The Lost Pianos of Siberia
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2. TRACES IN THE SNOW: KHABAROVSK
devoured ‘with relish’ by hungry convicts: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Volume I, trans. Thomas Whitney (London: Harper Perennial, 2007)
If there was a decent story to tell, I would sell it to a British newspaper: See Sophy Roberts, ‘On the Trail of the Siberian Tiger’, Financial Times (May 2016)
These days, professional conservationists are lucky to encounter a wild tiger: See Sooyong Park, The Great Soul of Siberia, trans. Jamie Chang (London: William Collins, 2016)
Before the Korean tiger researcher and filmmaker Sooyong Park started his work: Ibid.
‘When this nation becomes better known in Europe . . . prejudices that they have about Russia’: Catherine the Great, ‘Letter to Voltaire, March 1770’, in Catherine the Great, Selected Letters, trans. Andrew Kahn and Kelsey Rubin-Detlev (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
When Tchaikovsky met Liszt in 1877: Pyotr Tchaikovsky, ‘Letter to Madame von Meck, 1877’, in Richard Taruskin, On Russian Music (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010)
‘Pay no heed to the boasting . . . they would make us pay cruelly for our advantages over them’: Astolphe de Custine, ‘July 1839’, in Letters from Russia, trans. Robin Buss (London: Penguin Classics, 2014)
De Custine – described as a camp, gossipy travel writer: See Simon Sebag Montefiore, The Romanovs: 1613–1918 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016)
‘The Russians have gone rotten without ever ripening!’: de Custine, ‘July 1839’
‘There are few places on the earth’s surface . . . so little personal knowledge as Siberia’: A. F. Spencer, ‘Siberia in 1919’, Economica, 3 (October 1921)
‘The Siberians were selected . . . resourceful men accustomed to roughing it’: Vladimir Arseniev, Dersu the Trapper, trans. Malcolm Burr (London: Secker & Warburg, 1939)
he gave it ten years before all the sable and squirrel would be gone: Ibid.
‘the fishskin Tatars’: James Forsyth, A History of the Peoples of Siberia: Russia’s North Asian Colony 1581–1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Siberia’s population comprised almost a quarter of a million indigenous people: See Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014) – an important resource I owe a debt to for information on the indigenous history of Siberia.
outnumbered by indigenous Siberians at a ratio of around three to one: These numbers are unstable given the difficulty of drawing boundaries around a region like Siberia. I was drawn to the analysis published in Alan Wood, Russia’s Frozen Frontier: A History of Siberia and the Russian Far East 1581–1991 (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2011). Wood cautions against accepting figures as gospel; the line between who is ‘Russian’ and who is ‘indigenous Siberian’ has changed through the centuries according to the prevailing political ideology.
ten per cent of the state income: R. H. Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade 1550–1700 (Berkeley, 1943), cited in Wood, Russia’s Frozen Frontier
earning a copper kettle in return for the equivalent skins: W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007)
Sooyong Park, who has written so eloquently about his years sleeping in hides waiting for Siberian tigers: See Park, The Great Soul of Siberia – among the most compelling books I have read about the Russian Far East. I found Park’s commitment to tracking tigers profoundly inspiring, especially given the enormous personal privations he underwent to record their behaviour. Another great writer who has documented the region’s wildlife is Jonathan C. Slaght, the Russia and Northeast Asia Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society. See his blog, ‘East of Siberia’, Scientific American (2016 and 2017). His fieldnotes are like little missives of poetry documenting the smallest traces of hard-to-find species.
3. SIBERIA IS ‘CIVILIZED’: ST PETERSBURG TO THE PACIFIC
Ermak’s story, both mighty and bathetic: For more on Ermak see Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia, trans. Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
He expressed surprise to find such a variety of musical instruments: John Bell of Antermony, A Journey from St Petersburg to Pekin (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1965)
For exiles, there was also no return: A comprehensive explanation of Siberia’s various iterations of exile is given in Andrew Gentes, The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863–1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) – one of my most important sources on Tsarist exile, along with Daniel Beer’s book, The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
where the great and good once lived, including Catherine’s governor, Aleksandr Aliabiev: See Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia. Rasputin identifies the Korniliev [sic] House as the residence of the governor general, and birthplace of the composer.
had to acquire an instrument, along with other pieces of furniture: Robert K. Massie, The Romanovs: The Final Chapter (London: Head of Zeus, 2014)
a piano often played by the Empress when she was left by herself: Robert Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (London: Thornton Butterworth Limited, 1920)
‘[I]t’s just noise to me’: Cited in Virginia Rounding, Catherine the Great (London: Hutchinson, 2006). Rounding’s riveting book is one of my main biographical sources on Catherine.
she was assigned court musicians to tell her when to clap: Alexander Woronzoff-Dashkoff, ‘Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 97:3 (2007)
used to scratch on a violin in the imperial boudoir in between playing with toy soldiers: See Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000)
There was no creature unhappier than herself: The Tsar’s lack of musical talent, his cruelty to animals and Catherine’s subsequent disgust are all observations found in Rounding’s Catherine the Great.
nothing more than pieces of hollowed wood: Chappe d’Auteroche, A Journey into Siberia, Made by Order of the King of France (London: T. Jefferys, 1770)
perhaps by throttling . . . his death put down to haemorrhoidal colic: See Rounding, Catherine the Great
Russian women donned red-heeled shoes: Woronzoff-Dashkoff, ‘Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile’
‘being then a new word in St Petersburg, used only by the elite’: Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (Minneapolis: First Avenue Editions, 2016)
‘the one with little hammers’: The Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1991)
cluttered with these new keyboard instruments: Woronzoff-Dashkoff, ‘Dashkova: A Life of Influence and Exile’
he also taught keyboard: Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014)
Another of her lovers – Grigory Orlov, a dashing, music-loving officer – made a note of it . . . while he sat playing the harpsichord: This anecdote is told in Jno Hunt, ‘The Keyboard Works of Giovanni Paisiello’, Music Quarterly, 61:2 (April 1975)
he required his choir to be with him at all times . . . the field of war: These anecdotes about Potemkin’s love of music are given in Sebag Montefiore’s biography, Prince of Princes.
In September 1791, the music-obsessed Russian envoy: Mark Ferraguto, ‘Representing Russia: Luxury and Diplomacy at the Razumovsky Palace in Vienna, 1803–1815’, Music and Letters, 97:3 (August 2016)
Potemkin’s favourite composer was given a village in Ukraine: See Stuart Isacoff, A Natural History of the Piano (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2012)
or ‘clavierland’ as Mozart called it: Arthur Loesser, Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (London: Gollancz, 1955)
‘[Clementi’s] greatest strength . . . he is a mere machine’: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, ‘Letter to his father, January 1782’, in The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, trans. Lady
Wallace (New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1866)
‘make hay while the sun shines’: Muzio Clementi, ‘Letter to Frederick Collard, June 1806’, in The Correspondence of Muzio Clementi, trans. David Rowland (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2010)
‘slippery’ in payments, ‘cursedly stingy’, possessing ‘good ears for sound tho’ they have none for sense and style’: Muzio Clementi, ‘Letter to Frederick Collard, June 1806’, in ibid.
‘nothing less than a trumpet could make its way through his obtuse tympanum’: Muzio Clementi, ‘Letter to Frederick Collard, August 1803’ in ibid.
‘keep them some time in a very warm room . . . or any other mischief don’t ensue’: Muzio Clementi, ‘Letter to Frederick Collard, June 1806’ in ibid.
as well as subsidies to help transport pianos into Siberia: The economic structure of the piano industry is one of the central themes in Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century.
‘a lazy dog’: Muzio Clementi, ‘Letter to Frederick Collard, April 1807’ in The Correspondence of Muzio Clementi, trans. David Rowland
‘Not to have heard Field . . . sin against art and good taste’: F. A. Gebhard, cited in Patrick Piggott, The Life and Music of John Field (London: Faber & Faber, 1973)
‘pianopolis’: See Piggott, The Life and Music of John Field
‘drops of rain that spread themselves like iridescent pearls’: Cited in David Dubal, The Art of the Piano (Cambridge: Amadeus Press, 2004)
a hundred-rouble note to light his cigar: This anecdote and the one following about Field’s dogs chewing his earnings are told in Piggott, The Life and Music of John Field. Piggott’s work is a biographical gem, detailing the life and character of a man much overlooked in history books.
sometimes luxurious, often turbulent life Field was to pursue in Russia: My portrait of the disorderly Field is taken from various descriptions of the composer in Piggott, The Life and Music of John Field.
Polish-born Maria Szymanowska: It is thought she may have brought with her from Warsaw her treasured English Broadwood – a six-and-a-half-octave grand, serial number 10582. This detail is given by Benjamin Vogel, ‘Pianos of Maria Szymanowska’, in The Polish Musicological Yearbook (Warsaw: Fryderyk Chopin University, 2011).
‘the velvet paws’: Cited in Adrian Williams, Portrait of Liszt, by Himself and His Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)
‘[E]verything is full of fire . . . It has a soul’: Journal de St-Pétersbourg (January 1839), cited in Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century
a fairy tale in One Thousand and One Nights: Susanna Reich, Clara Schumann: Piano Virtuoso (New York: Clarion Books, 2005)
‘The Russian rouble had a very good clink to German ears’: Cited in Nancy Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)
By 1810, six Western entrepreneurs had set up piano workshops in Russia: See Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century
This single workshop built more than eleven thousand pianos: Ibid.
music teachers were paid two to three times the amount: Ibid.
‘highly respectableising piece of furniture’: Frederick J. Crowest, Phases of Musical England (London: Remington & Co., 1881)
made it through Russia’s protective trade barriers: Again, this is explored in painstaking detail – as well as the state subsidy system that enabled the shipping of raw materials for the industry to flourish – by Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century.
Tens of thousands of uprights were distributed into small towns: From 1924 to 1934 alone, the Red October factory produced 19,731 uprights and grands. See the entry by Sergei A. Rytsarev, ‘Russia – Piano Industry’, in Robert Palmieri (ed.), The Piano: An Encyclopedia, Second Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 2015).
The Red October factory closed in 2004: Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century
A piano maker in Kazan turned to coffin-making before going bust: Erika Niedowski, ‘Music Fades for Russian Pianos’, Baltimore Sun (May 2006)
it was reported that the last of Russia’s piano factories had closed: ‘Bor’bu za rynok otechestvennyi proizvoditel’ pianino proigral’, Kommersant’ FM (March 2016)
4. THE PARIS OF SIBERIA: IRKUTSK
In the Russian State Naval Archives in St Petersburg: Referenced in Peter Ulf Møller and Natasha Okhotina Lind, Until Death Do Us Part (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2008). This is a compilation of sixteen letters written by Vitus and Anna Christina Bering over the course of 1739– 40. It offers in-depth insight into their family life, together with a detailed inventory of the items that Anna brought back to Moscow after Bering’s death in 1741, including mention of her clavichord.
took this precious instrument from St Petersburg to the Sea of Okhotsk: See Susanna Rabow-Edling, Married to the Empire (Fairbank: University of Alaska Press, 2015)
recalled the sensation of a finger being dragged across all the keys of a piano: Prince Peter Kropotkin, In Russian and French Prisons (London: Ward & Downey, 1887)
‘It is heavy going, very heavy . . . flowing into Siberia!’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter from Siberia’, in Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (Surrey: OneWorld Classics, 2007). This translation is one I have relied on again and again – an annotated collection of notes and letters written by Chekhov to his family, friends and literary associates. The main prize is Chekhov’s account of the exile system on Sakhalin Island itself.
‘I’m armed from head to foot’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to A. S. Suvorin, April 1890’, in Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans. Gordon McVay (London: Folio Society, 1994)
‘coarse to the touch’: Chekhov, Sakhalin Island
caught like a fly in gooey jam: See Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to A. N. Pleshcheyev, June 1890’, in Sakhalin Island
Siberia was a place you rarely heard an accordion . . . struggle with nature: See Chekhov, Sakhalin Island
‘a splendid town’ . . . as well as ‘hellishly expensive’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to Chekhov Family, June 1890’, in A Life in Letters, trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin Classics, 2004)
thirteen hundred books to Irkutsk: W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, |2007)
A public library went up, designed according to the fashionable European Russian style: Janet M. Hartley, Siberia: A History of the People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)
An orchestra was founded . . . five foreign languages: Ibid. Hartley says German, Japanese, Mongolian, French and Chinese were taught to educuate interpreters and ease trade and administration.
One fifth of all the silk reaching Western Europe . . . China’s tea: For more, see Erika Monahan, The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016) – a helpful resource for understanding the early economic development of Siberia.
like pot-bellied Chinese jars: Jules Verne, Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar (New York: Charles Scribner, 1891)
It was a terrifying symbolic act: For a re-telling of this well-known Siberian saga, and what it said about Tsarist power, see Daniel Beer’s brilliant account in his Cundhill Prize-winning The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile under the Tsars (London: Allen Lane, 2016).
who endured four years . . . and taught a fellow prisoner to read: See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)
the cold that froze a man’s spit could also freeze the soul: Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories, trans. Donald Rayfield (New York: NYRB Classics, 2018)
He banned any kind of foreign-printed book: Charles A. Ruud, Fighting Words: Imperial Censorship and the Russian Press, 1804–1906 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2009)
like a cup of tea nobody wanted to drink: Nicholas Daniloff, Two Lives, One Russia (New York: Avon Books, 1990)
Constantine first heard the ten-year-old prodigy: Re
counted in Moritz Karasowski, Frederic Chopin: His Life and Works, Volume II, Second Edition, trans. Emily Hill (London: William Reeves, 1906)
convinced his music calmed Constantine’s difficult nerves: The Chopin connection is told in Alan Walker, Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times (London: Faber & Faber, 2018).
the First Russian Revolution: Anatole G. Manzour, The First Russian Revolution, 1825 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1937)
‘What a wretched country! . . . how to hang properly’: This anecdote is told in Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance (London: Penguin, 2003).
‘All her life was this one unconscious weaving . . . with whom she came in contact’: Leo Tolstoy, ‘The Decembrists’, in The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, trans. Leo Wiener (Boston: Dana Estes & Company, 1904)
When Zinaida threw a leaving party in Moscow . . . wouldn’t forget their voices: See Maria Fairweather, Pilgrim Princess: A Life of Princess Volkonsky (London: Constable & Company, 1999). Fairweather tells Zinaida’s story.
‘a stitched seam’ . . . ‘the sky-cover to see what is happening on Earth’: See Uno Holmberg, The Mythology of All Races, Volume IV (New York: Cooper Square, 1964)
Maria spent her first few months in exile in the town of Nerchinsk . . . : My telling of Maria Volkonsky’s life in Siberia – where she lived and how, the travels and location of her clavichord, and the fabulous resourcefulness of her friend, the French couturier Pauline Annenkov – rely on the comprehensive research in Christine Sutherland’s biography, The Princess of Siberia (London: Quartet Books, 2001). Sutherland invests the Volkonsky myth with a level of detail which brings to life the moving, everyday humanity that helped the Decembrists thrive.
‘he would rather deal with a hundred political exiles than a dozen of their wives’: See M. Kuchaev, ‘Stanislav Romanovich Leparskii’, Russkaia starina, 28 (August 1880) cited in Jeanne Haskett, ‘Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826– 55’, Studies in Romanticism, 4:4 (Summer 1965)
large sums of money from home: In Beer’s The House of the Dead, the author describes ‘immense sums’ of money making it out to the Decembrists in exile. Of the money officially declared, the men received 355,000 roubles in the decade they spent as state criminals in Siberia, while the women received 778,000 roubles.