‘Ask the prosecutor to exile you to Siberia’

Julian Evans warms to a remarkable book about the spread of pianos across Russia’s forbidding east

PTHE LOST PIANOS OF SIBERIA by Sophy Roberts 448pp, Transworld, £18.99, ebook £9.99

eering into Sophy Roberts’s world of snow, exile and music feels at first like the sensation of touching something so cold that for a hundredth of a second it burns. Her argument – that Russia’s love affair with the piano and its history of repression and incarceration have over two centuries turned Siberia into a forgotten golden treasury of piano music and pianos – is beguiling. The time she takes to engage with her thesis, however, can leave you confused. Is this a remarkable book about an unusual quest, or is the combination of Siberia and lost pianos just literary eye-candy? Are her pianos truly lost – abandoned, missing, destroyed by Russia’s violent past? Do they actually matter?

She herself has doubts: 40 pages in, at Khabarovsk, she writes that “the idea of Siberia’s lost pianos [was] nagging at my conscience” but confesses that her real reason for visiting Khabarovsk is to write about the Siberian tiger for a newspaper. She doesn’t hear her first Siberian piano until page 87.

In narrative terms, this is a lot of adjusting the piano stool and shooting your cuffs. It is not helped by slack sentences like “I am no musician, but music moves me”, or claiming Vienna as “the city of Beethoven” in the 1780s, when he first went there with Haydn 10 years later, or ticking off Clara Schumann for describing her concert for Nicholas I at the Winter Palace as a scene from a fairy tale when a few pages earlier she has described Tobolsk in identical terms, or dismissing the Marquis de Custine, who in La Russie en 1839 wrote one of the first and hardest-hitting anti-absolutist books about Russia, as a “camp, gossipy travel writer”.

Yet at about 80 pages in, something – a muffled chord, the faintest far-distant run of notes borne into Siberia’s boundless blue air – starts to be heard in Roberts’s story. The idea for her book had been given to her by a German friend, the patron of a young Mongolian pianist, who had asked her, more or less on a romantic hunch, to find “one of the lost pianos of Siberia” for his protégée. As she starts to look for leads and makes her first journey to the Russian east, that indeterminate image finally starts to gather focus.

Because this is Russia, her route is one travelled by generations of exiles and gifted dissidents, starting with the Old Believers of the 17th century: a journey that unexpectedly made Siberia in some ways more civilised than the metropolises its exiles left behind. Several familiar stories are retold here: the 1825 Decembrist uprising against Nicholas I is one. When the Decembrists whom Nicholas didn’t hang after their failed revolt were exiled to Siberia, many of their wives followed them – “Decembrist wife” is still in the language, meaning a devoted partner. Prince Sergei Volkonsky’s wife Maria, General Raevsky’s daughter and once a muse of that very naughty boy Alexander Pushkin, roped her clavichord to her sledge for the 4,000-mile journey to Lake Baikal; all the exiles brought their liberalism, and their artistic and educational aspirations, with them. When their sentences were up, many stayed on, having founded music schools and theatres, and because Siberia had no history of serfdom. As Nikolay Basargin, another Decembrist, wrote, the people “better understood the dignity of man, and valued their rights more highly”.

It is in that phrase, Roberts implies, that Siberia’s special relationship with pianos is to be found: in the juxtapositions of freedom and music, of stately, unwieldy instruments and the flights of the soul. Imperial Russia fell in love with the modern, Mozart-era piano in the 1790s – St Petersburg became known as “Pianopolis” – and the incarceration of large numbers of well-educated, liberal transgressors in Siberia through the 19th and 20th centuries unlocked a hunger for music there. Commerce was a handmaiden to idealism: the theology student Pyotr Makushin arrived in Tomsk not quite penniless in 1863. Thirty years later he had set up an orphanage, library and museum, founded two newspapers, opened a bookstore that sold sheet music, and sold more than 500 pianos to its citizens.

Russia’s ambivalent attitude to its empty two-thirds is well summed up by Chekhov in a June 1890 letter to his brother:

Siberia is an extensive and chilly land. I go on and on without seeing an end to it. I’ve seen little that’s interesting and novel, but I’ve felt and experienced a great deal… I’ve had the kind of sensations you wouldn’t undergo for millions of roubles in Moscow. You ought to come to Siberia! Ask the public prosecutor to exile you here.

Siberia became more civilised than the metropolises the liberals left behind

Sometimes Roberts cannot quite stick to her quest – her search for the Romanovs’ last piano, played as they awaited their fate at Ekaterinburg, becomes distracted by accounts of their imprisonment, execution and disappearance – but again and again she shows us, with a lover’s passion for a subject and territory that she has made hers, stories of how pianos, from Bechsteins and Beckers and Mühlbachs to basic Russian-made “Red October” uprights, became

To Nina, Siberia was no heart of darkness: it was the Appassionata – an experience of such intensity, it had worked its way deep into her magnificent Russian soul.

Roberts eventually finds a piano for her German friend’s protégée, a Thirties Grotrian-Steinweg upright, “tender, smooth, vulnerable and full of feeling”, that she first sees in the basement of the Novosibirsk opera house, and it is restored and transported to Mongolia. But that is not truly the objective of her book. Her aim is simply to prove that, yes, her pianos matter. She succeeds because her deeply sympathetic story of a dual obsession, despite its opening unevennesses, not only makes many of those pianos and their histories come alive, but movingly demonstrates how a remote and limitless wilderness was transformed, for her, into the most intense, musical, intimately human space imaginable.

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