An Unofficial Marriage is a simply wonderful teling of a very romantic love story. The reader follows the protagonists from the early encounters to the maturity of their love. I truly appreciated the extract of letters, and the quotes form the famous people of the period. It is a true insight into the Age of Romanticism.
It is the kind of book that remains in your memory long after you have finished to read.
All opinions are mine, I received a copy from NetGalley.

This story brings “life love affair of two great artists - the famous Russian author, Ivan Turgenev, and the celebrated French opera singer, Pauline Viardot.”

Saint Petersburg, Russia, 1843. Ivan Turgenev, Russian aristocrat, is mesmerized with the opera sensation Pauline Viardot. When they meet in person, their reciprocated love turns into a life love affair. Through following decades, he pursues her across the countries.

France. Louis Viardot is a “respected art historian, a translator and a scholar.” He is much older than Pauline and hoped that his unfailing kindness would make Pauline love him with time. With Pauline’s success and growing number of younger admirers, he takes a different approach. He accepts Ivan in order to make Pauline happy which also feeds her success.

Pauline Garcia Viardot is the sister of the immortal soprano and daughter of the great Spanish tenor and composer. There was a time when she felt being in the shadow of her sister, but no more. Now, she enjoys her own success.

As the story goes back in time in flashbacks, it reveals Pauline’s background and her family, how she got married to Louis and how he helped to pave her career. We don’t get to know Ivan as much and that’s what I was looking forward to.

Ivan’s mother is indecently rich by the highest measure in Russia which is the number of souls one owns. She owns six thousand serfs. “At her manor house in Spasskaye, she sits on a throne, ringing bells and giving orders.” While being berated by his mother for resigning his respectable position at the interior ministry, he hopes to take up writing. He is outspoken for the rights of the serfs. His kindness and his genius are shown briefly. I wished more for that, showing who he was. There are some mentions of how his writing is progressing, but those are just brief mentions.

The character of Pauline is well developed. We get to know her career’s rises and falls and her singular passion for her art is well-expressed.

The historical background is more of a remark. We don’t get to feel the tumultuous time during which they lived.

The prose is beautiful. The expressions of love are intensely passionate and that’s what I’d say represents the time period. How they expressed themselves. The story explores the relationship between following one’s passion for career and for love which is a complex matter. The story has a good flow with steady pace.

An Unofficial Marriage is a glimpse into the 19th century European literati as seen through the longstanding friendship (and eventually relationship) between Russian author Ivan Turgenev and French-Spanish opera singer Pauline Viardot. The scope of this book is wide, as it follows the various tours and travels of these two formidable characters. It is a very character-centered novel — especially impressive considering Pauline and Ivan are not just imaginations, but were real people.

3/5: I enjoyed following the characters across many locations — Paris, Baden-Baden, London, etc — and the immersing myself in the life of the 19th century intelligentsia. I did not find this book stunning or unforgettable, just a well-researched, unique work of historical fiction.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I’ve recently read and really enjoyed Dostoevsky in Love, an excellent biography of one of the world’s greatest authors. So I wanted to revisit that world and this book seemed like a great opportunity to do so, despite the fact that normally I don’t go for fictionalized real life romances. There just seems to be something lightly exploitative and salacious about that interest, something born right out of the culture’s pervasive obsession with celebrities and their love lives. I mean, I’d prefer a proper biography, heavy reliant upon facts that a juiced up love story heavily reliant upon speculation, but it isn’t a sort of strict prohibitive mentality and so when I found this book on Netgalley, I decided to check it out.
Turgenev is a character only peripherally mentioned in Dostoevsky in Love, though he is, of course, one of his country’s literary giants and very much deserving of his own book. Though to be fair, here he is more of a second fiddle or, more precisely, one side of a love triangle. The leading role belongs to Pauline Viardot, an extraordinary opera singer of her time, in addition to being a composer and music teacher in her own right. Because operas, at least performed at that time, aren’t preserved and passed down like books, present day recognizes Turgenev and has all but forgotten Viardot, but in their own time their fame was at the very least comparable with Viardot quite possibly eclipsing his. But this isn’t really a story about fame, it’s about love, a love between famous people, sure, but still…
And so…one evening a young dashing Turgenev goes to the opera and becomes positively obsessed with its 21 year old star, Viardot, who was no one’s idea of a great beauty as the novel so exhaustively highlights, but had that certain something, that je ne se quois of ugly sexy that you can only apparently find in the more refined areas of Europe. And from that day one, Turgenev’s fate is decided, he will follow Pauline wherever she goes, despite her being married and having a child, despite propriety and gossip mills and reason. Eventually, he’s enter into a semi functional menage a trois style marriage with her very reluctant much older spouse and her, the eponymous unofficial marriage that had two people on paper and three in real life. It’s a very peculiar relationship, all the more so for having been sustained for so many years, despite the fact that a triangle, while a perfectly good shape for great many things (A frames, pizza or pie slices, etc.) is absolutely no shape for a relationship.
Essentially, the entire thing operated on duty, love and patience. Which is to say Louis Viardot adored his much younger wife and indulged her every whim, however reluctantly. Pauline Viardot had an enormous responsibility of duty to Louis and would never leave him, but also had a passionate love for her Jean as they’d call Ivan Turgenev, so she’d have him whenever her guilt permitted her. And Turgenev was just so in love that he learned to live with the arrangement where the best option was by definition second best. Also, apparently he was so charming and likeable that he became great friends with Louis, they’d go hunting together, in fact, work on translations together. In fact and this might be one of the craziest things about the entire already pretty wild arrangement), for stretches of time Turgenev actually lived with the Viardots and depended on them financially. Oh yeah, and he loved their kids too, and some of them might have been his and no one ever talked about it. In fact, when he discovered he had a bastard daughter with a serf, he sent that girl to Viardots to raise. And sure times were different back then, but what the actual f*ck? Seriously?
So yeah, it was a grand affair and it went on for a grand long time too. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the plot are facts, the dates are known. The love affair might have been somewhat of a stretch, extrapolated from some surviving letters and powered by much supposition, but it’s a good story, so why not.
Facts are…Pauline Viardot was a great talent and on a personal level she managed a very long (for that era especially) life and died at the ripe old age of 89, leaving behind music, children, grandchildren and a legend.
Ivan Turgenev died at 64, leaving behind a most excellent literary legacy. The man came from wealth, but has always advocates the liberation of serfs, not to mention other social reforms. The ups and downs of his career and personal life saw him reviled and revered, both, had him confined and widely praised, hated and respected for his outspokenness and criticism of his country’s politics. Born to be a typical well educated but ineffectual dandy of his day, over the years he became a power to reckon with, creating for himself a literary platform from which to speak and he was listed to indeed. It is said that his words had even had the effect on the czar himself when he finally freed the serfs.
Theirs was (allegedly) a romance for the ages. One with a very sad ending, but nevertheless or maybe made all the more poignant by it, a grand romance.
The book does it justice, as much as such a thing is possible. It’s well written, it doesn’t go over the top in many places when it so easily might have and it brings to live a fascinating time and place in European culture and politics. And so, despite my misgivings about the genre, I did enjoy reading this one quite a lot. For fans of historical fiction with a romantic angle. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.