Sophy Roberts
In the epilogue of The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Sophy Roberts quotes Fyodor Tyutchev – “You cannot fathom Russia with the mind… You can only believe in it.” Once you really pay attention to the map and figure that it has Finland and Ukraine on its western borders and China and Japan in the south/east, it is easy to nod in agreement. For a lark, I tried to calculate the distance/time taken from Moscow to Vladivostok, and gave up on any dreams – 7 days, 7 time zones, 30 cities and almost 10000km!
Sophy Roberts’ Siberian journey is the hunt for a piano for her friend Odgerel in Mongolia, but for a reader if offers far more – a fantastic trip through time and space in one of the remotest parts of the world. The book is divided into three portions – 1762-1917 (from Catherine’s the Great’s ascension to the February revolution when Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and was taken to Siberia with his family), 1917-1991 (when the Soviet became the Russian federation) and 1991 – present. We see the region not just through the political changes, but primarily through the lens of music and culture. In fact, the music remains the constant.
Siberia is 1/11th of the world’s landmass, with the Urals, the Pacific, the Arctic Circle and Mongolia serving as its borders. The Tsars made it a penal colony early on, and it played host to a variety of famous folks – politicians to writers to artists. But it was also home to pianos, starting from the nineteenth century, thanks to Catherine the Great’s penchant for collecting new technologies. Chasing these lost pianos, we go across Siberia from Tobolsk and Irkutsk and Tomsk to Sakhalin, Harbin (now in China, but with a very Russian past), the Dead Road (one of Stalin’s crazy projects where the track was being built in temperatures 50 degrees below zero and where people’s hair froze on to their neighbour’s skin when they slept close for warmth), Kolyma, Akademgorodok and Kamchatka, Kurils and Khabarovsk. Names on a map, but now rich in my mind with character.
But what makes this all come to life are the people and their poignant stories. A family that retreated into the Siberian taiga in 1945 , living in total isolation in the Sayan Mountains, until someone discovered them in the 70s. They only possessed a spinning wheel and a bible and refused to believe the moon landing. Dmitri Girev, who had accompanied Robert Scott to the South Pole. The ordinary yet moving story of Lidiya in Duė Post, where the infamous coal mines used to be. Anatoly Lunacharsky whose efforts made sure pianos weren’t completely lost during the Revolution, the last days of the Romanov dynasty, the 2500 year old Ukok princess’ mummy in the Atlai mountains.
Leonid Kalsohin, an Aeroflot navigator who gave up that life to settle in a remote village called Ust-Koksa, where he is trying to build a concert hall. “The world is very remote. We are at the centre“, he says with a twinkle in his eye. The stunning concert during the Leningrad siege, when people braved the cold and the enemy fire just for the music. The Lomatchenko family in Novosibirisk, whose room in the basement of the Opera House contained musical treasures (‘It’s not much“, said Igor, ‘but it is my life.’) Mary, the 80-year-old birder, whom Sophy meets on a cruise to Commander Islands (‘neither of us had come for the certainties, but for the outside possibility that a little marvel might appear‘).
You don’t need to enjoy music to love The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Because this is about places and people, who even in this hyperconnected world are outside the radar of most of us. Sophy Roberts’ prose is vivid and deeply moving, and takes us on a fantastic tour of a unique part of the world.
