While the Poles in Paris could protest freely, back home the line of Polish rebels clanking towards Siberia was getting longer and longer, with nearly two thirds of those banished for political offences in the 1830s belonging to a culturally sophisticated nobility. Following the Poles’ next notable revolt in January 1863 – at first an under-resourced insurrection of skirmishes and peasant rebellions, which scaled up into a full-blown war – Russia banished another four thousand members of Poland’s educated upper classes to the Siberian wastes. While the Russians were ransacking Warsaw, famously tossing Chopin’s piano on to a bonfire in the city square, a bright light was being flicked on in Siberia’s expanding towns.
When Maria Volkonsky’s daughter, Elena, returned to St Petersburg after the Decembrists were granted amnesty, the new Tsar’s wife remarked on her excellent French. For a child brought up ‘à la Rousseau’, as her mother described Elena’s early years running wild in the Siberian taiga, Elena’s sophistication came as something of a surprise to the Romanov court. Elena replied she had been taught by a Polish political prisoner exiled to Siberia. Elena Volkonsky’s Siberian education was unusual, but not unique. When the first families of Kiakhta sought piano teachers for their children, they relied upon the Polish diaspora. When Omsk needed an orchestra, it was the Poles who played the clarinet, strings and trumpet.
Thomas Knox, an American journalist travelling through Siberia in 1866, remarked on this erudite presence: ‘Siberia has received a great many individuals of high culture in the persons of its political exiles. Men of liberal education, active intellects, and refined manners have been in large proportion among the banished Poles,’ he observed. ‘The influence of these exiles upon the intelligence, habits, and manners of the Siberians, has left an indelible mark.’
Knox may have been burnishing the miserable reality of the exiles’ lives, but his encounters with Polish exiles were still testimony to their influence. Knox wrote about a Pole in charge of the Geographical Society of Eastern Siberia who had been a well-known poet in Kraków, and exiles practising as successful physicians. He also recounted the public execution in Irkutsk of a handsome thirty-year-old Polish pianist and political prisoner, Gustaw Szaramowicz.
When Szaramowicz lost a finger to a stray bullet in the 1863 Polish Revolt, he was said to have looked at his broken hand and remarked: ‘Chopin’s mazurkas are lost.’ Punishment served to harden Szaramowicz’s resolve. While working as a penal labourer in the knee-deep snows of Siberia, Szaramowicz led another revolt three years later, this time of seven hundred Polish prisoners assigned to build the road south of Lake Baikal. It is said that when Szaramowicz was being executed by firing squad in Irkutsk, he threw his hat up into the air. ‘Vive la Pologne!’ he shouted as he heard the order to fire.
Music disperses easily in big spaces, just like people. Most artists and intellectuals perished in Siberia without so much as a state record of their arrival or their death, whether it was suicide that took them, the typhus-addled way-stations, or the caged barges which carried the exiles upriver into Siberian towns like Tomsk. Their stories were silenced by a penal system which killed off far more people than Siberia ever remembered. Forgetting was also a method of survival. There are records of prisoners who escaped into the taiga and then changed their name to ‘Ivan Dontremember’ when authorities brought them back in.*
While instruments may not have been among the luggage of the deported (though certain ranks were allowed to travel by cart with whatever possessions they pleased), the sound of music would have formed a strong connection to the Poles’ former homeland. Writing in 1846, the exiled nobleman Rufin Piotrowski – one of the most famous political prisoners to escape Siberia, his disguise a home-made goat’s-hair wig – said the only music he heard in thirteen years was Poland’s national song, which rang out across the Siberian steppe: ‘I forgot my chains, forgot my past life, my future destiny, forgot everything.’
What would have definitely been present was the sound of the piano in a nineteenth-century Polish exile’s head. In mid-nineteenth-century Warsaw, the piano was ‘reigning like a despot in the drawing rooms’, reported one local newspaper. ‘There is almost no house where the thumping of a piano is not heard,’ claimed the Warsaw Courier: ‘We have pianos on the ground, first, second and third floors. Young ladies play the piano, mothers play the piano, children play the piano. The piano has become a family piece of furniture, the family talents’ touchstone.’ These social habits migrated into Siberia as the century progressed and Polish exiles intermarried with Russians, with exiles given land plots to help tie them to the country for ever.
A late-nineteenth-century image of a group of escaped convicts in Siberia, one of whom wears a home-made mosquito net.
The Polish connection, which ran so deep in the nineteenth century, came and went as I travelled through Siberia: in the village east of Baikal, where I met the Old Believer priest with his Book of the Apocalypse; in Irkutsk, where many of the people I interviewed claimed direct Polish descent; and in the Western Siberian city of Tomsk, home of Siberia’s first university, opened in 1888, where two of the eight founding faculty members were Poles. Tomsk also established one of Russia’s first museums of repression in 1989, occupying the town’s former prison. In this windowless vault, the director was gathering the stories not only of thousands of people arrested by Stalin’s secret police but also of political exiles of the nineteenth century. He was of direct Polish descent. Half his family migrated to America in the 1860s; the other half migrated from Belarus to Siberia, looking for a better life. ‘There is a stereotype that if you find Polish people in Siberia, they are all convicts and exiles,’ he said. ‘There were free settlers, too, and among them, a great many people who influenced the musical culture of Siberia.’
I arrived in February. The snow had fallen so thickly that in older neighbourhoods a few houses had split under the pressure. Outside the nineteenth-century House of Science – conceived as a foundation stone of Siberian enlightenment, offering free education, regardless of a citizen’s creed or background – there stood a crab-apple tree, its fruit ruby-red, like drops of blood. Walking the streets, I imagined Tomsk as it was in the year Chopin’s piano was being hurled on to the bonfire in Warsaw. ‘The sound of that falling lingers,’ wrote Chopin’s contemporary, the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid: ‘Behold – how noble thought / Is trampled by human fury.’
In Tomsk, amnesties came and went. Many Poles returned to a version of home in European Russia. Others stayed on, like the grandfather of the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who was sent to Tomsk after the 1863 January Uprising. Year by year, former exiles moved up through the ranks of Siberian industry, geological exploration and administrative ‘society’ – a stratum in Siberian prison towns that one Polish prisoner said commanded nearly all the luxury accoutrements of Western civilization.
Nearly. Tomsk was still Siberia, too far away from Europe’s musical capitals to concern itself with the debates raging in the West as critics grappled with the musical revolutionaries like Wagner and Liszt. At the dawn of the 1860s, Russia was undergoing its own, slightly lagging cultural shift as music was finally being professionalized under the Imperial Russian Musical Society – a brilliantly ambitious organization, supported at the highest level by the Romanov court, founded in St Petersburg in 1859 by Anton Rubinstein to develop musical taste and talent across the Empire at large. What the Society symbolized was even greater than the sum of its provincial parts: it was a key feature of Rubinstein’s wider plan to emancipate Russian musicians from being mere ‘entertainers’. He sought to earn them the kind of recognition they had long commanded in Western Europe as professional ‘Free Artists’ – to give them the dignified status that Liszt had insisted upon in St Petersburg when Tsar Nicholas I had heard him play. The Emperor spoke during a pause and Liszt refused to continue, as if nobility and art deserved an equal footing.
Rubinstein’s influence was remarkable. In 1862, he
successfully opened the country’s first conservatory in St Petersburg, with Tchaikovsky among the inaugural intake. All through the 1860s, the so-called ‘Mighty Five’ of Russian composers – Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Borodin and Mily Balakirev – were busy creating a new, deeply serious national identity for Russian music. All of them were self-taught, at a time when not a single textbook on musical harmony was written in the Russian language.
Meanwhile, in Tomsk, music was being enjoyed opportunistically, with amateur teachers trying to make ends meet as the town expanded with a growing merchant class and an influx of civil servants. This was a time when a Russian version of the bumjakjak – a deliciously suggestive word used by nineteenth-century German critics to describe a crude rhythm accompanying folk songs – would have been more common in Siberia’s wooden homes than Wagner. But Tomsk was also a growing provincial town hungry for metropolitan culture. By 1885, it had a population of thirty-one thousand people, twenty-six schools, twenty-nine churches, three synagogues and a mosque, while the university was pushing through a stop–start opening as the imperial government responded to suspicions about the town’s liberal tendencies.
‘A naturally enterprising and promising colony,’ is how Tomsk was described by the American journalist George Kennan, who spent September 1885 there with an exiled writer whose wife, an accomplished musician, earned her living teaching music. Kennan reported on the political prisoners. He also documented the city’s strangulating censorship, pitiable human misery and prison overcrowding. He predicted a fine future for Tomsk, if only the government would loosen the vice it held around people’s throats.
Poor Tomsk – trying to find its dignity, only for Chekhov to condemn its reputation to a national joke when he stayed here five years later. ‘The most notable thing about Tomsk is that governors come here to die,’ he wrote in a letter to his publisher. In the same lacerating spirit, he wrote a bibliography for a St Petersburg literary journal; the books he cited included Hedgehog Animal Husbandry: For Glove Manufacturers, a sixty-kopek paperback on How to Pinpoint the Universe, and A Tourist Guide to Siberia and Environs, featuring best restaurants, tailors, carriage-builders and coiffeurs, and names and addresses of ‘certain ladies’.
In Tomsk, Chekhov made a drunken tour of the brothels with the town’s chief of police. He made no mention of music – neither Ukrainian melodies, French chansonettes, amateur bumjakjak, nor gypsy romances. And yet, even as Chekhov was dismissing Tomsk as boring, the town’s musical culture was evolving. The year before he arrived, the first chapter of the Imperial Russian Musical Society opened in the city, its grand piano chosen by none less than Anton Rubinstein’s younger brother, the pianist and composer Nikolai Rubinstein. Among the directors of the society was Grigory Tomashinskiy, a Polish émigré to Siberia, who with his wife, Kamila, was among the town’s most influential musical patrons, and the host of numerous charitable concerts. Kamila taught piano, basing the musical programme on the founding principles of a special musical school in Irkutsk, also managed by a Pole, where a number of students progressed to the conservatories in Moscow and St Petersburg.
Tomsk might not have experienced pianomania on the scale Liszt had once unleashed in St Petersburg, but the appetite in Western Siberia for the instrument became more and more significant. By 1880, St Petersburg manufacturers were advertising their grand pianos in Tomsk with enthusiasm. Piano tuning was also emerging as a licensed profession, with some of Tomsk’s grander families possessing not one but two pianos in their home. Tuners came all the way from Warsaw for the good business that was to be had in Tomsk, where, in 1880, Siberia’s first piano shop opened. The owner was Pyotr Makushin, a Russian theology student born near Perm in the Urals, who settled in Tomsk shortly after the Polish rebellion of 1863.
Pyotr Makushin and his family, c. 1923.
Unlike the Volkonskys, Makushin arrived in Siberia with no financial means. He came instead with the deep conviction that literacy was the key to unlocking Siberia’s future, even though a local bishop had tried to warn him off. Tomsk wasn’t America’s land of opportunity, the priest told Makushin, but a true Siberian backwater. Makushin persisted. A voracious reader, he began with a marketplace stall in Tomsk. Then he bought a horse and cart, and employed a coach driver so that he could distribute his wares to villagers. In 1873, he opened his first bookshop. Eleven years later, he founded Siberia’s first national free public library – four months before Moscow’s equivalent. He opened an orphanage, a printing house, a museum on Siberian history, two Siberian newspapers, the House of Science and a theatre. He gave lectures in the local prison colonies. In the city’s musical circles, a healthy economy evolved as piano classes created demand for sheet music sold not only by Makushin’s bookstore – before long as good as any in the capital – but also in a second shop he opened in Irkutsk. As for pianos, Makushin’s pioneering store sold more than five hundred instruments in twenty years, including Beckers and Mühlbachs, with ninety per cent of them purchased by citizens of Tomsk.
Not only was piano ownership on the upswing; so was Tomsk’s musical talent. Among the town’s beloved piano-players of this period was Yadviga Zaleskaya, a young Polish graduate of the Warsaw Conservatory, who moved from Tomsk to the Russian capital in 1893. Seven years later, Le Figaro was calling Zaleskaya one of the St Petersburg greats. By the mid-1890s, she had left Russia to perform all over Europe, her enormous popularity epitomized by her performance in Paris in 1900, at which she received two ovations from a sold-out concert hall. Later, her talents took her further afield, to Singapore and Indonesia, before she returned to her native Poland, where she was killed by Nazi SS soldiers in 1944.
One of the town’s principal tuners, Anatoly Salaev, agreed to meet me. He was an authority on Tomsk’s piano history, and generous with his information. It was Salaev who told me that the music school still contained Makushin’s instrument. It stood unused on the second floor. The piano – a Diederichs grand, serial number 6583, dating from 1898 – was originally housed in Tomsk’s House of Science.
I went to find it. Under the piano’s lid were eight empty butter pots covered in damp silk – a home-made humidifying system for winter. Two strings were missing, said Elena Fefelova, who was teaching piano in the same room when I appeared unannounced. According to Elena, who had studied and then worked in Tomsk since 1959, the Diederichs had been owned by the school for as long as she remembered. It wasn’t working as it should, she said; the pedals were unstable when it was played. Then she showed me where the case was embossed in gold leaf with Makushin’s name.
As we talked, I learned about another alumna of the Tomsk music school, a concert performer and piano teacher called Olga Leonidovna, whom I needed to meet. Olga was living nearby in Bogashevo village. She had played Makushin’s Diederichs on numerous occasions, as both a student and a teacher. Olga also had her own special piano, an 1896 Bechstein. Makushin’s instrument was of national importance, but Olga’s was private property with a unique history. Two women had arrived in Tomsk on a train from Leningrad with the piano in tow during the Great Patriotic War, and sold it to a local for a bag of potatoes. In 1973, about thirty people in Olga’s community – friends and neighbours of her parents – clubbed together to help her family buy the instrument.
So I went to visit, and found Olga’s Bechstein baby grand in her house – a typical Siberian countryside home with timber walls, the path to the front door cut through metre-deep snow. The piano looked magnificent in the main living room, even though the instrument was cluttered with a grandchild’s plastic toys. Only eleven strings in the Bechstein had ever been replaced, she said. Two were faulty, yet the piano still played well enough, with the humidity kept in balance by hanging wet linen in the cottage.
Over a magnificent spread of forest mushrooms, berries and stewed tongue, Olga described her first mentor, a Muscovite bootmaker with a perfect ear who had found her the piano, and persuaded Olga’s parents to
invest in her early show of talent. It was under the bootmaker’s direction that they saved up and bought the instrument. Whenever he came to tune, he would take off his jacket, lean into the Bechstein, and that was it – he would be lost in its music. He loved the piano, said Olga. So did the children in the village, who would gather to watch him work.
‘The Bechstein is noble, kind and demanding. It has a kind of magic,’ said Olga, picking out a doll from its bed of piano strings as she spoke: ‘Every morning, I come to my mother’s portrait. I speak to her, and kiss the piano.’
Olga Leonidovna photographed with her 1896 Bechstein at her house in Bogashevo village near Tomsk.
Olga said the Bechstein was suffering a little these days, but it had a proud history. She played a flurry of notes, each sound expanding into the room as if the instrument were sighing, then singing, with relief. For forty-five years the Bechstein had entertained the Siberian village where Olga’s father ran the collective farm. It carried the sacrifices of good friends. It represented the community ethic of Soviet society at its best. For that reason, she was glad I was writing the instrument’s story – the best piano in Siberia, she declared, kissing it again – but her beloved Bechstein was not, and never would be, for sale.
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* A religious zealot with a literary bent, Avvakum found time in exile to scribe one of the earliest travel books on Siberia. His pocketbook account describes Lake Baikal covered with so many swans, they looked like snow, and cliffs so high you would crick your neck to see them. Avvakum, The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum by Himself, trans. Jane Harrison and Hope Mirrlees (London: Hogarth Press, 1963).
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 10
