings of his great friend Gustave Flaubert to the Russian reading public, even translating “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” into Russian. In a related effort, Turgenev and Pauline acted as “go-betweens, connecting people in the European music world” with composers in Russia. |
| Turgenev stands in “The Europeans” as an ambiguous emblem of cosmopolitanism. Notwithstanding his role as an “important intermediary” between Russia and the West, he evinced a certain degree of cultural schizophrenia, which his expatriate lifestyle likely compounded. (While holding hereditary estates in Russia, Turgenev resided chiefly in France and in the spa town of Baden, where he built a grand villa next door to the Viardots’.) “I am a European, and I love Europe; I pin my faith to its banner,” he declared. “Although he felt himself to be a Russian,” Figes adds, he “was opposed to nationalism in all its forms, and refused to believe that the calls of any country should come before those of humanity.” Yet later in the book, Turgenev informs the Slavophile Dostoyevsky: “You should know that I … consider myself a German, not a Russian, and I’m proud of it!” | |
| This avowal complicates Turgenev’s cosmopolitan profile because, as Figes repeatedly notes, German identity in these years was increasingly and explicitly bound up with a fierce nationalist agenda. In the cultural sphere, this mentality found its leading advocate in Wagner, with his often anti-Semitic calls for a “purely ‘German’ art.” Though Pauline was a fan — informing Turgenev, who was not, “I am a Wagnerian to my fingertips, my poor friend!” — Wagner scoffed that her collaborations with Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer “made Pauline a ‘Jew’ herself.” Over the course of the 1860s, Wagner’s vitriolic brand of national pride fused with the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck’s “blood and iron” militarism, culminating in 1870-71 with the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War. When this conflict broke out, Turgenev wrote: “I am wholeheartedly on the German side. This is truly a war of civilization against barbarism.” Admittedly, these words reflected his hatred of the French emperor Napoleon III more than any fondness for Wagner, Bismarck or Kaiser Wilhelm I. Even so, the Franco-Prussian War spelled catastrophe for the liberal, pluralistic culture Turgenev did so much to advance. The war of civilization against barbarism had only just begun. | This avowal complicates Turgenev’s cosmopolitan profile because, as Figes repeatedly notes, German identity in these years was increasingly and explicitly bound up with a fierce nationalist agenda. In the cultural sphere, this mentality found its leading advocate in Wagner, with his often anti-Semitic calls for a “purely ‘German’ art.” Though Pauline was a fan — informing Turgenev, who was not, “I am a Wagnerian to my fingertips, my poor friend!” — Wagner scoffed that her collaborations with Jewish composers like Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer “made Pauline a ‘Jew’ herself.” Over the course of the 1860s, Wagner’s vitriolic brand of national pride fused with the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck’s “blood and iron” militarism, culminating in 1870-71 with the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War. When this conflict broke out, Turgenev wrote: “I am wholeheartedly on the German side. This is truly a war of civilization against barbarism.” Admittedly, these words reflected his hatred of the French emperor Napoleon III more than any fondness for Wagner, Bismarck or Kaiser Wilhelm I. Even so, the Franco-Prussian War spelled catastrophe for the liberal, pluralistic culture Turgenev did so much to advance. The war of civilization against barbarism had only just begun. |
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