PositiveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Figes artfully makes these individual lives into illustrative examples of the changing terms of nineteenth-century culture, and especially the ways in which a Russian writer and a Spanish diva, from the eastern and western margins of Europe, could emerge as fully European and cosmopolitan cultural figures. As history-writing The Europeans feels a little old-fashioned, but its argument is made with conviction and the characters come vividly to life. Figes also offers a set of insights into the question of what it meant to be and feel European in the nineteenth century ... Perhaps Figes’s most original contribution to the discussion of nineteenth-century European cosmopolitanism, however, derives from his expertise as a Russian historian, which allows him to discuss (with particular reference to Turgenev) the special complications of Russia’s relation to European culture – and there was probably no country in Europe from the nineteenth century to the present moment with a more tangled and ambivalent sense of its European identity. That said, readers may be most interested in Figes’s account of the unusual Turgenev-Viardot ménage, and most appreciative of his broad canvas of nineteenth-century cultural life, evoked in fascinating detail rather than by systematic analysis.
