Jacek Hugo-Bader, Kolyma Diaries (London: Portobello Books, 2014)
W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)
Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers (London: Record Press, 1892)
James Meek, The People’s Act of Love (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005)
Fridtjof Nansen, Through Siberia, The Land of the Future, trans. Arthur G. Chater (London: William Heinemann, 1914)
James Palmer, The Bloody White Baron (New York: Basic Books, 2011)
Sooyong Park, The Great Soul of Siberia, trans. Jamie Chang (London: William Collins, 2016)
Vasily Peskov, Lost in the Taiga, trans. Marian Schwartz (London: Doubleday, 1994)
Susanna Rabow-Edling, Married to the Empire (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2015)
Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia, trans. Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996)
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories, trans. Donald Rayfield (New York: NYRB Classics, 2018)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. H. T. Willets (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005)
—, The Gulag Archipelago, Volumes I, II & III, trans. Thomas Whitney (London: Harper Perennial, 2007)
Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)
Willard Sunderland, The Baron’s Cloak (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014)
Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia (London: Quartet Books, 2001)
Sylvain Tesson, Consolations of the Forest, trans. Linda Coverdale (London: Penguin, 2014)
Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975)
Colin Thubron, In Siberia (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999)
Piers Vitebsky, Reindeer People (London: Harper Perennial, 2005)
Stephanie Williams, Olga’s Story (London: Viking, 2005)
Christian Wolmar, To the Edge of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2014)
Alan Wood, Russia’s Frozen Frontier: A History of Siberia and the Russian Far East 1581–1991 (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)
Music
Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker, Music and Soviet Power 1917–1932 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012)
Marina Frolova-Walker, Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007)
Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2004)
James Parakilas, Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (London: Fourth Estate, 2009)
Lynn M. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia 1917–1970 (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972)
Anthony Storr, Music and the Mind (London: Harper Collins, 1992)
Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014)
Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Alan Walker, Franz Liszt, Volumes I, II & III (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, 1993 & 1997)
—, Reflections on Liszt (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011)
Films
Dersu Uzala (1975) directed by Akira Kurosawa (Russian and Chinese language; English subtitles)
Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) directed by Werner Herzog and Dmitry Vasyukov (English and Russian language)
Siberiade (1979) directed by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky (Russian and German language; English subtitles)
Acknowledgements
For the numerous people who helped me in Russia and Mongolia, please refer to the book itself. I have not changed any names. My acknowledgements below are for those people who do not appear in a significant way in the main text, or who assisted behind the scenes. Please also refer to the Source Notes and Selected Bibliography. Any errors are unfortunately mine.
I am indebted to a number of specialist readers: Tim Buchen, Junior Professor of History at the Technical University of Dresden, for his knowledge of Russian–Polish relations; Ariane Galy, specialist in Soviet history and owner of History Box; Darya Hoare, for her input on my chapter about the last Tsar, and her professional translations of various Russian texts; John McCannon, Associate Professor of History at Southern New Hampshire University, for his knowledge of arts and culture; and Vladimir Orlov, Associate Professor of Music ology at St Petersburg State University, for his expertise in Russian music and much more besides. Thank you also to Catherine Gerasimov for her friendship on the road in Kolyma and her remarks on modern Russian cultural nuances.
For their help with piano technology, I am immensely grateful to Brian Kemble, the English manufacturer of Kemble pianos and recently retired Managing Director of Austrian piano company Bösendorfer; David Kirkland and Anthony Gilroy at Steinway & Sons; and the expert piano tuner Benjamin Treuhaft, who at one point in his career took second-hand pianos from the US to Cuba. I spent a happy morning at Benjamin’s house in Coventry, England, where he showed me the principles of tuning in his garage; years ago, I had worked for his mother, Jessica Mitford, whose advice to write a book took me more than twenty years to act upon. It took another friend, the late Mark Shand, to push me over the edge and give me the nerve to do it. This project is a product of their encouragement.
Thank you also to researchers at Memorial in Moscow; the archives department at C. Bechstein in Berlin; and the C. F. Theodore Steinway Academy in Hamburg for help securing Kostya Lomatchenko’s place on a Steinway training course, which he successfully completed in November 2019.
I am indebted to a number of local historians, some of whom I met, and others whose granular research I used heavily: Dan Ben-Canaan, an authority on Harbin’s Jewish history and diaspora; Anastasia Bliznyuk, who helped me gather accounts of Akademgorodok; Vasily Khanevich, who charted the lives of the Poles in Tomsk; Lyudmila Lipatova, the Salekhard-based journalist and historian who has written extensively about Railway 501; Anatoly Salaev for his knowledge of piano culture in Tomsk; Tamara Staleva, an authority on Pyotr Makushin; Stanislav Vavilov, a music historian in Tomsk; and Liliya Tsydenova at the Kiakhta Regional History Museum. Their books and pamphlets are all detailed in the Source Notes. What isn’t listed is the time many gave so freely.
For guidance with the natural world, thank you to Chris Collins for his knowledge of Russian ornithology; Dale Miquelle, Director for the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Russia Programme and Coordinator of the WCS Tiger Programme; and Rodney Russ, founder of Heritage Expeditions and Strannik Ocean Voyages.
For Polish transliteration, thank you to Zuzanna Dyrkacz. For Library of Congress Russian transliteration in my Source Notes and Bibliography, thanks to Ariane Galy. Aside from my principal interpreter and researcher, Elena Voytenko, I was assisted by Ruslan Afinshakov in Khabarovsk, Gabriela Anderson in Yamal, Maria Shilova in Moscow, Yulia Lycheva in Kolyma and Vladivostok, and Arsenii Eremeev and Nadezhda Eremeeva in Irkutsk – all of whom opened numerous doors with their indefatigable research skills.
The historic photographs featured in this book include private heirlooms shared by people I met along the way. Thank you also to Katie Neame and Oliver Grant for their work securing picture permissions and chasing down copyrights.
For their assistance on travel logistics: thank you to Richard Mitchelson at AKE International for his security advice and training; John Birch at Benmar Visa Agency; Rick Fancett at Air Deal; Will Bolsover at Natural World Safaris; Vyacheslav Dmitriev at Ba
igal Travel; Douglas Grimes and Vladimir Kvashnin at MIR Corporation for their constant support, professionalism and generous introductions (including the bellringer in Irkutsk and Old Believer priest); Martha Madsden at Explore Kamchatka; my PA, Laura O’Sullivan; Boris Golodets, Kseniya Lukyanova and Michael Sadowski at Intrepid Travel; Undraa Buyannemekh, Anand Munkhuu and Jalsa Urubshurow at Nomadic Expeditions in Mongolia; Guy Rubin at Imperial Tours in China; Simon Cockerell at Koryo Group. And the staff at Four Seasons, St Petersburg, and the Ritz-Carlton, Moscow, who gave me space to work and interview.
I would like to thank the following for their help in specific regions. In Akademgorodok: Aleksandr Kandyba, Maxim Kozlikin, Aleksandr Stepanov and Nataliya Timofeeva. In the Baikal region: Vyacheslav Dmitriev, Ksenia Drozdova, Igor Gerasimov, Andrei and Lyudmila Shelkovnikov, Vladimir Shevchenko and Tatiana Starova. In Barnaul and the Altai: Viktor Babushkin, Igor Dmitriev, Grigory Dolgich, Gennadiy Ignatov, Viktor Shvetsov and Nikolai Zhiba. In the Commander Islands: Sergei Pasenyuk and Maria Vozhikova. In Ekaterinburg: Nikolai Neuimin, Vitali Shitov and Sergei Skrobov. In Harbin: Sergei Yuremin. In Kamchatka: Viktor Belyaev, Kirill Kiselev, Igor Sesterov, Vladimir Vyatkin, Viktor Zakharin and Stanislav Zverev. In Khabarovsk: sincerest thanks to the piano tuner, Vladimir Gordeychik; the Khidirov family for their endless hospitality and friendship; Nataliya Kirilenko and Irina Zhdanova-Kamenska; TV journalist Anna Rozhkovskaya; Nataliya Sheremet at Guberniya Media. In Khanty-Mansiysk and the Numto region: Aleksandr Berezin, Lyudmila Matveeva, Alsu Nazymova, Valery Pyak and his extended family, Nataliya Vylla and Vasily Yarema. In Kiakhta: Marina Chagdurova, Aleksandr Kuzkin, Father Oleg and Nataliya Parnyakova. In Moscow: Nadya Eremeeva and Anna Kochetkova. In Mongolia: thank you to all the people who have made the Orkhon Valley feel like a second home to my family – especially Enkhtsetseg Sanjaadorj and her three children Ich Tenger, D’Artagnan and Kristina-Alegra – as well as Amarzaya Bayarmandakh, Batzaya Bodikhuu, Mendbayar Bold, Enkhdul Jumdaan, Ang Tshering Lama, Dawa Sherpa and Mingma Sherpa. In Novosibirsk: Nina Golovneva, Nataliya Kochergina, Leonid Kolesnikov, Marina Monakhova, Elena Shchukina, Tatyana Sibirtseva and Viktor Titov. On Sakhalin: Valentin Lekus and Rimma Novokreshchentseva. In St Petersburg: Tamara Dubko, and at Pavlovsk Palace, Aleksei Guzanov and Nataliya Kulina, who dug deep into the archives on my behalf to reveal the Siberian tale of Catherine’s Zumpe piano. In Tobolsk: Pavel Sidorov and Lubov Zhuchkova. In Tomsk: Aleksandr Adam and Vasily Khanevich. In Tyumen: Nataliya Fedorovna, Aleksandr Shishkin and Larisa Tyurina. In Ulan-Ude: Olga Shaplanova. In Vladivostok: Yuri Shibnev.
Various family and friends endured endless drafts. Thank you in particular to my father, Jonathan Roberts, for his patient and judicious editing; my mother, Anne Roberts; and my sisters, Amy and Flora Roberts. Nicholas Chan impacted the book more than he will ever realize. Thank you also to Alice Daunt, Ben Elliot, Christie Lear, Olivia Lee, Ben Parker and Justin Wateridge. Many, many friends proved to be patient sounding boards and important supporters: Susie Bain, Alex Baldock, Max Baldock, Caroline Barnes, Horatio Clare, Rachel Cobb, Nikki Cooper, Sheila Donnelly, Catherine Fairweather, Liz Fisher, E-Len Fu, Martin Hartley, Derek Henderson, Ken Kochey, Sarah Laird, Kerry de Lanoy Meijer, James McBride, Rosanna Menza, Polly Morland, Martha North, William Jones, Christina Ong, Melissa Ong, the late Willie Roberts, Bels Silcox, Rebecca Smith, James Verner and Janie Woolfenden. Thank you also to Orlando Figes, Marina Frolova-Walker, Inna Krause, Chantel Tattoli and Benjamin Wegg-Prosser for some helpful contacts.
Various magazine and newspaper editors – including Pilar Guzman and Alex Postman – were always supportive and tolerated shifting deadlines. Thank you to Pilar for taking stories on Kamchatka and Baikal, both of which were published in Conde Nast Traveler. I would especially like to thank my editor at the Financial Times ‘Life & Arts’, Tom Robbins, who commissioned the article I wrote about a Siberian tiger (a version of which features substantially in this book), as well as stories in Yamal, and a journey to Harbin. The articles are referenced in the Source Notes.
To get this project over the line: special thanks to the chief piano tuner of the Novosibirsk Philharmonic, Vladimir Biryukov; Valery Kravchenko in Kamchatka for his constant encouragement; and Stanislav Dobrovolskiy for his professional assistance and time, which he gave freely; to my agent, Sophie Lambert, and her colleagues at C&W Agency, including Jake Smith Bosanquet, Kate Burton, Alexander Cochran, Emma Finn, Meredith Ford and Dorcas Rogers; Simon Hartley; Michael Brown; Jane Phillips; Michael Turek for his friendship on the road; Dušan Sekulović for his video editing; my US publisher, Morgan Entrekin at Grove Atlantic (without his conviction early on, this book simply would not have happened), and editors Brenna McDuffie and Sara Vitale; in the UK, my brilliant editor Andrea Henry who kept my spirits up and the wheels turning, Doug Young and all their colleagues at Transworld: Tim Bainbridge, Emma Burton, Sarah Day, Phil Evans, Phil Lord, Sharika Teelwah, Viv Thompson, Jo Thomson, Katrina Whone and Sally Wray.
Most of all, I want to thank my colleagues Sam Fry and Serena Strang, who researched and fact-checked for two long years with tireless grace and enthusiasm – any errors in this text are entirely my own, but without Serena and Sam, there would have been many more – and my husband, John. I am lucky to be married to a man who thinks piano hunts in Siberia are not only a valid way of making a living, but an interesting one. Thank you for putting up with my long absences, endless anxieties and, on more than one occasion, agreeing to join me in Mongolia and Siberia with our children.
Picture Acknowledgements
Printed ends
Front: Semion Remezov’s maps of Siberia. MS Russ 72 (6) f. 166, Houghton Library, Harvard University. Back: Semion Remezov’s maps of Siberia. MS Russ 72 (6) f. 169, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
1. Music in a Sleeping Land: Sibir
Page 23: Liszt playing to a Berlin crowd, 1842. Original Artwork: Drawing by Adolf Brennglass. Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Page 26: A Russian family with their piano. The Print Collector/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 27: Becker pianos at the World Fair. L’Illustration, Journal Universel, 1848: 72 (July 1878). Getty Images. Page 35: Odgerel Sampilnorov’s ancestors. Courtesy of Odgerel Sampilnorov. Page 35: Odgerel Sampilnorov’s ancestors. Courtesy of Odgerel Sampilnorov.
2. Traces in the Snow: Khabarovsk
Page 44: Nomadic hunter Dersu Uzala. Fine Art Images/Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 46: Indigenous Siberian fur trapper in Evert Ysbrants Ides, Three Years Travels from Moscow over-land to China (London: W. Freeman, 1706). Science & Society Picture Library/Getty Images.
3. Siberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific
Page 61: Catherine the Great listening to Giovanni Païsiello. Edoardo Matania, ‘Giovanni Païsiello and Catherine II of Russia’, L’Illustrazione Italiana, 39 (September 1881). DEA/BIBLIOTECA AMBROSIANA/De Agostini/Getty Images.
4. The Paris of Siberia: Irkutsk
Page 70: Travelling on ice in Siberia according to Father Philippe Anvil. John Bell, A Journey from St Petersburg to Pekin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965). Printed with kind permission of Edinburgh University Press Ltd. Page 71: The tarantass. Harper’s Magazine (New York: 1868). Courtesy of Harper’s Magazine. Page 77: Varlam Shalamov. Sourced Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 81: Five Decembrists hanging. Institute of Russian Literature (Pushkin House), St Petersburg. Page 85: The Volkonskys. The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 86: The Volkonskys’ manor house in Irkutsk. Courtesy of the Irkutsk Museum of the Decembrists, Irkutsk.
5. Pianos in a Sandy Venice: Kiakhta
Page 95: Kandinsky’s theory of music’s relationship to art. Wasily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane (New York: Dover Publications Ltd, 1979). Page 98: Aleksei Lushnikov with his family. Kiakhta Local Lore Museum of Academician V. A. Obruchev, Kiakhta. Page 99: The American writer George Kennan. Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 101: Aleksei Lushnikov’s daughters. Kiakhta Local Lore Mus
eum of Academician V. A. Obruchev, Kiakhta. Page 101: The Lushnikov family at the piano. Kiakhta Local Lore Museum of Academician V. A. Obruchev, Kiakhta. Page 105: Baron von Ungern-Sternberg. Fine Art Images/Heritage Image Parnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 106: The Kiakhta Bechstein © Michael Turek.
6. The Sound of Chopin’s Poland: Tomsk
Page 117: A group of escaped convicts in Siberia. GL Archive/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 122: Pyotr Makushin and his family. Courtesy of the Tomsk Regional Local Lore Museum of M. B. Shatilov, Tomsk. Page 125: Olga Leonidovna © Michael Turek.
7. Home in a Hundred Years: Sakhalin Island
Page 131: Dmitri Girev. Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Page 132: One of Captain Scott’s sled dogs, Chris. Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge. Page 133: Chekhov’s photo of the notorious thief Sonka. Fine Art Images/Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 137: The wheelbarrow-men of Sakhalin. SPUTNIK/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 144: Employees of the House of Culture. Courtesy of a private family collection.
8. The Last Tsar’s Piano: The Urals
Page 151: The last Tsar’s grandfather, Alexander II © The State Hermitage Museum. Angeli, Heinrich von, Portrait of Alexander II. Oil on canvas, 271×150 cm. Austria, 1876. Inv. no. ERZh. II-693. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum. Photo by Leonard Kheifets, Yuri Molodkovets. Page 153: The Romanov family, 1913. Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images. Page 154: The Romanovs during their imprisonment in Tobolsk, 1918. Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images. Page 161: Tourists visiting the cellar of the Ipatiev House. Copy of original image courtesy of the Ekaterinburg History Museum, Ekaterinburg. Page 162: The basement of the Ipatiev House after the murders. Fine Art Images/Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo. Page 162: Rehearsals for The House of Bernarda Alba © Vitaly Shitov. Page 163: The demolition of the Ipatiev House © Vitaly Shitov. Page 170: Pyotr Ermakov. Sverdlovsk Regional Local Lore Museum of O. E. Kler, Ekaterinburg.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 29