In October 1843 the Russian writer Turgenev heard the opera singer Pauline Viardot perform in The Barber of Seville in St Petersburg; for the rest of his life, he remained in thrall to her in an apparently chaste relationship sustained within the framework of her existing marriage. The story of this devotion, and the view that such a love is impossible in the twenty-first century, are the pivots of Robert Dessaix’s new book, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev. Dessaix never loses sight of his central argument. But he is not a linear thinker, nor a simple writer. He swoops and dives, deft and sharp as a wattlebird, over a range that is spiritual and intellectual as well as geographic and temporal. His book concerns itself with much beside the significance of the relationship between Turgenev and Viardot: a distinctively Australian apprehension of Europe; the experience of travel; the ways in which loving relationships can bring depth to travel and vice versa; the links between history, tourism and imagination; economic and social upheavals in Russia; and the nature of civilisation, to mention only a few.
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