The Europeans

8

Death and the Canon

There have never been living great men. It is posterity that has made them.

Flaubert, 1870

1

Turgenev returned every year to Russia in the later 1870s, usually in order to attend to his estate and business affairs, which lurched from one disaster to the next. His short stays attracted little interest from the Russians, who had come to regard him as an émigré, if not a total foreigner. On the publication of his novel Virgin Soil, in 1877, he had been attacked by Russian critics from all sides who claimed that he had lost touch with Russia, where the novel – a complicated story about a group of populists who leave their noble households to ‘simplify’ their lives and spread socialist propaganda to the peasants – is set. Its chararacters, it must be said, lack the life-like qualities of those in his earlier novels; they feel like types to carry his political message – that however good and honest these young revolutionaries may be as people, their cause itself is false and bound to fail. Turgenev had accepted the charges. ‘There is no doubt that Virgin Soil has failed,’ he wrote to his brother Nikolai;

and I am beginning to think that its fate is merited. One cannot suggest that all the journals have entered into some kind of league against me; rather it must be admitted that I made a mistake: I took upon myself a labour that was beyond my powers and I fell down under its weight. In fact, it’s impossible to write about Russia without living there.

Because he could not write of any other place he talked of giving up fiction.¹

But that all changed on his visit to the country in the early months of 1879, following the unexpected death of Nikolai, who left a small part of his large fortune, around 250,000 francs, to his cash-strapped sibling in his will. Turgenev was given a returning hero’s welcome at a series of banquets in the writer’s honour organized by prominent representatives of science, education and the arts in both Moscow and St Petersburg. Now his absence from the country was seen as his protest against autocracy. Students thronged outside the houses where he stayed in the hope of catching sight of the white-haired giant they now hailed as the embodiment of their democratic hopes. Turgenev had returned to a society in a ferment of expectations of reform: pressure for a constitution was mounting, and, in spite of terrorist attacks by the revolutionaries, Tsar Alexander II was coming round to granting one.

Turgenev understood why he was welcomed so ecstatically. On 4 March, he gave a reading of one of his Sketches at a benefit concert for poor students in the Assembly Hall of the Moscow Nobility. It became a political demonstration. ‘Imagine more than a thousand students in this colossal hall,’ he wrote to Pauline the next day.

When I enter there is an uproar loud enough to bring the building down, shouts of ‘hurrah!’, hats are flying in the air. Then two enormous wreaths are presented, then a young student representative shouts a speech into my ear – every sentence prompts another outburst; in the front row the rector of the university is pale from fear; and I, while trying not to pour oil on the fire, answer in the hope of saying more than platitudes. Later, after the reading, I am escorted from the hall by a huge crowd. From the adjacent rooms I am called out twenty times. Young women try to grab hold of my hands in order to kiss them! It was a mad scene. If a colonel of the gendarmerie had not escorted me out, in the most polite manner, and got me into my carriage, I would still be there. The reason for this frenzy I well understand: on the eve of reforms which are always promised and postponed, these young people are all charged with electricity like a Leyden jar; I served as a machine to discharge it. In doing so my liberal views were as important as any of my writings. If these poor young people did not demonstrate, they would burst!²

Such demonstrations were not welcomed by the Russian government. Police spies reported to the Tsar on the writer’s every move. Reactionaries accused him of inciting revolution. Soon Turgenev was approached by one of the Tsar’s courtiers, who said His Highness was interested to know when he planned to return abroad. Concerned not to fall foul of the Tsar and jeopardize his chances of future visits to Russia, and perhaps fearful of his possible arrest, Turgenev packed his bags and left without delay. At the border he was told by the tsarist official, ‘We have been expecting you.’³

Although it had been cut short, Turgenev was delighted with his visit to Russia. He felt he had been reconciled with Russian youth and the progressive sections of society. Time had softened the controversies stirred by his novels of the 1860s, Fathers and Sons and Smoke; a new generation of Russians had grown up with ideas close to his liberal views; and he was now fondly remembered as the author of the Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, which had done so much to end serfdom. For the first time, he felt this was a Russia in which he might find a home. Pauline sensed that she could end up losing him. ‘My good, dear Tourgline,’ she wrote to him on 25 March,

I have just received your letter with the photograph. Thank you. I am replying to it with the certainty that my letter will find you settled happily still in Petersburg, where your latest triumphs may encourage you to put down roots. That is very well, provided you do not develop ‘Heimweh’ [homesickness] when you will be in Paris. Are you planning to abandon us? I fear you will get bored of Paris, where you are not surrounded by this frenzy of admirers – where you only have the same old people, who are getting older by the day, who look at you with a more quiet joy … God, what happiness it will be to see you here again. I am afraid you will not have the strength to tear yourself away from all that youth that prowls and bounces around you!⁴

The one prowling youth that Pauline really feared was Maria Savina, an actress whom Turgenev had met earlier that March, after her sensational performance in his long-neglected play A Month in the Country at the Alexandrine Theatre in St Petersburg. Young and beautiful, Savina was the most exciting talent of the Russian stage. Turgenev at once fell in love with her. He saw her constantly. After his return to Paris, he sent her passionate letters, declaring his love for her. The letters expressed an old man’s sexual yearning for a young woman (he was sixty-one and she twenty-five) but contained nothing to suggest that they were lovers.

His infatuation stemmed no doubt from the growing sense of loneliness he felt, both as an exile from Russia and as an old bachelor. Before his relationship with Savina, there had been other young women, all Russians, in whose affections he had found solace when he felt isolated or neglected by Pauline. From 1873, there had been a long flirtation with the young widow of a Russian general, Baroness Julia Vrevskaia, which had only broken off on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877, when she left for the front to volunteer as a nurse. She died in a military hospital from typhus fever in January 1878.

The foolishness of an old man who fails in his conquest of a young woman is the stuff of comedy. But there was a sadness in Turgenev’s longing for a younger woman’s love. Perhaps it was nostalgia for his youth, for its romantic possibilities, which he had sacrificed to his devotion to Pauline. His ardent love for Pauline had weakened – changed in form – as the two became older. It had become an intimate friendship in which his emotional existence was contained. He was incapable of breaking this relationship. He was dependent on Pauline, even though he knew his passion for her was reciprocated only by her ‘quiet joy’. Emotionally he needed her, in spite (and perhaps because) of the torment she caused him.

According to Anatoly Koni, the jurist in whom he confided about affairs of the heart, Turgenev was unsuited to marriage: he would have become bored with a loving wife (or perhaps with the everyday banalities of married life). ‘For him to love for a long time, and to become accustomed to love, he needed the sort of person who would make him suffer, doubt, waver, be secretly jealous and dejected – one who, in a word, would torment him.’⁵ Pauline was this tormenter. He was devoted to her like a slave.

Koni recalls a conversation with Turgenev in the autumn of 1879, when the jurist, then aged thirty-five, visited him in Paris. Turgenev advised him to get married. It was impossible to imagine, Turgenev explained, ‘how lonely and wearisome old age can be when you have to cling to the edge of a stranger’s nest, accept kindness as if it were charity and be in the position of an old dog, which is not driven out because people have got used to it and pity it’. According to Savina, Turgenev felt a profound disappointment, even resentment, about the sacrifices he had made for his unofficial marriage to Pauline. He expressed his feelings in a poem which he read to her, his voice shaking with emotion, from a ‘large book bound in green leather’ that he kept locked up in a drawer in his desk at Spasskoe. The poem, which has not survived, told the story of an ‘overmastering love for a woman to whom a whole life had been given and who would not bring one little flower or shed a single tear on the writer’s grave’. When Savina asked him what he meant to do with this poem, Turgenev replied that he would burn it to prevent it being published after he had died: ‘It might hurt her.’⁶

Turgenev returned to Russia in February 1880. He wanted to resume his relationship with Savina. He saw her frequently during the five months he spent in Russia, from February to July, the longest he had stayed for almost twenty years. There were fleeting encounters, stolen moments in her changing room at the theatre, and exchanges of flirtatious notes. On one famous occasion he even travelled to the railway station at Mtsensk, twenty kilometres from his estate at Spasskoe, so that he could join her in her compartment for the hour’s journey to Orel. From the letter which he wrote to her after he had left the train to spend the night in a hotel, it would seem that they had kissed (‘If I live for a hundred years I shall never forget those kisses’) but she had rejected his further advances, resulting in Turgenev, no doubt realizing that he had made a fool of himself, distancing himself from her (‘If the bolt must remain closed, you had better not write to me, but I kiss your hands, your feet, and everything you’ll allow me to kiss – and even what you won’t allow’).⁷ The cooling off was temporary. His infatuation started up again. The next summer Savina spent five days with him at Spasskoe – a place Pauline never visited – though by that time she was about to marry someone else.

One of the reasons for Turgenev’s long stay in Russia was his involvement in a Pushkin festival culminating in the unveiling of a monument to the Russian poet in Moscow on 6 June. The idea of a public statue had been promoted since the 1840s, when Belinsky had concluded his series of articles on Pushkin by looking forward to a time when Russia’s ‘classical’ poet would be recognized with a monument. From the 1860s, when the campaign was taken up, first by Pushkin’s old schoolfriends at the Lycée in Tsarskoe Selo and then by the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature (OLRS), which specialized in literary commemorations, the call for a statue of Pushkin began to assume a national symbolic importance. There were no public monuments to literary or artistic heroes in Moscow or St Petersburg: only statesmen and military figures shared that honour with the tsars. The unveiling of a Pushkin monument was seen by many as a new beginning for Russia. It would mark the moment when it was reborn as a nation in the European sense, a society independent of the State, on a par with the Germany of Goethe or the England of Shakespeare. Coming at a time of liberal reform, it was also seen as a turning point in the state’s relations with society, a chance for the country to be reunited by the values of its literature.⁸

Turgenev played a leading role in the preparations for the festival. Acting as ambassador-at-large for the OLRS, he helped to acquire Pushkin memorabilia for the main exhibition, wrote to writers all around the world to invite them to attend (not many came, but Hugo, Tennyson and Auerbach sent congratulatory telegrams), and accepted a commission from Stasiulevich to write a pamphlet on Pushkin ‘for the people’ to be read aloud and distributed free in Moscow’s public reading rooms on the day of the unveiling of the monument. The pamphlet turned out to be pitched too high. ‘I don’t know how to write for the common people, who don’t read Pushkin anyway, only for the cultured few,’ Turgenev admitted to Stasiulevich. Just before the start of the festivities, on hearing that Tolstoy would not attend, he travelled down to his estate at Yasnaya Polyana in a last attempt to change his mind. Tolstoy would not listen to Turgenev’s arguments. He had declared his intention to give up literature and live a simpler Christian life with the peasants. He refused to have anything to do with the ‘comedy’ of honouring a man of easy morals, like Pushkin, whose poetry meant nothing to the peasantry.⁹

Huge crowds turned out for the unveiling of Alexander Opekushin’s statue in Moscow on 6 June 1880. Pushkin souvenirs of every type were available from sellers in the streets: portraits, clay busts and statues, cheap editions of his poetry, song albums and musical arrangements of his verse. To the orchestral sound of the ‘Coronation March’ from Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète (Pushkin had composed a poem by the same name as the opera) delegations from all over Russia approached in turn to lay wreaths by the monument. There were banquets, public readings, ceremonial meetings and eulogies by dignitaries.

Turgenev’s speech at the opening session of the OLRS was eagerly awaited by a public keen to hear what he would have to say about the country’s great poet. As a famous exponent of the Westernist philosophy, he had given much offence to the Slavophiles and nationalists by cutting Russia’s cultural achievements down to size. Turgenev’s eulogy was a disappointment to his audience. While acknowledging that Pushkin was the first and finest national poet, he stopped short of ranking him with the greatest European poets – Shakespeare, Goethe and Homer – who had higher universal qualities. It was a measured, nuanced argument, which paid homage to the great leap Pushkin had made in the creation of a Russian literature, but it did not satisfy the nationalist, euphoric mood, which demanded Pushkin’s elevation to a higher world significance.

Dostoevsky stole the show by satisfying this demand in his explosive panegyric at the closing session of the OLRS, the next day, on 8 June. The speech was the starting point of Dostoevsky’s fame as a national prophet. He hailed Pushkin as a world-historic genius, greater even than Shakespeare, Cervantes or Schiller, because he possessed that uniquely ‘Russian’ quality of embodying the spirit of all humanity: ‘The greatest of European poets could never so powerfully embody in themselves the genius of a foreign, even a neighbouring, people … Even Shakespeare’s Italians, for instance, are almost always Englishmen. Pushkin alone of all world poets possessed the capacity of fully identifying himself with another nationality.’ His universal spirit, Dostoevsky claimed at the messianic climax of his speech, was a revelation of Russia’s destiny to unite all the peoples of Europe in a Christian brotherhood. ‘The hall was in hysterics,’ Dostoevsky reported to his wife, ‘and when I finished I can’t tell you the roar, the wail of rapture … For half an hour they called me back, waved handkerchiefs … “Prophet! Prophet!” they shouted in the crowd. Turgenev, about whom I put in a good word in my speech, rushed up and hugged me with tears.’ In his own report on Dostoevsky’s speech, Turgenev described it to Stasiulevich as ‘false from start to end, but extremely pleasing for Russian self-esteem’.¹⁰

2

When Turgenev was at Spasskoe preparing his Pushkin speech he received the devastating news of Flaubert’s death. ‘I took the blow in a most brutal fashion,’ he wrote to Zola on 23 May, ‘by reading the obituary notice in Golos [a Petersburg daily]. I need not tell you how deeply grieved I am: Flaubert was the man I loved most in the world. It is not only a great talent that has passed away but a rare spirit, and a centre for us all.’ The details of his death came a few days later in a long letter from Maupassant, who had received a telegram from Flaubert’s niece on 8 May, telling him to come quickly after Flaubert had collapsed from an epileptic fit. He was dead by the time Maupassant arrived on the train from Paris to Rouen.¹¹

The funeral took place three days later at Croisset. After a perfunctory mass in the parish church, the mourners followed Flaubert’s coffin to the Rouen Monumental Cemetery, a journey of a few kilometres. Zola was shocked by the small turnout of literary people from Paris (aside from himself, just Goncourt, Daudet, Maupassant, Théodore de Banville, Huysmans and a few others, but not Hugo or Dumas) and above all by the small size of the congregation from Rouen – no more than a hundred mourners in total. ‘What seems inexplicable, unforgivable, is that Rouen, the whole of Rouen did not walk behind the body of one of its most illustrious sons,’ Zola wrote. ‘You could say that the Rouen people are all in commerce and don’t take literature seriously. But this big city must have schoolteachers, lawyers, doctors, a population that reads books, who at least have heard of Madame Bovary.’¹² The burial itself could have come straight from the pages of that masterpiece. The hole prepared by the gravediggers was not long enough for the coffin of Flaubert, who was almost six feet tall (1.81 metres). Lowered into the ground, the coffin became stuck at an angle, the feet higher than the head, and was left in that position for the final rituals.

When Turgenev returned from Russia, he got together a committee of writers to raise the funds for a monument to Flaubert in Rouen. Goncourt, Daudet, Maupassant and Zola joined it along with Charles Lapierre, the editor of the daily newspaper La Nouvelliste de Rouen and an old friend of Flaubert, but Victor Hugo was too proud to sit on the same committee as Zola, who had criticized his work. Of the 12,000 francs demanded by the sculptor, Henri Chapu, only 9,000 was collected from the public in five years. They had to scrape the rest together from their own pockets. The monument was finally unveiled on 23 November 1890. The weather was miserable. Goncourt, Zola and Maupassant were among the tiny crowd of Parisian dignitaries sheltered from the wind and rain in a marquee while the statue was unveiled to the oompahs of a fairground band – another scene that could have come straight out of Madame Bovary.¹³ Goncourt gave the main address:

Now that he is dead, poor Flaubert is starting to be given the status of a genius, as his memory deserves. But do you know that when he was alive the critics were reluctant to admit that he even had talent? What did all his masterpieces earn for him? Rejection, insult, moral crucifixion. One could write a good book on all the errors and injustices committed by the critics against writers from Balzac to Flaubert. I recall an article by a political journalist arguing that Flaubert’s prose was a disgrace to the reign of Napoleon III, and another in a literary journal where he was reproached for writing in an epileptic style – only now you understand how much poison that epithet contained for the man to whom it was addressed …

At a time when money is transforming literature and art into commerce, Flaubert stands as one of the last of an old generation of artists never motivated by money, resisting its temptations even at the cost of his own fortunes, and writing only books that satisfied his taste in art, books which paid him badly in his own lifetime but which earned him posthumous glory.¹⁴

Flaubert had to wait a long time to get the recognition he deserved. It was not until the centenary of his birth, in 1921, that the French state acknowledged his significance by unveiling a monument to him in the Luxembourg Gardens. But the death of other writers would be marked by large-scale state and civic funerals during the 1880s.

Dostoevsky died from a pulmonary haemorrhage in January 1881. If his Pushkin speech had been the origin of Dostoevsky’s status as a national prophet, his funeral was the start of a national cult. It was the closest any writer had yet come to a state funeral in Russia, with both the Church and government taking on responsibility for the arrangements and sending representatives. Huge crowds turned out for the procession through St Petersburg. Tearful students left their lecture halls to line the streets from Dostoevsky’s home in Kuznechny Lane to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The representatives of sixty-seven delegations carried wreaths as they walked behind the coffin. Fifteen different choirs sang at various points along the way. As the cortège approached its destination, the gates of the monastery opened and its monks filed out in procession to honour the deceased – a ceremony normally reserved for the interment of a tsar.¹⁵

‘Nothing like it had been seen before in Russia,’ Stasov wrote. Only a few decades previously, Pushkin’s funeral had been closed to the public, his body taken from St Petersburg by the police to prevent crowds from gathering. But now the state was claiming Dostoevsky as its own. The Tsar ordered the Ministry of Finance to grant a lifetime pension of 2,000 roubles (8,000 francs) a year to Dostoevsky’s widow, the first time such a pension had been given in Russia, and places were reserved for Dostoevsky’s children in the Corps des Pages and the Smolny Institute, though neither place was taken up. A public fund was established for the publication of a first complete edition of Dostoevsky’s works, and another for a monument to the writer. Turgenev contributed fifty roubles (200 francs), a modest sum. He had not forgotten Dostoevsky’s unpaid debt and cruel baiting of him over many years.¹⁶

Victor Hugo’s funeral, on 1 June 1885, was on an even larger scale. It was one of the biggest state occasions the French capital has ever seen. From the moment it was known that he was dying, large crowds gathered outside Hugo’s house in the avenue d’Eylau. A young Romain Rolland was among the many students who missed school to join the crowd of Hugo fans, many of them workers, waiting for announcements from the balcony. Ever since the writer’s birthday celebrations in 1881, it had become a tradition for his admirers to gather on the street outside his house and wait for Hugo to appear. Hugo took five days to die. He played the part of the Romantic death to perfection, making sure to issue statements to family and friends around his bed (‘I am ready!’, ‘It is a dead man who speaks to you!’, ‘If death must come it is welcome!’, etc.), which he knew would find their way to the newspapers. The international press published daily updates on his condition.¹⁷

By the time Hugo died it had been decided by the government to honour him with a state funeral and ‘pantheonization’. Hugo had requested to be buried in a poor man’s coffin. Even in death he was conscious of the need to cultivate his image as a man of the people. For the lying in state Hugo’s simple coffin was put on top of a monumental catafalque bearing his initials and placed underneath the Arc de Triomphe, which was draped in a black mourning veil, surrounded by a dozen burning torches, and illuminated with electric light. Maurice Barrès compared the dramatic mise-en-scène to the funeral arrangements of the Roman emperors. Nietzsche thought it was an ‘orgy of bad taste’. On the night before the funeral, monster crowds assembled at the Arc de Triomphe and lined the Champs Elysées, taking up positions for a better view of the funeral processsion to the Panthéon. The area began to take on the appearance of a huge fairground as pedlars sold cheap souvenirs – pictures of the deathbed scene, Hugo silhouettes, songsheets, pamphlets of his poems, wooden models of his characters. By the morning there were two million people on the procession’s route, more than the entire population of Paris, and perhaps another million would join them later on. The government was worried that the funeral could become a workers’ uprising and put more police and soldiers on the streets. The thickest crowds were in the rue Soufflot leading to the Panthéon. At its colonnaded entrance the representatives of nineteen delegations gave their eulogies and placed their wreaths on the steps in turn before Hugo’s body was laid to rest in the necropolis.¹⁸

For Hugo’s lying in state, before his funeral on 1 June 1885, his coffin was placed on a monumental catafalque underneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

His placement in the Panthéon was a symbolic victory for the secular tradition of honouring the ‘great men’ of the nation. The tradition had been inaugurated by the revolutionaries in 1791, when the National Assembly had ordered the creation of the Panthéon in the church of Sainte-Geneviève. Designated as a civic burial place, the Panthéon was named in imitation of the Roman model. The remains of Descartes, Voltaire and Rousseau were transferred to the Panthéon’s crypt. Over the course of the nineteenth century the building had become a battleground between Church and State. Under the Bourbon Restoration it was returned to the Church; the ‘infidel remains’ of Voltaire and Rousseau were removed from the crypt and hidden behind an unmarked door under the portico. After the July Revolution the Panthéon was restored, its ‘infidels’ brought out again, but no other bodies were buried there. Louis Philippe added to the building the pediment ‘Aux grands hommes, la patrie reconnaissante’ with its depiction of France distributing laurels to the nation’s famous men (the first woman to be buried there was Marie Curie as late as 1995). Napoleon III restored the building to the Church, which became a site of pilgrimage. It remained a religious shrine until 1885, when Hugo was the first man to be interred in the crypt since Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–80), the architect of the Panthéon, in 1829. Hugo’s death had provided the impetus for the Republican government to take over the building and reconvert it to the Panthéon so that the freethinking poet could be buried in a suitably secular place.

Hugo was the first of many writers to be buried in the Panthéon. He was later joined by Zola (who became his crypt-mate in 1908) and by Dumas père (in 2002). Of the eighty people given a state funeral in the Third Republic between 1878 and 1940 a quarter were major figures in the arts. Hugo’s death marked the moment when the secular values of the Republic were properly established as a force for national unity. The Republican victory in the elections of October 1877 had ended the hopes of conservatives for a restoration of the monarchy. Moderate republicanism could now build its intellectual infrastructure – founded on the Enlightenment ideals of the Revolution – as a national ideology. The cult of artists and philosophers represented an essential part of this campaign. It had taken off with the celebrations for Voltaire and Rousseau on the centenary of their deaths in 1878. Louis Viardot was on the organizing committee for the celebrations of both.¹⁹ There were banquets for the civic leaders in all the major towns, statues of the two men were unveiled, and their works published in jubilee editions and pamphlets. For the Voltaire centennial (organized, ironically, by the Menier chocolate company) there was a ceremonial event in the Théâtre de la Gaieté on 30 May. Hugo gave a legendary speech, widely published in the press and issued as a pamphlet, in which he presented the great writer and philosopher as the embodiment of his faith in progress, revolution and democracy. To cement the symbolic link between the Revolution and Rousseau, the main event to mark his centenary, a grand ceremony attended by 6,000 people in the Cirque Américain in Paris, was held, not on the day of Rousseau’s death, 2 July, but twelve days later, on 14 July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, which would be commemorated from this time on (it became a national holiday in 1880).²⁰

The official cult of Hugo reinforced this connection between the nation’s great writers and the Revolution’s intellectual principles, of which, it was said in the eulogies that appeared on his death, Hugo had been the main champion in the many tests they had faced in the nineteenth century. His pantheonization was proclaimed as a victory for the Republic’s secular ideals against the old ‘Moral Order’ of the clergy and the monarchists. But it was a bitterly contested one. The Church attacked the ‘pagan’ cult of worshipping a man instead of God.

To consolidate that victory the Ministry of Fine Arts inaugurated a large programme of monumental sculptures for the Panthéon in 1889, the centenary year of the Revolution, marked too by the opening of the Eiffel Tower at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The centrepiece of the Panthéon commission was a sculptural ensemble of the revolutionaries with a figure representing the National Convention, but there were also individual sculptures of the great philosophers who had laid the intellectual foundations of the Revolution (Descartes, Voltaire and Rousseau), of the statesmen who had enacted it (such as Mirabeau), and one was planned for Hugo, who had embodied its republican values in the nineteenth century. Auguste Rodin was awarded the commission for a statue of Hugo. The sculptor chose to depict the poet in exile, seated with the Tragic Muse on the rocks of Guernsey, one hand to his head, lost in contemplation, the other stretched out to the sea, a gesture of defiance against the dictatorship of Napoleon III. The project was rejected by the ministry, which found another site for Rodin’s bronze in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, so Rodin worked on two alternatives – a seated Victor Hugo, shown in plaster at the Salon of 1897, and a standing one for the Panthéon which he never completed.²¹

Rodin and his statue of Hugo in the garden of the Palais-Royal, 1902.

Hugo’s name was everywhere. Death had raised him to the status of a national saint. Mass editions of his works were found in every local bookshop and public library. Schoolchildren were made to learn his poetry by heart; textbooks told his story of exile and resistance to the Second Empire as a moral instruction in republican principles. There were various initiatives to establish a Victor Hugo Museum. The mayor of the 16th arrondissement, where Hugo had lived in the avenue d’Eylau, petitioned the Paris government to protect his house as a ‘sacred’ site, and many people wrote with the same request. In 1889, a group of businessmen rented Hugo’s former home to set up business as a ‘National and Universal Pilgrimage at the Victor Hugo House and Museum’ (Pélerinage national et universel à la Maison et au Musée Victor Hugo), intended mainly as an attraction for visitors to the Exposition Universelle.²² The house was not protected by the city of Paris. Nor was it later used as a museum (today it stands above a boutique selling underwear).* But on Hugo’s birthday in 1881 the avenue d’Eylau was renamed after him.

Before the middle of the nineteenth century it was rare for a figure in the arts to be commemorated by a public body or the state. Monuments to monarchs and military heroes filled the streets and squares of Europe’s cities, but statues of the nation’s cultural heroes were few and far between. It was only from the 1860s that states began to give more weight to the commemoration of national heroes of culture.

Across Europe there was a steady increase in the public celebration of artistic anniversaries: the Schiller centenary (1859), the Shakespeare tercentenary (1864), the six-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth (1865), the celebrations for the Walter Scott centenary (at which Turgenev had spoken in 1871), the fifth centenary of Petrarch’s death (1874), the centenaries for Voltaire and Rousseau (1878), for the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1879) and the third centenary for Luís de Camões, the great Portuguese poet of the sixteenth century (1880). Monuments to writers, artists and composers appeared with growing frequency, almost equalling the number built for statesmen and soldiers, which in the first half of the century had heavily outnumbered them. Between 1800 and 1840, the states of Europe erected seventy-five monuments to monarchs, politicians and military heroes – three times the number they unveiled for figures in the spheres of culture, science and philosophy (twenty-three). In the last four decades of the century, when the craze for public statues reached its peak, the numbers were more equal: 512 for the men of power against 401 for those of ideas, science and the arts.²³

Streets and squares, libraries, halls and theatres were named after famous men from the cultural and scientific fields. Commemorative plaques were placed on buildings where they had lived. London’s blue-plaque scheme, the oldest in the world, began with the unveiling of a sign for Byron at his birthplace in Holles Street (the building was later demolished). House museums became part of a booming tourist trade in pilgrimages to literary and artistic shrines. By 1900, over 30,000 tourists travelled every year by rail to Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford. The train timetables coincided with the start and end of the performances at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, opened in 1879, so that Londoners could make it a day-trip and take in a matinée before returning to the capital.²⁴ The railways also drove the growing tourist traffic to destinations sacralized by their association with creative ‘geniuses’ (‘Brontë Country’, Wordsworth’s Lake District, the shores of Lake Geneva connected with Rousseau, Weimar as the crucible of Goethe and Schiller, etc.). These monuments and sites were both nationalist and European in their cultural significance: much of the national pride in these figures was based on the idea of their ‘universalism’ – as the country’s ‘gift’ to other countries and the world.

The house museum was the focus of this cult. The Schiller House Museum was one of the earliest to open, in 1847. On his visit to Weimar, in 1869, Turgenev made ‘the obligatory pilgrimage’ to it, noting the smallness of the room in which Schiller died (‘any well-off craftsman would now refuse to live in it’). He was disappointed that the Goethe house remained closed.²⁵ The poet’s grandson was stubbornly refusing to sell it. But on his death, in 1885, the house was taken over by the Duchy of Saxony-Weimar and opened up to the public. By this time, writers’ house museums were being set up everywhere – the Musée Pierre Corneille near Rouen, Dante’s house in Florence, Cervantes’ in Madrid – and many more were opened by the time the First World War broke out.

Why was there such a marked increase in the commemoration of artistic figures at this time? The Romantic cult of the artistic genius had been a part of European culture since the eighteenth century. But in the final decades of the nineteenth century it became part of the marketing of art in a culture where successful writers, artists and musicians were treated as celebrities, their biographies examined in the media in an effort to explain their creativity. This preoccupation with the artist’s private life and personality was easily transferred to the canonic figures of the past. Biographies of the great artists, writers and composers multiplied, becoming one of the biggest literary genres by the end of the century.

States and national movements claimed these geniuses for their own ends. Goethe was the ‘German’ genius, Dante the ‘Italian’ poet – their creativity interpreted as an expression of the national character, their poetry the basis of the national language. This was an age of nation-building and nationalist movements across Europe. New nations came into existence (Italy, Romania, Germany) or struggled for their liberation from multi-national empires (Hungary, the Czech lands, Serbia, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Ireland, and so on). All the European states increasingly depended on culture – above all on the broad dissemination of a national literature – to unify society.

The spread of mass communications made this use of culture possible: writers, artists and composers became known to a wider public than had been conceivable before the railways or lithography; they were national heroes and celebrities. When Hugo died the whole of France came to a stop. When Verdi died, on 27 January 1901, shops and theatres closed their doors in a sign of national mourning. Three days later, in what is said to be the largest showing of the Italian people in their country’s history, 300,000 mourners lined the streets in freezing early-morning temperatures to watch the funeral procession in Milan, and at points along the way, or so the story goes, the crowds spontaneously broke into singing the ‘Va pensiero’ chorus from Verdi’s Nabucco, a sort of informal national anthem.²⁶

Verdi’s funeral, Milan, 30 January 1901.

The cult of Verdi was central to the national identity fostered by the new Italian state. Although Nabucco had been first performed in 1842, it was only after the unification of Italy that the famous chorus of the Hebrew slaves – a lament for the loss of their homeland with symbolic parallels for Italians under foreign rule – attained its national significance and popularity. From the 1860s the Italian state promoted the idea of the Risorgimento as a popular uprising and rebirth of the nation. It championed Verdi’s operas, particularly those with patriotic themes such as Nabucco, I Lombardi and Ernani, which could be used to cultivate a national consciousness. Verdi’s music was promoted as the inspiration and expression of the nation’s unity – Verdi as ‘the bard of the Risorgimento’ became part of the Italian national myth.²⁷

Public commemorations of important artists played a vital role in the nation-building projects of the European states. In Italy, in 1865, the sixth centenary of Dante’s birth was commemorated in Florence, the new capital of King Victor Emmanuel II. It was billed as a celebration of the country’s ‘national poet’, whose Divine Comedy (1320), written not in Latin but in the Tuscan vernacular, was said to be the start of Italy’s protracted cultural unification. In Germany the centenary of Schiller’s birth was an important moment in the development of a liberal nationalist sentiment. It was celebrated in ninety-three German towns and cities, and in more than twenty outside Germany. Schiller statues were unveiled in Weimar (in 1857), Jena and Marbach (1859), Mannheim and Mainz (1862), Hanover and Munich (1863), Frankfurt-am-Main (in 1864 and 1880), Hamburg (1864), Marbach-am-Neckar (1867), Berlin (1871), Vienna (1876), Ludwigsburg (1883), Wiesbaden (1905), Nüremberg (1909), Königsberg (1910), Stuttgart (1913) and Dresden (1914).²⁸

In Belgium the death of Hendrik Conscience, in 1883, gave birth to a full-blown cult of the popular and prolific Flemish writer, ‘the man who taught his people to read’, as the elaborate memorial monument to him in his native Antwerp was inscribed. For Flemish-speakers, who had long been dominated by the francophone culture of Belgium, Conscience was a source of national pride. He was given two state funerals, one in Brussels, the other in Antwerp. In many Flemish towns statues of Conscience were unveiled, streets and squares named after him.²⁹

In other countries under foreign rule the commemoration of a ‘national poet’ brought together national liberation movements. In Slovenia the nationalist cult of Valentin Vodnik (1758–1819), the ‘first Slovenian poet’, culminated in the opening of a monument to him in Ljubljana’s Vodnik Square in 1889. In Hungary the nationalist movement was united in a long campaign to commemorate the revolutionary and patriotic poet Sándor Petőfi (1823–49), which finally succeeded with the erection of a monument in Budapest in 1882. In Poland, under Russian rule, statues of the ‘national poet’ Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) began to be erected only during the centenary celebrations of his birth.

If the 1880s were a highpoint in the public celebration of national heroes in the arts, it was also at this time that the notion of a ‘canon’ of great works and artists worthy of commemoration took root in societies throughout Europe.

The word ‘canon’ was not yet used in this secular manner. It applied only to saints and scriptural texts approved by the Church. But the idea of a canon in its modern sense – a stable list of classic works enshrined in the value-system of societies – began to find expression from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. For many years it was articulated by the term ‘world literature’, which Goethe had first used in 1827 to describe, not a set canon, but the international circulation of literary works in Europe, including works of non-European origin. Cultural exchanges between nations would enrich their literatures and lead to the creation of a hybrid fusion between them – what he termed ‘world literature’. Goethe came to his idea from the observation of contemporary reality. He was impressed by the growth of international trade, and saw a parallel between the development of a global market in material goods and one in literature: the first would lead to the second. Influenced by Goethe, Marx and Engels reached the same conclusion in The Communist Manifesto (1848). The globalization of the capitalist market was giving ‘a cosmopolitan character to the production and consumption’ of intellectual creations as well as material goods in every country, they maintained:

In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.³⁰

By this time the idea of a world literature was being widely used for a collection of literary masterpieces from all over Europe and the world. Lists of such works were beginning to appear. In 1849, Auguste Comte published his Positivist Calendar, an almanac of 558 ‘great men’ from all historic ages and nations, which he proposed as an alternative to the calendar of saints. Two years later, in his Catéchisme positiviste, he compiled a list of 150 books that he believed should constitute a basic reading course for all educated citizens. The list proved influential throughout northern Europe, especially in Britain, where it appeared in translation and inspired other registers, including one, in 1886, by John Lubbock, the head of the Working Men’s College. His directory of the world’s best hundred books (including several in Arabic, Chinese, Persian, Sanskrit and other languages) was widely circulated in the press. It had an enormous impact on the reading culture of the self-improving working class, generating a new mass market for the ‘classics’.

The idea of compiling an agreed list of the world’s greatest books gained ground more broadly on the Continent around this time. It had been discussed by the International Writers’ Congress in 1878. The Polish writer Wacław Szymanowski had campaigned for one in the hope of getting recognition and quotas on the list for the smaller literary nations like his own. Turgenev had been drawn to the idea. It appealed to his European cosmopolitanism, to his belief in cultural enrichment through translation and exchange between nations. And it was true to the Goethian ideal of a world literature which he had followed all his life. Much of his translation work and activities as an intermediary between cultures had been carried out with the aim of helping to create, if not a world literature, then at least a European one. He wanted to promote an international corpus of literary works around which the nations of Europe could unite. By advancing mutual understanding between different nationalities, literature could play a role in the creation of a European cultural identity.

Turgenev gave much thought in his last years to the idea of publishing a library of classic works, not just for Russia but for Europe. On his visit to St Petersburg, in 1879, he announced that he would like to organize a group of Russian artists to illustrate a series of publications of the Russian classics for the widest readership. He cited as his model the illustrated editions of Goethe and Schiller that had recently been published in Germany. In November 1880, he recruited Maupassant to a literary project he had long been planning and was hoping to extend to all the major countries of Europe. He wanted him

to write a series of articles in Gaulois [a Paris newspaper] about the great writers of Europe – a project I strongly approve and for which I shall put myself entirely at your disposal for directions and advice. For Russia, for example, begin with Pushkin or Gogol; for England Dickens, for Germany Goethe, and from there, once you get the hang of it, proceed to the gods of small nations. I am sure that you will do a splendid job.³¹

For the next six months, Maupassant immersed himself in research for a ‘Gallery of European Writers’, as he outlined it to Turgenev, but the project fizzled out, and in Gaulois all he published was a series of sketches of a few important writers, mostly after they had died.³²

3

In addition to state commemorations and published lists of the best books, a European canon was being formed by economic forces in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The movement of people, money and commodities across national boundaries, the new technologies of print and photographic reproduction, mass communication and transport, and the establishment of more effective laws of international copyright combined to produce by the 1880s a relatively stable repertoire of ‘classic’ works in music, opera, the ballet, drama, art and literature right across the Continent.

This canon first developed in the concert repertoire, where as early as the 1840s the serious-music movement championed by Schumann, Berlioz and other critics and composers had established a programme of chamber and orchestral classics dominated by the three most venerated dead masters, Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart. This was a new development. In 1800, the concert repertoire had mainly consisted of music by living composers – 80 per cent of all the music performed in the concert halls of Vienna, Leipzig, Paris and London; but in these four cities, by 1870, the same proportion of the repertory was music by composers who were dead.³³ The concert hall became a museum where the same familiar music was endlessly repeated. It became increasingly difficult for young or even living composers to get their works performed, especially if their works were difficult or experimental, or required large orchestras and choruses – a concern voiced by Liszt and Berlioz, who both suffered on this score. One music critic reported on a visit to Paris in 1863:

Works more recent [than Beethoven’s] are heard here extremely seldom, and it has been only a few years since even Mendelssohn was first accepted on the programmes of the Conservatoire concerts. Schumann and Schubert are but little known as instrumental composers; … a few cautious attempts have been made, in concerts established especially for this purpose, to present works of living composers to the public … but the attempts met with no real sympathy, and the public, quite content not to compromise itself, would rather be allowed to admire pretty much the same pieces by famous masters every year; the musicians, for their part, find this so convenient that they do not feel impelled to challenge this routine.³⁴

Convenience and familiarity were certainly a large part of the explanation for this growing musical conservatism. But it did not come about from a general rejection of new music (an attitude that appeared only in the twentieth century). Rather, it developed from the economics of the concert hall. Well-known works were cheaper to produce – they required less rehearsal by the orchestra and soloists; and the oldest scores were free of copyright. They also gave a better guarantee of filling seats, for the entirely legitimate reasons that they were popular. As cities grew in size and became accessible to more people because of improvements in suburban railways, bigger concert halls were built, adding to the risk of untried music and further reinforcing the dominance of classic works: concert managers could turn an easy profit by providing a familiar repertoire for this larger audience, a good part of it drawn from the lower-middle and artisan classes, who, being new to serious music, were interested mostly in the famous works.

The railways once again were instrumental in opening the market by allowing more extensive concert tours. Soloists and orchestras could introduce the classics to a provincial public or pay their way around the world by playing the familiar works. In 1885–6, Anton Rubinstein toured through Europe, starting from St Petersburg and Moscow and travelling to Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, Dresden, Paris, Brussels, Utrecht, London, Liverpool and Manchester, performing in more than a hundred concerts, ‘historical recitals’, in which he aimed to cover the development of the classical canon for piano. In the same decade, Albert Gutman, the music agent, impresario and publisher, brought whole orchestras to Vienna. ‘A touring orchestra, playing not dance music but the greatest works of the symphonic repertoire, is a novelty reserved for our railway age,’ marvelled Eduard Hanslick, the city’s leading music critic, thereby helping Gutman fill the Philharmonic Hall.³⁵

Publishing was a key factor in the popular dissemination of the classical canon. Technical improvements in lithographic printing in the 1870s enabled music publishers to print mass editions of the now standard works at affordable prices. The classic music library of Edition Peters was launched in Leipzig in 1867, an important ‘classic year’ in the history of German publishing when, in line with earlier legislation by the Prussian parliament, copyright protection was removed from works by authors dead for more than thirty years. The market was flooded by cheap mass editions of the works of Mozart, Haydn, Schubert and Beethoven, all of whom had died before 1837. Edition Peters was the most successful venture of this kind, although it was closely rivalled by Breitkopf & Härtel’s Volksaugabe series (People’s Edition), which also dates from the ‘classic year’ of 1867, and by Novello’s Cheap Classics and Octavo editions, which had been established earlier.³⁶ The distinctive covers of Edition Peters (green for works of dead composers not in copyright, pink for newer works in copyright) were found in every piano-owning home. The idea that the classics should be readily accessible to everyone was taken very seriously by Max Abraham, who took over the directorship of Peters from 1880. He considered it, by his own description, his ‘holy duty to make sure that the works of the great masters are available in an easily legible style’. He employed expert editors to produce definitive editions of the standard works, and made sure to have them ready for release as soon as their copyright ran out and they entered into public ownership. In 1894, on the death of Abraham, the Peters Music Library was left to the city of Leipzig.³⁷

*

Economics also underlay the entrenchment of a stable opera repertoire. Between 1860 and 1885, a small group of the most profitable operas emerged from the many hundreds produced over the past century to dominate the repertory of music theatres in Europe. Over the same period the production of new operas fell, as programmes focused more and more on proven hits. At London’s Covent Garden, for example, the share of first-season productions declined from 23 per cent of all performances in the 1850s to only 8 per cent between 1861 and 1878. A similar decline occurred at Her Majesty’s Theatre, where the business-minded manager, James Mapleson, was forced to compete with Covent Garden by offering the most popular works – ‘the inevitable Trovatore, the always welcome Lucrezia, the universally popular Martha, the stately Norma, the magnificent Huguenots, and the unequalled Don Giovanni’, as James Davison, the music critic of The Times, described the programme in 1861.³⁸

The same thing was happening all across the Continent. By the 1860s, La Scala in Milan was producing only one or two new works every year instead of the five or six that had been customary in the 1820s and 1830s. At the San Carlo Theatre in Naples the number of premieres declined from six per year in the 1820s to just one in the 1870s. At Madrid’s Teatro Real the number fell from eight per year in the early 1850s to only one or two in the 1870s. The story was the same at the Vienna Hofoper, where there were eight premieres per year in the 1830s and 1840s, but only two by the 1870s.³⁹

The emergence of a standard repertoire can be seen most clearly at the Théâtre Italien in Paris, where the number of new operas declined to an average of less than one per year in the 1870s. The range of different operas was dramatically reduced – from seventy-two in the repertoire of the 1810s to only twenty-eight for the entire decade of the 1870s. Operas tended to stay longer in the repertory. Only 10 per cent of those produced in the 1810s continued to be part of the theatre’s active stock in the 1840s; but of those performed in the 1870s, two thirds remained in the repertoire for over thirty years. The theatre’s repertory was dominated by the great workhorses of Italian opera: Rossini’s Barber of Seville, Bellini’s Norma and Sonnambula, Donizetti’s Lucia, Verdi’s Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore and Aida.⁴⁰

A standard operatic repertoire was emerging globally. By the final quarter of the century, a visitor to Paris was likely to be offered the same choice of operas as he or she might find in London, Milan, Naples, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna or St Petersburg – or, for that matter, in Buenos Aires or New York. With a few exceptions, such as the now long-forgotten masterworks of Meyerbeer, the operas on offer across Europe in the final decades of the nineteenth century are still at the core of the repertoire today.⁴¹

The laws of the market were the key to this development. No longer able to rely on state or royal subsidies, the great opera houses of Europe had to make their way on ticket sales, an unreliable source of income for their managers. London’s theatres were ahead in this respect. They had never really had large subsidies and were more used to operating as commercial businesses than theatres on the Continent, where state grants were either ended or reduced only in the 1850s and 1860s. In Italy the declining wealth and power of the Habsburgs and Bourbons led to cuts in subsidies before 1861. But after the unification of Italy the idea of supporting opera houses from the state budget was deemed incompatible with the free-trade ideology of the country’s parliament, which abolished them altogether in 1867. Theatres might continue to be subsidized by their city governments, but these grants were small and unreliable, resulting in a crisis for those houses which had once been backed by wealthy courts, such as the theatres of Naples, Modena and Parma.⁴²

In France a reform of 1864 ended all state subsidies except for the national theatres in Paris: the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre Lyrique. It was left to the communes (municipalities) to decide whether they would subsidize their own theatres. The reform led to a period of uncertainty and financial crisis for many regional theatres, which were now forced to compete with more commercial forms of entertainment such as operetta and café-concerts. In this competitive environment it made no sense for them to run the risk of producing untried operas. Where their licence obliged them to put on a set number of new works every year, they found ways to get around the rules. At the Lyrique, for example, where two new operas were meant to be presented every year, Carvalho used a loophole in the licence to include translations into French of old and well-established works.⁴³

Meanwhile the mounting costs of staging opera, especially Grand Opera, discouraged the commissioning of new and risky works. Singers were becoming more expensive as the international demand for their services increased. With steamships and railways it was possible for the big stars to do extensive tours (the great soprano Adelina Patti had her own train), so opera managers were forced to pay more to keep them.⁴⁴ Italian singers, in particular, were in high demand abroad, especially America, where they could earn higher fees. ‘The best Italian singers are rarely heard or seen in their native land,’ lamented the British impresario Walter Maynard in the 1860s. ‘As soon as they have means to do so, they seek their fortunes in other countries, where they receive better pay.’⁴⁵ It was an ironic consequence of its own international success that the birthplace of opera was relegated to the lower division of the global market once big money called the tune.

There was another reason for the falling number of new works in the opera repertoire: the supply was running out. As Gye observed in his prospectus for the 1867 Covent Garden season, it was becoming increasingly difficult for the director of an opera house to buy new works, because the composers who had been responsible for the expansion of the repertoire in the 1830s and 1840s – Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Auber, Meyerbeer and Verdi – were either dead, no longer writing, or composing fewer operas.⁴⁶ The development of copyright protection was a major reason for this falling off in production. Once they were able to earn a living from their royalties, composers could simply work less than they had done from necessity when they earned a single fee from each opera. The best illustration is Verdi, arguably the first composer to make his fortune out of royalties, who had long declared his intention to liberate himself from what he called the years of ‘the galleys’ when he was forced to write an opera every year. His chance came after 1860, when new laws of copyright were introduced in Italy. Between 1839 and 1859 Verdi composed twenty-four operas; but between 1860 and 1893 he wrote only five.

Underpinning these commercial pressures was the growing size of the public able to attend the opera. It allowed theatres to survive from ticket sales by programming popular operas. The population of the major opera cities expanded rapidly between 1860 and 1900: London’s grew from 2.5 million to 6.8 million, Paris’s from 1.8 to 3.3 million, and Milan’s from a quarter to half a million. The railways opened up the cities to day and weekend trippers from the provinces and suburban areas, enabling theatres to put on longer runs of the most successful operas by drawing from a larger catchment area. Bigger theatres could be built, with more public seating in the stalls, where tickets could be purchased for a single performance, as opposed to private boxes, owned or rented for a whole season, where the capacity was limited. Tickets could be ordered and sent out by post, and agencies began to operate, offering discounts to the big hotels for purchases in large numbers.

Mapleson was the first opera manager to gear his programme to this larger public in Britain. From 1862, he extended the season at Her Majesty’s well into the summer months, when London’s élites traditionally left for the country and the theatre closed. He lowered prices to attract the middle classes, put on matinée performances, allowing the suburban public to catch an evening train home, started earlier in the evenings, and ended the requirement of formal dress. One of his aims had been to attract ‘the numerous foreign and country visitors’ who had come to London for the International Exhibition in 1862. But profits were so good that he expanded on this policy. From 1863, Mapleson replaced a row of private boxes with cheaper public seats, advertised productions in the regional press, and started ticket sales by post and telegraph. The musical taste of this suburban public was decidedly conservative: it would come by rail for an evening at the opera to hear familiar classics but would not make the journey for an unknown work.

For all these reasons theatres across Europe became more cautious, increasingly relying on a programme of well-loved operas to make a profit from their ticket sales. The repertoire became so standardized that it formed a ‘canon’ in effect, although critics and historians would define it in such terms only in the twentieth century. The ‘canonic’ operas – Don Giovanni, The Barber of Seville, Robert le diable, Lucia di Lammermoor, Norma, Rigoletto, Traviata, Faust – were an institution in themselves – a badge of European Civilization that every national opera house in Europe and beyond adopted as a marker of its Europeanness.

Music publishers had a powerful influence on the opera repertoire. The biggest firms were able to determine which works were performed as well as set the standards of how they were produced. As the owner of an opera’s score, the publisher was able to control the terms on which it was leased to a theatre. It was not uncommon for Ricordi or Edoardo Sonzogno, the two big Milan publishers, to make the loan of a money-making score dependent on the theatre undertaking not to perform an opera published by a rival company in the same season – a practice possible because so many theatres were dependent on a big ‘hit’ to break even. In this way they aimed to raise their market share. Ricordi, for example, had a near monopoly on the operas staged at La Scala during the 1880s (one in four was by Verdi, a Ricordi composer). His hold was broken only in the 1890s, when Sonzogno had successes at La Scala with Le Cid by Massenet and Cavalleria Rusticana by Mascagni.⁴⁷

In the contract for the leasing of a score the publisher could set strict conditions on the production (the choice of singers for the major parts, the size of the orchestra, the staging, costumes, props and set designs, even detailed instructions on the singers’ gestures and expressions). These were usually the terms demanded by the composer as part of his moral right to protect the work’s integrity. They were often detailed in a staging manual, known in Italian as the ‘disposizioni sceniche’ and in French as a ‘livret de la mise-en-scène’. The publisher’s enforcement of these conditions played a vital part in fixing the canonic form of operatic works. Previously, in the early decades of the century, an opera could be tampered with in any way the theatre chose: whole scenes could be cut or songs inserted for popular effect; while singers like the young Viardot or Malibran would embellish their vocal lines and sometimes even improvise. An extreme example of this tampering was in 1834, when the Paris Opéra put on Mozart’s Don Giovanni as a Grand Opera in five acts, including a ballet with a medley of Mozart tunes from all his best-known works in the first act and a dance at the end for the funeral of Donna Anna, who was made to fall in love with Don Giovanni before committing suicide.⁴⁸ Less dramatic adaptions continued to be common over the next fifty years. It was only when the publisher enforced a composer’s moral rights that this malpractice stopped and a standard version of an operatic work was established in the repertoire.

Publishers were able to control productions internationally. That was certainly the expectation of Verdi, who constantly reminded Ricordi of his duty to ensure that his operas were faithfully translated and produced around the world as he had specified in the score, the libretto and disposizioni sceniche. There was a clause in all Ricordi’s contracts that legally obliged the theatres borrowing or purchasing his scores to be accurate and faithful to the composer’s wishes, with substantial fines for their failure on various accounts.⁴⁹ The publisher enforced these moral rights through a network of agencies, which distributed scores, collected royalties, checked on the progress of productions, and took measures to prevent unlicensed productions, if necessary by legal means. The Milan company had offices in Naples, Rome and London by the middle of the 1870s, in Palermo and Paris (from 1888), Leipzig (1901) and New York (from 1911).⁵⁰ With the transatlantic telegraph, Ricordi in Milan could readily oversee the running of his global empire.

The Ricordi shop in London, c. 1900.

Milan was the centre of an opera industry stretching across Europe and into the world beyond. The presence of Ricordi and La Scala was the key to the city’s international influence. Theatre agents and impresarios travelled to Milan from far and wide to negotiate performance rights, purchase scores, and hire singers, who gravitated there in large numbers, as did the best singing teachers, dancers and designers, because of its importance as a hiring market. In 1890, there were 4,500 singers living in Milan (a city with a total population of around 400,000). Only a small fraction found employment in the major European opera houses. Many of the rest formed companies and toured by rail to the smaller cities of Europe, while others crossed the Atlantic by steamship to tour in North and South America, where all the major capitals had opera houses by the 1870s. There were even touring companies of Italian singers from Milan in India, New Zealand and Australia.⁵¹

Opera singers had been touring round the world since the age of Rossini, when Manuel Garcia and his family had left Europe for New York and Mexico. In those days the touring groups consisted of a few singers. They would take what they could pack in a few trunks, the costumes and the props, and perform in halls or theatres with simple makeshift sets, hiring an orchestra in the town when they arrived or playing all the parts on a keyboard. With the advent of the railways and steamships the nature of the touring opera was changed completely. A whole company could now go on tour, not just the lead singers but an orchestra and chorus, with all the sets, just as they were specified in the production manual by the composer and his publisher. In this way the railways helped to spread the standard repertoire, so that when an opera was produced in a small provincial town, a Lecce, Graz or Baden, it looked the same as it did on stage in Milan, Vienna or Berlin: the sets, decorations and effects, props and costumes were identical.

Angelo Neumann’s international touring Richard Wagner Theatre was arguably the first to make extensive use of the railways. It played an important role in the dissemination of the Wagner canon across Europe during the 1880s. Formerly a singer who had taken part in Wagner’s own productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, Neumann formed his touring company in 1882, when he was managing the Leipzig Opera House. Taking advantage of a financial crisis that had kept the Bayreuth Theatre closed since 1876, Neumann bought the performance rights, costumes, sets and props of the Ring cycle from Wagner, and chartered his own special train with five wagons, in which the scenery, a complete orchestra and the singers, including many of the leading artists from the Bayreuth Festival, went on several summer tours. The impresario took Der Ring des Nibelungen to London, Russia, Austria and Italy, where his company gave the first Italian performance of the Ring in the Teatro La Fenice in Venice in 1883. From 1885, when he became its director, Neumann turned the German Theatre in Prague into a Wagnerian stronghold, not least because a brilliant young conductor by the name of Gustav Mahler, a passionate disciple of the ‘music of the future’, performed several Wagner operas during his brief tenure as its principal conductor from the same year. Before he died, in 1883, Wagner was begrudgingly forced to admit that Neumann, a Jew, had done more than anyone to enhance his reputation in Europe.

In the world of opera, as in other cultural spheres, the railways strengthened international networks between cities. These inter-city connections were at times more important in the creation of a standard repertoire than nation states. Operatic scores, production styles, singers and conductors moved on lines from Milan to Palermo and Cairo; from Berlin via Leipzig, Dresden and Vienna to Prague and Budapest; from Prague to Ljubljana, Zagreb, Lemberg and Kiev; and from St Petersburg to Odessa and Tbilisi. Through these networks of musical communication and exchange a European style of opera developed that transcended national boundaries.⁵²

Opera houses became more alike in their design. The basic architectural elements – the colonnaded entrance with the portico, the grand foyer and sweeping staircase to the loggia and auditorium, the classic-baroque style and general effect of opulence and grandeur – were adopted everywhere as a badge of Europeanness. The Viennese architects Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer built some forty theatres with these same elements in the Habsburg Empire and the German-speaking lands between 1881 and 1913. The geographic distribution of their theatres could be used to map the spread of German culture in Europe.

Size and safety were the key criteria. Gas lighting had caused a series of devastating theatre fires in the 1870s, culminating in 1881 when the Théâtre Municipal in Nice burned down after a gas explosion and the Ringstrasse Theatre in Vienna caught fire, burning to death 450 people in the audience. Better safety regulations were introduced across Europe. Theatres were rebuilt with an iron stage instead of wood, a safety curtain, more exits, electric lighting and power (the Savoy Theatre in London, home to the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, was the first to be fully lit by electricity when it opened in 1881). The growing wealth and civic pride of Europe’s cities involved building theatres on the largest scale. They were meant to be a symbol of the city’s status as a ‘European’ capital. Sometimes the effect was grandiose. The Graz State Theatre (1899), built by the ubiquitous Fellner and Helmer, was designed on the proportions of a national rather than municipal theatre (its 1,800-seat capacity was much too big for the city’s modest population).⁵³ The Teatro Massimo in Palermo (1897), the biggest opera house in Italy and third largest in the whole of Europe, was a thumping statement of Sicily’s arrival on the European scene.

Opera was the first European cultural medium to be truly globalized. The nineteenth-century canon of operatic works was conveyed to every quarter of the globe by touring companies, colonial rulers and opera enthusiasts, from the Khedive of Egypt, a fan of Offenbach, to Italian expatriates in North and South America. Verdi’s opera Il Trovatore was arguably the first to have a global reach. Within three years of its premiere in Rome, in 1853, it had been performed in sixty cities, including Constantinople, Alexandria, Rio de Janeiro, Puerto Rico, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Havana and New York; in 1860, it had arrived in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Guatemala, Canada and Australia; by 1870, it had been performed in India, China, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines and the Cape Colony in southern Africa. Verdi was delighted by his worldwide fame. ‘Were you to go to India, or to the depths of Africa, you can hear Il Trovatore,’ he boasted to a friend in 1862.⁵⁴

Opera houses in the European style opened all around the world – from Algiers to Cairo, where one was built to mark the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and Verdi’s Aida was first performed; from Calcutta, where the British had an opera house from 1867, to Shanghai, Hong Kong and Hanoi, where the French had a theatre modelled on the Palais Garnier from 1901. Even in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, in Manaus in Brazil, there was an opera theatre, a distant outpost of European civilization, built with Tuscan marble, Glaswegian steel and cast iron from Paris, all paid for by Brazil’s rubber barons between 1884 and 1896. It was said that the theatre had been built to lure the world’s most famous tenor, Enrico Caruso, to Manaus. For its opening, in 1897, Caruso came to sing the part of Enzo in Amilcare Ponchielli’s La Gioconda (1876), a Ricordi opera first performed at La Scala. The story of the Teatro Amazonas (the starting point of Werner Herzog’s movie Fitzcarraldo) is a fitting symbol of the opera’s global reach.

4

The dissemination of a comparable art canon was also taking place across Europe. Louis Viardot played a small but notable part in it.

The popular museum guides which he had published with Hachette became standard works, used by thousands of visitors to the great art collections of Europe, and reissued many times in the later decades of the nineteenth century. His judgements on the most important works of art were cited frequently in the handbooks – the Murrays and Baedekers and Guides Joannes – that directed tourists to the major galleries in ever-growing numbers. Visitor numbers were not commonly recorded by museums in the nineteenth century, but from the fragmentary data that we have it is clear that by the final decades of the century visiting museums and art galleries had become a mass activity, with several hundred thousand people passing through the doors of Europe’s most visited collections – the Louvre, the National Gallery, the Rijksmuseum and the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden – every year. The best figures were collected at the Rijksmuseum, where the annual number of visitors increased from an average of 37,000 in the second half of the 1870s, when the national collection was still housed in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam, to an average of 427,000 between 1885 and 1889, when it was housed in its new building.⁵⁵

The success of his guides led to further books by Viardot, Les Merveilles de la peinture (1869) and Les Merveilles de la sculpture (1872), both translated into English and German, which provided a historical compendium of the great artworks in every European country from ancient Greece and Rome to the Renaissance in Italy, including the Spanish, German, Flemish, French and English schools. Reprinted many times, they probably did more than any previous history of art to define a canon of European artworks and make it widely known. In 1877, a second and expanded English version of Les Merveilles de la peinture appeared as A Brief History of the Painters of All Schools with Woodburytype reproductions, a recently invented mechanical technology (patented by the English photographer Walter Woodbury in 1864) for printing photographic images with a much higher tonal quality than previously achieved.⁵⁶

The organizing principle of Viardot’s guides – the chronological division of artworks into different national schools – was adopted by museums too. In the early nineteenth century public galleries had displayed their paintings in a mixed-up way – Watteaus next to Tintorettos, and so on – without guiding principles. But from the middle of the century the pedagogic ideas of museum guides like Viardot’s were increasingly reflected in the layout of such galleries, with the rooms arranged in historical order, from antiquity to the modern era, to display the history of art. Gautier, a great connoisseur, noted the beginning of this transformation at the Louvre in 1849. ‘Now, a walk through the Museum is a complete course in the history of art,’ he wrote. ‘The long wall is a lesson, and every step along it teaches something new: you see the birth, development and maturation of the great schools of Italy, Flanders and Holland, replaced slowly by the French, the only school alive today.’⁵⁷

Illustrated books and museum guides played a vital role in the definition and dissemination of an art canon at this time. They began to appear for a mass market from the 1860s, when the introduction of new photomechanical techniques, such as Woodburytype, collotype, photogravure and photolithography, dramatically reduced the cost of printing reproductions in art books compared to the luxury editions of the early nineteenth century with their print engravings of artworks. In the days of black-and-white photography, the best way to reproduce a painting photographically was not directly from the painting, whose colours would create a blurred effect, but from an etching of the work. Photographic albums of engravings sold very well in the 1870s, helping in particular to make the works of Dürer and Rembrandt achieve a canonic status they had not enjoyed before.⁵⁸

Photographic reproductions of the Old Masters appeared in a wide variety of commercial formats – from large prints mounted on card and framed for wall display to postcards, cartes de visites, and small photographs for collecting in albums. Picture dealers such as Goupil and Gambart had photographic prints of the great artworks for all budgets. Launched in 1858, Goupil’s ‘Galerie photographique’ offered reproductions of 1,802 paintings in three different editions each by the end of the century. Photographs of the great works of art were popularly sold by subscription. The Russian artist Alexander Benois recalls from his boyhood in the 1870s that ‘twice or three times a year’ a new Raphael issue would arrive at his home in St Petersburg, where it would be ‘greedily perused by the whole family’.⁵⁹

Art periodicals began to appear with photographic illustrations from the 1870s. They quickly found a mass market. The Picture Gallery (1872–80), a monthly publication, was said to be ‘so much appreciated by the artisan classes in the North of England that there is quite a rush for it on the day that it arrives in one or two of the principal manufacturing towns’.⁶⁰

In France the most popular publication of this sort was the bi-weekly magazine Galerie contemporaine (1876–86), published in Paris by Ludovic Baschet, a gallery-owner and artist. It combined photographs and short biographies of literary celebrities with Woodburytypes of artworks exhibited at the Salon. The popularity of the Salon exhibition, which in 1876 had attracted half a million visitors, alerted Baschet to the business potential of cheaply reproducing works from it. Printed by the Goupil company, the photographic reproductions were luxuriously mounted on a board that could be detached from the magazine for collecting and framing. Readers were encouraged to assemble their own private gallery of artworks in their home. The circulation of the Galerie contemporaine is not precisely known, but its modest price (1.5 francs per issue) and the fact that up to 50,000 prints could be obtained from a Woodburytype mould suggest that it was sold in tens of thousands of copies. Encouraged by the magazine’s success, Baschet launched a cheaper weekly version, Musée pour tous: Album de l’art contemporain (1877–9), which usually consisted of four large prints of contemporary works accompanied by a short text about the artist on the facing page. He also published more expensive books with photographic reproductions of the country’s most important works of art – those exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, for example, or the paintings on permanent display in the Musée du Luxembourg, the national collection of contemporary art. By advertising them in his magazine, Baschet’s aim was to encourage readers of the Galerie contemporaine to graduate to these éditions-de-luxe, which offered them a digest of the art canon being formed in museums.⁶¹

In 1880, Baschet founded his own publishing house, Librairie d’Art Ludovic Baschet, entirely dedicated to art books with photographic illustrations of canonic works of art. He later moved into illustrated guides and catalogues for art museums, galleries and the annual Salon, whose popularity continued to increase. He was one of the first publishers to exploit this new market (the origins of the museum-shop economy of art books and postcards that we know today). He understood the urge of the museum visitor not just to see a masterpiece but, in the later words of Walter Benjamin, to ‘get hold’ of it and possess it as an object ‘by way of its likeness’ in a photographic print. Mass reproduction transformed artworks into consumer products or commodities.

The reproduction of artworks began to influence the art canon. Having seen a painting in a museum, people were more likely to buy its reproduction as a souvenir, and if they knew an artwork through a reproduction, they were far more likely to visit a museum to see the original. The layout of museums increasingly reflected this relationship: the best-known works were placed in prime positions and reproductions of them put on sale in the entrance or museum shop. By selecting works of art for reproduction and channelling the flow of readers to museums, publishers like Baschet helped to shape the art canon.

When Turgenev announced his idea of an illustrated library of the Russian classics, he knew that it would mean competing in a crowded market of cheap books for the widest readership. Five years previously, in 1874, Stasiulevich had launched his ‘Russian Library’ of classic works, including volumes by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy, each priced at seventy-five kopecks, regardless of length or how much it had cost to produce them. It meant that the series was affordable to the newly literate masses of Russia’s artisan and working class. The first volume in the series, a collection of Pushkin’s stories, appeared in 10,000 copies (all profits from it went to famine relief in the Samara countryside, where there was a harvest failure in 1874). Five years later, at the time of Turgenev’s visit to St Petersburg, the publisher Suvorin launched his ‘Inexpensive Library’ of pocket-sized editions of the Russian and foreign classics, each costing only forty kopecks, which he sold in huge print-runs of up to 100,000 copies through his network of bookshops.⁶²

Across Europe publishers were launching mass editions of classic literary works in collectable libraries and series. Cheaply priced, these popular editions became standard items in millions of homes, effectively establishing a European literary canon by the end of the nineteenth century.

This was a competitive market. To keep prices down publishers were forced to concentrate on reprints of classic works, no longer in copyright, which they knew were popular. The pattern had been set by the railway libraries of the 1850s and the cheap mass editions of Routledge, Hachette, Charpentier and Lévy, who explained the business model of his Collection Michel Lévy when he launched the series of one-franc novels in 1856. ‘The main interest of the public is the price,’ the publisher announced, ‘so this is why we have decided to publish only successful works in order to sell more and reduce the price.’⁶³ From the 1860s a wide range of publishing initiatives aimed to make available the classic works of literature as cheaply as possible. The fiercest rivalry was in Britain, where by the turn of the century five major series (Cassell’s National Library, Chandos Classics, Routledge’s World Library, Heinemann’s International Library and Joseph Dent’s Everyman Library) competed for the sixpenny market of paperback classics.

Not all these initiatives were motivated solely by commercial gain. In 1863, for example, a group of printers in Paris formed a non-profit cooperative group to launch the Bibliothèque Nationale, a series of selected classic novels that sold widely until the First World War. The collection’s idealistic aim, stated on the back of every cover, was to bring ‘the greatest works of literature into the most modest homes’. Its editors selected books for their ‘undisputed literary quality’ and for their ability to ‘form the minds of citizens’ – classic works by Molière or Montesquieu but also, and increasingly, books by more modern authors such as Chateaubriand, Michelet and Lamartine.⁶⁴

The Catholic Church was also instrumental in the development of an international book trade, whose main aim was not so much profit as the dissemination of a morally instructive literature, to the young especially, through parochial libraries, religious schools and institutions, and bookshops supported by the Church. The leading Catholic publishers in France and Germany published mass editions of books in series approved by the Church, exporting them in translation to Austria, Croatia, Spain and other Catholic communities with less competitive publishing industries.⁶⁵

In Germany the most successful series of secular canonic literature was the Universal-Bibliothek launched by Anton Reclam in 1867. Its ‘classics for the people’ with their yellow covers remain popular today. Reclam came from a family of booksellers in Leipzig which had been active in the liberal movement for a united Germany during the 1840s. The publication of improving works at prices which the masses could afford was an important part of their political ideals. Reclam’s first big series, the Wohlfeile Unterhaltungsbibliothek für die gebildete Lesewelt (Inexpensive Entertainment Library for the Educated Reading World), published sixty volumes between 1844 and 1847. Ten years later the company brought out a German translation of Shakespeare’s plays in twelve volumes. But the turning point for the publication of the German classics came in 1867, the so-called ‘classic year’ when copyright protection was removed from works by authors dead for more than thirty years. The masterpieces of writers such as Schiller, Goethe and Lessing became public property. The market was soon flooded with popular editions of the German classics. But the dominant position of the Universal-Bibliothek was quickly established.

Reclam’s edition of Goethe’s Faust, 1867.

Reclam was able to keep the price of his volumes down to just twenty pfennigs each by saving costs. He reduced the size of the format and printed in a smaller font on thin and cheaper paper. He economized on marketing by advertising the collection as a whole, rather than its individual titles, and by offering discounts to booksellers who took the complete series and displayed it prominently in their shops. Stereotypes were also important. By allowing multiple and quick reprints, they enabled Reclam to reduce wastage by testing out the market with a safe print-run and reprinting if there was a high demand for the title. The first work in the series, Goethe’s Faust, for example, appeared in two volumes in November 1867 with an initial printing of 5,000 copies. It sold out in four weeks. A reprint of the same size was released in December, followed by a third, of 10,000 copies, in February 1868. The Universal-Bibliothek was so successful that eighty titles were added every year in the 1870s, rising to 140 a year in the next decade. By 1896, the year of Reclam’s death, the series had 3,470 titles. No other publisher had done more to make the literary canon so accessible, nor to modernize the publishing and marketing of books. By the First World War the Universal-Bibliothek was selling 1.5 million copies every year in automatic vending machines (similar to modern drink and snack machines) situated in more than a thousand railway stations, hospitals, schools, parks and squares.⁶⁶

Universal-Bibliothek stock-room, 1930.

In the Habsburg lands and countries such as Italy and Spain, where literacy levels were lower than in Britain, France or Germany, popular editions of the classics were important in extending readership, especially among the young. In Budapest the Universal Novel Library and Illustrated Library of Master Authors published dozens of standard works during the 1880s. In Prague the Zlata Library brought out fifty-seven volumes of translated classics, including novels by Dickens, Twain, Kipling, Flaubert and Balzac, between 1892 and 1911. In Madrid the Biblioteca Universal had over seventy volumes, half of them translations, in 1881. Children’s books were the best sellers. The literate population was young in countries such as Spain and Italy, where many publishers were kept in profit by children’s libraries. The most popular translations were classics such as Robinson Crusoe, The Last of the Mohicans, Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Around the World in Eighty Days.⁶⁷

Literacy rates were rising fast across Europe. This was the underlying base of the boom in cheap book publishing during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Italy the literate proportion of the population grew from 25 per cent to 50 per cent between 1861 and 1901, largely as a result of free and compulsory primary education, introduced from 1877, though a large gap remained between the north and south (82 per cent were literate in Piedmont but only 21 per cent in Calabria in 1901). In Spain the rate of literacy increased from 20 per cent in 1857 to 46 per cent in 1913, with the highest rates of growth in Barcelona and Madrid. In Britain, France and Germany more than four fifths of the population was considered literate by the 1880s. Among the young the rate was even higher after the introduction of free and universal primary schooling.⁶⁸

Schools played a key role in establishing a canon of literary works. The idea that children should be made to read a list of classic books was taken up by teachers’ groups, educators and governments across Europe. It was widely held that reading the exemplary works of a nation’s literature would instil patriotic values in schoolchildren, encouraging them to take pride in its language and heroes. Literary anthologies were carefully selected to promote these principles. In Germany, where books for schools were regulated by the state, publishers were issued a mandatory list of German poems to be included in anthologies (Goethe, Schiller, Lessing and Uhland were at the top of it) for pupils to learn by heart. The list of writers appearing in these school anthologies was remarkably stable between the 1890s and the 1910s, with only one or two relatively recent authors (such as Storm and Fontane) allowed to enter it in the years before the First World War.⁶⁹

In France the Ferry laws established state control of the school curriculum. Schools were instructed to teach a list of classic works, which appeared in all the government-approved school manuals and anthologies. There were around a hundred authors on this list in 1882, but only thirty on the literature curriculum, and just thirteen on the programme of the baccalauréat. In Britain, too, there was a growing emphasis on teaching children the classics of English literature. School editions of these works appeared, along with anthologies, such as The First Sketch of English Literature, which was almost ubiquitous in schools. Although the British state was less interventionist than the French, the Mundella Code, issued by the government Committee on Education, obliged school inspectors to listen to all pupils reading individually from children’s classics, such as Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe and Tales From Shakespeare (1807) by Charles and Mary Lamb.⁷⁰

The growth of public libraries was equally important in disseminating the canon, especially in smaller towns and rural settlements, where libraries were more likely to carry only the classics: the smaller the collection the more canonical it was.⁷¹ The 1880s were a turning point in the development of the public library movement throughout Europe. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, European states had taken little interest in libraries. It was left to philanthropic bodies to raise the funds for public reading rooms and libraries, which grew in number slowly and sporadically. Even in Britain, where the Public Libraries Act of 1850 had allowed municipal authorities to collect a penny rate for libraries, only a handful of the country’s boroughs had established one in the Act’s first twenty years. Attitudes were changed by the introduction of compulsory primary schooling: once it became clear that a whole new generation of the lower classes would be literate, governments and public bodies became more involved in the establishment of libraries, mainly out of concern to influence what people read.

Britain took the lead. After the passing of the Education Act in 1870 – the first legislative step towards compulsory primary schooling – the public-library movement grew with the support of local government, public bodies and philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie, who endowed many of the country’s smaller libraries. Between 1870 and 1890 there was an almost eightfold increase in the number of free libraries in England (from fifty-two to 408), most of the growth in the 1880s in small county libraries, and by the eve of the First World War 62 per cent of the population lived within a library authority.⁷²

In France there was a threefold rise in the number of public libraries (from 773 to 2,991) between 1874 and 1902. The greatest increase took place in small and medium-sized towns, where most of the country’s population lived. Places such as Firminy (with 17,000 inhabitants), Rive-de-Gier (15,000) and Beaune (12,000) got their first free public library after 1885, though none had more than 1,500 books.⁷³ Much of the initiative came from philanthropic organizations such as the Bibliothèques des Amis de l’Instruction, established in 1861 by the printer Jean-Baptiste Girard, whose declared, rather hopeful aim was to wean the labouring classes off the cabaret by opening libraries for them.

The public-library movement was slower to develop in the rest of Europe. But everywhere it gathered pace from the 1880s, as public groups became more active in pushing for the opening of libraries. In Germany there was the Verein für Förderung der Volksbildung (Society for the Promotion of Popular Education), which opened some 200 rural libraries; in Transylvania the Kulturvereine, which organized a hundred libraries in the German-speaking towns; in Holland the Vereeniging voor Volksbibliotheken; and in Italy the Società Promotrice delle Biblioteche Popolari, which opened 540 public libraries between 1867 and 1893. The socialist movement was also very active in promoting workers’ libraries, especially in Germany, where the Social Democrats built a vast network of 1,147 Arbeiterbibliotheken with a total stock of 833,857 books before 1914.⁷⁴

Public libraries were concerned to ensure that their readers had ‘good’ books. They were mostly organized by philanthropic groups that believed in wholesome reading as a means of popular enlightenment. Many published lists of recommended books to guide librarians. The Société Franklin, for example, a close ally of the Bibliothèques des Amis de l’Instruction, released annual catalogues of morally improving literature, which it believed should form the core collection of every public library. Its catalogues of the 1860s were seriously classical: Corneille, Molière, Racine, Cervantes, Shakespeare and Schiller, but no contemporary novelists, not even Hugo or Balzac. By 1883, the catalogue had become more permissive, including ‘modern classics’ such as Scott, Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, Sand, Dumas (père and fils) and Gogol. A similar change was noted in the catalogues of other library societies: the Bibliothèque du Cercle Girondin and the Ligue de l’Enseignement, whose catalogues of 1892 included for the first time works by Stendhal, Hugo, Flaubert, Zola and Maupassant.⁷⁵ Public libraries were clearly being forced to think in terms of the market, to select books that were not only classic but also popular. They were recognizing that a nineteenth-century canon had been formed.

5

On his return to Russia, in 1879, Turgenev had negotiated a new contract for his collected works. Three editions had been published previously by the Salaev company in Moscow – the first (in five volumes) in 1865, the second (in eight) in 1868–71, and the third (in nine) in 1874–5. They had earned Turgenev a good income, around 6,000 roubles (24,000 francs) annually, enough to overcome the losses he made on his estates and help to provide a comfortable existence for himself and the Viardots. As a writer Turgenev had attained canonic status in Russia, and there was a large and growing market for complete editions of his works. The sudden death of Turgenev’s brother, which had prompted his return to Russia, made Turgenev think more carefully about the need to put his affairs in order. The contract with Salaev was due to expire when the printed copies of the third edition had sold out. He was anxious to negotiate a new edition, either with Salaev or another publisher, that would yield a long-term income for Pauline and his daughter after his own death.

The contract he proposed to Salaev shows how businesslike he had become in his literary affairs. Setting out his terms to the Moscow publisher, Turgenev acted like a modern agent, using offers from other publishers to negotiate a higher advance against future royalties. He demanded to be paid a royalty of 25 per cent of the sale price (between fifteen and eighteen roubles for the nine volumes, according to the paper quality).* From a first print-run of 5,500 copies, he stood to earn between 20,000 and 23,000 roubles (80,000–92,000 francs), one third paid on his signature of the contract, the remainder two years afterwards. He excluded from the contract any rights to Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, Turgenev’s highest-earning work, which he published separately in a popular edition the next year, although it had been included in the previous editions of his collected works.⁷⁶

Turgenev was not satisfied with Salaev. There were too many errors in the third edition of his works. On 13 May 1882, he wrote to his old friend Annenkov appointing him his literary executor and instructing him to find a publisher willing to pay a large capital sum in advance for the outright purchase of his copyright.⁷⁷

Turgenev needed money to support his daughter and her two small children, who were now his dependants. Paulinette had fled from her husband, Gaston, whose factory in Rougement had gone bankrupt, after he had started drinking heavily and had threatened to kill her. ‘Every day I am expecting her to arrive here with her children,’ Turgenev wrote to Annenkov from Paris on 25 February. ‘I will need to keep her hidden until I can organize the séparation de corps et de biens – and so once again I need to get my hands on cash. I have sold my beloved Rousseau [painting], I will sell my horse, my carriage, and so on.’ Paulinette arrived a fortnight later. She was terrified of being tracked down by Gaston, who by law could take the children. For their safety, Turgenev sent them with a chaperone to Solothurn in Switzerland, where he paid their board at the Hotel La Couronne and sent them a monthly allowance, which Paulinette complained was not enough.⁷⁸

Turgenev’s main concern – and the real reason why he needed to negotiate a large advance – was to leave Pauline with an inheritance when he died. He was sixty-four. His health had been poor for several years. Gout, rheumatic pains, problems with his bladder, stomach and liver – these had aged him terribly in the 1870s. His illness became more acute in the spring of 1882, around the time when he appointed Annenkov his literary executor. His back, chest and shoulders were in constant pain (a symptom of the undetected cancer of the spine that would kill him) and the gout became so painful that he could barely stand without crutches. Confined to bed for days on end, he had hallucinations. At times he would talk in a fevered state of half-madness, perhaps an effect of the morphine he took to relieve the pain. Convinced that he was about to die, Turgenev added an amendment to his will on 15 May: he left all his property in France and his literary earnings to the Viardots, stipulating only that his manuscripts and letters were to go to Annenkov.⁷⁹

Turgenev’s will was to be one of the main reasons why his friends and admirers in Russia became so hostile to Pauline. The Russians were resentful that their great writer lived abroad, and blamed her for his absence. Rumours spread that she was keeping him from returning, that he was her prisoner. Such malicious gossip was reinforced by the reports of those Russians who had called on Turgenev in Bougival or Paris, only to be turned away by Pauline because he was too sick to receive them. Even some who did see him were determined to believe that he was mistreated by the Viardots (‘It was painful and offensive to see this great man dying in a foreign land among foreign people indifferent to his suffering,’ wrote Princess Tenisheva on visiting Turgenev at Bougival in the spring of 1882).⁸⁰ It was put about that Pauline was trying to kill him, or have him declared mad, so that she could get her hands on his inheritance. Turgenev’s failure to visit Russia in the summer of 1882, as he had planned, was seen as further evidence of his being kept in France against his will.

Disappointed not to see his estate one last time, Turgenev wrote a farewell letter to the Spasskoe peasants which serves as a testament to the benevolent paternalism of his liberal gentry class:

Rumours have reached me that for some time much less vodka is being drunk in your village; I am very glad of it and I hope that you will keep on abstaining from drink: drunkenness spells ruin for the peasant. But I am sorry to hear that your children do not go to school regularly. Remember that today an illiterate person is worse than a blind or an armless one. As in former years, I am presenting you with an acre of woodland. I am confident that you will do no harm to my house or to my park or, generally, to my estate, and I rely on you to see to it. And now, peasants of Spasskoe, let me say goodbye to you all and wish you every prosperity. Your former landlord.

Gloomy and depressed, Turgenev began a journal of his illness and treatment. He called it ‘My Death Roll’. The doctors were unable to decide what his illness was. The famous Paris surgeon and neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot diagnosed a heart disease, angina pectoris, brought on by his gout. He thought there was not much he could do, but prescribed a lengthy stay in bed with a course of cauterization with a Paquelin machine (used for electroshock therapy). A second doctor, Paul Segond, advised country air and encouraged the sick man to wear a Pulvermacher chain – a copper-and-zinc belt run by a voltaic battery that was widely advertised in magazines and newspapers to help relieve rheumatic pain by electrotherapy.* In addition to the Pulvermacher chain Turgenev used a Baunscheidts Lebenswecker, or ‘Life-Awakener’, the invention of a German specialist in nervous disorders, which was said to ease rheumatic pain by shooting needles into the affected area by a pump action. The celebrated Swiss physician François-Sigismond Jaccoud, who came to see Turgenev in July, put him on a strict milk diet, which Turgenev ignored, until a month later, when the prescription was confirmed by L. G. Bertenson, a distinguished Russian physician, who saw him on a visit to Paris. None of these quack remedies had much effect. Only morphine brought relief from the cancer pain.

In January 1883, Turgenev was subjected to an operation to remove a lump from his lower abdomen misdiagnosed by seven doctors as a neuroma requiring urgent removal. To avoid risking what they also wrongly thought was a weak heart, they carried out the operation without a general anaesthetic. Turgenev’s abdomen was frozen with ether before the knife cut into it and a cyst, the size of a walnut, was excised. ‘During the operation,’ Turgenev later wrote to Daudet, ‘I thought about our dinners and looked for words to give you an accurate impression of the sensation of the steel cutting through my flesh – just as a knife would cut through a banana.’ The operation brought no improvement to Turgenev’s condition. It was not even clear if the tumour had been malignant. It took weeks for the wound to heal. His pain got worse. He became dependent on morphine, began to overdose, and had frequent paranoid delusions and thoughts of suicide, probably the effect of too many drugs. In one of his fits in the middle of the night he demanded to be given poison, accused those closest to him of plotting to kill him, and said that Pauline, who had heard his screams and hurried to his room, was a monster worse than Lady Macbeth. Perhaps in his fevered state he thought that he was seeing her in the sleepwalking scene of Verdi’s opera, one of her most celebrated roles.

In one of his saner moments, around 20 April, Turgenev asked to be transferred to Bougival. He wanted to die in his dacha there. On 28 April, he was fit to travel. Carried on a stretcher from his rooms on the second floor, he was greeted on the first-floor landing by Louis, partly paralysed from a recent stroke, who was brought out in a wheelchair to say farewell. The two men embraced.⁸¹

A week later, on 5 May, Louis died from a second stroke.⁸² He was eighty-two years old. ‘His final moments were those of a sage,’ Pauline wrote to her brother-in-law, Léon Viardot, on 21 May. ‘He sensed death approach and welcomed it as if to smile at those around him whom he loved. He died without suffering, adored by his family and friends, respected by everyone.’ Louis was buried in the Montmartre cemetery. There was no religious ceremony, as Louis had insisted from his atheist convictions, and there were few obituaries in the Paris press. The republican activist, editor, opera director, Spanish scholar, critic, writer and literary translator, art expert and collector – perhaps the closest thing to a nineteenth-century ‘Renaissance Man’ – was already a forgotten man.

Louis’s death made Turgenev even more determined to secure a legacy for Pauline and the Viardot children. He had become increasingly impatient with Annenkov’s efforts to negotiate an outright sale of his copyright for a lump sum. He was keen to have a contract for a posthumous edition of his works to be published on his death, and wanted an advance of 60,000 roubles (240,000 francs) for this edition – enough to guarantee Pauline’s financial security. Turgenev must have calculated that a lump sum would be easier for her – both financially and legally – than an income from his royalties. Frustrated with Annenkov, Turgenev reassigned the task to Alexander Toporov, his amanuensis in St Petersburg, whom Savina described as ‘like an icon-lamp ever burning before Turgenev’. Stasiulevich, who visited Turgenev in July, noted with surprise how seriously he was taking the issue, for he had known him as a man who had always looked on his literary rights with careless indifference and naivety. Eventually, in August 1883, Toporov struck a deal with the publisher I. I. Glazunov in the Russian capital. Turgenev’s copyright was sold outright to Glazunov for 80,000 roubles (320,000 francs) – a sum equivalent to his literary earnings for eleven years, according to the writer’s calculations in 1882. Turgenev was delighted. In one of his final letters (number 6,173 of the 6,175 published in the Soviet edition of his works) he wrote in gratitude to Glazunov, expressing his relief that he had found a publisher to secure his literary inheritance.

By this stage Turgenev was too weak to hold a pen. Most of his letters were dictated to Pauline or Louise Arnholt, the Viardots’ housekeeper, who nursed him in these final weeks. But there were days when he felt well enough to get up from his deathbed, go outside a little, and even scratch a few lines in his own hand. On one such day, 11 July, he wrote in pencil to Tolstoy to tell him he was dying, that he was happy to have lived at the same time as him, and ‘to express to you my last request. My friend, return to literary activity. After all, this is your gift, from which everything else comes. Oh, how happy I would be, if I were able to believe that my request had some influence on you.’⁸³

Turgenev’s literary activities consisted of one more short story, ‘Un fin’ (An End), written just two weeks before he died. The story had been germinating in his head for a long time but he was too weak to write it down, so he asked Pauline to help him. She proposed that he dictate the story to her in Russian, a language she could write, if he was prepared to be patient. But Turgenev was afraid that, if it was in Russian, he would want to stop at every phrase to give it better shape, at every word to search for a better expression. He was too weak for that, the work would be exhausting, and he needed his ideas recorded more quickly. On Turgenev’s suggestion the story was dictated in the various languages they both knew – French, German, Spanish, English and Italian with bits of Russian in between – and then turned by Pauline into French for Turgenev to review.⁸⁴ Its composition was a fitting symbol of the cosmopolitan culture they had both promoted all their lives.

In these final days and nights Pauline and her daughters, Marianne and Claudie, were at Turgenev’s bedside constantly. Even Paul and Louise arrived in Bougival to help. There was a steady trail of Russian visitors who came to say farewell – Bogoliubov, Prince Meshchersky, Vereshchagin, who found Turgenev looking like a ghost, pale and withered, his eyes sunken in a face he barely recognized.

The end came on Monday 3 September. The Viardots were grouped around Turgenev’s bed. His daughter was not there. She could not arrive in time from Switzerland. She had been warned of the possibility that he might die ‘at any moment’ by telegram only on the morning of his death. Given morphine to relieve the pain, Turgenev started talking in various languages, French, German, English, but mainly in Russian. The time, he said, had come to ‘say farewell like the Russian Tsars’. In his delirium he kept repeating the name of Tsar Aleksei and then, as if trying to correct himself, said ‘the second’, possibly his effort to say the name of Alexander II, the emancipator of the serfs. Pauline bent down to kiss the dying man. Recognizing her, he became animated and said: ‘There is the Tsarina of Tsarinas, how much good she has done!’ He then began to mutter senselessly in Russian, imagining himself to be a dying peasant saying farewell to his family. According to Meshchersky, who was there, his last words in Russian were: ‘Farewell my dear ones, my whitish ones!’ He then slipped away into unconsciousness. He died at 2 p.m. on the next day.⁸⁵

As soon as the body had been washed and dressed in clean linen, photographers and artists were summoned to make images of the dead man’s face for release to the newspapers. By 5 p.m. the photographer, Morel, had arrived from the Paris studio Photographie Anonyme. He took several portraits from various angles, which soon began to circulate for sale as postcards both in Paris and in St Petersburg. The sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Tourgueneff, a distant relative of the writer, made a death mask of the head as well a model of his left, non-writing, hand (the fingers of his right hand had become too twisted in his agony to be usable). Pauline and Claudie both made sketches of Turgenev’s face. Contorted with pain at the moment of his death, the face gradually relaxed into a more peaceful expression. According to Stasiulevich, ‘he had never looked so beautiful nor so great in his lifetime’. Once the signs of suffering had passed, his face took on the heroic ‘image of a deep thinker with unusual energy, which, when he was alive, had not been apparent because of the dominating kindness in his face and his readiness to smile at any time’. Stasiulevich was so impressed by one of Claudie’s sketches, which had captured this expression, that he begged her to allow him to publish it in Russia as a gift from those Turgenev loved in France.⁸⁶

Pauline was devastated by Turgenev’s death. In a matter of a few months she had lost the two men in her life. ‘Ah, my friend,’ she wrote to Pietsch on 8 September, ‘it is too much, too much suffering for one heart. I don’t understand why mine has not broken.’ To the composer Ambroise Thomas she wrote on the same day: ‘I have lost my dearest friend. We awaited with terror the approaching end, but at the same time we took it as deliverance because the sick man’s suffering was intolerable … His death resembled that of my dearly beloved husband, and as a result I have experienced a double agony.’⁸⁷

There was a funeral service at the Russian Orthodox church in the rue Daru on 7 September. Placed before the altar, the coffin was covered with wreaths and surrounded by foliage. The candlelit church was packed. Among the mourners were many of the leading figures in French cultural life – Renan, Saint-Saëns, Daudet, Massenet, About, Goncourt – as well as Russians of every social class, from Prince Orlov, conspicuous in full court uniform with a ribbon and star on his chest, to poor Russian students and artists, ‘many of them nihilists and revolutionaries’, according to the French police, which had its secret agents in the church. Goncourt noted how the ceremony had ‘brought out from the houses of Paris a whole little world of flat-faced giants with beards like the Almighty’.⁸⁸

Turgenev had made it clear that he wanted to be buried in Russia. A week before his death he told Meshchersky and Stasiulevich that his ideal would be to rest at the feet of his ‘teacher’ Pushkin, whose grave was in the cemetery of the Svyatogorsk Monastery near Pskov, but since he felt unworthy of that honour he would like to be buried near his friend Belinsky in the Volkovo Cemetery in St Petersburg.⁸⁹ It was a surprising choice. Belinsky had championed Turgenev’s early work and influenced his realist approach to literature, but Turgenev had not been the best or closest friend to him, and at times had sacrificed their friendship to his obsession with Pauline. In 1847, when Belinsky was dying from tuberculosis in Paris, Turgenev reneged on his promise to help him back to Russia, and even failed to drag himself away from the Viardots in Courtavenel to make the short journey to Paris to say farewell. Perhaps he was tormented by remorse over the way he had treated Belinsky, who died without Turgenev seeing him again. But this hardly seems a likely reason for his decison, more than thirty years later, to be buried near the famous critic, who had defined the realist principles of Russian literature. Pushkin, after all, was his first choice. By asking to be buried near Belinsky, he was surely thinking of his place in Russia’s literary pantheon.

Stasiulevich was placed in charge of the arrangements for Turgenev’s burial. There were endless obstacles: long delays in getting permission to remove the body, which required a passport to leave France; drawn-out exchanges with the city duma in St Petersburg, which could not decide whether they would pay for the funeral of a man who was alleged to have had leftist sympathies, a controversy ignited by the Russian publication of an interview with Lavrov, the exiled revolutionary, who told a Paris newspaper that Turgenev had subsidized his paper Forward (Vpered);* more hold-ups when Pushkin’s ring, which was supposed to be worn by Turgenev on his journey back to Russia, was withdrawn by its donor, Pavel Zhukovsky, who had suddenly decided to hold on to it, necessitating delicate approaches by Pauline to persuade him to honour his promise. There were even problems finding space for Turgenev’s grave in the Volkovo Cemetery, all the places near Belinsky having been already occupied. The tsarist authorities proposed exhuming Belinsky’s remains and reburying them in a new location with Turgenev’s, but Belinsky’s widow objected, so more time was lost until an alternative was found. All this while, Turgenev’s body was held in the basement of the Russian church.⁹⁰

Pauline decided not to travel with Turgenev’s body to Russia. Her daughter Claudie went instead with her husband, George. In a letter to Stasiulevich Pauline explained her decision by citing unspecific ‘business problems’ which she said had forced her to remain in Paris: ‘otherwise I would have gone with my children to see dear Russia once again and bring back the precious remains of my best friend, the great man we are all mourning.’ Perhaps she took Turgenev’s own advice to her, a few years earlier, in one of his Poems in Prose, ‘When I am No More’ (December 1878), which began:

When I am no more, when everything I once was has crumbled into dust – oh you, my only friend, you, whom I loved so deeply and so tenderly, you who will surely survive me – do not go to my grave … There will be nothing for you to do there.⁹¹

On the other hand, Pauline’s failure to return with his body to Russia could be seen to justify the disappointment Turgenev had expressed in the poem he had read to Savina – the poem that had told the story of a great love for a woman ‘who would not bring one little flower or shed a single tear on the writer’s grave’.

His return to Russia started at the Gare du Nord on 3 October. Turgenev would make his last journey across Europe on a passenger train. His coffin had a wagon of its own. The floor was strewn with flowers, its inside walls were covered with black cloth on which were hung many wreaths. A white sash with ‘Les Frênes’ – the name of the dacha he had built in Bougival – inscribed in gold was draped over the coffin. At its head was a large green wreath from ‘La famille Viardot’. On the platform by the carriage a temporary chapel was constructed where a farewell service, organized by Pauline, was attended by 400 guests, including Renan, Zola, Daudet, Jules Simon and Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Turgenev’s publisher, as well as the Viardots. A choir performed Russian sacred music, which made a deep impression on the congregation, especially the French, according to Prince Obolensky, who was among the Russians there. Renan led the eulogies, paying homage to Turgenev as a man and writer, the moral conscience of his nation, and as a citizen of Europe too. When all was said and done, the mourners stepped back, Stasiulevich, who would travel with the coffin, climbed into a first-class carriage, and the train set off.⁹²

At every station on its journey across Europe crowds turned out to honour Turgenev. In Berlin, where his entry into Europe had begun, a large congregation of passengers assembled spontaneously around the funeral carriage, where a priest appeared to bless the coffin before it left on its way to Vilnius and St Petersburg. The German train went as far as the small town of Verzhbolovo, on the border with Russia, where it arrived in the early morning of 6 October. All night in the wind and rain huge crowds had been waiting at the station to greet the writer back on Russian soil. The local priest performed a service with thanksgiving prayers, and wreaths were laid by a dozen delegations, including one from the Tsar’s customs officers. The authorities were worried about the possibility of Turgenev’s funeral train giving rise to protests on its passage through Russia. The assassination of Alexander II by revolutionaries, in 1881, had made them wary of any public gathering. Police repressions were being carried out on the orders of the new Tsar, Alexander III, who had insisted that a demonstration of respect for Turgenev should be taken as a sign of opposition to the government – an idea encouraged by his reactionary advisers, who exploited Lavrov’s revelations to reinforce the regime’s anti-liberal policies. At every station between Verzhbolovo and St Petersburg they stopped the train for inspection (God knows what they were expecting to find) and put on guards to accompany the coffin as far as the next station. There was a frantic exchange of telegrams between stationmasters, local governors and the Ministry of the Interior, as the train progressed towards the capital. The Russian press was forbidden by the Tsar to publish details about where the train would stop, or what time it would arrive.⁹³

Even so, the crowds turned out. At Kovno they waited all night in the station hall, where they were confined by the police. But, when the train arrived in the early morning, they broke through the cordon and ran towards the funeral carriage, where wreaths were placed in the wagon and a service carried out by priests. At Vilnius the platform was already packed with people – many holding wreaths and portraits of Turgenev – when the passenger train pulled in. At Dinaburg there was such a throng of mourners by Turgenev’s carriage that Stasiulevich became concerned that people would be pushed onto the tracks beneath the train. Delegations had arrived with wreaths from every section of the town’s population – from a girls’ high school, a musical society, the zemstvo board, firefighters and librarians. At Pskov, where the train arrived in the pouring rain at 2 a.m. on 9 October, there was a massive crowd headed by a delegation of the city’s leaders with a wreath ‘From the people of Pskov’, which they laid by the coffin in a funeral service led by priests. ‘Nowhere else was Turgenev’s body honoured with such passion,’ Stasiulevich observed in a letter to his wife, ‘if you think about the time of our arrival, the miserable weather, and the distance from the town to the station [over two kilometres].’ At Gatchina, seven hours later, the entire town appeared to have turned out in the morning sun. The platform was filled by a dense mass of humanity. At the spot where the funeral carriage stopped there were waiting a delegation of schoolchildren, a church choir and some priests, who tried to climb into the wagon and perform the liturgy in the brief time before the train continued on its journey to St Petersburg. They did not succeed.⁹⁴

In St Petersburg, where the train arrived on time, at 10.20 a.m., at the Warsaw Station, the authorities had better control of the demonstrations of mourning. The public had been cleared from the platforms. Only a small delegation of priests and officials from the funeral commission was allowed to meet the train. Following a solemn mass, the wooden coffin was carried from the station and placed on a hearse draped in white and golden cloth. The coffin was covered with wreaths, and a portrait of Turgenev placed on top of it along with a silver cross. The procession then began. The hearse was followed by 178 delegations from literary, theatrical, artistic, academic, professional, national, civic and many other bodies, each bearing wreaths with suitable inscriptions and many also carrying portraits of the dead writer. Behind them a long line of priests and monks completed the procession, which took three hours to finish its progress through St Petersburg to the Volkovo Cemetery. Despite a heavy police presence, there was an enormous crowd, around 400,000 people, who lined the streets along the route. Claudie walked behind the hearse. She wrote to Pauline later on that day:

George and three venerable old gentlemen walked at the four corners of the hearse. I was placed directly behind it with the grand wreath of Les Frênes carried by four young men, then the literary groups, the delegates, committee members, people bearing tickets allowing them to enter the church, then a very colourful tail of people. Mounted police and armed Cossacks rode alongside the procession. The size of the crowd along the streets, on balconies, at windows, right up to the roof of every house from the station to the church, was too great to say; several hundred thousand Russians bowed their heads and crossed themselves as the body passed. It was truly grandiose.

At the Volkovo Cemetery access to the funeral service was severely limited. The place was teeming with police agents. But the service ran its course with due solemnity and dignity. Poems were composed for the occasion and read out in the church. Speeches were given by the writer Dimitry Grigorovich, an old friend of Turgenev, and by the rector of the university. Then, at the graveside, as Pauline read in Claudie’s letter,

The coffin was gently lowered onto a bed of flowers at the bottom of the grave. Around it stood the numerous delegations with their offerings, a student choir sang, then the priests arrived to say a final prayer, and three short eulogies were given. Someone pointed out to us a group of peasants from Spasskoe who had come to say a last farewell to their liberator.⁹⁵

* A Victor Hugo Museum was later opened in the house in the place des Vosges where Hugo lived between 1832 and 1848.

* A higher royalty than earned today by most writers.

* At the end of Madame Bovary, the pharmacist, Monsieur Homais, a keen follower of new discoveries, takes to wearing the galvanic chain, stunning Madame Homais when he undresses to reveal ‘the golden spiral’ underneath his flannel vest.

* The city duma voted 3,000 roubles towards the costs of the funeral, but the city mayor lodged a protest, and the question was disputed for the best part of the next ten years.