Remezov had a cartographer’s eye for the dimensions of the land, and an illustrator’s flourish. His maps are decorated with elaborately inked fortresses, sickle lakes and wooded copses. Many of Remezov’s manuscripts are dotted with Siberian creatures – flying horses, a pack of wolves, horned antelopes – and effortlessly fluid line-drawings of grand cathedrals, weaponry and soldiers. 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, from the fraying rivers spilling into lakes the shape of love-hearts, to forests hollowed out by lazy streams making their northern journey to the Arctic.
In my mind’s eye, Siberia began to burn with possibility, in the faults and folds of a landscape full of risk and opportunity. Names began to roll out of the emptiness: Chita, Krasnoyarsk, the River Yenisei, which is one of Siberia’s four great rivers, along with the Amur, Lena and Ob. I was captivated by how marvellous it would be to find one of Siberia’s lost pianos in a country such as this. What if I could track down a Bechstein in a cabin far out in the wilds? There was enough evidence in Siberia’s musical story to know instruments had penetrated this far, but what had survived?
On my last evening in the forest, I mentioned the idea to Aleksandr over another thin broth of dill and fish-heads with boiled white eyes – the notion of returning to Siberia to look for an instrument.
At first, Aleksandr didn’t address my idea. He talked about his personal history, and his father’s songs. In the Siberian village where Aleksandr was raised, his father had been a music teacher and accordion player; his melodies were well remembered. Aleksandr told me about a musician who ten years before had wanted help moving an old piano into his home in Khabarovsk. He described dragging it to the apartment block then up numerous flights of stairs. Then Aleksandr went back to scanning his camera-trap footage of tigers, leaving me to picture a piano being hauled across pavements of ice. Nothing more was mentioned about music until the last morning as we readied to leave the forest. Aleksandr reminded me of the tiger we had encountered on the path, and the snow pricked with blood. The sighting would be my talisman, he said.
‘You must give it a go,’ he urged. ‘The tiger will bring you luck.’
In my last hours with Aleksandr, a powerful attachment formed in my mind, that I might find as much enchantment in the historical traces of instruments through Siberia as Aleksandr did in the footprints of a rare animal. Instead of tigers, I would track pianos. By knocking on doors looking for instruments, I would be drawn deeper into Russia and perhaps find a counterpoint in music not only to Siberia’s brutal history but to the modern images of this country reported by the anti-Putin media in the West. Driving back out of the forest, I passed the spot where I had seen the tiger. If the silver birches were spirit trees, as the Nanai people believed, I wondered if I should have made a passing act of totemism to persuade Siberia to keep me safe.
When I returned to England, I started looking for good leads. I contacted Pyotr Aidu, a Russian concert pianist who had amassed a Moscow orphanage for abandoned instruments. In his collection, there was an 1820 English Broadwood, and a Russian-made Stürzwage wearing the scars of a firework detonated under its lid – a good brand, much overlooked, and one I should look out for, he advised. He said there were voices worth seeking out in old instruments. In his opinion, restored pianos have better sound than their modern counterparts.
Others disagreed. Numerous piano experts told me that all the reconstruction in the world wouldn’t necessarily make a dead piano sing again. I was told Siberia was a terrible place for pianos, especially because of the low humidity in winter. I was warned that there were strict laws to protect against artefacts of more than a hundred years old leaving the country; more than fifty years, and a piano would need, at the very least, special permission. I decided to home in on Siberia’s old trade routes, including the Trans-Siberian Railway towns that thrived in the nineteenth century, at the same time as Russian pianos spread east. I would use television adverts, social media and local radio channels to track down private instruments with stories. I would need Siberia’s piano tuners on my side. They would know best where history was still to be found in Russian homes. That was by far the most important part to me: gathering the stories, then seeing where they led.
As I marked up my map, I started to understand more clearly how the Tsars’ expansion into Siberia, and their establishment of the exile system, coincided with the state’s desire to bring European piano-making to Russia – and how instruments had trickled into this wasteland over the course of three centuries, contributing to the waves of Russification across old Siberia and lost indigenous cultures. Part of me hoped that the piano, which was such a magnificent symbol of European culture, hadn’t yet made it into a nomad’s tent. Every piano I found would be a victory, but I also wanted to seek out the corners of Siberia which had been left untouched – the parts not even Catherine the Great had managed to pull into line during a reign that helped turn Russia into a European musical nation, and Siberia into a synonym for fear. I not only needed to travel into the musical history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also to look at the piano’s domination, its shifting dominions, and its social role. Only then would I understand the value of something precious in the physical peripheries of Russia at a time when piano music was experienced ‘live’, before radio and recorded music shrank the world. By following the pathway of an object, I would get closer to understanding the place. I would learn that an object is never just an object – that each piano sings differently because of the people who used to play it and polish its wooden case.
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* The contemporary American author Ian Frazier recounts a story about Westerners flattering the seventeenth-century Tsars with the idea that their territory ‘exceeded the size of the surface of the full moon’. It didn’t matter that it was potentially untrue: ‘To say that Russia was larger than the full moon sounded impressive, and had an echo of poetry, and poetry creates empires.’ This is one of my favourite lines ever written about Siberia – a remark which speaks to the power of the great Siberian myth. Travels in Siberia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).
* Two of Remezov’s maps are published on the endpapers of this book.
Siberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific
WHEN I VISITED TOBOLSK for the first time, it was blowing a snowstorm. The weather softened everything – my mood, my expectations. This small town in Western Siberia with its white citadel, circular, frilled towers and windowless walls was built on top of a pleated escarpment. It seemed to belong to the pages of a fairy tale, Tobolsk’s profile glittering with the bulbous gold and turquoise domes of the Russian Orthodox religion. Beside the church stood a seminary – the oldest in Siberia, from which nineteenth-century missionaries were despatched all over the Empire, even to Russian America, when the Tsars’ colonial possessions extended to Alaska and parts of what is now California.* Standing at the heart of this old Siber ian capital, I was close to the site where an important battle took place 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