In his new book, Orlando Figes explores high European culture in the 19th century via the life and world of Ivan Turgenev, a Russian author
of the cosmopolitan glamour and sheer brassiness of high European culture in the 19th century, look no further than the obsequies of Frédéric Chopin, which took place in a grand Paris church in 1849. Pauline Viardot , a Spanish-born mezzo-soprano who had known the composer, sang Mozart’s “Requiem” to a packed congregation that included “the whole of artistic and aristocratic Paris”, as well as her lifelong admirer, the Russian author Ivan Turgenev .
Viardot, a French opera manager, critic and scholar of Spanish and Russian, had married Pauline Garcia when he was 39 and she was 18. Soon he was negotiating appearances for her in places such as Berlin and Vienna, and eventually St Petersburg. There, in 1843, she enthralled the royal court, high society—and in particular, Turgenev, an impoverished blueblood and author.
Mr Figes refrains from judgment about his protagonists and lets the densely woven detail speak for itself. Louis Viardot emerges as a quiet hero, Pauline Viardot as a ruthless but likeable pragmatist and Turgenev as an insufferable prig whom posterity could forgive only because of his excellent, observant prose.
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