Maria spent her first few months in exile in the town of Nerchinsk, near the Mongolian border, living in a small Cossack hut. She was allowed to visit Sergei’s cell twice a week. At first the men were forbidden to receive packages from relatives in European Russia, so the women began to sneak money into Siberia through secret channels in order to buy the prisoners extra privileges. When a French-born couturier arrived in Nerchinsk in pursuit of her Decembrist lover, she turned up with hundreds of roubles stitched into her clothes. She also smuggled in Italian sheet music for Maria. 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’.
The men were moved a year later to a prison at Chita, also east of Lake Baikal. Later, the Decembrists were transferred to a new jail at Petrovsky Zavod, in a nearby valley, where the wives were allowed to share their husband’s room. Maria’s clavichord moved into the windowless prison, which was far gloomier than the one at Chita. As the years went by, children were conceived. Maria learned to speak Russian, as opposed to the French of her aristocratic childhood. She gave birth to a little girl, who died after only two days. Her next two children, a son and a daughter, survived.*
While family provided comfort to a few of the Decembrists, it was through culture – for many, music in particular – that they were able to maintain some kind of connection to the lives they had left behind, helped along by relatives sending books, paints and large sums of money from home. ‘What remarkable fighters they were, what personalities, what people!’ wrote the nineteenth-century Russian journalist Alexander Herzen 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. They set up carpentry, blacksmith and bookbinding workshops, and ran lectures on subjects from seamanship to anatomy, physics to fiscal theory. They established a library, which they filled with thousands of books sent by their relatives (according to one account, a collection that numbered nearly half a million). Another building was turned into a music room for piano, flute and strings. Locals came to study, and to attend the Decembrists’ concerts and musical soirées. The prisoners dreamed up imaginary lands, inventing sea stories about the distant oceans, and found comfort in the smallest delights of nature. The Borisov brothers, for instance, went on to build a huge Siberian insect collection. Meanwhile, the school the Decembrists created during their prison years benefitted hundreds of Siberian peasant children.
An 1832 drawing by fellow Decembrist Nikolai Bestuzhev of the Volkonskys in their cell at Petrovsky Zavod.
When Sergei Volkonsky’s decade-long hard-labour sentence was up, the Volkonskys had greater freedom to influence Siberian culture, specifically in and around Irkutsk, where they were required to settle in exile. The Volkonskys were allocated a plot in swampy taiga. This was when Maria’s two surviving children learned the native Siberian dialect. Then, in 1844, the Volkonskys bought a house in town.
The Volkonskys’ manor house in Irkutsk.
Year by year, Maria gained confidence under a sympathetic new governor, who became a visitor to her musical salons. 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’. When a classical pianist from Tobolsk came to play in Irkutsk, Maria broke protocol for an exile’s wife: she went to the concert, and was given a standing ovation. Sergei led a humbler life; he grew a long beard and frequented the market with a goose under his arm. Nicknamed ‘the peasant prince’, he was simple and unostentatious, deeply respected by Siberians who sought his help. He made numerous friends among the locals, with whom he shared his knowledge of agriculture and strand of liberal political philosophy. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, Sergei’s lifelong quest for fairer government looked like it might be coming of age. During the 1848 Spring of Nations, absolutist regimes were toppling and a reformist press was on the rise. Prussian liberals got their constitution, and elective assemblies. In Hungary, serfdom was finally outlawed.
When I visited the Volkonskys’ two-storey house in Irkutsk, now a museum, frost laced the panes and dulled the glow of lamps inside. Upstairs there was a pyramid piano – an instrument of peculiar shape and height, like a concert piano turned up against the wall. The museum staff said it probably belonged to the family’s Florentine music teacher, who had lived in one of the outbuildings. Downstairs, there was a beautiful Russian-made Lichtenthal, which Maria’s brother delivered from St Petersburg. The Lichtenthal, made by a piano maker who had moved to Russia following the Belgian revolution of 1830, was the grandest instrument Maria owned. It was also the most potent surviving symbol of her affection for music, given that Maria’s original clavichord, which had travelled on her sledge from Moscow to Siberia, had disappeared – when or where, no one was quite sure.
As for the Lichtenthal, the instrument behaved awkwardly when a museum worker tried to make the prop stick hold up the lid. The keys were sticky, like an old typewriter gluey with ink. He struck the keys until the softened notes – muted by a layer of dust, perhaps, or felt that had swollen in the damp – started to appear. At first the sound was reed-thin, no louder than the flick of a fingernail on a bell. Inside the piano, the amber wood still gleamed, the strings’ fragile tensions held in place by tiny twists around the heads of golden, round-headed tuning pins. The Lichtenthal, said the museum worker, was full of moods that made it challenging to tune. 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. Different makers devised different solutions to this problem. Mozart’s favourite maker would deliberately split a piano’s soundboard by exposing it to rain and sun, and would then wedge and glue it back together so that it might never break again.
I traced the Lichtenthal’s restorer who had picked the yellowed ivory tops off the keys to clean them, re-spun the bass strings, and repaired the veneer.* I also wanted to talk to the piano’s current keepers, to see whether they might know of other noble instruments of its type. One thing led to another and via various other city institutions, I was connected with an Irkutsk piano tuner who seemed to hold the keys to my quest. Cutting an elegant figure with a tuning hammer in his leather satchel, he said he had a private collection of forty historic instruments. His most prized piano was a rare 1813 grand which he had bought for a few kopeks from an army general in the early nineties. It was an Andreas Marschall, serial number 5, traced back to a very old Danish maker. He said it was in such bad condition that it was just a box and strings, but one day he wanted to do it up.
I made an appointment to visit the tuner’s Siberian workshop a few months later, but when I arrived back in Irkutsk, he didn’t show up as we had agreed. When I found the numbers of other tuners working in Irkutsk, they seemed