The Great Convergence
THE EUROPEANS: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture
BY ORLANDO FIGES
Metropolitan, 592 pp., $35
SOME WRITERS USE a telescope to look at the world, others a microscope. Orlando Figes, a British historian well known for his work on Russian history, uses both to his readers’ constant surprise and delight. His subject in his new book is the culture that took form in Europe beginning in the 1840s. Notwithstanding their political differences, intellectuals and literary and artistic types read the same books, admired the same paintings, played the same music, and enjoyed the same operas across the continent. According to Figes, this convergence would not have been
