"The Lost Pianos of Siberia"

[fiefoe]

Sophy Roberts' quoxotic quest to locate a vintage piano in Siberia makes a nice companion read with "The Story of Russia", though stories from the more modern periods are still vividly sad.

• the region’s mosquitoes – as vicious as the Siberian legend suggests, that they were born from the ashes of a cannibal.
• I was sent a photograph from a musician living in Kamchatka, a remote peninsula which juts out of the eastern edge of Russia into the fog of the North Pacific. In the photograph, volcanoes rise out of the flatness, the scoops and hollows dominated by an A-shaped cone. Ice loiters in pockets of the landscape. In the foreground stands an upright piano. The focus belongs to the music, which has attracted an audience of ten.
• Siberia. The word makes everything it touches vibrate at a different pitch... Whatever the word’s ancestry, the sound is right. ‘Siberia’ rolls off the tongue with a sibilant chill. It is a word full of poetry and alliterative suggestion. But by inferring sleep, the etymology also undersells Siberia’s scope, both real and imagined.
• * Siberia is a wardrobe problem – too cold in winter, and too hot in summer – with wooden cabins and chimney stacks belching corpse-grey smoke into wide white skies. It is a melancholy, a cinematic romance dipped in limpid moonshine, unhurried train journeys, pipes wrapped in sackcloth, and a broken swing hanging from a squeaky chain. You can hear Siberia in the big, soft chords in Russian music that evoke the hush of silver birch trees and the billowing winter snows.
• Covering an eleventh of the world’s landmass, ... so far from Moscow that when some kind of falling star destroyed a patch of forest twice the size of the Russian capital in the famed ‘Tunguska Event’ of 1908, no one bothered to investigate for twenty years.
• Siberia’s size also stands as testimony to our human capacity for indifference. We find it difficult to identify with places that are too far removed. That’s what happens with boundless scale. The effects are dizzying until it is hard to tell truth from fact
• Despite... toxic lakes, and forest fires contributing to smoke clouds bigger than the EU, Siberia’s abundant nature still persuades you to believe in all sorts of mysteries carved into its petroglyphs and caves. But Siberia’s deep history also makes you realize how short our human story is, given the landscape’s raw tectonic scale
• The black iris of Russia’s ‘Sacred Sea’ is opening up, the rift so significant that when this eye of water blinks sometime in the far future, Baikal could mark the line where the Eurasian landmass splits in two: Europe on one side, Asia on the other, in one final cataclysmic divorce.
• * In Baikal there is a little omnivorous crustacean smaller than a grain of rice, with a staggering appetite. These greedy creatures are the reason why Baikal’s water is so clear: they filter the top fifty metres of the lake up to three times a year – another strange endemic aberration like Baikal’s bug-eyed nerpa seals, shaped like rugby balls, whose predecessors got trapped in the lake some two million years ago when the continental plates made their last big shift. Either that or the nerpa are an evolution of ringed seal that swam down from the Arctic into Siberia’s river systems and got stuck – like so much else in Siberia, unable to return to their homeland, re-learning how to survive.
• Fyodor Dostoevsky, who in the mid-nineteenth century described convicts chained to the prison wall, unable to move more than a couple of metres for up to ten years... Among nineteenth-century prisoners, shackles were called ‘music’, presumably from the jingle of the exiles’ chains. In Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, to ‘play the piano’ meant having your fingerprints taken when you first arrived in camp.
• Peter the Great’s Westernizing legacy when his founding of St Petersburg in 1703 first ‘hack[ed] a window through * to Europe’... serf orchestras became a distinctly Russian phenomenon, with one well-known musical fanatic of Catherine’s time insisting his entire staff address him only in song.
• This was a time when the instrument was still developing, when even the names of keyboard instruments betrayed an identity problem. The German word Klavier sometimes referred to a harpsichord, spinet, virginal or clavichord. The word ‘clavichord’, if correctly used, referred to an instrument which, like the piano, used a percussive hammer action on the strings rather than the pluck of a harpsichord’s plectrum.
• *  Where wooden houses seem to cosy up together for warmth, there are pianos washed up and abandoned from the high-tide mark of nineteenth-century European romanticism. This was one of the most important periods in the popularization of the piano, when a new breed of virtuoso performer became its most convincing endorsement. <> Soon after arriving in Russia in 1802, the Irish pianist John Field – the inventor of the nocturne, a short, dream-like love poem for the piano – could name his price as both a performer and a teacher in the salons of Moscow and St Petersburg.
• Liszt: Fans fought over his silk hankies, coffee dregs (which they carried about in phials) and cigarette butts. German girls fashioned bracelets from the piano strings he snapped and turned the cherry stones he spat out into amulets.
• Russian piano-making was thriving, an early Russian-made salon grand piano costing not much more than a couple of rows of seats at Liszt’s 1842 performance in St Petersburg.
• Piano rental schemes were introduced for private citizens, with a buoyant market for uprights able to fit into snug Soviet apartments. <> This dynamic musical culture, its provincial and social reach far exceeding the equivalent education systems in the West, fell away after 1991 when Boris Yeltsin became the first freely elected leader of Russia in a thousand years.
• followed by dinners of roasted goat, each animal cooked from the inside out with a bellyful of hot rocks.
• he handed me a novel by an American author, Daniel Mason, about a British piano tuner who travelled up the Salween River into a lawless nineteenth-century Burma... The Erard functioned as a symbol of European nineteenth-century colonization in Asia, with many of the book’s themes recalling Joseph Conrad’s story of Kurtz, the painter, musician and ivory hunter who ‘goes native’ in Heart of Darkness. In Mason’s book
• mixed motivations. If I were to go and look in Siberia, I would need to understand the story of pianos in Russian culture and how and why these instruments had travelled east in the first place. I love nothing more than listening to people talk,
• ‘The Russians have gone rotten without ever ripening!’ he wrote in 1839, citing a well-known aphorism of the time... Khabarovsk was wrapped in this fog of stereotypes. It was a leaden sprawl in monochrome with neither the brutal beauty of Moscow nor the peppermint-coloured grace of St Petersburg... Trails from smokestacks streaked the sky with worry lines... surrounding forest turns to swamp blackened with mosquitoes, their wings pricking the surface like drizzle, their swollen corpses falling into every spoonful of soup.
• the Nanai tribe, also called ‘the fishskin Tatars’ after their habit of using dried fishskins for clothes. In the late sixteenth century, Siberia’s population comprised almost a quarter of a million indigenous people living as nomads, fishermen, hunters and reindeer herders. The Nanai were one among around five hundred unique Siberian tribes.
• the Russian taiga – the so-called ‘tipsy forest’, named after the skinny, deracinated trees.. From the mid-sixteenth century, sable was Russia’s ‘soft gold’, accounting for up to ten per cent of the state income, its silken fur, each dark chocolate hair tipped in silver as if sprinkled in morning frost, drawing bands of ruffian Cossack mercenaries. Answering to the Tsars, the Cossacks colonized Siberia so rapidly, they reached the Pacific within sixty-odd years of making their first incursion over the Urals.
• Tigers are clever, with a capacity for premeditated revenge. They like walking in our footsteps, said Aleksandr, preferring the feel and efficiency of compressed snow.
• Remezov had a cartographer’s eye for the dimensions of the land, and an illustrator’s flourish... His work is still the most perfect distillation of Siberia’s lures, rendered in beautiful, calligraphic loops. Painted in watery blues, the tributaries reach across the pages like the veins of the Empire itself, each spur as finely drawn as a fishbone. Remezov drew Siberia with a delicacy that belies its ferocious reputation,
• I was told Siberia was a terrible place for pianos, especially because of the low humidity in winter.
• * Russian America, when the Tsars’ colonial possessions extended to Alaska and parts of what is now California... in 1580 when the Cossack adventurer Ermak Timofeevich ventured east across the Urals with an army of less than a thousand men to defeat the last Sibir khan – an achievement the Tsar rewarded with new chainmail. Unfortunately for Ermak, the weight of his fashionable new armour led to his drowning when he toppled into a river nearby. <> Ermak’s story, both mighty and bathetic, marked the beginning of Siberia’s colonization, which saw the Russian Empire expand its territory by more than a hundred times.
• Tobolsk’s nineteenth-century boulevards. In the old Governor’s House, the last Tsar and his family were kept under house arrest by the Bolsheviks in 1917 before being moved to Ekaterinburg, where they were eventually murdered.
• *priests: With no ceremony, concert hall or church, they started to sing, led by a wide-chested choir regent. For the next ten, fifteen minutes, they barely paused in their plaintive chants, their naked voices making the hairs stand up on the backs of my arms. Something felt innately right about these people – in their precise commitment to their art, and their passionate belief in a divinity greater than themselves. I felt reassured that in a part of the world associated with fear I was now among Siberians for whom music mattered as much as air.
• Catherine the Great... with one account claiming she was assigned court musicians to tell her when to clap... she adored English gardens and Scottish architects. Like the vast art collection she acquired, music was a means to establish power and prestige – above all, to bring Russia closer to Europe.
• After Païsiello came Giuseppe Sarti, an Italian composer-conductor and favourite of Catherine’s most influential paramour, Prince Grigory Potemkin – a political genius whose passion for music was as intense as his love-making was renowned.
• In September 1791, the music-obsessed Russian envoy to Vienna urged Potemkin to employ a willing Mozart. Unfortunately for Russia, by the end of the year both Potemkin and Mozart were dead... the piano duel of the century: Muzio Clementi versus Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The event, attended by the great and the good, pitted the two musicians against each other in a kind of eighteenth-century boxing ring...
• * Clementi began exporting his English brand of pianos to Russia... Through his pupil and sales representative in Russia, the Irish composer and performer John Field, Clementi was able to show off his pianos’ capabilities to Russian customers... Field’s teaching – his students included Aleksandr Aliabiev, who wrote ‘The Nightingale’ in Tobolsk jail, as well as Mikhail Glinka, who described the pianist’s fingers falling on the keys like ‘drops of rain that spread themselves like iridescent pearls’.. the sometimes luxurious, often turbulent life Field was to pursue in Russia for the next thirty years, his eccentric genius revealed in the way he wore his stockings inside out, his white tie skewed, and his waistcoat buttoned all wrong.
• The Russian audience is completely different from the Carnegie Hall audience in New York, Matsuev explained. But Siberians trump them both: ‘They understand everything. They are my number one audience,’ he said, describing the perfectly attentive ‘suspicious silences’ he experienced east of the Urals.
• Anna was married to Vitus Bering, a Danish-born sea captain in the service of Peter the Great. Known as the ‘Russian Columbus’, Bering’s job was to establish a postal route across Siberia, build ships on Russia’s Pacific coast, and then penetrate the American Northwest. Anna, along with her clavichord, accompanied him.
• Siberia’s rivers were another hindrance for travellers: instead of winding across the Empire from west to east, or vice versa, all the big waterways flowed south to north before emptying into a frozen Arctic Ocean.
• passing a tall priest with the poise of a chess piece, his neck held stiff in a rigid golden cassock.
• a few other bell towers puncturing the sky, their cupolas skinned in green, gold and peacock blue. With snow unable to stick to their pitch, the domes caught the sun, their satisfying shapes exactly as the author Jules Verne described them, like pot-bellied Chinese jars.
• The pull of private histories is always present in Siberia. Every face informs the enigmatic texture of a place where the legacy of exile lingers, like the smell of incense, or the feeble gleam of traffic lights, with the complexity of Russia’s identity, and the mix of Europe and Asia, evident not just in the jumbled architecture of the Siberian baroque church
• * Arthur started to play – softly at first, the resonance making the snow tremble on the belfry’s flimsy balustrade as the bell’s tongue licked its copper skirt. Then the patterns started to build until all eight bells were singing. Arthur pushed and pulled the ropes with his hands, while his feet worked pedals to strike the largest bells, the pace an exhilarating distillation of music’s power, of chords at once melodically familiar and outlandishly foreign... For five or six minutes Arthur held the city in thrall, sweat riding down the sides of his temples, his body moving with the ease of a dancer, not a giant of a man in clumsy shoes. The sequences quickened until the deepest bell tolled three bass notes. With the sound eddying over Irkutsk,* In 1591, a bell was among the first exiles to Siberia... The bell had committed the crime of being tolled as a rallying call to urge the citizens to join a small, bold and foolhardy uprising against the state. In response, and to establish his legitimacy, the Tsar Regent executed two hundred of the Uglich townspeople. In a final sadistic twist, those exiled to Siberia were forced to carry the Uglich bell, itself subject to a public lashing, some thirteen hundred miles across the Ural Mountains to Tobolsk.
• Gulag: he said his friend’s study of the migrating birds around the camp was the thing that stopped him going crazy.
• Catherine the Great’s death. Her son, Tsar Paul I, had enjoyed a brief, tyrannical tenure before assassins strangled him with a sash in 1801... Paul formalized a ruthless backlash to Catherine’s flirtations with the Enlightenment. He banned any kind of foreign-printed book or pamphlet from entering Russia, including sheet music. The next in line, Tsar Alexander I, had a reformer’s spirit.
• the Decembrists: They were stripped of their wealth and privileges. As they were members of some of the grandest, most decorated families in Russia, this was the high-society scandal of the time...After 1825, political exiles were regarded with far greater sympathy. As for the eleven women who elected to follow their Decembrist husbands and lovers into exile, they were revered as living saints.
• * Volkonsky: Maria decided to abandon her enchanted circle – as well as her infant son, who would die aged two – and follow her husband into exile. It became one of the most talked about tragedies of a feverishly romantic century. ‘All her life was this one unconscious weaving of invisible roses in the lives of those with whom she came in contact’ is how Tolstoy described the heroine... Maria sat close to Zinaida’s piano, and Pushkin close to Maria. She wanted her friends to sing so that she wouldn’t forget their voices in exile... The women were pushy, persistent and resourceful. As for the Decembrists’ prison commander, he soon got the measure of their capabilities, remarking ‘he would rather deal with a hundred political exiles than a dozen of their wives’.
• of the gentlemen revolutionaries. The Decembrists represented everything brave and humane that was missing from Tsar Nicholas I’s lightless reign. ‘I have been told, – I don’t know whether it is true, – that wherever they worked in the mines in Siberia, or whatever it is called, the convicts who were with them, improved in their presence,’ wrote Tolstoy. The Decembrists teamed up to create a small academy in exile.
• She expanded Irkutsk’s hospital for orphans, fought for musical education to be introduced in schools, and raised money to build the town’s first purpose-built concert hall – civic duties that earned her the sobriquet ‘the Princess of Siberia’... Sergei led a humbler life; he grew a long beard and frequented the market with a goose under his arm. Nicknamed ‘the peasant prince’,
• In Siberia, violent swings in humidity and heat can shrink the wood. The soundboard, a large, thin piece of wood which transforms vibrations into musical tones, can easily crack... Mozart’s favourite maker would deliberately split a piano’s soundboard
• The tuner opened the piano up to show me where he had found three gold coins, dated 1898, minted with the face of Tsar Nicholas II. The tuner had sold the coins during perestroika to help make ends meet... Siberia’s pianos were full of hidden treasures, like the grand piano her teacher used to own. Inside its workings, the woman had concealed all her jewellery. The piano was her teacher’s family safe...
• Such an instrument would be ill matched to a musician like Odgerel, who needed pure sound reinforced by a retrievable inner story.
• Maria Volkonsky: Did Siberia allow her to live more intensely than she could have ever done in high society back home? Was it empowering in nineteenth-century Russia to be disconnected from the period’s suffocating rules and expectations around her gender and class?
• Kiakhta, the old tea traders’ town on the Mongolia–Russia border depicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as if it were one of the most important centres of nineteenth-century world trade.
• the Baikal, a British-built icebreaker. The ship, made of parts transported to Russia in pieces, sometimes took up to a week to make the winter crossing – from port to port, less than fifty miles – carrying twenty-five Trans-Siberian Railway cars on her specially designed deck.
• * the lake’s frozen surface ... The sweeps and curves look like the drawings of Wassily Kandinsky – an avant-garde, turn-of-the-century Russian artist obsessed by Russian ethnography, the ‘double faith’ combining paganism and Christianity, as well as the relationship between music and painting, between sound, points, lines and planes... Kandinsky’s great-grandmother claimed Buryat–Mongol blood. His father was a tea merchant from Kiakhta.
• In this barren steppe country, the snow didn’t seem to settle like it did further north, but hung in the air like smoke... A nineteenth-century account called the town Asia’s ‘Sandy Venice’... The reason for this wealth was unique in Russia: for every consignment of tea that passed through this border, Kiakhta’s merchants creamed off a tidy local tax, part of which was invested in local philanthropy. It worked brilliantly until the money started to show signs of drying up after 1869, when the access provided by the Suez Canal took business from Eurasia’s camel trains.
• the Mongolian Revolution of 1921 just across the border. Leading the army of Mongol revolutionaries was a madman with an identity crisis: an Austrian-born German warlord – Baron von Ungern-Sternberg, known as the Bloody White Baron – who had originally attached himself to imperial Russia as a Tsarist officer, then ‘went rogue’. Believing he was an incarnation of Genghis Khan, von Ungern wanted to reinstate Mongolia’s old Buddhist theocracy... They were frozen to death rather than shot, so as not to waste bullets,
• a direct connection to the vision of those brilliant exiles of 1825 who spread their European culture through a region that still feels fundamentally Asiatic – fenceless steppe country imbued with Buddhist history, where there are as many churches as there are Buryat invocations to the spirits evident in the blue and yellow ribbons tied to trees... ‘From Baikal onwards, the poetry of Siberia begins,’ wrote Chekhov to a friend: ‘Before Baikal it was all prose.’
• Many of the Old Believers, both clergymen and followers, left Russia for the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth on the Empire’s western border. A large number went east to Siberia... Even today, you can tell an Old Believer by the set of crockery and cutlery he keeps to himself – a legacy of their fear of contamination beyond their own closed world.
• What was Poland’s loss, however, was Siberia’s gain, with significant forced migrations of musically educated Polish rebels – including a significant Jewish population... In 1795, which was the most dramatic partition of the three, Poland lost its sovereign statehood. Even the country’s name was wiped when Catherine annexed the Western Provinces, a region that roughly included Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus... Poland enjoyed a brief moment of semi-autonomy during the Napoleonic Wars, but that vanished when the Poles actively participated in the French invasion of Russia, and Tsar Alexander I decided the Poles needed to be punished.
• * There are numerous echoes, in fact, between the story of the Polish rebels of 1830 and the Decembrists. At different prisons and mines in Eastern Siberia, the new influx of Polish prisoners organized lectures, orchestras and a formidable library of books.
• a tragedy Chopin sought to capture in his brooding ‘Siberian’ or ‘Revolt Polonaise’.‡ It opens very quietly, in a low, gloomy register, with the piano’s newly invented damper pedal allowing for ravishing variances in mood and texture. The music then explodes – con forza! agitato! molto crescendo! – before slipping back into a sense of hopeless defeat, the dark ending of the polonaise evoking the cold and damp of the Siberian mines.
• When the first families of Kiakhta sought piano teachers for their children, they relied upon the Polish diaspora. When Omsk needed an orchestra, it was the Poles who played the clarinet, strings and trumpet.
• Others stayed on, like the grandfather of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was sent to Tomsk after the 1863 January Uprising. Year by year, former exiles moved up through the ranks of Siberian industry, geological exploration and administrative ‘society’
• Rubinstein’s influence was remarkable. In 1862, he successfully opened the country’s first conservatory in St Petersburg, with Tchaikovsky among the inaugural intake. All through the 1860s, the so-called ‘Mighty Five’ of Russian composers – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin and Mily Balakirev – were busy creating a new, deeply serious national identity for Russian music. All of them were self-taught,
• Under the piano’s lid were eight empty butter pots covered in damp silk – a home-made humidifying system for winter.
• ** Avvakum found time in exile to scribe one of the earliest travel books on Siberia. His pocketbook account describes Lake Baikal covered with so many swans, they looked like snow, and cliffs so high you would crick your neck to see them. Avvakum, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself, trans. Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees (London: Hogarth Press, 1963).
• Photo: One of Captain Scott’s sled dogs, Chris, listening to a gramophone on the ice, c. 1911.
• Dragonflies with crisp, see-through wings milled about flowering weeds.
• * It is astonishing that not everything was destroyed in these dark days of revolution. This was because of the immediate, prescient actions taken by Lenin to protect the country’s enormous cultural wealth. On day three of the October Revolution, Lenin appointed the critic and playwright Anatoly Lunacharsky as Commissar of Enlightenment – an Orwellian-sounding title for a sensitive, artistic man whose numerous roles as head of the Soviet Ministry of Arts included shoring up the country’s cultural treasures. Lunacharsky needed to stem the flow of instruments out of Russia; he needed to nationalize them, like the piano factories, making them state rather than private property...  Kubatsky was given his own train and soldiers to help him execute orders. His sweep included a cello made by Nicolò Amati, which was discovered in a derelict mansion in the Crimea, and four Stradivarius violins confiscated from an old count; they were handed over only after the count performed one last melancholy solo dressed in his ceremonial military uniform... Remarkably, not a single piece in either collection has since been lost, not even during the Nazis’ Siege of Leningrad, when the number of civilian casualties ran to nearly four times more than the total of bombing victims in Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined
• Unbeknown to their executioners, the girls’ corsets had been tightly sewn with jewels before they had left Petrograd. The diamonds protected them like bulletproof vests, with fragments of jewellery later found scattered in a Urals mineshaft a few miles to the city’s north-west, where the bodies were first interred. Precious stones and pearls, hacked and tarnished by fire, had been trampled underfoot, along with splinters of glass from the Empress’s spectacles, the family doctor’s false teeth, and eggshells from the executioners’ picnic.
• I received news that the man who had first discovered the Romanov remains in the forest outside the city had agreed to meet me. His name was Aleksandr Avdonin... forever after, it must have been like sleeping in the presence of unquiet ghosts. Galina said that her husband was so stressed by the discovery that he didn’t speak for a couple of months.
• Pivots. The fixed point on which a mechanism depends. The person or thing on which something hangs. Like a piano, movement is dependent on the stability of its fixed parts. When a key on a grand piano is pressed down, it sets in motion a small pivot movement that throws a felted hammer upwards to strike a string, or strings. Only with a stable pivot will the music ever sound... Beneath the Urals’ black soil, I could feel the questions reverberating deep inside Russia’s conscience, like the last working key on the Ipatiev piano hitting a broken pivot and not making any sound. My conscience also hummed and hawed. Something in me found it violently exciting to have stepped so close to the end of the Russian Empire; every hint of a lost piano encouraged my ambitions, as if the historic instruments with state stories somehow carried a deeper timbre. I also felt ashamed, as if I had joined the ranks of the early nosy parkers,
• Cats provided a food source for a starving populace during the Leningrad Siege. The Hermitage cats, however, were saved in order to keep the treasures of the museum safe from mice.
• it was Russia’s Prince Elim Pavlovich Demidoff – the richest man in the world – who made perhaps the biggest killing after he spotted some of the Altai’s most alluring quarry in a London taxidermist’s shop. In 1898, he bagged thirty-two of the largest wild sheep on the planet, each animal weighing more than two big men, a single horn if it were uncoiled measuring almost two metres in length.
• The Roerichs had spent the summer of 1926 in the Altai as part of a four-year painting and ethnographical expedition... Nicholas Roerich, born in St Petersburg in 1874, was one of Russia’s great twentieth-century polymaths. He first rose to prominence as an archaeologist, then as a set designer for the composer Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Diaghilev, the impresario and founder of the Ballets Russes.* Roerich was a brilliant painter... they were searching for the mythical kingdom of Shambhala – the earthly paradise in Tibetan Buddhism.
• * Altaian space junk, shot by Norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen in 2000. The men in the image are collecting scrap metal from the crashed spacecraft. The white flecks are butterflies... The image depicts two men on top of a crown of crumpled metal photographed at the very moment a butterfly storm is taking place. The creatures are swarming in a thick cloud of beating wings, the butterflies as white as snow. The image thrums with vibrations in the air, a rushing whirr against the Altai’s summer flush of grass. The landscape feels like a kind of paradise, a throwback to an untamed planet – raw and unpopulated, the rocket the poisoned apple in a field of blooming life.
• writer of Doctor Zhivago described the Russian composer Aleksandr Scriabin at the piano and ‘the pitch of an unheard-of blending’ – music that could also describe the colours of the Altaian landcape. The snow crust creaked when I waded into drifts as deep as my thighs. We crossed narrow bridges strung with baubles of snow dangling off scoops of wire. Above the skirts of forest which draped the mountains, the sky turned from white to pink. When snow began to fall, the flakes looked like diamond dust, then splinters of trembling gold.
• I needed to keep the object front of mind, not the symbolism Russians can read into every experience, which was pulling me in with the same ease as Uncle Vitya’s stories. If a photographer could come upon a piece of space junk in the Altai at the very moment a butterfly storm was taking place, then surely I would find an instrument for Odgerel.
• zigzagged down switchbacks – in Russian, nicknamed ‘a mother-in-law’s tongue’.
• The Altai’s roots run as far back as the Pazyryks, a Scythian tribe who invented saddles, said Uncle Vitya, as well as the Huns, Uyghurs and Mongols. The stories of human prehistory in these mountains make the Altai another cradle of mankind.
• ‘But this place is so remote,’ I remarked, feeling the tables turn: Leonid was asking me to find him a piano, rather than the other way around. ‘The world is very remote,’ he said, his grey eyes alight: ‘We are at the centre.’
• * Harbin – these days a Chinese metropolis, but at that time in history a Russian city across the Siberian border in Qing-controlled Manchuria. Known as the Moscow of the East,.. There was a brittle glamour to the city, with cabaret nights, rampant prostitution and banditry. But at least life felt free. As early as 1907, plays censored by Tsarist Russia premiered in Harbin... brilliant early jazz artists who gave Harbin its swing in one of the stranger twists in the musical history of Eurasia.
• The anarchic freedom of improvisation fitted with contemporary Russian culture in the Far East, where big bands and ragtime struck dramatic carpe diem chords in refugee communities. The Harbin Symphony Orchestra included principals who had been soloists in major Russian orchestras. The First Harbin Musical Academy was among the top conservatories in Asia... When Lundstrem stumbled on a recording of ‘Dear Old Southland’ by Duke Ellington, that was it: the swing was on. In 1934, Lundstrem founded what was to become the world’s longest existing jazz band. Oleg played the piano
• artists from Moscow’s Bolshoi later moving to Paris for careers at the Folies Bergère. White Russian ‘princesses’ worked as dancing girls alongside gypsy performers (the less attractive Harbin women, observed an American journalist in 1933, tended to work in dentistry).
• A large proportion of kharbintsky – ethnic Russians from Harbin – met less than salubrious fates. They returned to the USSR, only to perish in the Gulag because of their connection to the Whites in the Russian Civil War, or because of an alleged collaboration with the Japanese.
• it seemed strange to me that in a country which now counted piano talent as one of its most important cultural exports, there was only negligible evidence of the wonderful old Russian artists who did so much to turn the Chinese ear to piano music in the first place... I couldn’t find a piano attached to an individual’s past, .. It was as if there was no past before Mao, no individual before state property.
• German U-boats slipped into these waters as part of an ambitious Nazi strategy called Operation Wunderland to command Siberia’s Arctic sea lanes.
• Where was the lost ship’s piano now? I pictured the instrument drifting in a polar sea, its ivories washed up among a colony of seals, the notes entwined with the clicks and trills of a beluga whale.
• As I struggled to understand how the Sihirtia, a cornerstone of the Nenets’ culture, lined up with her Christian beliefs, Anna explained it thus: these sacred rocks were God’s unfinished altars and churches, she said.
• With his son’s gentle urging, Semion agreed to sing. They performed one of his compositions – mother, father and child in melodic unison, their bodies linked in a close-knit triptych with Semion seated at the piano stool.


• Lyudmila, who had interviewed survivors from the railway construction, found evidence of extreme human resilience. A Greek poet studied higher maths by writing numbers in the snow... On their release, Stalin re-arrested his own Red Army soldiers as traitors and sent them to Railway 501.
• This tiny patch of history, which betrayed nothing of the railway’s epic sorrow, felt like a stark moral prompt to engage with the extreme opposite of music. Confronting memory and repression, I knew that however hard I wanted my piano hunt to celebrate all that is magnificent about Siberia, much of what I was looking for was tied up with a terrifying past.
• Kolyma: An Okhotsk sea fog moved in until I could barely see the grey stillness of the bay where Stalin’s Gulag ships had offloaded their human cargo, including Russians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Hungarians and Volga Germans, Koreans, Japanese, and Spaniards ‘rescued’ by the USSR during the Spanish Civil War.
• The Soviet poet Vera Inber said Leningraders got so adept at listening they could separate the sounds of an air raid like the orchestral parts in a Tchaikovsky concert.
• * But there was only one ensemble left that could possibly play this hugely ambitious work. The city’s best orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic, had already been evacuated to Novosibirsk in Siberia, leaving behind a starving, lower-rank alternative. The Leningrad Radio Orchestra comprised a hundred members before the war. In the middle of the siege when the orchestra was ordered to re-form, the list of members made for dismal reading: there were numerous names crossed out (known to be dead), and others marked up in red to indicate they were on their way out. At the first rehearsal fewer than twenty musicians turned up, so military commanders called on soldiers to make up numbers. In late June, Shostakovich’s score was airlifted into the besieged city and the improvised orchestra – playing in layers of old clothes, described by one participant as ‘dressed like cabbages’ – began to prepare as best they could... When it was over, not only Leningraders but also German soldiers listened to the half-hour standing ovation given by a people on its knees.
• As Leningrad suffered, Novosibirsk – the de facto capital of Siberia, sitting almost a third of the way between Moscow and Vladivostok – was doing rather better: it wasn’t under bombardment, and could therefore function as a kind of Siberian safe house during the war... Novosibirsk is still home to the largest opera house in Russia, founded under Stalin in the thirties. The so-called Siberian Colosseum
• ‘Crate 63’, containing Catherine the Great’s precious 1774 Zumpe piano anglais...  On the long, two-month journey to Siberia, the convoy encountered hostile railway workers, brutal weather conditions and a fire from a stove. To escape bombardment, one of the trainloads hid for two weeks in a forest siding.
• A full-size punch bag was suspended over a concert grand in the middle of repair, the precision and the improvisation of Igor’s craft hidden among the pliers, lacquers and copper-wound bass strings, the tuning pins, hinges and wooden ribs. It was as if all the niche skills which had created the early piano industry had ended up here, in a basement in Novosibirsk: the belly-men (who worked with the sounding-board makers), the chipper-ups (the men who gave the instrument its pre-tuning), the key makers, polishers and action finishers.
• It was a powerful idea that appealed to just about everyone, leading to the creation of what was later described as ‘the little town with probably the biggest I.Q. anywhere’. For the country’s intelligentsia with a renegade bent, the far-off location of Akademgorodok meant their work might be less shackled to the party’s chain
• Vera Lotar-Shevchenko: By the time she came out of the Gulag herself, the man she loved had been taken from her, leaving her nothing but the music inside her head... the female prisoners had seen how badly she had pined for her piano, so they carved a keyboard into her wooden bunk with a kitchen knife so she could practise silently at night. Another account gives her Gulag piano as a kitchen table... Vera sat at that instrument for one, maybe two hours (typically of Vera’s story, there are others who say far longer). She played without stopping, laughing and crying, the recall of her repertoire note-perfect as her stubby fingers behaved with the same exhilarating precision as they had before her arrest. Teachers and students who were listening at the door were dumbfounded by this magnificent squall of Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven... a dilapidated Soviet-era Estonia. The Steinway was locked shut, in what felt like a deliberate snub. Vera cried a little. She asked her friend for a shot of vodka, then walked back on stage in a borrowed, ill-fitting concert dress to play the Estonia so spectacularly that everyone from the coat-check to the kitchen staff was spellbound.
• some new pianos imported from China: the humidity and temperatures were so low in Siberia in winter that the instruments were condemned before they arrived, the moisture sucked out of the pin blocks which meant that the strings couldn’t hold any tension.
• During the troubled years of perestroika, Stanislav had also come up with a plan for Soviet customs officers on how to frisk a grand piano for drugs. A piano, he said, was a better place for hiding heroin than down the bell of a trombone. More than anything, I wanted to see him again because of a passing comment he made about surviving the Siege of Leningrad. The way he wore this monumental experience so lightly made for an uncanny feeling in his company... As for the records he didn’t like, they had another use. When there was electricity, he sat on the oven with a record between his bottom and the stove top. The records slowly melted, the heat seeping into his bones... During the siege, he described how familiar streets started to appear strange to him. Leningrad’s most iconic structures were camouflaged to confuse German pilots. St Isaac’s dome was dulled with grey battleship paint, and the spire of the Admiralty scaled by mountaineers so it could be hidden under canvas... One of their family friends suspended a piece of sugar from the ceiling. She hung it there because the thought of it made everything else taste that little bit sweeter.
• The Rönisch action lasted well in extreme conditions; it was strong enough to handle the trials of shipping, which is one of the reasons Rönisch pianos sold well in the Spanish and British colonies, as well as in Russia. Rönisch tweaked the seasoning and finishes for the Russian climate,
• * The more he talked, the less Stanislav’s remembering focused on the siege than on the music that punctuated his past. He was using pianos in the way J. Alfred Prufrock measured out his life with coffee spoons.
• Getting to Kamchatka has also always been challenging... They moaned about corduroy roads made from logs laid across sunken pilings.
• The Sredinny Range, a spine of ice caps and lava plateaus, runs down the centre of Kamchatka in a line of volcanic cones. Off these peaks flow short, fast-moving rivers which flood alluvial plains. Wildlife has the upper hand, thriving in a hostile landscape where geysers burst into the air. Pools of chocolate mud bubble and steam, while up above, the sky is often draped in rainbows – double, even triple half-moon crescents of splintered light. There is jeopardy in the whorls of molten lava glowing red at night, and the petrified forests which stand like fields of stubble,...
• The man recited one of his poems: ‘I am very useful to this Earth, to this very fairy-tale Earth.’
• Petropavlovsk for short, is unlike any other Russian city. At night, there is something of San Francisco to the pinpricks of light curled around the hills, dips and shoreline. The horseshoe-shaped Avacha Bay lies out in front, the lid of water heavy, as if it is a bowl of liquid mercury. By day, the city returns to being utterly, unapologetically Soviet.
• These masks were staples in the Cold War – originally made in case an attack from America took place. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the Russian–American relationship was fuelled by a very different propaganda. Russia was being called ‘America’s best friend’. The country’s two leaders were being favourably compared in the press – Tsar Alexander II for abolishing serfdom in Russia, and Abraham Lincoln for outlawing slavery in the United States.
• We anchored off Medny first. Darkly alluring, this is about as far as you can go in Russia – the silent, final ellipsis at the end of this vast country’s turbulent story. It is Siberia’s last frontier, a tiny continental fragment where sea and land fight against each other in a state of constant tension and unease. Medny is where Eurasia runs out entirely
• She would kill time organizing her list, familiarizing herself with the new species she hoped to find, their images detailed in her heavily annotated book on birds of the Russian Far East. I would do the same, my list comprising all the instruments I had already ticked off during my travels,
• As I surveyed my findings, I saw all the surprises my search had thrown up – and how each piano had reduced Russia’s illimitable size to a human scale.
• * Then Stürzwage’s heir, also called Léopold, born in 1879, abandoned the family business for a career in painting. In the early twentieth century he left Moscow for Paris, where he changed his name to Léopold Survage, worked as a tuner at the Pleyel concert hall in Paris to help make ends meet, and trained with Henri Matisse. He exhibited his musically inspired ‘colour symphonies’ with Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky,... He designed fabrics for Coco Chanel, and shared a studio (and drinking habit) with the painter Amedeo Modigliani. In a 1918 Modigliani portrait of the Russian émigré, one of Survage’s eyes is smudged. When Survage asked why he had been given only one eye, Modigliani replied: ‘You regard the world with one eye, and with the other you look inside yourself.’
• Edward Said in his description of the exile’s divided psyche. ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,’ he writes: It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.
• grandmother. She had married the son of a Pole captured during one of the later Polish revolts. She had met him at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk, where the Tsar and his family were later incarcerated. As Nina talked me through the family tree, it started to feel as if all the fragments scattered throughout my piano hunt were finally coming together like Russian dolls in one neatly organized, close-fitting stack... Nina’s grandfather was a well-regarded academic among the citizens of Tobolsk. He was executed during the Revolution by the Reds
• Sometimes, however, the truth is more banal than all of this, and Siberia is like anywhere else – a place where people get bound to the territory, not knowing quite when, why or how. There were times when I came to think of Siberia not only as a physical location, but also as the word to describe what happens if you stay too long in a place that is not your own, sticking around for one winter too many until you realize you have gone too far to turn back.
• 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.
• I gave Kostya my word: if he could get a piano to Mongolia, then I could surely get a Siberian to Steinway. <> On 18 May 2018, the Grotrian-Steinweg was packed with mattresses, ropes and foam to start its two-thousand-mile-long journey by truck and trailer from Novosibirsk to the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia.
• This was music at its best: intimate, pure and true. Russian, Mongolian, German – it didn’t matter whose; the music flowed so effortlessly it was as if it were revealing a shared and noble truth.
• The felt was embroidered with flowers – stitched by one of the Grotrian-Steinweg’s previous owners before the Lomatchenkos had bought it in the Novosibirsk antiques shop. It was a personal memento – a kind of coat to protect something that had been dearly loved by someone, somewhere, its history still unknown. Who was this person? Would they be glad to be weaving these invisible roses in the lives of those who came next?
• ‘[John] Field did not so much play his own nocturnes, but dreamed them at the piano,’ observed Liszt of the Irishman who had first set Russia’s hearts alight. That was how it felt listening to Odgerel on the Grotrian-Steinweg. It was as if she were revealing the singing heart of the instrument that had affected so many lives through the centuries,