>
Copyright © 2020 by Sophy Roberts
Maps by Lovell Johns Ltd
Jacket design by Becca Fox Design
Jacket photographs: piano © Michael Turek; map courtesy of MS Russ 72, Houghton Library, Harvard University
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Lines from Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (trans. Robert Conquest) on p. 256 reproduced by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Lines from Cyprian Kamil Norwid’s poem Fortepian Szopena (trans. Leonard Kress) on p. 118, from Maya Trochimczyk (ed.) Chopin with Cherries: A Tribute in Verse, reproduced by permission of Moonrise Press. Lines from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s ‘Battle-order to the Army of Art’ on p. 155 in Vladimir Mayakovsky and Other Poems (2016, trans. James Womack) reproduced by permission of Carcanet Press. Extracts from Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island, on pp. 36, 69, 71, 72, 127, 128, 129, 132–3, 134, 138, 337, 339, and 341 (trans. Brian Reeve) reproduced by permission of Alma Books Ltd.
First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Doubleday an imprint of Transworld Publishers
First Grove Atlantic eBook editon: August 2020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.
eISBN 978-0-8021-4930-5
Typeset in 11/15.25 pt Sabon Next LT Pro by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For John, Danny and Jack
‘Once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents, of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery.’
SIMON SCHAMA
Landscape and Memory
‘Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters.’
EDMUND DE WAAL
The Hare with Amber Eyes
‘My piano is to me what his vessel is to the sailor, his horse to the Arab, nay even more, till now it has been myself, my speech, my life . . . I confided to it all my desires, my dreams, my joys, and my sorrows. Its strings vibrated to my emotions, and its keys obeyed my every caprice.’
FRANZ LISZT
Franz Liszt, Gesammelte Schriften, Volume II
Contents
1 · Music in a Sleeping Land: Sibir
2 · Traces in the Snow: Khabarovsk
3 · Siberia is ‘Civilized’: St Petersburg to the Pacific
4 · The Paris of Siberia: Irkutsk
5 · Pianos in a Sandy Venice: Kiakhta
6 · The Sound of Chopin’s Poland: Tomsk
7 · Home in a Hundred Years: Sakhalin Island
PART TWO
Broken Chords · 1917–1991
8 · The Last Tsar’s Piano: The Urals
9 · The End of Everything: The Altai Mountains
10 · The Moscow of the East: Harbin
11 · Beethoven in a Red Chum: The Yamal Peninsula
12 · Music in the Gulag Archipelago: Kolyma
13 · The Siberian Colosseum: Novosibirsk
14 · Vera’s Mühlbach: Akademgorodok
PART THREE
