A great French soprano, her impresario husband and a feted Russian writer, and their interwoven lives: it sounds like the stuff of fiction. But in a fascinating group portrait, historian Orlando Figes brings us the very real lives of Pauline and Louis Viardot and Ivan Turgenev, showing how their devotion to their art relates to a rapidly changing Europe, and how the middle of the 19th century saw the creation of a ‘European canon’ of culture. In conversation with Michael Prodger, Associate Editor of the New Statesman