"Cultural Narrative" about European Identity in the Context of Personal Stories (Reflections on the Book by Orlando Figes

The article contains reflections on the book by a famous English historian - Russian scholar O. Figes "Europeans. Three lives and the birth of cosmopolitan culture", his approaches to the representation of the biographical history of I. S. Turgenev, P. Viardot and L. Viardot in the context of the formation of pan-European culture in the second half of the XIX century. Special attention is paid to the methodological significance of such trends as "new narrative", "history of representations" and "new biographical history" present in the reviewed book and emerging in modern historiography, as well as discussions about the meanings of the concept of "Europeanness" as a characteristic of supra-ethnic identity and about its manifestations at micro and macro levels in the changing and modernizing historical and cultural space of the Russian Empire and Europe in the XIX century.