This is not a trendy book—because after all, who cares about European-ness in an age of isolation and Brexit?—but it is a rich and dense description of a the nineteenth century knitting together of music, art, and literature into “the ideal of a coherent European cultural identity” (479). What the author describes is the constant tension between distinct national and local art forms and trends that worked to smooth out differences and allow the “best” to rise to prominence. Figes uses the lives of opera singer Pauline Garcia Viardot, her impresario husband Louis Viardot, and their writer-partner Ivan Turgenev as threads through the story, demonstrating how technology transformed artistic life and how they in turn coped with the changes. Turgenev met the unbeautiful-but-charismatic Pauline in 1843 on her tour in St. Petersburg, and it was love at first sight; for the rest of his life he remained the third partner in the Viardots’ marriage, sharing homes with them with Louis’s acquiescence. Their relationship stimulated Pauline to use her operatic fame to promote Russian literature in Paris and other European capitals. The expansion of the railroads, increasingly sophisticated methods of cultura dissemination, and a growing audience of literate and sophisticated consumers of art all revolutionized culture in the nineteenth century, and artists struggled to keep up. Because what Figes explains is the rise of the arts as consumables, the book also demonstrates the ways in which these innovations pressured artists to use whatever business skills they had to ensure they could make a living. Not incidentally the reader also learns about nineteenth-century opera, Russian literature, the Franco-Prussian War, music publishing, and copyright. A thoroughly enjoyable cultural history.