A curious hybrid of a book – part travel
tale, part history, part quest. (Review
by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
The
Lost Pianos of Siberia is a curious hybrid of a
book – part travel tale, part history, part quest. And the quest part is
perhaps the oddest. After all, most people don’t have a burning urge to trawl
the inhospitable wastes of Siberia looking for ancient pianos.
But that is what British travel writer and
journalist Sophy Roberts did. And as she says, her hunt was “more about the
looking than the finding”. Fascinated by out of the way places, her quest
started when she met Odgerel Sampilnorov, an Italian-trained Mongolian concert
pianist, in need of a piano on the dusty Mongolian steppes. And Roberts, who
had heard of the lost Siberian pianos, decided to try to find one for her.
Siberia, “a country within a country” has
long been a place of exile for those who Russian regimes deem undesirable. The
Tsars sent Decembrists and other political opponents; Poles were exiled there
as the boundaries of their country advanced and retreated; Stalin forced his
enemies east, and, after a brief thaw in the Krushchev years, Brezhnev kept the
Gulags full. But it was after the Decembrist plot of 1825 that music flooded
the spaces beyond the Ural mountains. The exiles took pianos, part of the 19th
Century musical culture, for comfort, entertainment and, by teaching, as a way
of earning a meagre living for a sophisticated but impoverished exile
population.
Many are still there, some useable, some
derelict, some loved, some neglected. But, as Roberts points out, when an
object has lost its owner’s story, it has lost something of its meaning. And so
she attempted to trace the history of the pianos she found, not often with much
success. But on her travels, she met some extraordinary people, from Uncle
Vitya the fixer who had seen a yeti, to the man who showed her a glimpse of a
Siberian tiger, to the blind woman whose poignant story of her piano is one of
the most moving parts of the book.
In the end, Roberts finds a piano for
Odgerel, but that is almost incidental, tacked on to the end of her tale of
travel, disappointment, success and danger. In places, the book is hard to
follow as the author tacks back and forth across the enormous expanse of
Siberia. And the lists of piano makers, piano serial numbers and the strange
tangents she follows could have been pruned without losing much. But for
armchair travellers in lockdown, there are worse places to go. Margaret von
Klemperer
The
Lost Pianos of Siberia by Sophy Roberts is
published by Doubleday. - Margaret von Klemperer
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