They meet when Pauline Viardot takes the stage in Russia for the first time in 1843 at the age of twenty-two. By then, she is already a celebrated singer in Western Europe and has been married for three years to the significantly older former opera director Louis Viardot. Ivan Turgenev is twenty-five and at the beginning of his career as a writer. He is immediately captivated by her: "From that moment, from that fateful minute, I belonged only to her." He follows the couple to Paris and Germany, and they live for a few years in Baden-Baden. She is the first reader of his manuscripts, he supports her work as a composer, and together with her husband Louis, translates the works of Russian writers. The guests at the salons hosted by Pauline Viardot include the most important representatives of contemporary art and culture. At the unconventional B.