The Europeans

3

The Arts in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day credo of the sophisticated, above all in France, is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature … I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature … Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art.’ A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre is his Messiah.

Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1859’

1

In January 1850, a man by the name of Charles Gounod called on Pauline Viardot. He had a letter of introduction from the conductor François Seghers, recommending him as a composer. In fact they had met before, in Rome nine years earlier, when Pauline had been on her honeymoon with Louis, and Gounod was a student at the Villa Medici, having just received the Prix de Rome. She had sung an aria from Weber’s Der Freischütz and he had played the piano part, remarkably, from memory. Pauline had forgotten that meeting, but Gounod had not. He had thought of his connection to Pauline as his entry to the theatre, ‘the only place to make his name’, as he put it. Until then, composing for the church, he had struggled to establish his career.¹

Pauline had agreed to give the caller half an hour of her time. But she was so impressed by his music that she spent the whole day in his company and ended up by promising to sing the leading part in any opera he chose to write. She even made it one of the conditions for the renewal of her contract at the Paris Opéra that a work by him should be staged there within a year. Nestor Roqueplan, the Opéra’s director, was so anxious to retain his prima donna that he readily agreed to her caprice.

Pauline was keen to find new talent for the stage. She had tired of Le Prophète. ‘I have sung nothing but the eternal Prophète (I have not said immortal),’ she wrote to George Sand on 16 February. She was excited by Gounod, whose music promised a renaissance for French opera. ‘I have been very happy,’ she continued in her letter.

We have made the acquaintance of a young composer who will be a great man once his music becomes known. He had the Prix de Rome ten years ago, and since then he has worked alone in his study, without seeming to realize that every phrase issuing from his pen is a stroke of genius. In truth, it is a comfort to the art to have before one a great musical future to admire, without always having to give oneself a stiff neck by looking back to the past … He will have an opera next winter, if I am on hand, as is probable. Besides his genius, he is a very distinguished man, a noble nature, lofty and simple.²

Pauline was infatuated with Gounod. She wrote to all her friends to broadcast her opinion of his genius. He would be the French Mozart. He was handsome, charming, graceful and vivacious, musically connected to her spiritual being in a way that neither Louis nor Turgenev could ever be. Her feelings were returned by the composer.

In the early months of 1850, they spent hours together every day working on his ideas for Sapho, the opera based on the Greek myth which he had chosen for Pauline and the Paris Opéra. Gounod was embarrassed that he had been helped by a woman to compose his opera and downplayed Pauline’s involvement.³ Turgenev was consumed with jealousy. He tried to conceal it by sharing Pauline’s enthusiasm for the promising composer, and found solace in hunting trips with the mild-mannered Louis, who had long since learned to stifle any jealousy on account of his wife’s admirers. But if the husband was not jealous, then Turgenev was. He suffered terribly. According to Herzen, Turgenev took to drinking heavily and visited brothels.⁴

His anguish can be felt in two works written at this time. In The Diary of a Superfluous Man, the hero of the story, Chulkaturin, becomes jealous of a prince who wins the heart of his beloved Liza, and challenges him to a duel. Turgenev’s play The Student (later renamed A Month in the Country) is even closer to the complicated story of Pauline, Louis, Gounod and himself. The play’s married heroine, Natalia Petrovna, spurns her passionate admirer Ryabinin (Rakitin in A Month in the Country) when she falls in love with her son’s tutor, the student Belyaev (Turgenev later confessed that Rakitin was himself). A note in the margins of the manuscript suggests that Turgenev was unsure how far Pauline was to blame for her affair with Gounod. At the moment when Natalia becomes aware of her love for Belyaev, a heavily reworked passage, Turgenev wrote: ‘She herself had not suspected how strong her feeling was.’⁵

Gounod, c. 1850.

Turgenev’s torment did not end when Pauline departed for Berlin, where the opera season started with Le Prophète in April. A few days after she had left Paris, Gounod’s brother died, leaving him to provide for his widow and their baby son. Informed by Gounod of the tragedy, Pauline told him to take them with his mother to Courtavenel, where he could work without disturbance on Sapho. As a favour to Pauline, Turgenev went with them to provide moral support, putting off his previous plan to return to Russia when the Viardots had left for Germany. Pauline wrote to Turgenev with specific instructions about which rooms the Gounods were to have. She was treating him as little more than a servant. Turgenev did his best to act as the composer’s friend, despite his jealousy of ‘that monster Gounod’, who received longer letters from Pauline.⁶ Gounod and Turgenev went for walks together in the woods. They would sit with each other in the evenings, when Pauline was performing in Berlin, following the probable timing of her arias, applauding her in absentia at the end, and even throwing sprays of white lilac at the phantom singer, bits of which Turgenev enclosed in a letter to Pauline. Masochistically, he also told her news about Gounod.⁷

By the start of May, Turgenev could bear it no longer. He wrote to Pauline in despair, telling her in rather formal language that he must return to Russia. He would leave Courtavenel on 10 or 12 May and pass through Berlin on his way. Was Turgenev leaving out of jealousy? He would not say so. But he was depressed, and the sense that he had lost Pauline was at the heart of his sadness. Pauline’s response is unknown. She expressed her regret that he was leaving in a letter to Gounod but did not write to him. Turgenev wrote again, insisting he must leave, though saying that it grieved him to do so, after which he added a few bits of news (the activities of the poachers, a change in the weather, Gounod’s progress on Sapho), before stopping to explain that he could not go on writing with this ‘artificial jollity’ – nor hide his misery behind a semblance of normality: ‘I am dreadfully sad,’ he confessed at last.⁸

Perhaps Turgenev was waiting for Pauline to plead with him to stay. He could not bring himself to leave while that was possible. On 12 May, he left for Paris, but two days later he returned, claiming that he had been told by a Russian friend there that the Tsar had ordered the arrest of suspected oppositionists, making it advisable for him to wait a while before returning to St Petersburg. Turgenev was ‘as happy as a boy’ to be back at Courtavenel, he wrote to Pauline; so much so that he forgave her for having sent in his absence a ‘tiny little letter’ compared to the ‘big, fat, long and compactly written ones’ which she had sent to Gounod. If only she would join him at Courtavenel, they could discuss together when he should go back to Russia. Perhaps she could persuade him not to go:

Russia can wait – that vast and sombre figure, motionless and veiled by clouds like the Sphinx of Oedipus. She will swallow me later. I think I can see her great immovable gaze on me, fixed with a gloomy scrutiny befitting her eyes of stone. Do not worry, sphinx, I will return to you, and if I do not solve your riddle, you can devour me at your leisure. Leave me in peace for a little longer! I will come back to your steppes.⁹

Turgenev spent another five weeks at Courtavenel. He was generous towards Gounod, jollying him along as he laboured on Sapho and writing to Pauline with praise for his music, which he thought too ‘melancholy’ and ‘lofty’ to achieve commercial popularity.¹⁰

Pauline and Louis returned to Courtavenel in June before departing for London, where Pauline was to sing at Covent Garden as well as in a series of concerts. But she made no effort to discourage Turgenev from returning to Russia. His presence there was now a matter of urgency. In Russia it was rumoured that his connections to French republican circles would soon lead to his being placed on a list of permanent exiles, which would mean his works could not be published in his native land. That was not a risk he could take, because he still depended on the small income from his publications in Russia.¹¹

Money, in the end, was the most important factor in Turgenev’s decision to return. Deprived of his allowance by his mother since 1848, Turgenev barely scraped a living from his writing. Until the success of his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album in 1852, he was paid just fifty paper roubles (around sixty francs) per printer’s page by the Contemporary.* He was frequently reduced to borrowing from his friends or writing begging letters to his publishers in Russia for advances against future plays and stories which he promised to give them. He desperately needed to return to Russia, not just to secure his future as a writer, but to make peace with his mother so that she would resume paying his allowance, without which as a writer he could not survive. He hoped to get a settlement from her that would let him live abroad.

On 15 June, Turgenev travelled with the Viardots to Paris and saw them off at the Gare du Nord, where they departed on the London train. Although he had not announced his plans, he had brought his bags and favourite hunting dog to Paris, so Pauline was suspicious of his intentions, and their parting was emotional. Four days later, he wrote to her that he was leaving for Russia. She replied, expressing her regret, hoping that he would return, but not asking him to change his mind. He also wrote to Gounod. The next day he received a long reply – the letter of a victor to the vanquished – in which the composer spoke about his hope that they would remain bound by their ‘excellent friends, whom we both love very deeply’, and asked him ‘in her name’ to let him know through her about important changes in his life. In a P.S. he also wrote: ‘Your laundry bill comes to 8 francs 55 centimes.’¹²

The evening before his departure, Turgenev wrote again to the Viardots. To Pauline he confessed that returning to Russia was like going into the desert. She must promise to remember him and write to him with every trivial detail of her life. When she sat outside her château by the poplars in the courtyard she must think of him at Spasskoe with its old lime trees, gazing back in her direction at Courtavenel. He attached a separate note for Louis, who had consoled Turgenev with the prophecy that his conscience would be clear once he had returned to Russia and made peace with his mother:

I do not want to leave France, my dear good friend, without expressing my affection and esteem for you, or saying how sorry I am that we must part. I take with me the friendliest remembrance of you; I have come to appreciate the excellence and nobility of your character, and you must believe me when I say that I shall never feel truly happy until I am again able, gun in hand and by your side, to tread the beloved plains of the Brie. I accept your prophecy and will try to believe in it. One’s homeland has its rights; but is not the true homeland that place where one has found the most affection, where one’s heart and spirit feel the most at ease? There is nowhere on earth that I love so much as Courtavenel.¹³

On 29 June, Turgenev left by steamship from Stettin for St Petersburg, and then went by stagecoach to Moscow, following the course of Russia’s first main railway, at that time being built by vast armies of serf labour, finally arriving at his mother’s estate at Spasskoe on 5 July.

He found his brother newly married to a German woman, Anna Shvarts, who had been employed by his mother as a paid companion. The tyrannical Varvara Petrovna had refused to give her consent to the marriage, but since she did not give her son enough to live on, he had married Anna without her consent and was now living with her independently. His mother would not allow her within her sight.

Turgenev also found a daughter there, an eight-year-old girl born to one of his mother’s household staff, a seamstress called Avdotia, whom he had forgotten while he was abroad. ‘I was young,’ he explained in a letter to Pauline. ‘I was bored in the countryside and took an interest in a pretty seamstress employed by my mother. I whispered some words in her ear – she came to my room – I gave her money – and soon afterwards I went away.’¹⁴ Shortly after his return to Spasskoe he had seen the child being forced to carry a heavy pail of water by a coachman. He complained to his mother, who was entertaining visitors. Varvara Petrovna had the young girl, Pelageya, brought into the drawing-room, and asked her guests to say whom she resembled. ‘Why, it is your daughter,’ she then told her son.

When she began to show her pregnancy Avdotia had been sent away to Moscow, where she worked in the mansion rented by Varvara Petrovna on Ostozhenka Street, and was later married off to a merchant. The baby was brought back to Spasskoe, where she was brought up by the household serfs. Turgenev was appalled. He felt ashamed. For the next quarter of a century, until her death, he paid a monthly pension to Avdotia. Turgenev felt a sense of duty to his unexpected daughter but no real love or affection. Writing to Pauline, he proposed to give his daughter to a convent or take her with him to St Petersburg and find a boarding school for her. He did not think to bring her up himself. Pauline offered to give the child a home, educating her with her own daughter, who was then nine years old. Turgenev jumped at the offer. No doubt he was happy to have in his daughter (whom he renamed Paulinette) a family connection to Pauline. Turgenev promised to provide an annual income of 1,200 francs to help with the costs of her upbringing. Paulinette was despatched to Paris with a governess. The poor girl did not speak a word of French. The only thing her father told her when she left Spasskoe was to ‘worship’ Pauline as ‘her god’.¹⁵

Turgenev’s hopes of mending his relations with his mother were quickly dashed. She refused to make any sort of financial provision for either of her sons, except to give out small sums when she felt like doing so. ‘I have been forced to choose between losing my dignity, my independence – and poverty,’ Turgenev wrote to Pauline on 1 August. ‘My choice did not take long to make – I have left my mother’s house and renounced my inheritance. You will believe me, won’t you, my dear friends, when I tell you that it was impossible for me to do otherwise.’ The two brothers moved with Anna to Turgenevo, their father’s small estate a dozen kilometres from Spasskoe, where Turgenev set up rooms in the abandoned building of a paper factory. Hunting expeditions were his daily consolation. ‘I shall spend two months here to arrange my affairs,’ he wrote to Pauline, ‘and then return to Petersburg to work and live there from my work.’¹⁶

On 16 November, Varvara Petrovna died. She had been ill for several days. Turgenev was in Petersburg and Nikolai had written to call him back, but the journey then, before the railway, took six to seven days, and Turgenev was too late. ‘My mother died without having made any provisions [for her serfs] of any kind,’ he wrote a few days later to Pauline:

she left a multitude of people who depended on her to keep them from the street, so to speak. We shall have to do what she ought to have done. Her last days were really sad – God preserve us from a similar death. Her only desire was to deafen herself. On the eve of her death, even when the agony of the death-rattle had begun, there was – by her orders – an orchestra playing polkas in the neighbouring room.¹⁷

Her death left Turgenev with a lot of land but also with a lot of debts and obligations to her dependants. There were numerous hangers-on at Spasskoe, favourite servants, doctors, hard-up gentry neighbours looking for a hand-out from Varvara Petrovna – types who fill the pages of Turgenev’s works. Capricious to the end, she had added to her will a gift of 50,000 roubles to a serf girl she had chosen to adopt, money which Turgenev had to find from an estate that had been run into the ground by negligent and thieving farm stewards. It would take several years for Turgenev to work out how much money he should make – and how much he had lost – from his estates. With Spasskoe, alone, he possessed a manor with sufficient land and serfs to be able to expect an annual income of at least 6,000 silver roubles, or 24,000 francs. It was certainly enough to live well as a gentleman of leisure, even after he had paid his daughter’s allowance. The apartment which he rented in St Petersburg cost 450 silver roubles annually, and when he moved there, in 1855, he paid 1,000 roubles for a live-in cook, one of the best in the capital. But he never got the income which he should have earned from Spasskoe. Preoccupied by literature, he took no interest in the estate’s management and turned it over to a series of disastrous managers – beginning with a literary acquaintance from the Belinsky circle, N. N. Tiutchev, who lost him thousands, followed by his uncle, Nikolai Turgenev, a retired cavalry officer, who lost him even more. Naively trusting of people, and careless about money, Turgenev failed to realize the extent of his losses for many years.¹⁸

Sapho received its premiere in Paris in April 1851. A critical success, it had only six performances, mainly because Pauline could sing only on the first three nights and audiences dropped off steeply after that. George Sand, who had planned a trip to see it at the start of May, arrived to find that Sapho had been taken off.¹⁹

Gounod thought that Sapho lacked the theatrical elements that made Grand Opera popular.²⁰ It was not helped by the censor’s heavy pen – wielded in the interests of the popular but increasingly authoritarian Louis-Napoleon – which struck out some dramatic scenes on grounds of immorality and incitement to rebellion.²¹

Before the Paris premiere, Pauline had persuaded Frederick Gye, the manager of Covent Garden, to include Sapho in her contract for the 1851 season. She would sing the leading role.²² Pauline went to London at the start of June. Gounod joined her there a few weeks later. They made some improvements to the opera, removing scenes that dragged, and including a ballet. They had high hopes for London, where Sapho would receive its first performance on 9 August. It seemed to have a good chance of appealing to the English, who were in a festive mood for the Great Exhibition, which had opened in Hyde Park on 1 May. But the opera was a failure, receiving only two performances before it was taken off. The London critics were scathing, accusing Gye of putting on the ‘monotonous’ opera only to please Viardot.²³

With so many visitors in London for the Great Exhibition, the private concert season was particularly busy that summer, and Pauline was in high demand. But she managed to make several visits to the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton’s glass and iron exhibition hall, where she was impressed, as she put it in a letter to her mother, by the ‘creative similarities between all nations and the sheer inventiveness of humankind’.²⁴

The idea of a ‘universal exhibition’ went back to the Jacobins, who had mounted one to celebrate the industrial achievements of the French Republic in 1798. There had been many others since – in Berne and Madrid in 1845, Brussels and Bordeaux in 1847, St Petersburg in 1848, Lisbon and Paris in 1849. But the Great Exhibition was the first of its kind to be truly international, with over forty countries taking part. It was the original world’s fair, a ‘global village’ under glass.

The decision to internationalize the exhibition was taken by Prince Albert in 1849, following a visit to the Exposition Publique des Produits de l’Industrie Française in Paris. As President of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, the prince was the sponsor of ‘The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’ (as the Great Exhibition was officially called), with Henry Cole, a member of the Royal Society who had organized a number of successful exhibitions of industrial art, its chief organizing force. Originally conceived as a means of improving British design standards by comparison with other countries, the exhibition was quickly taken over by free-trade ideologists, who saw the development of international trade as a mechanism for promoting peace and progress, not to mention British interests as the leading manufacturer in the world. Its organizers did not stress the free-trade argument, because foreign governments were still generally opposed to it, but instead turned up the internationalist rhetoric, the old ideals of unity between the nations which had been invoked with the opening of international railways after 1843.

‘We are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to the accomplishment of that great end to which, indeed, all history points – the realization of the unity of mankind,’ declared Prince Albert, emphasizing how the ‘achievements of modern invention’ meant that the ‘distances which separated the different nations’ were ‘gradually vanishing’. The benefits of cultural exchange between nations were at the heart of this discourse. ‘The Exposition is calculated to promote and increase the free interchange of raw materials and manufactured commodities between all the nations of the earth,’ wrote Charles Babbage, the English polymath best known for his invention of a mechanical computer, whose ideas influenced the layout of the exhibition. ‘It is the interest of every people that all other nations should advance in knowledge, in industrial skill, in taste, and in science.’²⁵

For Karl Marx, who had been living in exile in London since 1849, the exhibition was ‘a striking proof of the concentrated power with which modern large-scale industry is everywhere demolishing national barriers and increasingly blurring local peculiarities of production, society and national character among all peoples’. It was, in other words, a symbol of the globalized economy created by the growth of capitalist networks and international trade. Marx also saw the exhibition as a monument to consumption. It was the foundation of a mass ‘consumer culture’ – as it would be called today – where a cultural value was assigned to goods over and above their use value. In his view the Crystal Palace – with its tens of thousands of items on display, from railway engines and boilers, electrical devices and machines, telescopes and microscopes, low-cost pianos, furniture of every kind, stuffed birds, umbrellas, pencils, gold and silver objects, porcelain and sculpture, prints and photographs – was a showcase for the fetish of commodities. ‘With this exhibition,’ Marx and Engels wrote, ‘the bourgeoisie of the world has erected in the modern Rome its Pantheon, where, with self-satisfied pride, it exhibits the gods which it has made for itself.’²⁶

A spectacle, museum and bazaar, the Great Exhibition blurred the old divisions between art objects, machines and commodities. The idea of the Royal Society was to ‘wed high art with mechanical skill’, as Prince Albert put it in 1846, and in the exhibition the emphasis was on the productive process of industrial arts (‘Art Manufactures’, as Cole termed them).²⁷ Paintings were excluded from the Crystal Palace,* unless they were deemed to demonstrate a new material or technique, but in the Fine Arts Court there were sculptures, ceramics, mosaics and enamels, all exhibited as the precious work of skilled craftsmen.

The narrative created by this curatorial principle represented art as a high-value consumer commodity. The art objects were displayed like merchandise, alongside gold and silver works, clocks and furniture, as in a department store.* Glass was the key to this display. The invention of the cast plate-glass method in 1848 allowed the production of the much larger sheets of glass which went into the building of the Crystal Palace, the shopfronts of department stores, and the great iron–glass arcades, the passages couverts de Paris.²⁸

Much of the art at the Great Exhibition was machine-made – casts and copies of antique statuettes, imitation bronzes, lithographic prints of famous paintings, designed for sale in the mass market. Although the organizers had decided that the objects on display should not have price tags, the decision had been taken only after ‘much examination and inquiry’, according to Cole. There were many critics of this policy, including Babbage, who argued that the price ‘is the most important element in every bargain’ and that to omit it was ‘not less absurd than to represent a tragedy without a hero, or to paint a portrait without a nose’. Since the main aim of the exhibition was the ‘increase of commerce and the exchange of commodities’, Babbage suggested that ‘sales should be permitted on the premises’. Queen Victoria probably agreed. After visiting the exhibition, she recorded in her diary ‘a wish to buy all one saw!’²⁹

2

Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, the work that would make Turgenev’s name, was published in 1852. The book was made up of stories he had previously published, mostly in The Contemporary, whose editor, Nekrasov, had wanted to collect them in a single volume since 1847; but it was only three years later, after the success of those that had appeared, that Turgenev began to prepare the publication and wrote the last stories for the book. Hunting stories and sketches were a popular genre, particularly if they doubled up as travelogues or social commentaries. Louis Viardot had achieved a success with his Souvenirs de chasse (1846), which by 1852 was just about to go into its fifth edition in Hachette’s Bibliothèque des Chemins de Fer. Turgenev must have hoped to achieve something similar.

Turgenev had problems with the censors from the start. Any work that set out to expose the conditions of the serfs was bound to run into trouble in Russia, the only country in Europe at that time that had yet to abolish serfdom. After the revolutionary convulsions of 1848, governments across the Continent were wary of the power of the arts, the theatre in particular, to mobilize political emotions. The problem was especially acute in the Austrian Empire, where the counter-revolution had left a legacy of frustrated national sentiment in, among other places, Hungary, the Czech lands and northern Italy. Verdi’s opera Stiffelio (1850) was butchered by the censors in Trieste because its story-line (a priest forgives his adulterous wife) was seen by the Austrian authorities as an attack on Catholic morals. Rigoletto (1851) ran into similar problems before it was first performed at the Teatro La Fenice in Venice. Based on Victor Hugo’s play, Le Roi s’amuse, the opera’s depiction of the French king as an immoral womanizer was deemed unacceptable by the Austrian censors, although after long negotiations they allowed a toned-down version shifted to the extinct Duchy of Mantua under the Gonzaga family.

Nowhere were the censors more active than in Russia. The European revolutions had not spread to Russia in 1848 but there were small groups of revolutionaries and intellectuals committed to democracy, from which the Tsar and his panicky advisers expected trouble any time. To seal off Russia from possible contagion by Western ideas the Tsar established the Buturlin Committee in 1848 to extend his powers of preventive censorship. Any literary activity deemed remotely subversive attracted the attention of the Tsar’s police. There was no rhyme or reason to its repressions. In 1849, the Slavophile writer Yury Samarin was imprisoned for an unpublished manuscript in which he criticized the nobility in Riga, where he lived. In the same year the so-called Petrashevsky Circle, a group of intellectuals (including the writer Dostoevsky) who met once a week to discuss political ideas, was sentenced to death by a Russian court. Dostoevsky’s offence was to have read out Belinsky’s by-then famous but forbidden letter to Gogol of 1847 in which the critic had attacked mysticism and called for reform. At the last moment before their execution, the twenty-one ‘conspirators’ received a pardon from the Tsar, their sentences commuted to various terms of penal labour in Siberia.

Turgenev had already had some trouble with the censors in Russia, who had barred the publication of some of his stories in The Contemporary between 1849 and 1851. But these problems were insignificant compared to the storm that erupted on the publication of the Sketches as a book in 1852. Aware of the tightening censorship in St Petersburg, Turgenev had let his friend Vasily Botkin give his manuscript to a relatively liberal Moscow censor, Prince V. V. Lvov, who had agreed to advise the writer on what needed to be cut. On the basis of those changes the book was approved for publication by Lvov in March (among the cuts was a dedication to Pauline, whose name had been replaced with asterisks).³⁰ The censor no doubt thought there was no harm in passing stories that had been mostly published previously. None of them contained a single sentence that could be read as an overt attack on the tsarist system or serfdom (although taken altogether the whole book was suffused with a subtle condemnation of both).

On 28 April, Turgenev was arrested, not apparently for the Sketches, but for an obituary of Gogol he had published in the Moscow Herald (Moskovskie Vedomosti) on 25 March. Turgenev had been deeply shaken by the writer’s death in February. ‘It is difficult for you as a foreigner to appreciate the huge scale of this loss, so cruel and so complete,’ he had written to Pauline. ‘Even the most penetrating critics from abroad, a Mérimée for example, saw in Gogol just a humourist in the English mould … But you have to be a Russian to understand what we have lost. For us he was more than a writer – he revealed us Russians to ourselves.’³¹ Like every Russian writer to emerge in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Turgenev thought of himself as a ‘follower of Gogol’. In an influential article of 1845 Belinsky had described his story ‘The Overcoat’ as the founding text in a ‘new literary school’ defined by the critic as the ‘reproduction of reality in all its truth’. The term ‘realism’ was only just beginning to be used, but the idea that the writer ought to show all aspects of society, including its vulgarity and ugliness, as Belinsky argued Gogol had achieved, became the basis of the realist tradition in Russia (as Dostoevsky famously put it, the whole of Russian literature ‘came out from underneath Gogol’s “Overcoat”’).

There was nothing political in Turgenev’s article about Gogol. Describing him as a ‘great man’, it was written, however, in a spirit of exasperation at the general silence in the Russian press about his death, a frustration he expressed in letters to Botkin and Ivan Aksakov, the Slavophile critic, which were intercepted by the Tsar’s political police. He also wrote in the same vein to Louis Viardot, who subsequently wrote an article in Le Siècle, the French republican newspaper, reporting from an unnamed Russian source that Gogol had been persecuted by the censors in Russia. The article was picked up by a tsarist police agent in Paris who named the source as Turgenev. His report was handed to the Tsar, who was determined to punish Turgenev for his Sketches. Ignoring the advice of his police chief simply to place Turgenev under surveillance, Nicholas accused him of ‘open insubordination’ and ordered him to be imprisoned for a month, followed by a period of house arrest on his estate. The room which served as his prison cell also held the police archives of a whole district, whose secret files he had time to study at leisure. One night he was visited by the chief of police, curious to meet the famous writer, who, after a few glasses of champagne, proposed a toast ‘To Robespierre!’³²

From his cell Turgenev wrote to the Viardots to tell them of his situation: he thought the Gogol article was only a pretext for his arrest, because the authorities had been watching him ‘for a long time’ – by which he meant the time he had spent in France with them in the company of revolutionary republicans.* It seems likely that he meant to warn the Viardots, who, as he had feared, were being watched by the French police following the coup d’état of 2 December 1851, when Louis-Napoleon dissolved the National Assembly – which had opposed his constitutional reform to allow him to stand as President for a second four-year term – and established his dictatorship. Turgenev was full of gloom and self-pity: ‘My health is good but I have aged ridiculously – I could send you a lock of my white hair … My life is over, all the joy from it has gone – I have eaten all my supply of white bread.’³³

Turgenev thought that his arrest would stop the publication of his Sketches. The Minister of Education gave Lvov a ‘severe reprimand’ for allowing the book to pass. But it was too late to stop the publication of the book, which appeared in August and sold out very quickly in both Moscow and St Petersburg – to a large extent because the arrest of its author had made him a celebrity. Prompted by the Minister of Education, the Tsar’s chief censor reviewed the published book, decided it was harmful, and concluded that since Turgenev was ‘well known to be a wealthy man’ his motives for writing it must have been political – to show ‘that the peasants are oppressed, that the landowners conduct themselves immorally and against the law, that the priests kow-tow to the landowners, that the local officials take bribes, in sum that the peasants would be better off if they were free’. On the orders of the Tsar the book was now banned and Lvov dismissed from his job.³⁴

‘I am re-reading your Sketches from a Hunter’s Album,’ Aksakov wrote to Turgenev on 4 October 1852, ‘and I cannot understand what Lvov was thinking when he let them pass. The book is a subtle series of attacks, a whole battalion of gunfire against the landed order.’³⁵ The Sketches were a sensation. No book did more to raise the awareness of society about the suffering of the peasantry. For the first time the peasants were portrayed not as simple ‘rustic types’ with stock expressions and characteristics, as they had been in Romantic literature, but as thinking, feeling, complicated individual human beings. By simple observation of the ways that serfdom shaped their lives, Turgenev had aroused the moral indignation of his readers more effectively than any political manifesto ever could have done. The impact of the Sketches was immense. Published in the same year as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they had as big an impact in swaying Russian views against serfdom as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book had on the anti-slavery movement in America. It was commonly believed that Tsar Alexander II, who would come to the throne in 1855, had not only read them but was influenced by them in his decision to abolish serfdom in 1861. Turgenev would later claim that the proudest moment in his life came shortly after the Emancipation Decree, when two peasants approached him on a train from Orel to Moscow and bowed down to the ground in the Russian manner to ‘thank him in the name of the whole people’.³⁶

What struck readers of the Sketches most was their visual reality. Strikingly pictorial, they were frequently compared to photographs or daguerreotypes of country life. Turgenev himself said his stories were ‘like photographic exposures of what I have seen and heard’.³⁷ As a writer, he was certainly a realist. He made ‘real life’ the subject of his writing and always drew his characters from actual people. He aimed to let his readers engage directly with reality – to see it on the page like a transparency without authorial intervention or judgement – through a descriptive prose thick with sensory details. The narrator of the Sketches reveals nothing of himself – he acts as a window on to life. But Turgenev thought that realist art should never be reduced to the type of reproduction in a photograph. ‘Art is not just a daguerreotype,’ he wrote. As he saw it, holding up a mirror to reality should only ever be the starting point for a novelist, whose task was not just to copy but to select and colour what they wanted to be seen, and then let the reader form their own judgement. The observation of reality should never overshadow the writer’s own imagination or the search for hidden truths – the motives and ideas that lie beneath the surface of human actions and society. His aim was ‘to capture the poetic in reality’, as he wrote to the painter Ludwig Pietsch, and this he achieved in the Sketches, combining poetry with a photographic vision as few other writers have. After reading them in a French translation, George Sand wrote to Turgenev: ‘You are a realist who sees everything, and a poet who makes beauty from reality.’³⁸

Turgenev led a quiet life under house arrest at Spasskoe. Kept under constant surveillance, he could not even go hunting on his land without being followed by a policeman. ‘Here are my occupations in the day,’ he wrote to Pauline in November 1852:

I get up at 8 o’clock. I breakfast etc. until 9. Then I take an hour’s walk. From 10 to 2 pm. I read, or write letters, etc. At 2 I have a bite to eat – or go for a little walk. Then I work ’til half past 4. Dinner at 5 in the house with the Tiutchev family (I live in a wing that looks on to the garden).* I stay with them until 10. We play cards or I read aloud, etc. I go to bed at 10, read until 11, and go to sleep immediately – one day is exactly like the next. It isn’t jolly, as you see, but it’s not so bad as you might believe.

The worst of it was the isolation from Europe, and those parts of European culture that reached Moscow and St Petersburg. It took fifteen days for a letter from London or Paris to get to Moscow, and another five or six to reach him at Spasskoe. He was not used to this slow pace of life and felt the isolation acutely. ‘So I am truly stuck here in the middle of the steppes,’ he wrote to Pauline,

as far from you as possible, far from any news – for we have no journals here as you can well imagine. Take an atlas, look on the map of Russia for the road that goes from Moscow to Tula and from Tula to Orel – and if between these last two towns you find a place called Chern (just before you get to another town which has the name of Mtsenk), then you know that I am two French leagues (10 versts) from this town.

Missing music more than anything, he begged Pauline to send him an arrangement of an aria from Sapho with ‘a little piano accompaniment’ that was not too hard for him to play.³⁹

It was not just music that he missed – it was Pauline. On 13 November, the ninth anniversary of their first meeting, Turgenev wrote to her: ‘I am today, as I was nine years ago and will be nine years hence, all yours, heart and soul. You know this. Nine years! Alas, it will be ten before I have hope of seeing you again.’ Turgenev feared it was too late to rekindle their romance. He had just turned thirty-four, and she was thirty-one. After her infatuation with Gounod, Pauline was attempting to mend her relations with Louis. She had given birth to a second daughter, Claudie, in May 1852. Turgenev had moved a peasant wife into his house at Spasskoe. But what he really wanted was a visit by Pauline.

Her pregnancy had forced her to take a break from the Paris stage. She had not appeared there in the autumn season of 1851. Her return was then postponed by Napoleon’s coup d’état in December. The Viardots were personae non gratae with the Imperial regime. Known for his republican connections, Louis, in particular, was watched by the police, who followed him on his way to the Sorbonne library and filed reports on whom he met for lunch. Suspicion also cast its shadow on Pauline. There was no invitation from the Paris Opéra for the 1852 season. Rumours spread that she had retired from the stage.⁴⁰

Instead, as before, she looked abroad for opportunities. There had been talk of her appearing for another season in St Petersburg. Now at the height of her international fame, she could cash in on a trip to Russia before her voice began to fail. The radical connections of the Viardots were the main problem. The Italian repertoire which Pauline had proposed to bring with her had been a focal point for the revolutionary sentiment of the Risorgimento in 1848, and as such had come to hold a special interest for Russia’s democrats. The Tsar was reluctant to invite Pauline. But there was no denying the popular demand for the return of ‘our Viardot’, as the Russians had continued calling her, and on the last day of December 1852 a contract with the Imperial Theatre was at last agreed.⁴¹

Pauline arrived in St Petersburg in January 1853. She sang the parts she had sung in her youth: Rosina in The Barber of Seville, Desdemona in Rossini’s Otello, Amina in La Sonnambula, and then sang in private concerts for the court. She received so many jewels that she sold them to a jeweller in St Petersburg and sent the money to her bank in Paris to save herself the trouble (and potential risk) of carrying them back to France.⁴² In March she went to Moscow, where the opera was closed because of Lent, so she gave a series of recitals. To the delight of the Muscovites she sang mainly Russian songs – by Glinka, Alexander Dargomyzhsky and Anton Rubinstein – and even wore a kokoshnik, the traditional Muscovite headdress.⁴³ Pauline continued to perform these songs in European concert halls. She did more than anyone in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to make Russian music better known and appreciated in the West.⁴⁴

Turgenev wrote to Pauline in St Petersburg, begging her to visit Orel on her tour. He recommended the serf orchestra of one of his neighbouring landowners for a concert performance. ‘They play very well, they have a wide repertoire, and know all the classics,’ he assured her. Unless Pauline was accompanied by her husband it would not have been appropriate for her to visit Turgenev at Spasskoe: rumours of an affair would soon spread. Louis did not want to make the trip. Perhaps he was smarting from the gossip about Pauline and Gounod. No doubt too he thought it was unwise for her to visit one of the Tsar’s prisoners, given that he was her paymaster. Writing to Turgenev in Spanish – a language he did not think the police would understand – Louis told him that there were too many risks in coming to Orel. Turgenev bowed to his decision gracefully but he was disappointed and felt let down. ‘My dear friend,’ he wrote to Louis with more than a hint of sarcasm, ‘what particularly distinguishes you from others is – your sagacity and common sense. We shall meet only when God wills it, and not before.’⁴⁵

The situation changed when Pauline was in Moscow. News came that Louis had been taken ill and had left for France. Turgenev was beside himself with frustration. If Pauline would not visit him, he decided he would go to Moscow to see her. A minor relaxation of the conditions of his sentence encouraged him to think this possible. On 1 April, after several petitions on his behalf, including one from the Tsar’s own son, Turgenev was officially released from house arrest at Spasskoe and allowed to live in town in Orel under police surveillance. But to go all the way to Moscow was a serious offence and, if caught, he would face a sentence behind bars. He was prepared to take the risk. With a false passport, Turgenev departed on 3 April, spent a week with friends in Moscow, visiting Pauline at the Dresden Hotel, where she was staying, and returned to Spasskoe by 13 April. In his later correspondence with Pauline, Turgenev referred to the secret rendezvous, which, he said, had shown that ‘nothing is impossible’.⁴⁶ He also used it for a scene in his story ‘Enough (Fragment from the Notebook of a Dead Artist)’, written between 1862 and 1864, in which the narrator recalls a late-night meeting with his lover in Moscow and writes to her about it after they have parted: ‘I have left you, but even here, in this far-off exile, I am filled with you, and as before I am in your power, I still feel your hand on my bowed head.’⁴⁷

3

The Sketches were Turgenev’s first success financially. Nekrasov sold 3,000 copies to a Moscow bookseller which were all bought in a few weeks. The Tsar’s banning of the published book did not prevent it reaching anyone who wanted to read it, because it soon came out in French and other languages, as well as pirate Russian editions reprinted in Berlin, which managed to enter Russia without any obstacles. Technological changes and the ideological diversity of European governments made traditional censorship less effective.

The success of the Sketches established Turgenev as a major writer on the European scene. It also meant that he could raise his fees and strike a harder bargain with publishers. If before the publication of the Sketches he had earned fifty roubles for every printed page, afterwards he could demand a rate of seventy-five roubles, knowing that if Nekrasov refused to pay, he could find another editor who would do so. The book was not enough to make Turgenev rich or financially secure, even with the income he received from his estate. He was still forced to write to publishers begging them for loans against future works. But he was now a writer who could make a living from his work.⁴⁸

Turgenev was one of a growing number of professional writers living from their literary earnings in Europe. There had long been jobbing writers, lowly hacks and journalists that had been able to support themselves from their writing. Grub Street in London had been full of them since the eighteenth century. But few writers of serious literature earned much from their works before the nineteenth century. For The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), an international bestseller, Goethe received 1,000 thalers (£240)* from his Leipzig publisher. But that was exceptional. The majority of published writers at this time were gentlemen with private incomes, the beneficiaries of patronage, or the holders of a sinecure that enabled them to write. They did not need or even expect to be paid.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, it became the norm for writers to receive a payment from their publisher. This was normally a one-time payment for the right to print a certain number of their books (usually between 1,000 and 2,000 copies) over a set period of time (no more than a year or two). Once this contract had expired, the writer was free to switch to another publisher. Sometimes writers were persuaded to share in the profits of their publisher instead – a risky strategy because publishers, whose devious reputation was proverbial, could not be relied upon to give accurate figures. Levels of remuneration were not high, as Lucien de Rubempré, the protagonist of Balzac’s Lost Illusions (1837–43), soon discovered when he came to Paris to launch himself as a writer and received just 400 francs for his novel, a medieval saga in the style of Walter Scott.

The Scottish writer was the first in Europe to make a fortune from his pen – his historical romances were international bestsellers – even if he lost it in the stock market crash of 1825–6. By 1818, Scott was making the fantastic sum of £10,000 a year from his novels, and in 1819, his best financial year, when he published three novels, including Ivanhoe and The Bride of Lammermoor, he earned £19,000.

Few writers came close to Scott’s earnings. Balzac was among them, but his first ten years in the writing trade were hardly lucrative. He was paid a mere 400 francs – the same amount received by his poor hero Lucien – for his debut novel, L’Héritière de Birague, co-written with Auguste Lepoitevin and published in 1821 under two pen names (Balzac’s was Lord R’Hoone, an anagram of his name, Honoré). The two friends sold their next novel, Jean-Louis, ou La Fille trouvée (1822), for 1,300 francs, which they also divided. For his first novel published under the sole name of R’Hoone, Clotilde de Lusignan (1822), Balzac was paid 2,000 francs, a recognition of his pseudonym’s success. But for Les Chouans (1829), the first under his real name, he earned only half that sum, not enough to clear his massive debts (some 90,000 francs) following the failure of his various business ventures – a publishing house, a printing firm and a type foundry – between 1825 and 1828. By his own calculation, Balzac made just ten francs a day from his work on Les Chouans – an amount that could be earned by a skilled craftsman (he referred to himself as a ‘poor worker in letters’). He had to spend his whole life writing novels, day and night, to pay off his creditors (his voluminous correspondence is largely taken up with his business affairs). He churned them out at a furious pace, eventually earning handsome fees from his writing (in 1835, the year of his breakthrough novel, Le Père Goriot, he earned 67,000 francs), even if his lavish lifestyle meant that he never fully cleared his debts.⁴⁹

Balzac was unusual in managing to live from his writing. Most writers had to supplement their income by doing other jobs: journalism, teaching, working as a civil servant or librarian were common daytime jobs for French and English writers in the first half of the century. As the book market grew, writers pushed for better pay. The structure of the market favoured them, for publishers were plentiful and good writers in demand. In France, in 1832, the ratio of publishers to published fiction writers was just two to one (152 authors were published in that year by no fewer than 73 different publishers). In these conditions the bestselling writers were well placed to push for higher fees or switch to other publishers in their search for better conditions. Victor Hugo knew his worth. He bargained hard with publishers. In 1832, he earned 6,000 francs for his poetry collection Feuilles d’automne – six times the sum he had been paid for his Odes et ballades in 1828. Balzac was notorious for his aggressive bargaining with publishers, never hesitating to abandon one and take up with another if he felt he had been wronged or could get a better deal. At the height of his fame, in 1844, he sold the serialization of Modeste Mignon to Le Journal des débats for 9,500 francs; a few months later he resold a revised and expanded version to the publisher Chlenowski for 11,000 francs; and a third variation to Charles Furne, who published it as part of his complete edition of La Comédie humaine in 1846. By one calculation, before 1850 the French writer typically had up to thirteen different publishers in the course of his career.⁵⁰

For book as for music publishing the situation was transformed by the introduction of more effective laws of copyright in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. This did more than anything to increase writers’ earnings from their work and establish a more stable base for their relations with their publishers. Publishers and writers had a mutual interest in the development of copyright as a form of literary capital in whose exploitation they both shared.

The biggest peril for their business was piracy, the mass reprinting of unauthorized editions, which was a booming industry in the 1830s and 1840s, when new print technologies made this cheap and quick to do. Pirate book publishing was an international business, ultimately uncontrollable without international laws. With its large and porous border France was particularly vulnerable. In Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Austria there were scores of publishers whose business was reprinting French books cheaply and sending them back into France.⁵¹ Pirated editions of German books were printed by the Dutch and Austrians for export to the German states (which pirated each other’s books as well). English books were reprinted by the Galignani publishing house in Paris and shipped across the Channel for resale at cheap prices. They were pirated on an industrial scale by the Americans, who printed several novels at a time in broadsheets known as ‘Mammoths’, which sold in great quantities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Belgium and America were the biggest pirate states, feeding as they did off the two largest literary languages. In both states the pirates were protected by their governments, which put the interests of native printers before those of foreign writers and their publishers. Under the newly independent Belgian government, the number of pirate publishers in Belgium rocketed. By 1838, there were 229 pirate presses in Brussels, and 200 in other Belgian towns, many with the best technology, capable of printing the text in double columns that made their editions so affordable. Three out of four books printed in Belgium were pirated editions for export, most of them transported across the border into France, but some overseas as far as the United States, Brazil, Mexico and Cuba. The international market was so swamped by cheap pirate editions that the publishers of authorized editions were forced to lower their prices to compete with them, which meant increasing print-runs to sustain profits. To squeeze out the pirate Belgian editions of Dumas, for example, Michel Lévy published his complete works in a mass edition of 20,000 copies with each volume priced at just two French francs, instead of the usual 3.5.⁵²

Publishers and writers combined forces to campaign for more effective laws of copyright to stamp out this piracy. They advanced new ideas of intellectual property. Throughout Europe the case for more protection was based on the notion of a work of art as a product of the artist’s genius and personality, a concept championed by the Romantics. But there was a difference between the French philosophy of droits d’auteur, which saw this as a natural right, inalienable and absolute, and the British way of thinking about copyright in which the economic interests of the author, publishers and booksellers needed to be balanced against wider issues of free trade and public access to creative works. Although Britain had passed the first real law of copyright, in 1710, which had given authors fourteen years of protection before their work passed into the public domain, the argument for stronger laws had to overcome the widely held perception that copyright was a ‘monopoly’ that made books too expensive for the common man.

In 1837, Thomas Talfourd, the writer, judge and politician, introduced a Copyright Bill in the British House of Commons proposing to extend the term of copyright to the author’s life plus sixty years. The Bill was opposed by the booksellers’ trade, which argued that copyright would cut into its profits, and by a number of MPs, including Thomas Babington Macaulay, the historian, who argued that a longer term would be ‘a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers’. Over 30,000 people signed petitions against the Bill, which was defeated several times before eventually being passed in 1842, albeit in a form much watered down (the term of copyright was limited to the author’s life plus seven years).⁵³ The supporters of the Bill, including Wordsworth and Dickens, based their case for copyright not on the idea of an author’s natural rights, but on the protection of his economic property – a cause dear to the British. Dickens’s main concern was the industry of pirate publishers who sold cheap reprints of his works, many of them shipped in from America. His tour of the United States in 1842 was noted mainly for his condemnations of this piracy and calls for stronger laws to stamp it out.

In France the campaign for more protection was led by two associations, both involved in the collection of royalties for their members: the Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs Dramatiques, founded in 1829; and the Société des Gens de Lettres, established in 1838 by a committee that included Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Louis Viardot, with Balzac joining later that year.⁵⁴ Balzac was a strident campaigner for the protection of intellectual property (he once smashed a bookshop window in the Palais-Royal when he saw in it a pirated edition of one of his novels). In 1834, he published a Lettre adressée aux écrivains français du XIXe siècle, in which he argued for the moral right of authors to their work, demanding that the law protect the products of the mind as it would the merchant’s bale of cotton or any other tangible object manufactured by labour.⁵⁵ Hugo was less combative in his arguments for copyright, but more effective for having been appointed to the Senate, where, in 1846, he made his maiden speech calling for artistic works to have the same protection as inventions under patent law. The longer that protection the better, he argued, because ‘for great artists attempting to create great works, time is what is most important, longevity, the respect and assurance of the law for their thought, their property’.⁵⁶

In 1854, Napoleon III extended copyright to thirty years beyond the death of the author. When this failed to satisfy the publishers and writers, he appointed a commission to look into extending it further. Eventually, in 1863, after much deliberation, the commission recommended that the rights of authors should be limited to fifty years, after which their works should become public property and their heirs stop receiving a royalty for each published copy of their work. The commission’s recommendation – loosely based on Hugo’s notion of a ‘domaine public payant’ – became the basis of a new law in 1866.

In Germany the problem was enforcing copyright in the patchwork of independent states. Although the German Confederation had envisaged a uniform system of copyright legislation, it proved too weak to impose one on its forty-three members, kingdoms, duchies, principalities and free city republics. Saxony and Prussia both passed their own laws, in 1831 and 1837 respectively, but neither could impose its legislation on the other, or any other states. Piracy between them was endemic. None of these issues would be properly resolved until the unification of Germany, when the Empire’s laws of copyright would be taken from Prussia, which established copyright for the duration of the author’s life and, following their death, for another thirty years to protect their dependants. After a campaign by publishers and writers, the Prussian laws were strengthened in 1856 to benefit the families of those writers who had died before the 1837 law. It meant that the works of authors such as Schiller (1759–1805) and Goethe (1749–1832) could generate an income for their heirs and publishers until 1867, when this extension to the law ended. Schiller’s publisher (Cotta in Stuttgart) paid his descendants nearly 300,000 guilders (around 800,000 francs) for the rights to print his works – twelve times the royalties which Schiller himself had received during his lifetime.

A similar reform took place in Russia, where a decree in 1857 extended the duration of copyright protection from twenty-five to fifty years following the author’s death. Pushkin’s widow had been instrumental in getting the extension through the government connections of her second husband, Lieutenant-General P. P. Lanskoi, whose second cousin was the Minister of the Interior. The copyright on Pushkin’s work had been due to expire in 1862.⁵⁷

In Italy, as in Germany, the problem facing writers and their publishers was how to enforce their copyright without national laws and agencies. Until the unification of Italy there was no effective means of protecting literary property in one Italian state from pirate publishers in other parts of the peninsula. ‘The Milanese reprint the books of the Florentines; the Florentines will then reprint twice as many books of the Milanese – because they can,’ wrote the Italian essayist Niccolò Tommaseo in 1839. ‘The book trade is becoming an area for cowardly vendettas … fought with arms of ink.’ In 1840, a comprehensive law of copyright was passed in all the northern states of Italy under Austrian control. It protected books and music, dramatic works and translations for the duration of their author’s life and up to thirty years following the author’s death. But the Kingdom of Two Sicilies was not part of this convention and remained a pirate state. Nor did the 1840 law protect works that had been published before it was passed.⁵⁸

A good example of the problems this entailed concerns Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, the most-read work of Italian fiction in the nineteenth century. Published in Milan in 1825–7, the book was reprinted by many publishers, none of which consulted Manzoni. By 1839, there were fifty-three unauthorized editions in Italian and fourteen in other languages. Encouraged by discussions of the 1840 law, as well as by an offer of 30,000 Milanese lire (34,000 francs) from a publisher in Paris for a new illustrated version of the book, in 1839 Manzoni brought out a definitive edition of his own with illustrations by his friend the Milanese wood engraver Francesco Gonin, whose work he closely supervised. He revised the text, basing it more firmly on the Tuscan dialect, which would become the standard form of literary Italian. Manzoni spent a fortune on the edition, 80,000 Milanese lire (92,000 francs), hoping that the expense of the illustrations and fine paper would prevent it from being pirated. Ten thousand copies were printed. They sold slowly. Manzoni had underestimated the ability of publishers to reprint illustrations lithographically. A pirate version of Manzoni’s new edition with lithographic prints of Gonin’s engravings was soon brought out by a publisher in Naples, Gaetano Nobili. It outsold Manzoni’s own edition many times. Having suffered a large financial loss, Manzoni wrote to the Minister of the Interior in Naples asking him to put new laws of copyright before the King of the Two Sicilies, Ferdinand II, and compensate him for the money he had lost. His request was not answered.⁵⁹

The Manzoni affair motivated publishers and intellectuals from Milan and Florence, in particular, to organize themselves in a campaign to put pressure on Naples to adopt the 1840 law. Ricordi, who had endless problems with the piracy of Verdi’s works, was especially active in calling for new laws and conventions between states. One result of these efforts was a law of 1846 strengthening the legislative framework for the enforcement of copyright in the signatory states of the 1840 law, but it was only after the partial unification of Italy, with a national law of copyright in 1865, that Naples was brought into line.⁶⁰

Backed by stronger laws of copyright, writers across Europe became more assertive in the defence of their economic interests and moral rights in their own work. Longer terms of copyright encouraged publishers to invest in longer contracts with writers. They gave them an incentive to secure the rights to an author’s work, not for one edition, as they had done before, but for the duration of its copyright. They would offer higher fees and royalties to keep successful writers for as long as possible.

The royalty system began to appear in the 1850s, gradually replacing the flat-fee system during subsequent decades. Charpentier was its most committed pioneer. Rejecting payments in advance or on delivery, he paid writers only a percentage of the sales, a figure usually equivalent to fifty-five centimes for each copy sold. At first many writers were afraid – they might not sell enough to earn as much as they had done before with the flat fee – but Charpentier’s ability to stack high and sell cheap soon convinced them otherwise.⁶¹

The best-selling writers obviously had the most to gain from royalties. Hugo’s contracts with his publisher in France, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, in the 1850s, earned him around 20 per cent of receipts (double the amount of today’s standard book contracts). Zola received a royalty of 10 per cent for his first novel, La Confession de Claude, in 1865. But the new system had its risks, and many less commercial writers preferred the option of a guaranteed single payment. The two systems co-existed for several decades, often within the same publishing house. Baudelaire’s original contract for Les Fleurs du mal with Poulet-Malassis and De Broise paid him a royalty of twenty-five centimes per copy, whether sold or not, on a print-run of 1,000 copies priced at two francs each; but for the second edition of 1,500 copies he received a flat fee of 300 francs. Hetzel offered authors the choice of a flat fee or a royalty. He also paid a combination of the two: one sum on the publication of the book, and, once his costs had been paid off, a royalty, whose percentage varied according to sales. For his first book, Five Weeks in a Balloon, in 1863, Jules Verne was paid 500 francs on the initial printing of 2,000 copies, and then twenty-five centimes for each copy sold. For his next book, Expeditions and Adventures of Captain Hatteras, in 1865, Verne received 3,000 francs and then 6 per cent of the publisher’s receipts (a sum equivalent to twelve centimes per copy) on sales over 10,000 copies.⁶²

The worst option was to receive a flat fee for a book that went on to become a bestseller. That was Flaubert’s misfortune with Madame Bovary. Following its serial publication in the Revue de Paris, in December 1856, Flaubert signed a five-year contract with Michel Lévy for rights to the book. An up-and-coming publisher, Lévy paid 800 francs, a reasonable sum for a first novel with a print run of 6,000 copies sold at one franc per volume. A few days later, Flaubert was summoned to the office of the examining magistrate and charged with writing a novel whose ‘obscene’ story of adultery was said to be an ‘outrage to public morals and religion’ – a legal prosecution that had been made against other literary works and journals since the introduction of a more restrictive law of censorship to appease the Catholic Church, the main ideological supporter of Louis-Napoleon’s dictatorship, in February 1852. Put on trial for immorality in January 1857, Flaubert and his publishers were acquitted. Flaubert’s legal expenses were far more than he had earned from the novel. Boosted by the scandal of the trial, Madame Bovary sold well over 30,000 copies in the next five years. Feeling he had been cheated, Flaubert demanded 30,000 francs for his next novel, Salammbô, in 1862, even insisting that Lévy buy it without reading it. After weeks of haggling with Flaubert’s lawyer (there were no literary agents in those days), Lévy agreed to pay 20,000 francs, half in advance, half on its delivery, on condition that Flaubert sign a new and longer lease on Madame Bovary. To save Flaubert’s pride he proposed to spread the rumour that he had paid 30,000 francs for Salammbô and to go to town in publicizing it to reinforce that impression. Flaubert accepted Lévy’s terms – to the consternation of many of his friends, such as the Goncourts, who had often heard him say that ‘a true man of letters should write books without regard to money or publicity’.⁶³ By the time Flaubert had finished his next novel, Sentimental Education, in 1869, the length of copyrights had been extended by the law of 1866 to fifty years – so Flaubert consequently wanted more from Lévy, and was annoyed to receive only 16,000 francs for the two-volume novel. Eventually, through the intervention of his friend George Sand, one of the publisher’s most prized authors, Flaubert got the fee increased to 20,000 francs – a minor but symbolic victory. ‘What do you expect? A Jew will always be a Jew. It could have been worse,’ Sand reported on the deal to Flaubert on 1 May 1870.⁶⁴

British writers too were becoming more assertive in negotiations with publishers. In 1857, George Eliot had sold her debut novel, Adam Bede (1859), to the publisher John Blackwood on a four-year lease for £800 (20,000 francs), a generous payment for a good first novel in Britain. It became a bestseller. In recognition of the unexpected profits he had made, Blackwood paid £400 as a voluntary bonus, for which George Eliot thanked him with a terse note whose tone annoyed the Edinburgh publisher. On the publication of the book there was speculation about who George Eliot was. Various impostors claimed to be the author, including one whose publisher attempted to profit from his claim by advertising a sequel to Adam Bede. Eliot was disappointed that Blackwood had failed to protect her intellectual property by disproving these claims in the press. She was more aggressive in negotiations with the publisher for her next book, The Mill on the Floss (1860). Claiming that she had a large and ready readership, she asked Blackwood to name his best price. He came back with an offer of £3,000 (75,000 francs) for rights to the serial and the book. He wanted to retain the pseudonym because public interest about it was guaranteed to add to sales. This sort of attention was the last thing she needed. Sensing that Blackwood saw her novel as a form of speculation, she agreed to sell the copyright only for its first edition. She also talked to other publishers, including Dickens, who wanted something from her for his journal All the Year Round and let her keep the rights to sell it as a book. Smith and Elder, the cash-rich London publisher, offered £4,500 (114,000 francs). By this time, however, she had made her peace with Blackwood, who paid £2,000 for the book without rights to serialization.⁶⁵

It was not just money that motivated writers to become more assertive in the defence of their copyright; it was also a concern to protect the integrity of their work, their intellectual as well as economic property. This was what the French called droit moral, a term that emerged in the 1840s to define an artist’s rights to control the form and content of their published work.⁶⁶

Flaubert, for example, was outraged by the cuts and changes to the text of Madame Bovary proposed by the Revue de Paris, where the novel was serialized in 1856: ‘I will not suppress a comma, nothing, nothing!’ Flaubert was famous for the time he took to craft his prose: he would often spend whole days on a single phrase. ‘Every syllable had its own importance, its own colour, its own music,’ Zola wrote of him. ‘Naturally, after so much labour, the finished manuscript had a considerable significance for him. It was not vanity but respect for the work he had put into it, where he had also put his whole being.’ Flaubert wrote on thick paper, the most solid he could find, to preserve his original text, with all its punctuation, for posterity. He scrutinized the proofs to make sure that not a word was missed by the printers. To allow unwanted cuts or changes was unworthy of an artist in his view. He was horrified by the attitude of Turgenev, whom he had met in February 1863 at a dinner where the Russian had been introduced to Flaubert’s circle by Charles Edmond (his real name was Franciszek Maurycy Chojecki), the Polish writer, translator and librarian of the French Senate. Writing to Edmond in 1864, Flaubert expressed his abhorrence of writing for a newspaper or periodical where the ‘mania for correcting ends up by giving all the manuscripts they’ve bought the same absence of originality’.

Take for example the style of the Revue des deux mondes. Turgenev told me recently that Buloz [the editor] made him take out something from his last novel. For that alone, Turgenev has fallen in my estimation. He should have thrown his manuscript in Buloz’s face, and followed it up with a couple of slaps and some spit for dessert … When you submit a manuscript, if you are not a rascal, it is because you are content with it. You must have made the greatest effort possible, put in all your soul. A personality cannot be substituted by another one. A book is a complicated organism. Any amputation, any change, takes away from its nature.⁶⁷

Ideas of international copyright were also gaining ground, as publishers and writers across Europe pressed for laws and treaties to protect their works from piracy by foreign publishers in a book market that was fast becoming internationalized.

The Leipzig publisher Bernard Tauchnitz took perhaps the first initiative. He would offer British authors (notably Dickens) a small flat fee to authorize his English-language editions of their works in Germany, and later France. When Tauchnitz started, in 1841, there was no copyright agreement between Britain and either Germany or France. Legally there was nothing to prevent him from publishing his Collection of British Authors without paying anything. But he saw the voluntary fee as a step towards the development of international copyright, a cause in which he believed, and thought it was worth paying to market his editions as the ‘authorized’ or ‘copyright’ versions, even before copyright existed for foreign writers in Germany or France. His example was soon followed by other publishers, among them Hetzel, who began paying foreign authors for permission to print on the cover of his editions that they had been ‘authorized’ by them.⁶⁸ By winning their goodwill, Tauchnitz put himself in a strong position to publish British authors on the Continent. He bought the rights to many of their works after Britain signed bilateral copyright treaties with European states (beginning with Prussia and Saxony in 1846, and with France in 1851).

Such conventions put in place the founding structures of international copyright. As one might expect, the French took the lead. They suffered most from international piracy. Their biggest publishers (Hachette, Lévy, Charpentier and Édouard Dentu) had a growing export trade through their own networks of booksellers right across the Continent, where the cultural élites all read in French. On 28 March 1852, the National Assembly issued a decree extending copyright to foreign works published in France. The aim of this unilateral declaration was to encourage other states to follow the French example and sign bilateral conventions. A number of treaties were signed by France around this time: with Portugal and Britain in 1851; with Hanover and Brunswick in 1852; with Tuscany and Spain in 1853; importantly with Belgium, the main pirate state in Europe’s French book market, in 1854; with the Netherlands in 1855; and with Saxony and Luxembourg in 1856.⁶⁹

These treaties encouraged publishers to expand their business internationally. After 1852, Lévy, for example, developed an extensive network of bookshops across French-speaking Europe and entered into trade agreements with German publishers and booksellers. Hachette was developing a similar network, opening branches in Leipzig and London, by the end of the decade. The German publisher Friedrich Brockhaus had shops in London, Paris and Vienna. Albert Lacroix, the young Belgian publisher, who had bought the rights to publish Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables in 1862, used part of his profits to establish branches of his company in Livorno and Leipzig.⁷⁰

As a system of international law these bilateral treaties were weak structures. Too many pirate states remained outside the network of bilateral conventions. Eliminating piracy in one country would encourage it to grow elsewhere (the French treaty with Belgium was a massive boost to the pirate trade of French books in Prussia, which had no bilateral agreement with France).⁷¹ The system depended on the willingness of states to enforce the treaties, which made it subject to the ups and downs of international relations. There were many variations in the level of protection, and uncertainties about what was covered by the conventions. Translation, for example, received little protection: in most treaties it was limited to a few years; and in some (e.g. the convention between France and Holland in 1855) there was none at all. Performance rights were left unclarified, leaving it up to the courts to resolve conflicts between artists and theatres.

In October 1856, the Tribunal Civile de la Seine heard a case brought by Verdi against César Ragani and Toribio Calzado, co-directors of the Théâtre Italien. The composer claimed that their productions of La Traviata, Rigoletto and Il Trovatore were infringements of his copyright because he had withdrawn his authorization for them after expressing his dissatisfaction with the leading performers. Verdi’s lawyer based his claim on the Code Napoleon and the Decree of 28 March 1852, arguing that while the law remained unclear about the protection of performance rights, the spirit of the legislation suggested that they should be protected. The theatre’s lawyer counter-argued that dramatic rights had been excluded from the law deliberately, because the government had used the law to pressure other states to sign bilateral treaties with France. Verdi’s rights could only be protected by a treaty between France and those states where the work concerned had been first performed (Veneto in the case of Rigoletto and La Traviata, the Papal State in the case of Il Trovatore). There were no such treaties at the time of the productions at the Théâtre Italien. The lawyer also claimed that the real reason why Verdi had withdrawn his permission was not to do with the quality of the singers, but because he had been offered more money by the Paris Opéra: he was using legal threats to stop a lawful production for his own financial gain. The court found against Verdi, and ordered him to pay 1,000 francs in damages to the Théâtre Italien.⁷²

Because of loopholes and uncertainties like this, publishers and artists campaigned for a comprehensive international convention. Ricordi and Hachette were among the most active. Both had foreign investments to protect. In 1858, as a result of their campaign, a Congress on Artistic and Literary Property was organized by the Belgian government in Brussels, an ironic venue given that the city until recently had been the European capital of literary piracy. Attended by 400 delegates, writers, publishers, lawyers, journalists and government officials from a dozen countries, the congress aimed to formulate a multilateral convention protecting copyright for all creative works regardless of national boundaries between the signatory states. Nothing came directly from the congress. Tito Ricordi, who took over his father’s company in 1853, was disappointed by its failure to agree on the principle of defending intellectual property as a permanent and inheritable right.⁷³ Nonetheless, the congress was a start: it had voiced the basic ideas about the need to defend intellectual property on an international basis, and there would be others (in Antwerp in 1861 and 1877, Paris, 1878, London, 1879, Lisbon, 1880, Vienna, 1881, Rome in 1882) to carry on with this objective, culminating in the Berne Convention of 1886, the founding treaty of today’s global system of international copyright.

4

Turgenev’s Sketches soon appeared in foreign translations. A German version of some of the stories appeared first, in 1852, and two years later the full collection was published as a book. It was well received, establishing Turgenev as a major figure on the literary scene in Germany. In 1855, a second volume of his stories appeared there, but the translation was not good. Turgenev was annoyed, though not as much as he was by Ernest Charrière’s translation of the Sketches into French. The book was published by Hachette in 1854 without Turgenev’s name under the misleading title Mémoires d’un seigneur russe, ou Tableau de la situation actuelle des nobles et des paysans dans les provinces russes (Memoirs of a Russian Landowner, or a Picture of the Actual Situation of Nobles and Peasants in the Russian Provinces), suggesting that it was a work of non-fiction. The translation was a travesty of the Russian original. Apart from the obvious shortcomings of the translator, the lack of any copyright agreement between France and Russia enabled Charrière to play around as much as he liked with Turgenev’s text. ‘Monsieur Charrière has made of me the Devil knows what,’ Turgenev complained to Sergei Aksakov:

He has made up whole pages, made up some things and discarded others to an unbelievable degree. Where I, for instance, wrote ‘I fled’, he translates these two words in the following manner: ‘Je m’enfuis d’une course folle, effarée, échevelée comme si j’eusse eu à mes trousses toute une légion de couleuvres, commandées par des sorciers’ [‘I fled on a wild course, frightened and dishevelled, as if I had on my heels a whole legion of snakes, controlled by wizards’].⁷⁴

Eager to assert his moral rights, Turgenev wrote to the French-language newspaper Journal de St.-Pétersbourg to warn readers off the Charrière translation. He later authorized a rival one by the Russian literary scholar Henri Delaveau, using it to restore the passages that had been cut by the censor in Russia, although by the time it finally appeared, in 1857, a second edition of the Charrière translation had sold out in France and unfortunately served as the basis for an English translation published in 1855 as Russian Life in the Interior, or, The Experiences of a Sportsman. Without international copyright there was no way to prevent its publication as one of Turgenev’s works.

The outbreak of the Crimean War (1854–5) had created a large demand in France and Britain for any literature that might illuminate the internal conditions of their Russian enemy, and it was mainly for its social insights that the Sketches were so widely read in both countries.* In an article, ‘Photographs from Russian Life’, in August 1854, Fraser’s Magazine maintained that Turgenev’s Sketches were all the more revealing as a social document ‘inasmuch as he is not a professed writer’ but a nobleman: ‘he has not sought “effects” but has transferred to paper, with the vividness of a daguerreotype, the impressions produced upon him by the various personages and scenes he describes.’ By the end of the war the Sketches had appeared in numerous foreign editions, including Swedish, Hungarian and Danish, most of them translated from the German or the French, though some, like the Polish and the Czech, from the Russian. Four stories had appeared in Dickens’s Household Words, albeit in a bad translation of the bad Charrière.⁷⁵

The Sketches not only established Turgenev as a major international writer; they announced the arrival of Russian literature on the European scene. Turgenev was the first of Russia’s writers to be widely read in Europe. His stories, in the words of Annenkov, ‘lifted the edge of a curtain behind which one could glimpse the mystery of [this] … alien people and the work of their consciousness’.⁷⁶ In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the Europeans had been largely ignorant of Russian literature. Although there were translations of the works of Pushkin and Gogol, they were clumsy and inaccurate, most of them by Russian émigrés and amateur enthusiasts. Few European universities had Slav or Russian departments, so there was a shortage of competent translators to convey the riches of Russia’s literature to a European readership. That began to change in the 1840s with the appearance of two distinguished Russophiles and translators from Russian into French, the base language for translations into other European languages. The first was Xavier Marmier, Professor of Foreign Literature at the University of Rennes and a well-known travel writer, who went to Russia in 1842, met Turgenev, and started learning Russian with his help. In the 1850s, Marmier produced a series of accurate and readable translations of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov and Turgenev. The second was the writer Prosper Mérimée, who started learning Russian in 1848, largely to compete with his cousin, Henri Mérimée, who had made his name the year before with a celebrated travel book, Une année en Russie, based on the journal of his stay in Russia in 1839–40. Within a year of taking lessons from Madame Lagrené (née Varinka Dubenskaya), a former maid of honour at the Russian court, Mérimée had published a successful French translation of Pushkin’s Queen of Spades in the Revue des deux mondes, followed by translations of other Pushkin stories and poems, which were then translated into other languages (some of his translation of Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies found its way into Mérimée’s Carmen, his 1845 novella about Spanish gypsy life). The English version of Mérimée’s translation of Queen of Spades was reprinted several times between 1850 and 1854. By 1857, when he met Turgenev, who would then become his chief collaborator in translating Russian literature, Mérimée had published a whole series of articles about Pushkin, Gogol and Turgenev in the Revue des deux mondes.⁷⁷

Turgenev played a vital role in getting Russia’s writers better known in Europe in the 1840s and 1850s – a role he would broaden as a cultural intermediary between Russia and the West over the next thirty years. He was almost certainly the author of an influential but unsigned article on Russian literature in the Paris weekly newspaper L’Illustration, in 1845. The publication was organized by Louis Viardot, who at that time was working with Turgenev on translations into French of stories by Krylov, Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, the four writers featured in the article. The forthcoming publication of these translations was advertised in the newspaper alongside the article. Published in 1845 as Nouvelles russes, the collected stories appeared with the name of Louis Viardot as translator, although he could neither speak nor read Russian. In the preface Louis acknowledged the assistance of his friend Turgenev, ‘a celebrated poet and critic’, who had provided a basic translation from which Louis then crafted a more finished French version. Through their many connections the Viardots attained a good deal of attention for the Nouvelles russes among the Parisian cultural élites. Delacroix, for one, found the stories interesting for their ‘extraordinary feeling of reality’.⁷⁸

Paris was the centre of a growing culture of translation in Europe. It was the Continent’s most cosmopolitan city, home to more foreign intellectuals than any other city in Europe, so there was no shortage of translators there.⁷⁹ It had more foreign booksellers, more publishers with a European reach, more books published in translation and more literary magazines with an international perspective. The most important of these journals was the Revue des deux mondes, which specialized in articles on foreign literature (Viardot frequently wrote for it on Spain), often with a view to encouraging translations into French.⁸⁰

French was the language of Europe’s cosmopolitan élites. It dominated the translation business. More books were translated from French than from any other language, although by the middle of the century translations from English and German were quickly catching up. French was a medium of exchange between other languages: a book translated from, say, Russian into English, was likely to be translated from Russian into French and then re-translated from the French into English. English books would travel via French into other languages. This explains the dominant position of the French book trade in Europe. French books were sold everywhere. Even in Leipzig, the centre of the German book market, booksellers had more trading links with Paris than with any other city in the German-speaking lands. The French domination of the continental book trade began to weaken in the middle of the century, however. German became more important as a channel for translation into the developing markets in Slavonic and Scandinavian languages.⁸¹

Translations made up an increasing share of the fiction published in the middle of the nineteenth century. As the reading public grew, so too did demand for popular fiction of the likes of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers or Sue’s Mystères de Paris. Demand ran ahead of the ability of domestic writers in most countries to supply this growing readership, so foreign writers had to fill the gap. Even France and Britain, the dominant literary producers in Europe, saw their markets opened up to a growing number of translated works.

Statistics of book production are problematic and patchy. There is no systematic database for any country in Europe. The best figures come from France, where translated works increased their share of total book production from an estimated 4 per cent in 1831 to 12 per cent by 1859. The sharpest growth was in foreign novels: the number of titles in translation grew from under ten a year in the 1840s to fifty every year in the decade after 1854.⁸² Bookshops were flooded with translations into French, particularly in the mass-edition series of foreign literature, such as Gervais Charpentier’s Bibliothèque Anglaise, Charles Lahure’s Bibliothèque des Meilleurs Romans Étrangers, Lacroix’s Librairie Internationale and Hachette’s Littérature Étrangère, part of his Bibliothèque des Chemins de Fer, all of which invested heavily in translations in the 1850s and 1860s. Hachette, for example, bought up all the novels of Dickens for an ‘authorized translation’ in 1856 (a fact which helps to explain the publisher’s support of international copyright).⁸³

Britain was historically resistant to reading in translation because of the strength of its own literary language and relative cultural isolation from the Continent. Foreign works translated into English remained a small proportion of the British book market – around 3 per cent of total book production in the nineteenth century. But even here the absolute numbers were rising (from a mere 580 translated works per year in the first quarter of the century to over 2,600 by mid-century), and many of the titles were in mass-edition series such as the Routledge Railway Library, which introduced Balzac to an English readership. The recorded figures of translated books in Britain did not include, moreover, the pirated translations and English adaptations (plagiarizations) of foreign works which filled many pages of the penny press and popular-fiction periodicals such as Dickens’s Household Words.⁸⁴

With strong literary cultures of their own, France and Britain published fewer translations than countries with a smaller number of domestic writers which were more dependent on translating foreign works. In Austria, for example, the share of total book production made up by translations rose from less than 5 per cent in 1840 to 33 per cent in 1854 – an increase encouraged by the relaxation of censorship after 1848.⁸⁵ The Spanish book market was heavily dependent on translations from the French, which made up almost half the country’s total book production at the mid-point of the century. French literature was so dominant in Spain that in 1862 Hachette bought Antoine Mezin, the large Spanish publishing house, to facilitate the importation of his books from France.⁸⁶

In the Netherlands translations were even more important in the growing market for fiction. Without bilateral treaties obliging publishers to pay foreign authors royalties,* it was safer and more profitable for them to publish a successful foreign novel in translation than to pay for an original work in Dutch. The costs of translation were lower than the fees demanded for a new novel, especially when writers everywhere were beginning to assert their moral and economic rights. In a small country like the Netherlands, where the reading public was keen to keep abreast of developments in European culture, publishers had a better chance of profit from a famous and successful foreign novel than from an original but untried Dutch work. No wonder there were so few novelists of any note from Holland in the nineteenth century: they could not compete with translations of foreign works.⁸⁷

One of the results of this translation boom was a growing uniformity of literary subjects, formats, styles and ideas across Europe and the wider world. Writers imitated foreign novels they had read in translation, particularly French and English works, the two most translated literatures. These works became a ‘European’ standard for the nineteenth-century novel in emerging literary cultures on the Continent’s ‘periphery’, such as Spain and Hungary, or the Scandinavian countries, whose modern literatures would come into existence through their assimilation of French or English writing modes. Predictably, the process caused a good deal of disquiet among those critics who assigned the highest value to national character in their country’s literature (the basis of the nationalist reaction against literary cosmopolitanism which developed in these years). They feared that imitation of foreign literatures would undermine their national literature’s distinctiveness and originality, eventually leading to an international culture where all literatures would be the same. As one prophetic critic, René Tallandier, put it in the Revue des deux mondes in 1846: ‘In European literature it will soon no longer be possible to trace the diverse influences, poetic qualities or home-grown varieties of individual nations. One could almost say that foreign literatures do not exist any more. A sad uniformity is enveloping the world.’⁸⁸

In the early decades of the nineteenth century Walter Scott’s novels were translated (mostly via French) into nineteen languages and he had his imitators everywhere. In the 1840s and 1850s Dickens had a similar impact on the development of the realist novel in Europe. His works were published in translation in Germany (from 1837); Russia, France, the Netherlands and Denmark (1838); Bohemia, Italy and Poland (1840); Sweden (1842); Belgium, Hungary, Norway (1843); Austria and Moldavia (1844); Finland (1846); Portugal and Spain (1847); Greece (1853); Bulgaria (1859); even Iceland (from 1860). Few of these translations were made directly from English. Most went via other languages with their own dependencies: from French into Spanish and Italian; from German into Scandinavian languages; and from Russian into the Slavonic languages.⁸⁹

Everywhere the influence of Dickens was the same. In France his novels were immediately popular, forcing many critics, who had at first considered his subject matter too vulgar and offensive to qualify as art, to change their views on what was admissible in a novel. The turning point was an influential article by Hippolyte Taine in the Revue des deux mondes in 1856 in which the critic and historian praised the dazzling visual realism of Dickens’s writing in David Copperfield:

Never did objects remain more visible and present to the memory of a reader than those which he describes. The old house, the parlour, the kitchen, Peggotty’s boat, and above all the school playground, are interiors whose relief, energy, and precision are unequalled. Dickens has the passion and patience of the painters of his nation; he reckons his details one by one, notes the various hues of the old tree-trunks; sees the dilapidated cask, the greenish and broken flagstones, the chinks of the damp walls; he distinguishes the strange smells which rise from them; marks the size of the mildewed spots, reads the names of the scholars carved on the door, and dwells on the form of the letters.⁹⁰

In Germany a new breed of realist writers such as Gottfried Keller and Wilhelm Raabe looked to Dickens as a model of the realist writing they espoused. They wanted to move away from the Romantic idealism of Goethe’s age, and, as German nationalists, to engage their readers with the real conditions of society, not least of the middle and the lower classes, in order to forge a national identity.⁹¹

But nowhere was the influence of Dickens so profound as in Russia. ‘Your name has enjoyed a wide celebrity,’ his translator, Irinarkh Vvedensky, wrote to him in 1849, ‘and from the banks of the Neva to the remotest parts of Siberia you are read with avidity’. This was information that so delighted Dickens that when his affairs were going badly he would threaten to pack his bags and leave for Siberia.⁹² Dickens’s works were all translated into Russian within a year of their appearance in English, and Vvedensky’s lively style made them very popular. His literary impact was closely linked to that of Gogol, a follower of Dickens, who, like him, combined realism with melodrama in a manner to inspire later Russian writers such as Dostoevsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin, both keen readers of Dickens. Hailed by Belinsky as the first ‘social novel’ in Russia, Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (1846) was influenced by the author’s reading of Dickens, particularly those scenes in which Dostoevsky evokes pathos from the attempts of the poor to preserve their human dignity and care for others even less fortunate than themselves. There are clear Dickensian borrowings in many of Dostoevsky’s later works, The Insulted and the Injured (1861) in particular.

Turgenev too was a Dickens fan. He read him in English, French and Russian, and considered him to be the leading European novelist. Turgenev would reject comparisons between his realist style and that of Dickens. He did not share the English writer’s fondness for caricature, sentimentality or comic distractions. But, like Taine, he prized him for the visual realism of his prose, ‘his power of presenting to the eye a vivid, definite figure’, as Henry James would later write of Turgenev’s admiration for Dickens.⁹³

In the preface to his influential book Le Réalisme (1857) Champfleury placed Turgenev and Gogol on a par with Dickens, Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë and Berthold Auerbach as leading exponents of the realist novel, whose followers were conquering the literary world: ‘Everywhere abroad, in England, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, America, Russia, Switzerland, I see storytellers charged by the mysterious current of reality.’⁹⁴ It is indeed remarkable how writers around Europe were all converging on a similar ideal of their literary art as a true and objective reflection of contemporary social life. The 1850s witnessed the emergence of realist writers right across the Continent: Turgenev in Russia, Auerbach and Fontane in Germany, Flaubert in France, Eliot and Gaskell in Britain.

How should we explain this intellectual convergence? Throughout Europe writers were responding to a new social reality created by the growth of manufacturing industries and the railways; to a new conception of modernity that was all about the here and now (‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’ of Baudelaire); to new ways of looking at the world after the invention of photography. They were writing for a growing market of newly literate urban readers – many from the artisan and working classes – who wanted stories which they could relate to their everyday lives. The novel was the medium par excellence for engaging readers with this contemporary reality. Poetry was caught in the Romantic past, although some poets, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Aurora Leigh (1856), called on it to deal with the commonplaces of the present day:

Nay, if there’s room for poets in this world

A little overgrown, (I think there is)

Their sole work is to represent the age,

Their age, not Charlemagne’s – this live, throbbing age,

That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires,

And spends more passion, more heroic heat,

Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms,

Than Roland with his knights of Roncesvalles.⁹⁵

For Champfleury the task of the artist to focus on the present arose from the new realities highlighted by the revolutions of 1848. He saw the revolutions as a fundamental break in time: the old certainties were swept away, events moved faster, and history appeared, more than ever, to be directed by transient contingencies. The social problems exposed by the popular uprisings had made it all the more important for the arts to reach out to common people and lay bare the real conditions of contemporary society. ‘It was only after 1848,’ the critic wrote, ‘that realism became one of the numerous religions with an “ism” at the end: one could see it every day displayed in advertising posters on the walls, acclaimed in the clubs, worshipped by its followers in small temples [galleries]’.⁹⁶

The issue was not just to fix the attention of society on the sufferings of the labouring poor. That was achieved easily enough – by Dickens in Hard Times (1854) or Gaskell in North and South (1854–5). It could even be achieved by melodramas such as Les Misérables or by Les Mystères de Paris. The challenge for realist writers was how to portray the common people without sentimentalizing them or reducing them to types. This was the problem Eliot confronted. She felt that Dickens had successfully portrayed the ‘external traits of our town population’ but could not ‘give us their psychological character – their conception of life, and their emotions – with the same truth as their idiom and manners’. That was what she set out to achieve in her first novel, Adam Bede. Turgenev felt the same way about Balzac and George Sand as Eliot felt about Dickens. In his Sketches from a Hunter’s Album he attempted to convey the thinking and emotions of his peasant characters simply by observing their behaviour, without authorial intervention, so that they would come across as autonomous individuals, whose characteristics and motives were seen to come from within.⁹⁷

Turgenev’s approach to the realist novel had a profound influence on the German realist writers who emerged in the 1850s, among them Theodor Storm, August Viedert, Paul Heyse and Theodor Fontane, whose 1853 essay ‘Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848’, a literary survey of the past five years in Germany, advocates a type of realist writing in which the subjects are allowed to generate their own meanings without having the narrator or the author speak on their behalf.⁹⁸ This impersonality – the complete removal of the writer’s voice from the scientific observation of everyday realities – was the basis of a revolution in the art of the novel.

The international market of translated books underpinned this intellectual convergence. Everyone was reading everybody else. Turgenev was influenced by Dickens and Sand; Flaubert by Balzac; Fontane by Turgenev and Eliot; and Eliot by a whole range of writers: Goethe, Balzac, Dickens, Sand and Keller, whom she read during her extended stay in Germany in 1854. She was also an admirer of the German social historian Wilhelm Heinrich von Riehl, whose study of the peasants, Land und Leute (1853), influenced her ideas of the realist literary art, as articulated in her review article about von Riehl, ‘The Natural History of German Life’ (1856). ‘Art is the nearest thing to life,’ she wrote, ‘it is a mode of amplifying and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.’⁹⁹ She had perfectly expressed Turgenev’s artistic credo in the Sketches.

5

During the first year of his house arrest Turgenev wrote to Pauline with regular requests for her portrait photograph. Reports of her appearance in St Petersburg had claimed that she looked younger than she had done seven years before, when she had last been in the Russian capital. Such reports, he explained to her, ‘make me all the keener to see your daguerreotype, and even if I know that it is closer to a caricature than a true likeness, my eyes, nonetheless, will be able to discern the changes in your features’. Weeks went by before Pauline replied to the first request. In the letter that finally arrived there was no daguerreotype but a caricature she had drawn of herself with the caption: ‘While you wait for a photograph!’¹⁰⁰

Turgenev was keen on the new technology. It helped him overcome his isolation in exile. He had his picture taken in Orel and sent it to his friends in Russia and abroad. The fact that a small provincial town in Russia had a photographic studio was evidence of how far the mania for photography had spread in Europe by this time. There was barely any European town where it was not possible to get a cheap portrait done.

New techniques of reproduction had made photography affordable. Most importantly, the invention of the wet-collodion process, in 1851, enabled any number of prints to be made from a single negative. It was a huge advance on the daguerreotype (a complex and expensive process of fixing photographic images on a polished sheet of silver-plated copper preserved under glass) in terms of both quality and economy. Three years later, in 1854, the French inventor André Disdéri developed an ingenious method of mass-producing photographic portraits by using a camera with four lenses and a rotating back to make multiple exposures of an image on one glass-plate negative. Cut from the photographic positive and mounted on a card the size of a calling card, these cartes de visites proved so popular that Disdéri was able to reduce his prices to a level that the middle classes could easily afford. Whereas in the 1840s a single photographic portrait had cost between ten and fifty francs, by the later 1850s, a set of twelve from Disdéri cost only twenty francs, and by the 1860s it was just two francs. Photographic studios began to multiply. In Paris the number grew from thirty-nine at the beginning of the 1850s to over 200 at the end of the decade. London saw a similar increase. By the early 1860s, something in the region of 400 million photographic cards were sold in Britain every year.¹⁰¹

Mass reproduction began a craze for photographic portraits of celebrities, family groups and the individual self. Writing on the impact of the new technology in 1859, Baudelaire lamented its encouragement of vanity: ‘From that moment on, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.’¹⁰²

The photographic portrait put the individual self on an equal footing with celebrities – that was part of its appeal. Photographs of famous people made up a large share of the cartes de visites sold by studio photographers, who used them for publicity. Disdéri published a Galerie des contemporains, 120 celebrity photographs on mounted cards with a short biographical text and published all together as a deluxe album in 1861.¹⁰³ Pauline Viardot was number 69 in Disdéri’s gallery. She was regularly photographed for commercial cartes and albums, sometimes appearing as herself, sometimes in the costume of one of her famous roles.¹⁰⁴ She was also photographed by Nadar (the pseudonym of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) who placed his striking portraits of celebrities (Balzac, Delacroix, Baudelaire, George Sand, Berlioz, among others) in the windows of his studio on the boulevard des Capucines. For a modest fee, members of the public could also have their picture taken by Nadar, connecting themselves to such celebrities.

Photographs of famous nobles, military heroes, heads of state and politicians also sold in large numbers. Napoleon III and Queen Victoria were quick to recognize the propaganda power of the new medium. They were the first European heads of state to pose for commercial images. They appeared, not as monarchs in crowns, robes and jewels, but in the universal middle-class attire of suits and crinolines, top hats and bonnets, in family portraits and settings. The photographs were very popular, particularly those of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, which sold millions of copies each, an essential decoration for countless homes and helping to cement the popularity of the British monarchy.¹⁰⁵

In its early days photography was generally considered to be a means of record rather than an art. It was admitted to the Great Exhibition in the category of science and technology. But the new technology had a profound influence on the literary and visual arts.

Novelists developed a more visual style of writing, loading their prose with images and external descriptive details, and introducing optical effects, such as open doors and windows, to help visualize their descriptions. The famous opening passage of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) is a good example of this photographic realism:¹⁰⁶

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.¹⁰⁷

Flaubert was obsessed with the idea of making his prose visual. He said many times that it was his goal to ‘faire voir les choses’ (make things visible), to make real objects tangible to the reader.¹⁰⁸ That is why he violently rejected any illustrations for his books: it was his own job to make his readers see. He filled his prose with visual details, accessories to the actions and emotions that ‘were almost as alive as the characters’, in the words of the Goncourts.¹⁰⁹ Even Emma Bovary is seen by us through the minute features of her physiognomy – the whiteness of her fingernails, the beads of sweat on her bare back, the fine line made by her foot, and so on. A good example of this hyper-visual style is the following passage from Sentimental Education, in which Frédéric Moreau, the novel’s hero, stops in front of Arnoux’s shop-window in the hope of catching sight of Mme Arnoux:

The high, transparent plate-glass windows presented to one’s gaze statuettes, drawings, engravings, catalogues and numbers of L’Art industriel, arranged in a skilful fashion; and the amounts of the subscription were repeated on the door, which was decorated in the centre with the publisher’s initials. Against the walls could be seen large pictures whose varnish had a shiny look, two chests laden with porcelain, bronze alluring curiosities; a little staircase separated them, shut off at the top by a Wilkton portière; and a lustre of old Saxe, a green carpet on the floor, with a table of marqueterie, gave to this interior the appearance rather of a drawing-room than of a shop.

Frédéric pretended to be examining the drawings …¹¹⁰

It was the random nature of these details that created their ‘reality effect’.¹¹¹ This is where the realism of the 1850s differed from previous practices of literary verisimilitude: where writers in the past had selected and arranged the life-like details of their stories in line with their symbolic meaning or importance to the narrative, much as a painter might organize the elements of nature to create a picturesque effect, realists like Flaubert filled their texts with incidental details, appearing as they might in a photograph. The challenge was to capture what was real when reality itself was resistant to structure. As Champfleury wrote,

Ordinary life is made up of small, insignificant facts as numerous as the twigs of trees – these little facts come together and end in a branch, a branch in a trunk. Any conversation is full of pointless details that cannot be reproduced without boring the reader … A story needs a beginning and a middle and an end. But nature makes no arrangement, no coordination, no framing, no beginning and no end. Does that not make the telling of the shortest story highly difficult? And is it not made easier by a daguerreotype machine?¹¹²

Painters too were rising to the task of representing the reality of ‘ordinary life’. The advent of photography raised the bar of verisimilitude in the visual arts. What people most admired in photography – the clear reflection of unadorned reality, the recording of a precise moment and the visceral sense of ‘being there’ – was assimilated to the aesthetic of modern art. The impact of photography challenged old ideas of representation.

Critics of photography attacked what they saw as its detrimental impact on the appreciation of beauty and the imagination’s role in art. There was a danger, they believed, that painting would become the slavish reproduction of reality. ‘If art was just the imitation of nature,’ wrote Louis Viardot, ‘the most perfect painting would be a well-made diorama, the most perfect statues a wax model.’¹¹³ Baudelaire decried the commercial pressures that were leading, he believed, to the ‘daguerreotypization’ of visual art:

Now our public, which is singularly incapable of feeling the happiness of dreaming or of marvelling (a sign of its meanness of soul), wishes to be made to wonder by means which are alien to art, and its obedient artists bow to its taste; they try to strike, to surprise, to stupefy it by means of unworthy tricks … In matters of painting and sculpture, the present-day credo of the sophisticated, above all in France, is this: ‘I believe in Nature, and I believe only in Nature … I believe that Art is, and cannot be other than, the exact reproduction of Nature … Thus an industry that could give us a result identical to Nature would be the absolute of art.’ A revengeful God has given ear to the prayers of this multitude. Daguerre is his Messiah.¹¹⁴

Under the impact of photography, artists strived to add pictorial precision to their work, many of them using cameras as an aid to get a better likeness of reality. The hyper-realism of Ernest Meissonier’s finely detailed genre pictures was so reminiscent of daguerreotypes that he was accused by several critics of using photographic images as the starting point of his paintings. While cameras could be used as a ‘secret tool’ in the artist’s studio, one critic wrote in 1851, the danger was that its abuse could ‘kill real art’, which depended rather on imagination than on photographic precision.¹¹⁵ Public fascination for the latter explained Meissonier’s extraordinary success, according to Zola:

The artistic value of his work has nothing to do with his appeal. The truth is that the public is purely and simply interested in the artist’s sleight of hand. It distinguishes the buttons on a waistcoat, the charms on a watchchain. So much detail is rendered that none is lost; that is what arouses this unheard-of admiration. And the best thing is that he paints men four centimetres tall who can be examined with a magnifying glass. This is what excites the crowd … He is the god of the bourgeoisie that has no feeling for true art.¹¹⁶

Artists had used the camera obscura as an aid to drawing since the sixteenth century. But the invention of photography helped them to capture the effects of light and shade in more scientific ways. Nowhere was its impact more important than in landscape painting. Because of the long exposures needed for photography in the early decades of its existence, landscapes were an obvious subject for photographers, especially for those who wanted to establish the new medium as an art form. There was a close relationship between art photography and the landscape painters grouped at Barbizon, a village in the Fontainebleau Forest. Camille Corot had been going there since the 1820s. He was joined by Théodore Rousseau after his rejection by the Salon jury in 1836. By the 1840s, a large group of artists was spending summers there, some, like Diaz, renting peasant cottages, but most, like Millet, Troyon, Daubigny and Courbet, lodging at an inn, the Auberge Ganne, which became a sort of artists’ colony. In the 1850s, Rousseau and Millet were permanently based in Barbizon, which, in the words of the art critic Albert de la Fizilière in 1853, had ‘given birth to a new science of painting’.¹¹⁷

The key to that science was painting in nature itself – setting up an easel en plein air and depicting landscapes as they actually appeared: everyday and unpoetic scenes without Romantic idealization or embellishment. Plein air painting was relatively new. The outdoor sketch in oils had been done for centuries; it became widespread throughout Europe in the later eighteenth century. Yet the paintings it produced were not considered ‘finished’ works, but studies to be finished in a studio. There were problems with oils that limited the time they could be used outdoors. Painters made their paint by grinding pigment powder and mixing it in small amounts with linseed oil, usually storing extra paint in animal bladders; but the oil paint dried so quickly that they could not work for long without mixing more.

Attitudes to plein-air painting began to change at the turn of the century, when the landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, who had made oil studies from nature, advocated it in his influential thesis Éléments de perspective pratique à l’usage des artistes (1799). The early decades of the nineteenth century saw a gradual shift towards oil painting from nature. Painters could achieve a greater naturalness of colour, light and shade by painting in the open fields. John Constable was the first great landscape artist to do so. From early on in his career, he had sketched in oils, and then used these sketches to work up finished paintings in the studio. In 1815, he painted his first oil painting entirely out of doors, Boat-Building near Flatford Mill. The English critics praised the picture for its naturalness and veracity but criticized what they perceived to be its roughness of handling: the picture did not seem ‘finished’. Constable did not get the recognition he deserved: in his lifetime he sold only twenty paintings in Britain. But he was well received in France, where three paintings, including The Haywain, were displayed at the 1824 Salon and awarded a gold medal. They were subsequently sold by the Parisian dealer John Arrowsmith to French buyers. Géricault was ‘stunned’ by The Haywain. Delacroix was so inspired by its colours that he repainted parts of The Massacre at Chios (1824), hoping to achieve the same effect.

The Barbizon painters were deeply influenced by Constable. They would have seen his work in several Paris shows during the 1830s. Their interest in plein-air painting was encouraged by the invention of tube paints by John Rand, an American inventor and amateur painter, who took out patents on his ‘collapsible tin tubes for colour’ in the United States in 1841. Marketed by Winsor & Newton, the London manufacturer of art materials, the tin tubes had the advantage that they could keep the paint from drying out, thus allowing artists to complete a painting en plein air. Rand was a smarter inventor than he was a businessman. He earned very little from his invention, which not only transformed painting but later would be used for toothpaste and other creams.¹¹⁸

Liberated from the studio, the Barbizon painters took to the forest and the open fields to work directly from nature and capture the effects of light and shade. They would return to the same locations many times, painting them in different seasons, times of day, and weather conditions. They were joined in this endeavour by a group of photographers (Gustave Le Gray, Léandre Grandguillaume, Charles Marville, Constant Dutilleux and Adalbert Cuvelier), whose forest scenes of Fontainebleau were the first photographs to be accepted as artworks in the Salon of 1859. Most of these photographers experimented with clichéverre, a print process in which the artist etches a design on to a glass plate coated with collodion, and then exposes it to sunlight against a sheet of sensitized paper. Fascinated by its subtle contrasts of light and shade, Millet, Corot, Daubigny and Rousseau all worked in the medium, which in turn influenced their own painting. Corot, in particular, found in the effects of photographic light a new visual vocabulary: from the hard-edged architectural realism of his landscape paintings in the 1840s, he moved to a softer and more tonal style of painting with blurred edges and subtle light-and-shade effects.¹¹⁹

Turgenev felt a close affinity to the Barbizon painters. He once told the Russian banker and art collector Ivan Tsvetkov that, if he could start his life again, he would choose to be a landscape painter and work in nature, where ‘there is so much beauty that the artist never wants for a subject’. Turgenev was the most visual of all the Russian writers of the nineteenth century (Tolstoy thought his descriptions of nature were the best in any literature).¹²⁰ This description from the final episode of the Sketches, where the narrator sums up all the joys of hunting, is the closest thing in words to a landscape painting by Corot (it might have been the passage Alphonse Daudet had been thinking of when he wrote that Turgenev’s nature writing appealed to all the senses, ‘smell, sight and sound’, at the same time):

And a summer morning in July! Has anyone save a hunter ever experienced the delight of wandering through bushes at dawn? Your feet leave green imprints in grass that is heavy and white with dew. You push aside wet bushes – the warm scent accumulated in the night almost smothers you; the air is impregnated with the fresh bitter-sweet fragrance of wormwood, the honeyed scent of buckwheat and clover; far off an oak forest rises like a wall, shining purple in the sunshine; the air is still fresh, but the coming heat can already be felt. Your head becomes slightly dizzy from such an excess of sweet scents. And there’s no end to the bushes. Away in the distance ripening rye glows yellow and there are narrow strips of rust-red buckwheat. Then there’s the sound of a cart; a peasant drives by at walking pace, leaving his horse in the shade before the sun gets hot. You greet him, pass on, and after a while the metallic rasping of a scythe can be heard behind you. The sun is rising higher and higher, and the grass quickly dries out. It’s already hot. First one hour, then another passes. The sky darkens at the edges and the motionless air is aflame with the prickly heat.¹²¹

Turgenev had been introduced to the Barbizon painters by Ary Scheffer, who had been a champion of Rousseau’s work since the 1830s. The writer would amass a large collection of landscape paintings by Rousseau, Corot, Daubigny and Courbet, most of which he bought through Paul Durand-Ruel and Alfred Sensier, the Barbizon group’s main dealers in the 1850s and 1860s, or at the Hôtel Drouot, the large Paris auction house, which opened up for business in 1852.

The Barbizon painters were quick to take advantage of the new art market serviced by commercial dealers and auction houses in Paris, London, Amsterdam and even Boston, where they sold a lot of pictures in the 1850s through William Morris Hunt, an American painter who had studied with Millet in Barbizon.¹²² Despite their rural isolation, the Barbizon painters were sharp-eyed businessmen. Their main buyers were wealthy men from mainly middle-class backgrounds – the opera singer Paul Barroilhet and the haberdasher Paul Collot were among their earliest clients – who identified with them because they too were outside the academic art establishment dominated by the aristocracy. Below these major patrons were the smaller buyers who wanted landscape paintings for their living rooms and could afford the moderate prices commanded by these painters in their early years. In 1850, Sensier organized a sale of fifty-three works by Rousseau. They fetched an average of less than 300 francs per picture.¹²³

The railway created a new market for the Barbizon painters. After the opening of the line to Fontainebleau, in 1849, there was an influx of weekend trippers from Paris. The journey took just sixty-five minutes, making it an ideal day out from the city to look at the attractions of the royal palace and the beauty spots of the forest. Trains de plaisir began to run the route from 1850. There were eight trains a day in the summer months – twelve by 1857, when 135,000 people passed through the station at Fontainebleau (among them Turgenev and Tolstoy, who made a day-trip together). The artist’s colony at Barbizon was one of the attractions for these visitors. They came by the coach-load, many of them taking lunch at Ganne’s auberge, where, they were informed by a guide to Fontainebleau in 1853, ‘the panels of the cupboards, the wall-divisions are covered with studies and painted sketches which have turned this modest inn into a kind of museum, curious in more ways than one’. The artists objected to this intrusion. In 1852, Rousseau took the extraordinary measure of sending a petition in the name of all the artists to Louis-Napoleon, asking him to protect the forest from the tourist industry. Ten years later, the government established a protected forest area and ‘reserve’ for the artists.¹²⁴ But there was an irony in their plea, because by then it was the tourist trade that had brought them many buyers and made their work much better known.

Of all the Barbizon painters none was more attuned to the workings of the market than Courbet. Not that he was ever really one of them. He was a one-man industry. But he was closer to them than to anybody else, and often spoke for them as the acknowledged leader of the realist movement in painting. Born in 1819 to a landowning family in Ornans near the Swiss border, Courbet was commercially minded from the start of his career. ‘If I am making art,’ he wrote to Gautier in 1846, ‘it is first of all to make a living from it.’ When he was a young artist in Paris, his letters home were full of observations on the fluctuating prices of different kinds of art; his decision to concentrate on landscape painting was with an eye to where the money was.

Courbet was the first painter to make his own way as an artist in the developing market. Years of rejection by the Salon early in his career had made him resentful of the academic art establishment and equally determined to succeed as an independent artist in the commercial sphere. He studiously courted private patrons and dealers. From the growing power of the press he came to realize the value of publicity – the only means of marketing his work as an independent artist without patrons or the support of institutions like the Academy. In a letter to the critic Francis Wey in 1850, Courbet set out his credo of self-promotion through scandalous behaviour:

Yes, dear friend, even in our civilized society, I must lead the life of a savage. I must break free from its very governments … I will be so outrageous that I’ll give everyone the power to tell me the cruelest truths. You see I am up to it. Do not think this is a whim … It is a serious duty, not only to give an example of freedom and character in art, but to publicize the art I undertake.¹²⁵

Courbet sought the company of journalists. He made sure he was always in the press. He gained publicity by painting portraits of celebrities, among them Proudhon and Berlioz, before turning his hand to landscapes. He knew the markets well and tailored his production to their various tastes. ‘He realised’, in the words of his biographer, ‘that the high-society women in Deauville and Trouville, where he went bathing in the summer, did not have the same taste as the bourgeoises who visited his exhibitions in the provinces, and that German collectors were looking for other types of landscape scenes than those favoured by their British counterparts.’ His lengthy correspondence with his dealers is filled with observations on this score. ‘For London,’ he advised, ‘the theme is more important than the technique’ – a ‘snow landscape’ and other ‘pleasant subjects’ would always do well there – whereas in Vienna ‘highly coloured, serious paintings’ were demanded.¹²⁶

This pandering to commercial tastes was in contrast to the major large-scale works produced by Courbet between 1848 and 1855 when he proclaimed himself a ‘realist’. The three large paintings he exhibited at the 1850 Salon (A Burial at Ornans (Plate 8), The Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair and The Stonebreakers) were starkly realist images of ordinary people, a visual equivalent of Turgenev’s literary depiction of the peasantry in the Sketches. There was no attempt to sentimentalize or beautify the people for the purposes of art, as expected in such genre works. His depiction of the mourners in A Burial at Ornans – all portraits of the actual people who had been present at his great-uncle’s funeral – was unflattering. His critics attacked him for the ugliness of his subjects, which they deemed inappropriate for art. They equated his art with photography. ‘In this scene, which could pass for a poorly printed daguerreotype, there is the natural coarseness which one always gets in taking nature at any random moment, and reproducing it exactly as it appears,’ wrote the painter and critic Étienne-Jean Delécluze about A Burial at Ornans.¹²⁷

Undeterred, Courbet moved outside the art establishment and began to organize his own commercial exhibitions in the provinces, relying on publicity from journalistic friends. In Besançon only 250 people paid the fifty-centime charge to see his works. In Dijon his exposition payante was forced to close for lack of interest after only a few days. But Courbet did not give up the idea of making money on his own.

In the autumn of 1853, he was given lunch by the Comte de Nieuwerkerke, the government’s Director of Fine Arts, who offered a commission for a painting at the Exposition Universelle des Beaux-Arts, planned by the emperor to coincide with an Exposition Universelle of industrial products in Paris in 1855. The Exposition Universelle was the French response to the Great Exhibition of 1851, and, unlike it, was to showcase painting, in which the French excelled. Courbet was insulted by Nieuwerkerke’s proposal, which made it a condition that his sketches for the painting should be submitted for approval first. He told the director that he was ‘the only judge’ of his own work, that he painted for his ‘intellectual freedom’, and that while he might send him A Burial at Ornans, which had set forth his artistic principles, he hoped instead to mount his own exhibition in competition with the government’s. As he explained to his friend and patron, Alfred Bruyas, ‘I would make 40,000 francs from it, which I would certainly not get from them.’¹²⁸

Eager for approval by the art establishment on his own terms, Courbet challenged the selection committee by sending not just one, but fourteen canvases, including A Burial at Ornans and The Atelier, another large-scale work, the size of an academic history painting (‘the moral and physical history of my studio’, as he described it), representing his rebellion against the Salon (it showed him at work amidst the defeated workers of 1848).¹²⁹ The committee accepted eleven works but rejected the rest, including the two large paintings. Stung by the rejection of his most ambitious offerings, Courbet organized a one-man exhibition of his paintings in a temporary structure he had built at his own expense opposite the entrance to the Exposition Universelle in the Palais des Beaux-Arts. He advertised his show, which he called Du Réalisme, with posters all around Paris. He published an exhibition catalogue with a statement of his views on realist art and made photographic reproductions of his paintings (the first art postcards), which he put on sale as well. Admission cost one franc, the same price as a ticket to the Exposition Universelle, where 5,000 works of art, including a major retrospective of paintings by Delacroix and Ingres, were displayed in the Palace of Fine Arts.¹³⁰

Courbet’s exhibition was housed in a temporary structure between a fire station and a sugar refinery, photograph, 1855.

Five million people visited the Exposition Universelle between May and November. For six months Paris was the centre of the world. The vast majority were interested only in the Exhibition of Industrial Products. As Ernest Renan, the historian, remarked, ‘all Europe has bestirred itself to go and stare at merchandise’.¹³¹ Fewer than a million people visited the Fine Arts exhibition, despite entrance prices being dropped.

Only a handful came to Courbet’s show. On the opening day, according to the artist’s friend Champfleury, the sole visitors were Gautier, Proudhon and ‘two old ladies of fashion, haughty and curious, and a little astonished’. Courbet suffered a large financial loss. But he had succeeded in presenting himself as an independent artist, the first to produce, publicize and market his own work. His one-man exhibition marked the birth of the ‘avant-garde’ as a market-based attack on the Establishment using shock and publicity techniques. It would inspire many others – Manet, Monet, Gauguin, Rodin, Picasso and every artist afterwards – who sought to make a living from their art.¹³²

6

The real money to be made from works of art was not in the sale of the original painting but in its reproduction for a mass market. The new technologies of mass reproduction – lithography and photography – turned artworks into a form of capital, a long-term source of revenue for the owners of their copyright, the artist and the publisher.

The reproduction of a work of art by a major company like Goupil or Gambart not only made possible a good income but gave the artist international fame, because such firms had a growing network of galleries and shops in all the major cities of Europe. These companies were the driving force of the art market’s internationalization in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Their sales of prints opened foreign markets for artists.

They also shaped the type of art that artists made. Goupil and Gambart would tell a painter what sort of works would make good prints or sell well among their clientele; and if he wanted to survive in this market, the artist would adapt his work to these demands. As the imperatives of reproduction came to shape the processes of art production, the nature of the artwork was transformed. In the words of Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), ‘the reproduced work of art is to an ever-increasing extent the reproduction of a work of art designed for reproducibility.’¹³³

The copying of art is as old as art itself. Artists and their pupils would make copies of their works to circulate them more widely. Copperplate engravings and etchings had been used to make Old Master prints from the fifteenth century. By the eighteenth century art prints were a thriving industry. Artists such as William Hogarth made good money in the medium, controlling the whole production process and marketing himself. But the nineteenth century was the great age of art in print. The growing spending power of the middle classes created an insatiable demand for inexpensive reproductions for the home. Throughout Europe the walls of bourgeois homes were filled by framed engravings printed on a scale of mass production made possible by the Industrial Revolution. Many more print engravings were produced in the nineteenth century than in the four previous centuries put together.¹³⁴

This explosion of printed images was underpinned by the invention of lithography, which revolutionized the processes of reproducing graphic art. Liberated from the time-consuming labour of engraving the image onto a copper plate, the printmaker only had to draw it on a lithographic stone, a much speedier process that made it possible for images to be printed in bigger quantities, far more cheaply and quickly than before. The technology was first developed in southern Germany during the 1790s, but was quickly taken up in France, Britain and the Low Countries. Technical improvements in the 1830s, above all the introduction of steel lithographic plates, more durable than copper, made large print-runs possible, which explains the rise of illustrated books and periodicals from that decade.

The demand for print engravings was so high that dealers like Goupil and Gambart were prepared to pay enormous fees for the reproduction rights to paintings by the best-known artists of the day. In 1860, for example, Gambart paid a record British sum of 5,500 guineas (£5,775 or 144,000 francs) for the painting and reproduction rights of The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple by Holman Hunt. The painting was a good example of the type of composition that lent itself particularly well to reproduction for the home: filled with people and activity, it had a simple Christian narrative. Hunt was aware of the commercial value of the copyright: he knew that Gambart had done well with the print sales of his 1853 painting The Light of the World; and he was encouraged by his friends Wilkie Collins and Dickens to stand firm for the highest price. Even so, Gambart stood to profit more. After he had paid for the engraving and printing, a cost of around £3,000, he cleared a handsome profit of £83,475 (2,103,570 francs) from the shilling entrance fee to see the painting in his Pall Mall Gallery (where it was on show for the next two years), from smaller fees to see the painting on a touring exhibition through Britain, as well as from the sales of engravings.¹³⁵

Gambart’s success was connected to his skilful marketing. His Pall Mall Gallery, located in the centre of the fine-art world in London, provided his dealership with the upmarket ambience it needed to gain the confidence of wealthy investors. It attracted a large paying public by retaining the ethos of the Royal Academy in its exhibition practices. To enter the French Gallery, as it became known, Gambart charged a shilling, the same entrance fee as at the Royal Academy, at that time just around the corner in Trafalgar Square, and another sixpence for the catalogue. The paintings in the gallery were selected by a ‘visiting committee’ of members of the Royal Academy. Behind this emulation of the art establishment was a clever marketing and pricing strategy. The entrance fee made his gallery accessible to the middle classes, yet maintained a certain level of exclusiveness on which the prestige of his print-selling business depended. He was just as skilled in his use of publicity. He advertised his exhibitions in the Art-Union magazine, a widely read and influential authority in the Victorian art world, which returned the favour by giving them positive reviews. He cultivated good relationships with journalists to raise press interest in his shows, which were often fronted by ‘sensation pictures’, panoramic scenes with crowds of people depicted in photographic detail, such as Life at the Seaside (1854) or Derby Day (1858) by William Frith, which had the potential to attract large crowds (when Derby Day was first exhibited it had to be protected by a rail).¹³⁶

Investing in the reproduction rights of a painting involved a range of measures to protect and promote them. Goupil and Gambart were fierce in the defence of copyright for artistic works. Their businesses depended on maintaining the ‘authenticity’ of their reproductions. At the high end of the market this could mean a limited edition of prints signed by the artists; but at the lower end, where the firm’s brand embossed into the paper was the only mark of authenticity, there were the usual risks of piracy encountered by the publishing industry. Both firms used domestic laws and bilateral treaties to enforce their copyright. One of the main reasons why Goupil set up branches outside France – in New York (in 1850), Berlin (1855), London (1857), The Hague (1862) and Brussels (1863) – was to help the Paris office protect its copyright abroad by imposing his brand presence in the major markets of the picture trade.

The Goupil company, Europe’s biggest print seller, built its reputation as the publisher of Scheffer, Delaroche and Vernet, the three founding artists of the business. By the 1860s, however, the importance of these artists to the firm was matched by that of Jean-Léon Gérôme, the most popular of Academic painters, who married Goupil’s daughter in 1863 (a marriage founded on business interests as much as on love). Goupil purchased the paintings of these artists – often before they were finished – mainly for their reproduction rights. When their paintings were already owned, he bought the rights to reproduce them from copies, reductions or existing engravings, which under French law counted as original works of art if the painting had been sold without the artist retaining the reproduction rights.¹³⁷ In 1842, for example, Goupil published Louis Henriquel-Dupont’s engraving after Scheffer’s Christus Consolator (1837), one of the most popular religious paintings in nineteenth-century Europe, which had been purchased at the Paris Salon by the Duc d’Orléans. As a work of art in its own right, the engraving provided Goupil with the legal loophole he needed to profit from this famous work. There were five different versions of the print available in the Goupil catalogue of 1848: from the cheapest at just thirty francs to collectable editions at sixty or eighty francs, according to the quality of the paper, and first proofs, signed by the artist, at 160 francs.¹³⁸

Goupil, like Gambart, worked closely with his artists to ensure that their finished paintings would make for good prints and suit his clients’ tastes. Scheffer owed his huge success in the engravings market to his drawings of poetic figures, a post-1830 aspect of his work that had been encouraged by Goupil. His first bestselling print, Francesca da Rimini (1835), was a reimagining of the scene in The Divine Comedy when the narrator Dante and Virgil meet Francesca and her lover Paolo in the Inferno. Equally successful were Dante and Béatrice (1846), in which the angelic muse looks up towards Paradise, and Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1846), one of many scenes drawn by Scheffer from Goethe’s Faust. These were popular subjects, attracting some of the best engravers in Europe, which found a market among those people, mostly from the provinces, ‘who wanted to acquire and place before their eyes, in their salon, an image of sentiment and piety’, as Henri Béraldi put it in his great chronicle, Les Graveurs du XIXe siècle (1885–92).¹³⁹

Goupil’s printing factory outside Paris, engraving, 1873.

The market for engravings was more provincial and conventional in its artistic tastes than the market for paintings, which was concentrated in the big cities. The most popular subjects were sentimental scenes from the Bible, literary classics or historical scenes. ‘There is not a salon in the provinces,’ Zola wrote in his damning essay on Gérôme, ‘without an engraving on the wall representing The Duel after a Marked Ball (Plate 10) or Louis XIV; and in the bachelor’s household you are bound to come across L’Almée et Phryné devant un tribunal – such are the piquant subjects permitted between men. More serious people have Les Gladiateurs or La Mort de César. Monsieur Gérôme works for every taste.’

What Zola deplored most in Gérôme’s paintings was the sense that they had been specifically designed ‘for the House of Goupil. He makes a painting so that it can be reproduced through photographs and engravings and sold in thousands of copies.’¹⁴⁰

The invention of photography also transformed the business of reproducing art. Goupil began working in the medium during the mid-1850s, but his first mass edition of photographic reprints – a series of Delaroche’s paintings – appeared in 1858. In that year he also launched his ‘Galerie photographique’ – a series of mounted photographic reproductions of popular paintings designed for framing in the home. By the end of the century the series contained over 1,800 different works, each available in smaller formats as postcards or for collecting in albums. The age of the art postcard and art book had begun.

7

In November 1853, Turgenev was released from house arrest and allowed to return to St Petersburg, under police surveillance, provided that he made a ‘full admission’ of his guilt. The Tsar agreed to his release on grounds of ill-health – the first signs of the acute gout from which Turgenev suffered for the rest of his life. Turgenev left at once for the capital, taking temporary lodgings and then moving to a spacious apartment by the Anichkov Palace, where he kept a servant and a cook.

Any thought he might have had of leaving Russia to be reunited with the Viardots in France was ruled out by the Crimean War. The conflict had begun in the summer of 1853 with the Russian occupation of the Danubian principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia (nominally under Turkish sovereignty but effectively controlled by the Russians). The occupation aimed to force the Turks to submit to the Tsar’s demands in the Holy Lands, where the Orthodox were engaged in a struggle against the Catholics over the right of access to the Holy Places. Russia’s aggression prompted France and Britain to send a military expedition to defend the Ottoman Empire and punish Russia by destroying its naval base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. The French and British forces landed on Russian soil in September 1854. Beating the Russians back at the Alma River, for the next eleven months they laid siege to Sevastopol, subjecting it to artillery bombardment on an industrial scale. The invasion stirred the patriotic feelings of even the most Western-oriented Russians such as Turgenev, who wrote to Pauline on 30 October: ‘I confess that I would willingly give my right arm to stop any one of our invaders (excuse me!) from escaping, and if there is one thing I regret at this moment, it is not having followed a military career, for then perhaps I might have spilled my blood for the defence of my country.’ As long as the war went on, he wrote to Pauline, he could not concentrate on literature, and would gladly exchange his pen for a sword.¹⁴¹

One writer who had done just that was Tolstoy, who had joined the army in 1852, the year he had first come to the attention of the literary world with the publication of his memoir Childhood in The Contemporary. Dissatisfied with his frivolous way of life as an aristocrat in St Petersburg and Moscow, the young count had decided to make a fresh start by following his brother Nikolai to the Caucasus. In 1853, he was transferred to the Russian army on the Danubian Front, and the next year was posted to the Crimea, where he penned his Sevastopol Sketches, a masterpiece of realist writing, half fiction and half reportage from the besieged city, which was published in The Contemporary in 1855.

Tolstoy and Turgenev met for the first time that autumn in St Petersburg, following the fall of Sevastopol and the defeat of Russia. Turgenev was the older by ten years. The poet Fet, who was at that meeting in Turgenev’s apartment, was struck by Tolstoy’s ‘automatic opposition to all generally accepted opinions’.¹⁴² Living side by side with the ordinary soldiers in the Crimea had opened Tolstoy’s eyes to the simple virtues of the peasantry. It had set him on a restless search for a moral way of life that he might live as a Russian nobleman – for a way of life without serfdom – an aspiration shared by Turgenev. Since the death of Nicholas I and the accession to the throne of his son, Alexander II, in March 1855, hopes of liberal reform were increasing. Censorship was loosened. Alexander told the gentry to prepare for the liberation of their serfs. Military defeat had persuaded him that Russia could not compete with the more advanced industrial powers until it swept aside its serf economy and modernized itself on European lines.

Turgenev saw a lot of Tolstoy over the next years. The two men were brought together by their opposition to serfdom. Their estates in Russia were not far apart. Tolstoy’s only sister, Maria, lived just a few kilometres from Spasskoe with her unfaithful husband and their three children. Turgenev often called on her, beginning in October 1854, and a brief romance between them developed. ‘She is one of the most attractive women I have ever met,’ Turgenev wrote to Annenkov on 13 November 1854. ‘Lovely, clever, straightforward – I could not take my eyes off her. In my old age (I turned 36 four days ago) I almost fell in love.’¹⁴³ Their relationship was the inspiration for Turgenev’s Faust (1856), an epistolary story of a tragic love affair, whose heroine resembles Maria. Unhappily married, Maria left her husband in 1857, perhaps hoping for a relationship with Turgenev, but by this time he had gone abroad and when he returned, in 1858, he was no longer drawn to her.

With the end of the Crimean War, the way back to Europe for Turgenev was open. The liberal climate in Russia did not detain him for long. In April 1856, less than a month after peace had been restored between Russia and the European powers by the Treaty of Paris, Turgenev told Pauline that he was applying for an exit visa. He needed some connections in high places to obtain it. ‘If I get it – which by the way is far from certain – I count on being at Courtavenel for the beginning of the hunting season on 1 September,’ he wrote to Pauline. So many Russians were leaving for Europe that there were no places left on any of the steamships before the end of July. He bought one for the start of August, by which time his passport had come through. On the eve of his departure he wrote to Countess Lambert, a close friend and confidante who would have understood the subtext of his letter to be about Pauline:

It brings me joy to be allowed to go abroad, yet at the same time I cannot but recognize that it would be better for me not to go. At my age to live abroad – means: to commit oneself to a gypsy existence and discard any thoughts of family life. But what can I do! It is obvious that is my fate. It might be said that people with soft characters depend on ‘fate’ – which relieves them from the need to exercise their own free will, from the need to take responsibility for themselves. Anyway, the bottle has been opened, so the wine must be drunk.

Turgenev suggested he would stay abroad for at least four years, the term set by his passport from the Russian government.¹⁴⁴

Travelling by steamship to Stettin, he arrived in Paris in mid-August, and from there set off for London to be reunited with the Viardots, who had been there since June for a season of concerts. Turgenev had not seen them for three and a half years. He returned with them to Courtavenel at the start of September. His relationship with Pauline resumed there, and at once they again became close. Turgenev was accepted as a member of the household, along with his daughter, Paulinette, who was now fourteen, a headstrong and unhappy girl, allowed to speak only French, who did not get on with Pauline or her adopted family at all. There were musical evenings, amateur dramatics and the ‘portrait game’, in which someone drew a cartoon of a made-up character and everybody wrote down what they thought the character’s biography would be. ‘How perfectly we spent our time at Courtavenel!’ Turgenev wrote to Botkin shortly after their return to Paris on 6 November. ‘Each day appeared as a gift – something natural, not at all depending on ourselves, permeated everything.’ Botkin was one of the few people in whom he confided about Pauline. He would have understood Turgenev’s meaning when he read in the same letter: ‘Really, I was very happy all this time – perhaps because “last flowers are sweeter than the sumptuous first-born flowers in the fields”.’¹⁴⁵*

Turgenev took an apartment on the rue de Rivoli. But he spent all his time at the Viardots in the rue de Douai, where Pauline kept an open house with regular Thursday evening musical soirées and smaller, more informal gatherings of friends for music every Sunday afternoon in the ‘grand salon’ – the large room converted from the old conservatory with the Aristide Cavaillé-Coll organ, recently displayed at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The centrepiece of the salon was the original manuscript of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, which Pauline had purchased from a bookseller in London in 1855. The handwritten score had a special personal significance, for Pauline was renowned for her singing of the parts of Donna Anna and Zerlina, while the opera had a long association with her family. Its previous owner, Augustina André, had inherited the document from her father, the composer and music publisher Johann Anton André, who had bought it from Constanze Mozart in 1800. Through her husband, Augustina had offered it for sale to the Imperial Library in Vienna, the Royal Library in Berlin and the British Museum, all of which rejected it for lack of funds. Pauline got it for £180. She kept the precious manuscript in a special wooden box decorated in the neo-Gothic style. Finished in brass, the box had an escutcheon in the shape of an ‘M’ and an inscription on the lid. It looked more likely to contain the relics of a saint than an orchestral score. Placed on a table by the organ, it turned the room into a sort of shrine, a site dedicated to the cult of Mozart with Pauline as its high priestess.¹⁴⁶

The list of those who regularly came to the Thursday music evenings reads like a Who’s Who of the artistic world of Paris in the second half of the 1850s: the composers Berlioz, the young Saint-Saëns and the bon-vivant Rossini, who had known Pauline since she was a child and still held her in the fondest affection; the painters Delacroix, Corot, Doré and Scheffer; writers as diverse as Augier, Renan and Turgenev; and Daniele Manin, the Venetian republican leader of 1848, who lived in exile in Paris. The Viardots involved their own children in the music-making at these receptions. For Louise, the eldest, then a teenager and already a competent pianist, the concerts were a ‘real torture’ as she was made to sight-read the accompaniment for top-rate soloists before the distinguished audience. ‘It was evidently a good training to become a musician,’ she recalls, ‘but it felt like a punishment.’¹⁴⁷

Among the foreign visitors were Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, Chorley, Herzen and Bakunin, and Dickens. Dickens had heard Pauline sing in Le Prophète in London in 1849. Although they had mutual friends, he had not called on the Viardots during his trips to Paris in 1850, 1851 or February 1855. It was not until the autumn of 1855, when Dickens came to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, that they finally met. Dickens was in Paris for several months. Within days of his arrival he was visited by Scheffer, who persuaded him to sit for a portrait in his studio in rue Chaptal, just around the corner from the Viardots. Dickens found the lengthy sittings tiresome. They came at a time when he was under intense pressure in his work. ‘I can scarcely express how uneasy and unsettled it makes me to sit, sit, sit, with Little Dorrit on my mind,’ he wrote to his friend John Forster. The painting did not turn out very well. Scheffer was afraid that it resembled a Dutch admiral more than an English novelist, and Dickens, although pleased with the result, did not think it looked like him at all. It was during these sittings that Dickens met Pauline. He gave a reading of The Cricket on the Hearth for sixty guests in Scheffer’s studio. Pauline was reduced to tears by the reading – the tale of marital fidelity and accusations of betrayal must have struck a chord with her. On a second evening Pauline sang for the English writer, who sent her an instalment of Little Dorrit as a token of his gratitude for the ‘delight’ that her ‘great genius’ had given him.

From that point Dickens was a regular visitor at the rue de Douai. He was there for what he called ‘a very good and remarkably unpretending’ dinner with Scheffer and George Sand, who had come up from Nohant for the occasion, in January 1856. ‘The Viardots have a house away in the new part of Paris, which looks exactly as if they had moved into it last week, and were going away next,’ Dickens wrote to Forster. ‘Notwithstanding which, they have lived in it eight years. The opera the very last thing on earth you would associate with the family. Piano not even opened.’ The meeting between Dickens and Sand was a mixed success. Sand was bored and unimpressed by Dickens, who did not know her novels, while he found her a ‘singularly ordinary woman in appearance and manner’ – far, in other words, from his preconception of her as a dangerously immoral free-thinker. ‘Chubby, matronly, swarthy, black-eyed. Nothing of the blue-stocking about her,’ he wrote to Forster, ‘except a little final way of settling all your opinions with hers, which I take to have been acquired in the country, where she lives, and in the domination of a small circle.’¹⁴⁸

One person missing from the Viardot circle was Gounod. Pauline had fallen out with him in 1852, when he had unexpectedly announced his marriage to Anna Zimmermann, the daughter of a piano professor at the Paris Conservatory. The wedding was to take place at the end of May, the time of the birth of Pauline’s daughter Claudie, so there was no question of the Viardots being there. But Pauline was upset that she was not even invited. Several invitations from the Viardots were cancelled by the Zimmermanns at short notice and for no apparent reason. Pauline had sent a wedding gift, a valuable bracelet for the bride, but Gounod had returned it the next day, along with a brief letter in which he explained that he already wished to give his wife a bracelet, so Pauline’s gift was not needed.¹⁴⁹ Actually, Gounod had refused the gift on the insistence of the Zimmermanns, who wanted to distance themselves from the Viardots: there had been rumours of the love affair between Pauline and Gounod, and they had received an anonymous letter threatening to reveal it. The fact that Gounod, who owed so much to Pauline, had gone along with this affront outraged Louis, in particular, who wrote to Gounod on his wife’s behalf breaking off all relations. Ary Scheffer intervened, pleading with Gounod to make his first social call with his new wife to the Viardots, but when he failed to do so, the Viardots were incensed. They took it as an insult that Gounod would not take the measures needed to defend Pauline’s honour. Louis barred him from their home for good. Pauline wrote long letters to George Sand complaining inconsolably about how she had been wronged. Turgenev seized the opportunity to regain favour with Pauline. ‘To act as he has done is disgusting,’ he wrote to Pauline in August, ‘all is finished between me and him. I do not want to think of him again.’¹⁵⁰

* The printer’s page in Russia was equivalent to about 5,000 words. It contained several pages of the finished publication, which were then cut for binding in a book. Turgenev’s rate of pay was low by European standards – around twelve francs per thousand words, increasing to approximately eighteen francs per thousand words after 1852. At a similar stage of his career, in 1833, Balzac was earning thirty francs per thousand words from the Revue de Paris (Honoré de Balzac, Correspondance, ed. Roger Pierrot, vol. 2 (Paris, 1962), p. 280).

* There had been a plan for a Picture Gallery which the French – the main contributors – had blocked on economic grounds: they did not want to pay the costs of transporting their paintings (Patricia Mainardi, ‘The Unbuilt Picture Gallery at the 1851 Great Exhibition’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 45, no. 3, Sept. 1986, pp. 294–9).

* The new department stores, such as the Bazar Bonne-Nouvelle and Au Bon Marché in Paris, Lewis’s in Liverpool and Whiteley’s in London, would bear a striking resemblance to the exhibition hall. Their architectural grandeur, with glass and iron girders opening up the vast interiors to light, was meant to create spectacle; their layout was designed to direct the movement of their visitors through all the departments, just as the crowds were directed through the exhibition hall.

* Unknown to Turgenev, the Third Section, or political police, had also been compiling a report on his connections to Nikolai Turgenev, a distant relative and one of the main leaders of the Decembrist uprising against autocracy in 1825. Abroad at the time of the uprising, Nikolai remained in exile in Paris, where Turgenev had met him in 1845 (Turgenevskii sbornik, p. 212).

* The main house had burned down in a fire in 1839.

* The French franc was not in existence but the silver value was equivalent to 5,500 French livres.

* Turgenev was not the only Russian writer to be read in Europe in this way. In 1854, Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) appeared in a pirate English translation under the extraordinary title, Home Life in Russia. The publisher’s preface presented the novel as a documentary work whose purpose was ‘to throw light upon the domestic life of our ancient allies and present foes’ and to give ‘an insight into the internal circumstances and relations of Russian society which only a Russian can afford us’ (Home Life in Russia: By a Russian Noble. Revised by the Editor of ‘Revelations of Siberia’, 2 vols. (London, 1854), pp. i–ii).

* The Netherlands had bilateral copyright conventions with Germany (from 1854), France (1855), Belgium (1858) and Spain (1862), but not with Britain, its main source of translated literature. Rights to publish foreign books in translation were handled by a national book trade organization (Vereeniging ter Bevordering van de Belangen des Boekhandels, or VBBB) which registered these titles and protected them from competing publishers in the Netherlands. A Dutch publisher would offer a small fee (usually around £20) to a foreign publisher in order to receive early proofs of a work it wanted to publish in translation in the Netherlands so that it could register its title with the VBBB before its competitors. No other payment was made to the author or the publisher (Van der Weel, ‘Nineteenth-Century Literary Translations’, p. 33).

* A quotation from a Pushkin poem without title of 1825.