The Lost Pianos of Siberia
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‘What remarkable fighters they were, what personalities, what people!’: Alexander Herzen, A Herzen Reader, trans. Kathleen Parthé (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012)
‘I have been told . . . improved in their presence’: Tolstoy, ‘The Decembrists’
The Decembrists teamed up to create a small academy: A fuller description of the Decembrists’ academy can be found in Haskett, ‘Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826–55’, and Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia. Haskett’s academic paper is a page-turning biography-in-miniature of Nikolai Bestuzhev, the Decembrist who fascinates me more than any other.
a collection that numbered nearly half a million: See D. I. Zavalishin, Zapiski dekabrista (Munich: J. Marchlewski, 1904), cited in Haskett, ‘Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826–55’
inventing sea stories about the distant oceans: Haskett, ‘Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826–55’
to build a huge Siberian insect collection: Glynn R. Barratt, Voices in Exile: The Decembrist Memoirs (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974)
benefitted hundreds of Siberian peasant children: Ibid.
under a sympathetic new governor, who became a visitor to her musical salons: Figes, Natasha’s Dance
she went to the concert, and was given a standing ovation: One of the best scenes in Sutherland’s stunning biography, The Princess of Siberia, describes this moment when the crowd spontaneously applauds Maria. The author provides numerous other details about how Maria’s philanthropy and cultural activism positively affected Irkutsk society in the nineteenth century.
a goose under his arm: Lucy Atkinson, Recollections of Tartar Steppes and Their Inhabitants (London: John Murray, 1863)
‘the peasant prince’: Figes, Natasha’s Dance
During the 1848 Spring of Nations . . . : For the most part, the Spring of Nations was a false dawn. By the end of 1849, the rebellions had been repressed and punished, and liberals disillusioned by the even more iron-handed rule that the revolts left in their wake. See Michael Howard, ‘The Springtime of Nations’, Foreign Affairs, 69:1 (1989). Still, with hindsight, this was also a turning point in European culture when libertarian thought began to make itself heard.
The Lichtenthal, made by a piano maker who had moved to Russia: See Richard Stites, Serfdom, Society and the Arts in Imperial Russia (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)
Mozart’s favourite maker . . . never break again: See Hermann Abert, W. A. Mozart, trans. Stewart Spencer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007)
‘The further we moved into Siberia . . . valued their rights more highly’: Cited in Barratt, Voices in Exile
5: PIANOS IN A SANDY VENICE: KIAKHTA
when Maria Volkonsky made her last visit to Lake Baikal . . . coming in to drink: Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia (London: Quartet Books, 2001)
depicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . . . world trade: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, 1838– 42 (London: Lawrence & Whishart, 1975)
the Baikal, a British-built icebreaker: For more on the train’s history around Lake Baikal, see Christian Wolmar, To the Edge of the World (London: Atlantic Books, 2014) and Harmon Tupper, To the Great Ocean: Siberia and the Trans-Siberian Railway (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965)
sometimes took up to a week to make the winter crossing: R. T. Greener, ‘Commercial and Industrial Affairs in Siberia’, US Consular Reports (March 1900)
Russian artist obsessed by Russian ethnography: See Peg Weiss, ‘Kandinsky and “Old Russia”: An Ethnographic Exploration’, Syracuse Scholar, 7:1 (Spring 1986)
when his relations were living in a taiga village: Much of the information regarding the Kandinsky family’s Siberian history is found in Vladimir Vladimirovich Baraev, Drevo: Dekabristy i semeistvo Kandinskikh (Moscow: Izd-vo politicheskoi literatury, 1991).
‘There was not a lady without a large hat . . . an entire flowerbed’: Letter from Elisabeth von Wrangell to her sisters in January 1830, cited in Susanna Rabow-Edling, Married to the Empire (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2015)
‘The Russians, after all that they have borrowed . . . a higher order of life have been engrafted’: Alexander Michie, The Siberian Overland Route (London: John Murray, 1864)
Yet once Kiakhta had been so lively . . . : For these details, I am indebted to two Russian sources: I. I. Popov, Minuvshee I Perezhitoe. Sibir’ I Emigratsiia: Vospominaniia za 50 let (Leningrad: Kolos, 1924) in the Kiakhta archives, and the research made by L. B. Tsydenova at the Kiakhta Regional History Museum. A wealth of information regarding the lives of the town’s merchant millionaires, as well as one of the earliest adverts found for a piano tuner in Siberia, are to be found in Tsydenova’s elegantly illustrated book, HeobyCHAĬnaia Kiakhta (Ulan-Ude: NovaPrint, 2013).
‘Sandy Venice’: Popov, Minuvshee I Perezhitoe. Sibir’ I Emigratsiia
the Lushnikov house was overflowing with mourners: Baraev, Drevo
‘We were very often surprised . . . associations to the civilized world’: George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, Volume II (New York: The Century Co., 1891)
‘Lushnikova the Liberal’: Tsydenova, HeobyCHAĬnaia Kiakhta. This text also gives details about the Lushnikov family’s impact on Kiakhta society.
one daughter studied sculpture with Rodin in Paris: Valentin Rasputin, Siberia, Siberia, trans. Margaret Winchell and Gerald Mikkelson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996)
Another daughter went on to sing at the Tbilisi Opera House: Baraev, Drevo
During exile, he relied on colour pigments . . . also posted seeds for the Decembrists’ vegetable garden: Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia
A volume of the Rambler: Glynn R. Barratt, Voices in Exile: The Decembrist Memoirs (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1974)
‘golden fingers’: Jeanne Haskett, ‘Decembrist N. A. Bestuzhev in Siberian Exile, 1826– 55’, Studies in Romanticism, 4:4 (Summer 1965)
He made hats, jewellery from the Decembrists’ old fetters . . . cradles and coffins: Ibid.
‘In spite of a frost of twenty-five degrees, it went perfectly’: Cited in Barratt, Voices in Exile
Aleksei Lushnikov therefore received one of the most unusual educations . . . newspapers, including The Bell: See Tsydenova, HeobyCHAĬnaia Kiakhta
Kiakhta’s merchants providing a safe house: Edward Hallett Carr, Mikhail Bakunin (New York: Springer, 1975)
Both the key and the trunk vanished: These stories about alleged lost paintings, trunks and keys are told in Tsydenova, HeobyCHAĬnaia Kiakhta.
the museum’s records of events were deliberately destroyed: This is according to Stephanie Williams, Olga’s Story (London: Penguin, 2006) – a book about the author’s grandmother, who fled Kiakhta during this period. Williams recounts how the documents were allegedly burnt during perestroika.
the White Army killed some sixteen hundred Reds in Kiakhta: Tsydenova, HeobyCHAĬnaia Kiakhta
met his death in a baker’s oven: James Palmer, The Bloody White Baron (New York: Basic Books, 2011)
frozen to death rather than shot: Baraev, Drevo
split the body in two: Ibid.
‘From Baikal onwards . . . Before Baikal it was all prose’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to A. N. Pleshcheev, June 1890’, in Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans. Gordon McVay (London: Folio Society, 1994)
6: THE SOUND OF CHOPIN’S POLAND: TOMSK
One family retreated so far . . . : The story of the Old Believers is told in all its mesmerizing detail by Vasily Peskov, Lost in the Taiga, trans. Marian Schwartz (London: Doubleday, 1994).
including a significant Jewish population: See James Loeffler, The Most Musical Nation: Jews and Culture in the Late Russian Empire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010)
Catherine’s military confiscating important historic possessions, including magnificent libraries: Tomasz Nastulczyk, ‘Two Centuries
of Looting and the Grand Nazi Book Burning’, in Flavia Bruni (ed.), Lost Books (Leiden: Brill, 2016)
Nicholas specifically ordered one of the most high-profile Polish insurrectionists . . . : For more on Prince Roman Sanguszko, see Piotr S. Wandycz, The Lands of Partitioned Poland, 1795–1918 (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1974) and Jocelyn Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960).
lectures, orchestras and a formidable library of books: See Andrew Gentes, The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863–1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
five thousand of the highest ranking rebels managed to escape Russian arrest: Jolanta T. Pekacz, ‘Deconstructing a “National Composer”: Chopin and Polish Exiles in Paris, 1831– 49’, 19th-Century Music, 24:2 (Autumn 2000)
Adam Mickiewicz – a friend and confidant: Roman Robert Koropeckyj, Adam Mickiewicz: The Life of a Romantic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008)
‘cannon buried in flowers’: Cited in David Dubal, The Art of the Piano (Cambridge: Amadeus Press, 2004)
nearly two thirds of those banished for political offences: Vladimir N. Shaidurov, ‘On the Emerging Polish Diaspora and Its Development in Siberia in the First Half of the 19th Century’, Journal of Siberian Federal University: Humanities & Social Sciences, 10 (September 2016)
which scaled up into a full-blown war: Edward Lewinski Corwin, The Political History of Poland (New York: The Polish Book Importing Co., 1917)
Russia banished another four thousand: Gentes, The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia
When Maria Volkonsky’s daughter, Elena . . . wild in the Siberian taiga: This anecdote, and Elena’s ‘à la Rousseau’ upbringing, is told in Christine Sutherland, The Princess of Siberia (London: Quartet Books, 2001).
When the first families of Kiakhta sought piano teachers: L. B. Tsydenova, HeobyCHAĬnaia Kiakhta (Ulan-Ude: NovaPrint, 2013)
When Omsk needed an orchestra: This anecdote is cited in Vladimir Shaidurov, ‘The Siberian Polonia in the Second Half of the 19th – Early 20th Century in the Polish Historiography’, Przeglad Wschodnioeuropejski, 8:1 (January 2017).
‘Siberia has received a great many individuals . . . has left an indelible mark’: Thomas Knox, Overland through Asia (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1870)
‘Chopin’s mazurkas are lost’: Cited in Andrzej Solak, ‘Legioniści z Sybiru’, Polonia Christiana (February 2013)
‘Vive la Pologne!’: Cited in Knox, Overland through Asia
‘Ivan Dontremember’: See George Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, Volume I (New York: The Century Co., 1891)
‘I forgot my chains, forgot my past life, my future destiny, forgot everything’: Rufin Piotrowski, My Escape from Siberia (London: Routledge, Warne & Routledge, 1863)
‘reigning like a despot in the drawing rooms’: The Morning Paper (1839), cited in Benjamin Vogel, ‘The Piano as a Symbol of Burgher Culture in Nineteenth-century Warsaw’, Galpin Society Journal, 46 (March 1993)
‘There is almost no house . . . the family talents’ touchstone’: Warsaw Courier (1840), cited in ibid.
‘The sound of that falling lingers . . . Is trampled by human fury’: Cyprian Kamil Norwid, ‘Fortepiano Szopeno’, trans. Leonard Kress, in Maja Trochimczyk (ed.), Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse (Los Angeles: Moonrise Press, 2010)
nearly all the luxury accoutrements of Western civilization: See Piotrowski, My Escape from Siberia
the Imperial Russian Musical Society – a brilliantly ambitious organization: For a deeper understanding of the institution’s influence and history, see Lynn M. Sargeant, Harmony and Discord: Music and the Transformation of Russian Cultural Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
not a single textbook on musical harmony was written in the Russian language: See Liliya Shamazov, ‘Preface to Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky, Concise Manual of Harmony, Intended for the Reading of Spiritual Music in Russia (1874)’, Gamut, 7:1 (2014)
the bumjakjak: See Julia Mannherz, ‘Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-century Provincial Amateur Music-making’, Slavonic and East European Review, 95:2 (April 2017)
By 1885, Tomsk had a population of thirty-one thousand . . . liberal tendencies: Kennan, Siberia and the Exile System, Volume I
‘A naturally enterprising and promising colony’: Ibid.
‘The most notable thing about Tomsk . . . come here to die’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to Alexey Suvorin, May 1890’, Anton Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans. Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips (London: Penguin Classics, 2004)
he wrote a bibliography for a St Petersburg literary journal: Anton Chekhov, The Undiscovered Chekhov, trans. Peter Constantine (London: Duckworth, 2001)
Ukrainian melodies . . . gypsy romances: A more detailed picture of the provincial Russian music scene at this time is given in Mannherz, ‘Nationalism, Imperialism and Cosmopolitanism in Russian Nineteenth-Century Provincial Amateur Music-Making’.
the first chapter of the Imperial Russian Musical Society: Many of the details about Tomsk piano culture in the nineteenth century are derived from local archive work undertaken by A. V. Salaev and L. A. Salaeva, Iz istorii fortepiannoĭ kul’tury Sibiri: instrumenty i nastroĭshchikii v Tomske (XIX–XXI v.v.), Second Edition (updated), (Tomsk: Muzykal’noe obshchestvo Novosibirskoĭ oblasti. Soiuz muzykal’nykh masterov Sibiri, 2013).
Grigory Tomashinskiy: I use the Russified version of Polish names when the subject settled in Russia.
a Polish émigré to Siberia, who with his wife: The Tomashinskiys’ story is told by V. A. Khanevich, Poliaki v Tomske (XIX–XX v.v.): Biografii (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskovo gosudarstvennovo pedagogicheskovo universiteta, 2012).
the appetite in Western Siberia for the instrument became more and more significant . . . first piano shop: See Salaev and Salaeva, Iz istorii fortepiannoi kul’tury Sibiri
The owner was Pyotr Makushin: Makushin’s biography is comprehensively told in T. Staleva, Sibirskii Prosvetitel’ Pëtr Makushin (Tomsk: Tomskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1990) – a source I rely on heavily.
Makushin’s pioneering store sold more than . . . citizens of Tomsk: Salaev and Salaeva, Iz istorii fortepiannoi kul’tury Sibiri
Yadviga Zaleskaya, a young Polish graduate: Yadviga Zaleskaya’s story is told in Khanevich, Poliaki v Tomske (XIX–XX v.v.): Biografii, with other details given by a contemporary local music historian in Tomsk, the academician Vasilov Stanislav.
7: HOME IN A HUNDRED YEARS: SAKHALIN ISLAND
‘a place of unbearable sufferings . . . capable of causing and undergoing’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to A. S. Suvorin, March 1890’, in Sakhalin Island, trans. Brian Reeve (Surrey: OneWorld Classics, 2007)
‘ugly little creature’ . . . ‘When the creaky wooden handle . . . rats, cats and puppies’: Benjamin Howard, Prisoners of Russia: A Personal Study of Convict Life in Sakhalin and Siberia (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1902)
as unfamiliar as Patagonia: Chekhov, Sakhalin Island
‘Home in a Hundred Years’: Anton Chekhov, ‘Letter to A. S. Suvorin, September 1890’, in Chekhov: A Life in Letters, trans. Gordon McVay (London: Folio Society, 1994)
journalist for the New York Times: See ‘Manchooria’, New York Times (August 1858)
‘apparently the town was no stranger to the humanities . . . at the club here’: Chekhov, Sakhalin Island. The translation I have relied upon by Brian Reeve uses language with such a deft sense of tone, it feels as if Chekhov is in the room throwing around his barbed remarks.
By the time of Chekhov’s visit . . . : Ibid., for the numerous details and anecdotes I give about Chekhov’s experience of his journey and stay on Sakhalin Island.
Girev was the son of a female convict: For Girev’s biography, see Vicheslav Innokentievich Yuzefov, ‘Northern Sakhalin to the Antarctic: The story of a Russian participant in Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, 1910–1913’, trans. Ella L. Wiswell, Polar Record, 34:190 (July 1998
).
‘In the General’s garden there was music and singing . . . only a deadly yearning’: Chekhov, Sakhalin Island
a Russian movie serial about her exploits being produced in 1914: James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds (eds), Entertaining Tsarist Russia: Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779–1917 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998)
‘civilized’ society . . . a ‘luxurious’ zoological collection . . . ‘majestic as a marquise’ with her daughters ‘dressed up like little angels’: Chekhov, Sakhalin Island
‘Penal labourer E’s wife’ was ‘a miniature young woman, nearly a child’: This story is told in full in Vlas Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s ‘Sakhalin’, trans. Andrew Gentes (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2011).
‘[T]he poor woman’s heart . . . so her tears wouldn’t be noticed’: Ibid.
‘Music – it is all that beautifies her life . . . so much suffering, grief, torment and tears’: Ibid.
‘The condemned man is delivered . . . lard-greased noose over the shroud’: Ibid. Doroshevich gives a gory, blood-curdling version of events at Voevodsk Chasm, including a profile of the old executioner, Kamlev.
the ‘wheelbarrow-men’: For the full description, see ibid. and Chekhov, Sakhalin Island.
‘A dreadful, hideous place . . . people could live of their own free will’: Chekhov, Sakhalin Island
‘Perhaps the most foul hole as exists on earth’: Doroshevich, Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East
a girl over the age of nine who was still a virgin: Charles H. Hawes, In the Uttermost East (London and New York: Harper & Brothers, 1904)
‘We are not free artists . . . today’s abnormal social conditions’: Our Days Gazette (February 1905), cited in Lynn M. Sargeant, ‘Kashchei the Immortal: Liberal Politics, Cultural Memory, and the Rimsky-Korsakov Scandal of 1905’, Russian Review, 64:1 (January 2005)