At the top of the bell tower, its sides open to the weather, the snow absorbed the babble of the divine service going on downstairs: the priest chanting, babushki arriving with their trolley bags of shopping, the clunk and burst of heavy doors. The octagonal platform was topped with a stone cupola, its underbelly webbed with struts, many of them in poor repair. Circling the belfry was a balcony, its rim beaded in ice. Arthur warned me not to stand too close to the edge. Three of the wooden balusters were missing. Others were barely holding their place, hanging like loose teeth.
Beneath me lay the city’s wide boulevards. On a shallow incline stood historic wooden houses, and a few other bell towers puncturing the sky, their cupolas skinned in green, gold and peacock blue. With snow unable to stick to their pitch, the domes caught the sun, their satisfying shapes exactly as the author Jules Verne described them, like pot-bellied Chinese jars.
I looked for the train track to orientate me, and the river which runs through Irkutsk, winter’s grip holding it in frigid stasis. In the stillness, two figures in black moved through the whiteness below. One man shovelled snow from the cemetery path. Another swept up behind him, clearing the graves. I looked at them and wondered how they came to be there. Was the one with the dragging leg descended from a murderer, a tea trader, a political exile or a free settler? Or were they Old Siberians, born of the earliest Russian peasants, who intermarried with the indigenes? The pull of private histories is always present in Siberia. Every face informs the enigmatic texture of a place where the legacy of exile lingers, like the smell of incense, or the feeble gleam of traffic lights, with the complexity of Russia’s identity, and the mix of Europe and Asia, evident not just in the jumbled architecture of the Siberian baroque church I stood on top of in a snow-breeze in winter, but in the routes reaching out from every side.
Arthur guided me by the elbow to the edge of the belfry. He wanted to show me the nineteenth-century bell, which had been made in Berlin. The other bells came from the foundry towns ribboning the River Volga – a thousand-year-old tradition of Russian bell-making which had been significantly disrupted by the twentieth century’s atheist Soviet regime. In Irkutsk, the Soviets had turned the oldest church, into a cobbler’s shop, and another into a film studio. Bogoyavlensky Cathedral was used as a bakery, and the bell tower to store salt. These were fates to be preferred over that suffered by Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Though now rebuilt, it was torn down under Stalin’s orders and turned into Russia’s largest open-air swimming pool.
Arthur started to play – softly at first, the resonance making the snow tremble on the belfry’s flimsy balustrade as the bell’s tongue licked its copper skirt. Then the patterns started to build until all eight bells were singing. Arthur pushed and pulled the ropes with his hands, while his feet worked pedals to strike the largest bells, the pace an exhilarating distillation of music’s power, of chords at once melodically familiar and outlandishly foreign.
For five or six minutes Arthur held the city in thrall, sweat riding down the sides of his temples, his body moving with the ease of a dancer, not a giant of a man in clumsy shoes. The sequences quickened until the deepest bell tolled three bass notes. With the sound eddying over Irkutsk, I imagined the townspeople looking up. Would they ever know the identity of this person who found such intense pleasure in such an improbable place? When the last note began to fade, Arthur turned around to face me, wiping his brow.
‘I can play most things, except rock ’n’ roll,’ he said, a broad smile reaching across his face.
*
In 1591, a bell was among the first exiles to Siberia – the weight of a horse, cut down from the belfry in Uglich, a town on a bend in the River Volga in European Russia. The bell had committed the crime of being tolled as a rallying call to urge the citizens to join a small, bold and foolhardy uprising against the state. In response, and to establish his legitimacy, the Tsar Regent executed two hundred of the Uglich townspeople. In a final sadistic twist, those exiled to Siberia were forced to carry the Uglich bell, itself subject to a public lashing, some thirteen hundred miles across the Ural Mountains to Tobolsk. Like the men who bore the instrument on its journey, who had their tongues cut out, the bell was also rendered mute by having its clapper removed. It was a terrifying symbolic act: by silencing music in the belfry, the regime was exerting the alarming reach of its power over every facet of Russian life.
Nor did the horror abate after the Revolution, when the Tsarist exile system was effectively relaunched as the Soviet Gulag. Victims travelled in cattle wagons on the railways to Siberia’s mines and ports. Kolyma-bound prisoners would then sail by Stalin’s convict ships into some of the darkest corners of Soviet Russia, populating the regime’s network of forced-labour camps with political opponents and urkas (prison slang for legitimate thieves, murderers and criminals).
For some, the experience was made bearable with the smallest of survival strategies. Fyodor Dostoevsky – who endured four years as a convict in Siberia, living with dripping ceilings, rotten floors, filth an inch thick, and convicts packed like herrings in a barrel – was given a copy of the New Testament by an exile’s wife, and taught a fellow prisoner to read. The tiger conservationist Aleksandr Batalov spoke about a friend who spent decades in a Stalinist labour camp; he said his friend’s study of the migrating birds around the camp was the thing that stopped him going crazy. Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent a total of seventeen years in the Soviet Gulag, found no such comfort. He wrote about the terror of indifference, how the cold that froze a man’s spit could also freeze the soul.
I came to Irkutsk in pursuit of a piano which represented the opposite of Shalamov’s tears: the instrument belonging to Maria Volkonsky, the wife of one of the nineteenth century’s most high-profile political exiles. It functioned like a fulcrum in Siberia’s piano history, marking the moment when classical music in this penal wasteland was invested with a keen sense of European identity and pride, the piano’s Siberian story beginning with a poorly conceived rebellion in St Petersburg on 14 December 1825. It was the day of the winter solstice – an event traditionally bound to all sorts of ideas about birth, death and change.
An official NKVD (secret police) photograph of Varlam Shalamov following his January 1937 arrest for ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities.
Before dawn was up, a group of men gathered in the city’s Senate Square with the intention of deposing the Tsarist regime. The Decembrists, as the rebels came to be known, comprised noblemen, gentlemen and soldiers – including Maria Volkonsky’s husband, Sergei. Having fought alongside the peasantry during the Napoleonic Wars, Russia’s elite had come to admire the stoicism of their fellow countrymen. Liberal idealists all, the Decembrists not only wanted emancipation for Russia’s beleaguered serfs; they also sought to replace the country’s political structure with a constitutional monarchy, or even a republican form of government – a response to the despotism of the Romanovs, which had defined the dynasty’s long lineage since 1613.
Dissent had stepped up after Catherine the Great’s death. Her son, Tsar Paul I, had enjoyed a brief, tyrannical tenure before assassins strangled him with a sash in 1801. Paul’s murder was probably a good thing for music. Suspicious of Western thought to the point of paranoia, Paul formalized a ruthless backlash to Catherine’s flirtations with the Enlightenment. He banned any kind of foreign-printed book or pamphlet from entering Russia, including sheet music.
The next in line, Tsar Alexander I, had a reformer’s spirit. He relaxed state censorship but failed to progress emancipation in any meaningful way. After the trauma of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, when Moscow was all but burnt to the ground, Alexander governed with almost schizophrenic swings. He tried to improve the exile system, introducing new rights for convicts; he also fell under the influence of a demonic Russian general, Aleksei Arakcheyev, who was obsessed with turning the Empire into a military state. Alexander took increasingly draconian measures against liberal foreign in
fluence. In 1823, he banned Russian students from entering certain German universities, lest they be exposed to seditious ideas.
When Alexander died childless in 1825, leaving the country in a state of bankruptcy, Alexander’s brothers hesitated to fill the throne. The Russian crown, gossiped contemporary chroniclers, was being passed around the family like a cup of tea nobody wanted to drink. Constantine, the elder of Alexander’s siblings, had already run off to Poland, where he had fallen in love with a Catholic pianist (after Constantine first heard the ten-year-old prodigy play, his wife often invited Chopin to their Polish residence, convinced his music calmed Constantine’s difficult nerves). Alexander’s youngest brother, Nicholas, was also slow to act and take up the vacant throne; he needed to be cautious lest any advances he made be considered a coup. For the Decembrist revolutionaries, this messy two-week interregnum therefore presented the perfect opportunity to advance their plans for revolt.
But while the Decembrists’ motives were impassioned, their regiments were not. When the men began to assemble in Senate Square, there was a smaller force of rebel soldiers than the Decembrists had hoped. In addition, one of the main leaders deserted. Despite these setbacks, the Decembrists refused to disperse, so Nicholas ordered a cavalry squad to break up the rabble. Only with the whine of cannon fire did the men eventually retreat to a frozen River Neva, where Nicholas’s soldiers blitzed the ice with artillery. By nightfall, the revolt was quashed. The perpetrators were rounded up. On the same day as the Decembrist Revolt, also referred to as the First Russian Revolution, Nicholas I declared himself Tsar.
Close to six hundred suspects were put on trial. Five men were hanged, including the poet and publisher Kondraty Ryleev, who was executed holding a book by Byron in his hand. When the rope snapped on the first attempt, one of the prisoners reportedly quipped: ‘What a wretched country! They don’t even know how to hang properly.’ Another of the condemned men remarked on the privilege of dying not once but twice for his country. Whether any of these remarks are true is beside the point: the myth of the Decembrists’ martyrdom took root when Tsar Nicholas I ordered the execution to continue, and the gallows were strung with new rope.
With the hangings complete, a core of more than a hundred men were identified as coup leaders and sent to Siberia for hard labour, some for life.* They were stripped of their wealth and privileges. As they were members of some of the grandest, most decorated families in Russia, this was the high-society scandal of the time. It was talked about all over Europe, with the vengeance in Nicholas’s response also changing Russians’ perception of banishment forever. Prior to 1825, very little compassion had existed for the men, women and children sent to Siberia. After 1825, political exiles were regarded with far greater sympathy. As for the eleven women who elected to follow their Decembrist husbands and lovers into exile, they were revered as living saints. Under the rules of banishment, the women had to leave their children behind in European Russia. Any offspring conceived in exile would be forbidden from inheriting their family’s titles or estates.
The five Decembrists hanging from the gallows, sketched in Pushkin’s notepad. Pushkin was closely linked to the revolt, having gone to school with some leading Decembrists. His 1817 poem ‘Ode to Liberty’ was also cited by some conspirators as an influence. As a result, Pushkin was brought before the Tsar and restrictions placed on his freedom of movement and expression.
One of the most high-profile Decembrists banished for life was Prince Sergei Volkonsky – a childhood playmate of the Tsar’s, whose mother was a principal lady-in-waiting to the Dowager Empress. Sergei’s wife, Maria, came from an equally elite family. Her father, General Raevsky, was one of the heroes of Napoleon’s defeat in 1812. With her knowledge of literature, music and foreign languages, Maria was a descendant of Catherine’s ‘Enlightened’ Russia. She was also a well-known beauty, her abundant black curls and olive skin earning her the nickname la fille du Ganges.*
Maria decided to abandon her enchanted circle – as well as her infant son, who would die aged two – and follow her husband into exile. It became one of the most talked about tragedies of a feverishly romantic century. ‘All her life was this one unconscious weaving of invisible roses in the lives of those with whom she came in contact’ is how Tolstoy described the heroine, modelled on Maria, in his unfinished mid-nineteenth-century novel The Decembrists. Maria’s actions inspired paintings, music and Pushkin’s poetry, as well as a love of the piano on the other side of the Urals, when she took a clavichord some four thousand miles from Moscow to join her husband deep in the Siberian taiga.
The instrument, kept close at hand throughout Maria’s exile, was a gift from her sister-in-law Zinaida Volkonsky – a keen patron of the virtuosos, who hosted one of the most well-regarded cultural salons of the period. When Zinaida threw a leaving party in Moscow on the eve of Maria’s Siberian journey, Maria sat close to Zinaida’s piano, and Pushkin close to Maria. She wanted her friends to sing so that she wouldn’t forget their voices in exile. Shortly afterwards, she set off for Siberia with the clavichord Zinaida had strapped to her sledge. It was a remarkable journey, the instrument travelling all the way from Moscow to the eastern side of Lake Baikal. What the local Buryats would have made of this Russian princess as they watched her passage across the lake is hard to picture. The Buryats thought the Milky Way was ‘a stitched seam’, and the stars the holes in the sky. When meteors flashed, Siberia’s indigenous tribes described it as the gods peeling back ‘the sky-cover to see what is happening on Earth’. The sight of Maria bundled up in her ermine furs must have appeared out of this world to them, like a visitation from another planet.
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 col
lection 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.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 7
