9. The End of Everything: The Altai Mountains
Page 178: St George Littledale. Courtesy of The Library, University of California at Berkeley. Page 182: Altai space junk, 2000 © Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum Photos. Page 186: Leonid Kaloshin © Michael Turek. Page 187: An airport waiting room in Siberia, 1964. Mario de Biasi/Mondadori Portfolio/Getty Images.
10. The Moscow of the East: Harbin
Page 192: Flooded Harbin © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis Historical/Getty Images. Page 196: Semion Kaspe. Printed with kind permission of Professor Dan Ben-Canaan.
11. Beethoven in a Red Chum: The Yamal Peninsula
Page 208: Travel in the Yamal Peninsula, c. 1960. Courtesy of I. S. Shemanovskiy Yamal-Nenets District Museum and Exhibition Complex, Salekhard. Page 219: A prisoner sings for Gulag officials. Danzig Baldaev, Drawings from the Gulag (London: Fuel Publishing, 2010) © FUEL Publishing. Page 219: A Gulag orchestra is marched to a local village to perform. Danzig Baldaev, Drawings from the Gulag (London: Fuel Publishing, 2010) © FUEL Publishing.
12. Music in the Gulag Archipelago: Kolyma
Page 226: US Vice-President Henry Wallace in Kolyma, 1944. Courtesy of the Henry A. Wallace Papers, University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa. Page 228: The Magadan State Music and Drama Theatre. Courtesy of the Magadan Regional Museum of Local Lore. Page 231: Vadim Kozin. Courtesy of the Magadan Regional Museum of Local Lore.
13. The Siberian Colosseum: Novosibirsk
Page 239: The Novosibirsk State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre. Courtesy of the Museum of the History of Architecture of Siberia named after S. N. Baladin. Page 241: Installation of painting, Vasily Surikov, Boyarina Morozova, 1887, spring 1945. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 243: Boxes with packed paintings of the Tretyakov Gallery in the Novisibirsk Opera House. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 244: Artist-restorer M. A. Alexandrovsky records readings of temperature and humidity at the Exhibition of Russian realistic art at the end of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 246: Vladimir Biryukov © Michael Turek. Page 250: Lomatchenko family © Michael Turek.
14. Vera’s Mühlbach: Akademgorodok
Page 263: Vera Lotar-Shevchenko’s grave © Sophy Roberts. Page 267: Nikita Khrushchev and Harvey Van Cliburn, 1958. Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images. Page 275: Victims of the Leningrad Siege. Sputnik/Alamy Stock Photo.
15. A Game of Risk: Kamchatka
Page 287: A Russian punk fan, 1986 © Igor Mukhin. Page 287: A queue to buy bread in St Petersburg, 1992. TASS/Ivan Kurtov and V. Chumakov/Getty Images. Page 293: A Chechen separatist plays the piano, 1994. OLEG NIKISHIN/AFP/Getty Images. Page 293: A Russian soldier plays the piano. Georges DeKeerle/Sygma/Getty Images. Page 297: Demidoff with his wife. A Shooting Trip to Kamchatka (London: R. Ward, 1904). Courtesy of UCLA Library. Page 298: Valery Kravchenko performing © Michael Turek. Page 301: The boy and the bird by Vasily Peskov © Komsomolskaya Pravda (Moscow: March 1966). Page 302: Valery Kravchenko. Courtesy of Valery Kravchenko.
16. Siberia’s Last Piano: The Commanders to the Kurils
Page 311: Kate Marsden. Kate Marsden, On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers (London: Record Press, 1892). Courtesy of The London Library. Page 314: Medny fur trade. Kamchatka Regional Unified Museum, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.
17. Provenance Regained: Khabarovsk
Page 327: Anna Khidirov and the Stürzwage piano © Michael Turek. Page 331: Nina Alexandrovna’s ancestors, courtesy of Nina Ternovskaya.
Source Notes
EPIGRAPHS
‘Once a certain idea of landscape . . . of the scenery’: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Fontana Press, 1996)
‘Objects have always been carried . . . stories that matters’: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (London: Chatto & Windus, 2011)
‘My piano is to me what his vessel is to the sailor . . . obeyed my every caprice’: Lina Ramann (ed.), Franz Liszt, Gesammelte Schriften, Volume II (Leipzig: Brightkopf & Härtel, 1880–83), cited in Alan Walker, Reflections on Liszt (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011)
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Siberian railway sketches: This phrase is used by Charles H. Hawes, In the Uttermost East (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904)
‘diamonds that made one’s eyes ache’: John Foster Fraser, The Real Siberia: Together with an Account of a Dash Through Manchuria (London: Cassell and Company, 1902)
a Bechstein piano: See Annette Meakin, A Ribbon of Iron (London: Archibald Constable & Co, 1901). Meakin describes concerts aboard the Trans-Siberian performed by ‘lady pianists of no ordinary merit’.
‘From the shores of the Pacific . . . Europe as well’: Sergei Witte, cited in Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016)
the fancy tourist carriages . . . to stack the dirty dishes on: See Christian Wolmar, To the Edge of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2014), Harmon Tupper, To the Great Ocean: Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), and Lindon Bates Jr, The Russian Road to China (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910). The fat conductor is described by Francis E. Clark, A New Way Around An Old World (London: S. W. Partridge & Co., 1901), and the piano as a kitchen sideboard by Michael Myers Shoemaker, The Great Siberian Railway: From St Petersburg to Pekin (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904).
‘Welcome to Siberia’: In the nineteenth century, the only marker denoting Siberia was a stone post (now disappeared) a hundred and fifty miles to Ekaterinburg’s east. ‘Europe’ was written on one side of the column, ‘Asia’ on the other. ‘No other boundary-post in the world has witnessed so much human suffering, or been passed by such a multitude of heartbroken people,’ wrote the American journalist George Kennan (Siberia and the Exile System, Volume II (New York: The Century Co., 1891)). For an image of this obelisk, see the painting Farewell to Europe by Aleksander Sochaczewski, 1894, Museum of Independence, Warsaw, which depicts Polish prisoners falling at the pillar’s foot, desperate and exhausted.
There is no dramatic curtain-raiser to the edge of Siberia: This observation is common to many travellers, past and present, who encounter the Urals and then Siberia for the first time, from John Dundas Cochrane in his 1825 Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary – who describes a ‘nearly imperceptible’ rise of hills – to Colin Thubron, In Siberia (London: Chatto & Windus, 1999). ‘I know not why they are so darkly shaded on most of our maps, and made to look like a formidable barrier between the two continents,’ observed the Scottish traveller Alexander Michie, The Siberian Overland Route (London: John Murray, 1864). I met the Urals for the first time travelling from Moscow to Salekhard, which sits at the northern end of the mountain range.
aside from China, this country has more international borders: For an explanation of the make-up of the modern Russian Federation, see Robert A. Saunders and Vlad Strukov, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Federation (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010).
‘land of endless talk’: Alban Gordon, Russian Year: A Calendar of the Revolution (London: Cassell & Company, 1935)
‘The plain of Siberia begins . . . goodness knows where’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to his sister, May 1890’, in Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1920)
born from the ashes of a cannibal: For the full story, see Uno Holmberg, The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV (New York: Cooper Square, 1964).
‘In matters of translation . . . the equivalent of infidelities’: Franz Liszt, cited in Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861–1886 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)
PART ONE: PIANOMANIA
‘Liszt. It is only noon . . . elbow each other and enter’: Cited in Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014)
1. MUSIC IN A SLEEPING LAND: SIBIR
Early Arab traders . . .
Johann Schiltberger: See Anatole V. Baikaloff, ‘Notes on the Origin of the Name “Siberia”’, Slavonic and East European Review, 29:72 (December 1950)
‘The Rock’: Alan Wood, Russia’s Frozen Frontier: A History of Siberia and the Russian Far East 1581–1991 (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011)
falling star destroyed a patch of forest: See Melissa Hogenboom, ‘In Siberia in 1908, a huge explosion came out of nowhere’, BBC News (July 2016)
‘black snow’ from coal mining: See Marc Bennetts, ‘Toxic black snow covers Siberian coal mining region’, Guardian (February 2019)
toxic lakes: See Andrew E. Kramer, ‘It Looks Like a Lake Made for Instagram. It’s a Dump for Chemical Waste’, New York Times (July 2019)
smoke clouds bigger than the EU: See Jonathan Watts, ‘Arctic wildfires spew soot and smoke bigger than the EU’, Guardian (August 2019)
Every year the shores around Lake Baikal . . . move another two centimetres apart: The two-centimetre growth rate is given in Tatvana Sailko, Environmental Crises: Geographical Case Studies in Post-Socialist Eurasia (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). For more on Baikal’s capricious character, see Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia, trans. Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
Fissures in the ice look like the surface of a shattered mirror: Of all the books on Baikal, there is one I pick up again and again for its magnificent descriptions of the lake, Sylvain Tesson, Consolations of the Forest, trans. Linda Coverdale (London: Penguin, 2014). Tesson spent six months living in a cabin on the lake’s shores in 2010, observing its ravishing, sometimes frightening changeability in winter, spring and summer.
they filter the top fifty metres of the lake up to three times a year: Mark Sergeev, Baikal (Moscow: Planeta, 1990), cited in Alan Wood, Russia’s Frozen Frontier
an evolution of ringed seal that swam down from the Arctic: Fridtjof Nansen, Through Siberia, The Land of the Future, trans. Arthur G. Chater (London: William Heinemann, 1914)
The Gulag Archipelago: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volumes I, II & III, trans. Thomas Whitney (London: Harper Perennial, 2007)
‘cultural education’: See the research made by Inna Klause, ‘Music and “Re-Education” in the Soviet Gulag’, Torture, 23:2 (February 2013): ‘Musical theatres were founded in numerous camps between the 1920s and 1950s. However, an average of only about two percent of the inmates took part in the music and theatre circles.’
you could usually return home: Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (London: Penguin, 2004), details a phenomenon called ‘wolves’ passports’, which forbade former political prisoners from returning to the Soviet Union’s major cities.
Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin – they all spent time in Siberia as political exiles before the Revolution: Lenin’s Siberian experience was greatly eased by his access to luxury goods in exile. His family received a number of requests, including one for a pair of kid gloves to protect his hands from Siberia’s ravaging mosquito bites. Rolf H. W. Theen, Lenin: Genesis and Development of a Revolutionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
‘Here was our own peculiar world . . . a house of the living dead’: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Memoirs from the House of the Dead, trans. Jessie Coulson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
shackles were called ‘music’: Cited by Miron Ėtlis, Sovremenniki Gulaga: Kniga vospominaniĭ i razmyshleniĭ (Magadan: Kn. Izd-vo, 1991)
to ‘play the piano’ meant having your fingerprints taken: Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume III
‘Truly, there would be reason to go mad if it were not for music’: Pyotr Tchaikovsky, ‘Letter to Nadezhda von Meck, 1877’, in John Warrack, Tchaikovsky (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989)
‘hack[ed] a window through to Europe’: Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, trans. Alistair Noon (Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2010)
with one well-known musical fanatic of Catherine’s time: This anecdote is told in Marina Ritzarev, Eighteenth-Century Russian Music (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
murdered their master by cutting him up into pieces . . . also tasted liberty: The murderous serfs’ revenge is told in Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
The German word Klavier sometimes referred to a harpsichord: See Alfred Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers: A Comprehensive History of the Development of the Piano from the Monochord to the Concert Grand Player Piano (Covina: Covina Publishing Company, 1911). In Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (London: Gollancz, 1955), Arthur Loesser talks about ‘a sloppiness of nomenclature’ during this period of the piano’s evolution.
‘the poor man’s keyboard’: Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos
‘In short, the clavichord was the first keyed instrument with a soul’: Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers
‘Until about 1770 pianos were . . . uncertain in status’: Cyril Ehrlich, The Piano: A History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
Within ten years of its invention, versions of this instrument were being made: Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers
Zumpe couldn’t make his pianos fast enough to gratify demand: Charles Burney, cited in James Parakilas, Piano Roles: Three Hundred Years of Life with the Piano (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)
certain sweetness when playing a slow adagio: In 2016, Pavlovsk Palace Museum released a CD, And The Old Chords Will Sound, performed by Yuri Semenov. This is how I heard the Zumpe’s sound.
‘One lady of my acquaintance had carried . . . without inflicting the least injury upon it’: James Holman, Travels through Russia, Siberia, Poland, Austria, Saxony, Prussia, Hanover, &c. &c. Undertaken during the Years 1822, 1823 and 1824, While Suffering from Total Blindness, and Comprising an Account of the Author Being Conducted a State Prisoner from the Eastern Parts of Siberia (London: Geo. B. Whittaker, 1825)
Women grabbed at strands . . . a procession of thirty carriages: Most of these details are derived from Alan Walker’s stunningly comprehensive biographies of Liszt: Franz Liszt, Volumes I, II & III (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987, 1993 & 1996), and Reflections on Liszt (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011). The story about the German girls making bracelets with piano strings is given in Parakilas, Piano Roles.
‘smasher of pianos’: Clara Schumann, cited in Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)
Liszt leapt on to the stage rather than walked up the steps . . . : Vladimir Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence Jonas (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968). See also Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt, by Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), and Walker’s biographies, as before.
‘Does he bite?’: Cited in Patrick Piggott, The Life and Music of John Field (London: Faber & Faber, 1973)
‘the past, the present, the future of the piano’: Cited in Wilhelm von Lenz, The Great Piano Virtuosos of Our Time (London: Kahn & Averill, 1983)
‘something unheard of, utterly novel . . . a throne high above the heads of the crowd’: Stasov, Selected Essays on Music
‘We exchanged only a few words and then rushed home . . . pouring forth cascades of tender beauty and grace’: Ibid.
considered the first true ‘Russian’ opera for its native character and melody: See Richard Taruskin in Defining Russia Musically (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000): ‘Through [Glinka], Russia could for the first time join the musical West on an equal footing, without excuses, as a full-fledged participant in international musical traditions, and a contributor to them.’ Taruskin, a leading American musicologist, also sounds a note of caution: ‘Measuring the Russianness of Russian music by its folkish quotient is also a Western, not a Russian, habit, and a patronizing one that originates in colonialist attitudes.’
‘You will find a piano, or some kind of box . . . ninety-three instruments and a piano-tuner’: ‘“Sme
s”: Petersburgskia khronika’, Literaturnaia Gazeta (January 1845), cited in Lynn M. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
That same year, the London piano maker Broadwood & Sons was one of the city’s twelve largest employers of labour: David Wainwright, Broadwood by Appointment (London: Quiller, 1982)
Russian piano-making was thriving: These specific details about the Russian piano industry and the state subsidy system are derived from Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014). Swartz helpfully provides the cost of a Liszt ticket (fifteen roubles) as well as piano prices of the period (from five hundred roubles).
‘a remarkable bundle of inventions’: Dolge, Pianos and Their Makers
Gobelin tapestries, even Van Dyck paintings, were scooped up: Thomas Preston, Before the Curtain (London: John Murray, 1950)
In 1919, one of St Petersburg’s music critics sold his grand piano: Nicolas Slonimsky, ‘Soviet Music and Musicians’, Slavonic and East European Review, 3:4 (December 1944)
Pianos were built with jumbled parts: Preston, Before the Curtain
‘Art belongs to the people . . . feeling, thoughts and desires’: Cited in Klara Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin (London: Modern Books, 1929)
he handed me a novel by an American author, Daniel Mason: Daniel Mason, The Piano Tuner (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)
when nomadic pastoralism was replaced with collective herds . . . cut up into smaller territories: For a fuller version of events, see James Minahan, Encyclopedia of Stateless Nations, Volume I (London and Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002)
‘We made our plans in this way . . . not being able to do it’: John Steinbeck, A Russian Journal (London: Penguin, 2001)
‘Even assuming my excursion is an utter triviality . . . I never have any money anyway’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to A. S. Suvorin, March 1890’, in Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (Surrey: OneWorld Classics, 2007)
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 30