The Europeans, Orlando Figes’s bustling and exhaustive history of this time, forms the natural sequel to his admirable account of Russian culture, Natasha’s Dance (2002). Figes sees the inexorable expansion of the railway system as synonymous with an increased circulation in people, letters, news, and information, ‘leading to a widening public sense in all the railway nations of belonging to “Europe”’.

The Europeans is a whole rail journey unto itself: the literary equivalent of a whistle-stop tour, but with things to learn and relish at every stop along the way. Figes’s masterstroke is how he squarely places human involvement at the forefront of his narrative. This is in the form of three distinct Europeans: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818–83); the French-born mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot, née García (1821–1910); and her husband and one-time manager, the French critic, scholar, and author Louis Viardot (1800–83).

Pauline Viardot in old age (photograph, c.1900)

Pauline Viardot (younger sister of the great soprano Maria Malibran) was the most celebrated singer of her day. Her vast repertoire ranged from Monteverdi and Handel to ‘modern’ works by Rossini, Meyerbeer, Gounod, and, later, Wagner, who presented her with a score of Meistersinger inscribed ‘An der Meistersängerin Mme Viardot’. In addition, Pauline was the first foreign singer to perform the Russian repertoire in the original language.

Throughout her life, Pauline’s fame and stratospheric fee structure remained unwavering: ‘Never sing for nothing’ was her credo. This applied even to singing at Chopin’s funeral in 1849, for which Pauline charged two thousand francs, or roughly half the cost of the entire event. She was also an accomplished teacher, keyboard player – her instrument of choice was made by French organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1848 at a cost in today’s money of $95,000 – and composer of several hundred works, including songs and operettas.

In St Petersburg on 9 November 1843, during Pauline’s Russian tour, Louis Viardot was at a party and was introduced to a tall young nobleman with a high-pitched voice, who had been to every one of Pauline’s performances. A few days later, Louis introduced his wife to her admirer, and she would later recall him as ‘a good hunter and a bad poet’. This was Turgenev, who instantly fell in love. His unilateral declaration would take some years to be reciprocated, but the die was cast. Pauline also changed her mind about his poetry.

The relationship between Turgenev and the Viardots was an always discreet ménage à trois, conducted across much of Europe, as the peripatetic family spent various spells in France, Spain, Russia, Germany, and Britain. Although this is not a prurient bedroom-gazing book, some inevitable speculation occurs: for example, was the father of Pauline’s fourth child her husband or her lover?

Of greater interest, and in keeping with the wider ambitions of The Europeans, is what Turgenev and the Viardots achieved outside the various châteaux, mansions, dachas, and lodging houses the family collectively occupied for more than half a century. It was the people they knew, as well as the changing times in which they lived, that set the momentum of this illustrious book. For example, Turgenev, who became a good friend of Flaubert, campaigned to have the Frenchman’s novels published in Russia. ‘He acted in effect as his literary agent, publisher and translator.’ As a result, Turgenev became a go-between for the St Petersburg and European literary scene.

Quite often, almost within the space of a page, the narrative swiftly oscillates between the purely personal and the more general, enhancing rather than diverting from the main subject. For example, a mention of how Turgenev’s novel Home of the Gentry (1859) uses the piano to illustrate the mannerisms of the aristocracy arises from a longer essay on the thriving piano industry (in Britain alone, more than two hundred firms were manufacturing 23,000 pianos a year); from here, the subject expands again, into how the sheet-music industry, particularly transcriptions of symphonic or operatic works, changed the way composers earned their living.

Another example. Turgenev’s interest in the relatively new art of portrait photography transforms into a section that explains how new techniques of mechanical reproduction made photography more accessible and affordable, resulting in early versions of fan magazines – or Galeries des contemporains – that promoted people such as Pauline Viardot. This, in turn, leads to an account of photography’s influence on visual artists, especially the development of plein-air painting that would herald the birth of the Impressionist movement.

Sometimes, the action goes in reverse. For instance, an expansive section on the rise of the guidebook and its effect on nineteenth-century tourism, with the English in Italy wandering everywhere with Murray’s Handbook in hand, suddenly brings Louis Viardot into focus: while accompanying Pauline on her European tours, he visited museums and wrote about their collections in a series of five guides published between 1852 and 1855 under the general title Guide et memento de l’artiste et du voyageur.

Figes’s book is at once a celebration of times past and a lament for time present. From this vantage point, it presents a persuasive argument for a united Europe, especially when brutal Brexit reality has it otherwise. The Europeans makes one appreciate anew the irony of the apocryphal Times headline, ‘Fog in the Channel, continent isolated’.