“The Europeans” is the much-anticipated follow-up to Figes’s acclaimed history of Russian culture, “Natasha’s Dance,” and like that book, it tells the story of a society in radical transition from tradition to modernity. This is the society Orlando Figes examines in “The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture,” and it is the world of mid-19th-century Europe, “an international culture that vanished on the outbreak of the First World War.” Where, at the same time, legislation struggles to keep pace with technological change capitalism and consumerism destroy even as they enrich and nationalism, racism and xenophobia poison the public discourse, threatening disaster. Where audiences converge in a worldwide culture of “sharing,” and diversity and connectedness join equality and freedom as the shibboleths of Western liberalism. Where media-driven celebrity trumps older modes of authority and forms new elites, endowing famous artists and performers with peerless cachet.

Where new platforms radically transform the ways in which news, music, books and art are created and consumed. Imagine a society where, within the space of a single generation, human innovation all but collapses the most formidable geographic distances, allowing individuals and information to travel the globe with unprecedented swiftness and ease. THE EUROPEANS Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture By Orlando Figes

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