Os Europeus e a cultura cosmopolita do século XIX

A experiência de "The Europeans" (2019) de Orlando Figes funciona como uma grande viagem cultural através de toda a Europa — da Rússia a Portugal — ao longo de todo o século XIX. Figes escolheu para companheiros de viagem: o ícone literário Ivan Turgenev, a renomeada cantora de ópera Pauline Viardot, e o seu marido Louis Viardot, crítico e historiador de arte. Três inseparáveis companheiros que percorreram toda a Europa durante as suas vidas, pondo em contacto as mais diversas culturas, dando assim suporte ao subtítulo: "Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture". O registo apresenta uma simbiose perfeita entre a exposição de factos e o contar de histórias que poderiam quase ser ficcionais, quase checkovianas, mantendo-nos enredados ao longo das mais de 500 páginas. Figes faz-nos sentir nostalgia daquilo que não vivemos, nomeadamente quando dá conta do nascimento de correntes, de movimentos e renovados interesses da sociedade pela cultura e arte florescentes num tão diverso continente suportadas pela evolução tecnológica desse século, em particular os caminhos de ferro, o telégrafo, a imprensa, a fotografia, assim como a criação do copyright e do canône literário.

Figes realiza um trabalho meticuloso em termos cronológicos, relatando década após década, começando com Turgenev na Rússia, que conhece os Viardot aos 20 anos, e de quem não mais se separará até à sua morte em 1883, e por isso mesmo vivendo quase toda a sua vida em trânsito pela Europa. Os três, atravessarão e conviverão com os mais importantes legados europeus: George Sand, Berlioz, Dickens, Wagner, Saint-Saëns, Chopin, Flaubert, Rossini, Liszt, Delacroix, Henry James, Tolstói, Dostoiévski, Gogol, entre outros. 

A Criação do Artista

"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."

"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. (...) 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. (...) Hugo’s name was everywhere. Death had raised him to the status of a national saint."

"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. (...) 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 (...)"

"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."

Pauline Viardot

A acompanhar os criadores de arte e cultura, Figes coloca todas as revoluções tecnológicas desse século, dando grande destaque para o impacto dos caminhos de ferro que foram ligando as grandes capitais europeias e permitiram a circulação de pessoas não só a maior velocidade, mas acima de tudo a partilha de cultura e costumes num modo mais fusionado. O teatro e a ópera pode circular mais facilmente, e a cultura foi-se tornando mais comum. Mas mais ainda impacto geraria o telégrafo e a imprensa suportada pelos processos de impressão fotográfica, que tornariam a circulação de informação tão veloz a ponto de eliminar o sentimento de distância geográfica. Por outro lado, as elites primavam pelo conhecimento de múltiplas línguas — Turgenev falava fluentemente russo, alemão, francês, inglês e espanhol — o que tornava cada vez mais transparente as diferenças culturais,  simultaneamente contribuindo para o seu desaparecimento.

"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. -- 

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. Its composition was a fitting symbol of the cosmopolitan culture they had both promoted all their lives."

No final do livro, e do século XIX, sente-se que uma Europa una emergia, que a cultura pan-europeia se afirmava, não só pela força dos seus criadores de arte e tecnologia, mas pela partilha da diversidade linguística e cultural que ajudava ao florescimento criativo. Parecia mesmo que nunca nada poderia pôr termo a isso, no entanto, como bem sabemos, em 1914 e depois em 1939, tudo isso foi praticamente destruído obrigando a todo um renovado esforço, mas desta ver político no sentido de unir a Europa de novo.

A Criação do Cânone

"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’."

"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."

"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."

"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.’"

"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."

"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."

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Saber mais:

In Conversation with Orlando Figes, Forum on European Culture, 19.9.2020