The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  * Joseph Conrad’s short story Prince Roman – Tales of Hearsay (New York: Doubleday, 1925) – records the author’s boyhood meeting with the elderly Prince Roman Sanguszko, who had survived his exile to Siberia thirty years prior. Conrad describes Sanguszko as ‘a man among all men capable of feeling deeply, of believing steadily, of loving ardently’.

  * Chopin lived a peripatetic life, travelling widely throughout Europe. In 1838 he wintered in Majorca, where he finished his famous 24 Preludes on perhaps the greatest lost piano of them all. The piano was rediscovered seventy years later by Wanda Landowska, a Polish harpsichordist and Chopin devotee, only to be snatched by the Nazis, and lost again. The full story is told by Paul Kildea in Chopin’s Piano (London: Allen Lane, 2018).

  † The number of Polish people exiled to Siberia in the nineteenth century varies according to where chroniclers drew the Ural line, as well as other factors such as the unreliability of Tsarist records. In The Mass Deportation of Poles to Siberia, 1863–1880 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), the historian Andrew Gentes suggests the following: ‘The mass deportation of Poles between 1863 and the 1880s was perhaps the largest forced migration of Europeans prior to World War One. It resulted in thousands upon thousands of personal tragedies, a small minority of which were ever documented.’

  ‡ ‘Polonaise in E flat minor’.

  * There was also a tradition among convicts who were caught and dragged back to the same prison they had escaped, to take on the the name ‘brodiaga’, meaning ‘origins forgotten’. Prison culture was such that fellow convicts had to keep silent about the returnee’s true name. Reveal it, and they could expect to be killed, according to the nineteenth-century Russian journalist Vlas Doroshevich. Russia’s Penal Colony in the Far East: A Translation of Vlas Doroshevich’s ‘Sakhalin’, trans. Andrew Gentes (London and New York: Anthem Press, 2011).

  7

  Home in a Hundred Years: Sakhalin Island

  WHEN ANTON CHEKHOV decided to travel four thousand miles overland from Moscow to the penal colony of Sakhalin Island, he knew he didn’t have much to lose. Before he left home, he was already showing the tell tale signs of the tuberculosis that would kill him within four years of his homecoming. Nor did he seem to care much about the threat of censorship, having set out to record the horrors of the Tsarist exile system – ‘a place of unbearable sufferings, which only a human being, whether free or subjugated, is capable of causing and undergoing’.

  Sakhalin Island, about twice the size of Belgium, lies five miles off Russia’s Pacific coast, and almost scratches the top of Japan – territory which the two countries have tussled over for centuries. When Chekhov travelled here, the entire island was under Russian control, which lasted until the Tsar lost the southern half to Japan following the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. Not until Japan’s dramatic defeat in the Second World War was Stalin able to demand the island’s return.

  When I visited, Sakhalin’s capital, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, was pulsing with neon and oil money. The restaurants were busy and the karaoke noisy, the bar music still showing something in common with the description given by Benjamin Howard, a turn-of-the-century British traveller to Sakhalin. With the exception of the Governor’s piano, Howard encountered nothing but an ‘ugly little creature’ of a barrel organ, about the size of a sewing machine: ‘When the creaky wooden handle was turned, it stirred up rats, cats and puppies.’ The entertainment notwithstanding, the modern cut and thrust of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk felt like the nerve centre of a new universe – the extreme opposite, in fact, of the Sakhalin Chekhov encountered after his long passage east.

  Describing the last stages of his journey to the island, Chekhov complained of a disintegrating identity, a loss of Russianness, until the country of his birth felt as unfamiliar as Patagonia. This eastern side of Siberia was a place Chekhov considered so far from Moscow that he would only be ‘Home in a Hundred Years’. His final port of call on the Russian mainland before sailing for Sakhalin was the town of Nikolaevsk (now known as Nikolaevsk-on-Amur). In the 1850s, a journalist for the New York Times had stopped off in the same place and thought the scene rather civilized: ‘capital dinners’, lamps burning with whale oil, coal from Pennsylvania glowing in the grates, newspapers only six months old, and a social club where dancing to the sound of an excellent English piano occurred every Thursday evening. Chekhov acknowledged this brief flutter of polite society: ‘apparently the town was no stranger to the humanities, since there was even one occasion when a touring scholar considered it both necessary and possible to deliver a public lecture at the club here,’ he wrote.

  By the time of Chekhov’s visit, Nikolaevsk was down on its luck. The townspeople had taken up the habit of shooting Chinese vagrants, and hunting down ‘hunchbacks’ – the local term for escaped prisoners, owing to their knapsacks. Here on the edge of Siberia, Chekhov said the locals were ignorant of Russia’s history, Pushkin and Gogol. Any lingering connection he might have felt with Moscow was finally severed during a hot week in July 1891 when he crossed the Tatar Strait to Sakhalin Island. He described the steamer’s clean, cramped cabins, and an upright piano. Also on board was a baroness, and a prisoner accompanied by a five-year-old daughter who clung to his fetters as he ascended the ship’s steps.

  Chekhov’s port of disembarkation on Sakhalin was the penal settlement of Aleksandrovsk on the island’s north-west coast – at the end of the nineteenth century, deemed the most terrible example of the entire Tsarist exile system. I arrived into the island’s south, also by boat, so needed to head upcountry to pick up Chekhov’s trail. I travelled on a night-train from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, sleeping beside oil workers. These were the people Russians describe as ‘sitting on their suitcase’. They come to make money, their bag always packed ready to return home.

  My cabin share was surprised when I got off at Tymovsk, a dust-blown, back-of-beyond, one-horse-town type of station, where I was met by Grigory Smekalov, a local historian. He drove me to Aleksandrovsk, passing the site of a memorial marking the mass grave of some eight thousand prisoners who died on their marches through Sakhalin’s notorious swamp. As we pulled into town, I hadn’t expected Aleksandrovsk to be so small, given the size of its sinister reputation. The settlement dribbled out over rising ground above a long beach. Abandoned ships were marooned on its rippled sands, the iron cadavers hollowed out by waves. In the town square, a thin gathering of locals were getting ready to celebrate Russia Day. A rare outsider, I was watched wherever I went.

  In one of the only cafés open year-round, Grigory talked me through his work, which revealed his own deep sense of moral justice. His father endured a labour camp in Chukotka, north of Kolyma. Grigory was interested in repairing reputations – not just those of forgotten individuals who suffered repression, but places blackened by historical events. He said he wanted Sakhalin to be known for more than Chekhov’s withering report. ‘It is essential to restore Sakhalin’s history, to show that heroes existed,’ he said. He and I agreed to trade some research. In return for help looking for pianos in this former prison colony, I would dig into the archives at the Scott Polar Research Institute in England. Grigory was researching Captain Robert Scott’s dog handler, Dmitri Girev, who was born in Aleksandrovsk and joined the British explorer’s 1911 attempt on the South Pole.

  Girev was the son of a female convict. He was brilliant with husky teams, a talent Scott’s right-hand man, Cecil Meares, spotted when he came to Siberia to purchase dogs strong enough to drag the British expedition across the Antarctic ice. If only Scott had trusted a Sakhaliner’s tenacious capacity to survive some of the harshest conditions known to man. Some four hundred miles short of the South Pole, Scott sent Girev and his dogs back to base. Girev survived, along with some of the Sakhalin huskies.*

  Dmitri Girev, photographed in 1912. In Russia, Girev often travelled long distances to hunt and fish using his family’s dog team.

  One of Captain Scott’s sled dogs, Chris, listening to a gramophone on the ice, c.
1911. In total, thirty-three dogs were taken on the expedition, a large proportion of them purchased from Sakhalin and the Amur River region with money donated by English schoolchildren.

  Nobody knows about Girev’s Sakhalin history, said Grigory, nor the role these Siberian dogs played in one of the most iconic polar journeys of the twentieth century. They only know Chekhov’s version of Sakhalin’s story, he said, which clanks with the sound of iron manacles. From the open windows of Chekhov’s lodging, the rare glimmers of music he described included the tireless whistling of canaries, and soldiers rehearsing on flutes, bassoons and trombones. They were practising for a parade to welcome the Governor General.

  ‘In the General’s garden there was music and singing,’ wrote Chekhov. ‘They even fired a cannon – which blew up. And yet, despite such gaiety, the streets were dismal. No songs, no accordions, not a single drunk . . . A penal colony illuminated by Bengal flares is still a penal colony, and music, when heard from a distance by a man who will never return to his homeland, brings on only a deadly yearning.’

  Chekhov’s readers wanted drama, said Grigory – yellow-skinned lunatics, tales of corrupt officials, Dostoevsky and Gogol. They wanted to hear the gruesome stories, like the one about the governor murdered in the bakery, who fell into the trough and stained the dough with blood. They wanted their writers to tell gory tales about people eating each other, and feeding on rotten pieces of wood. Chekhov gave plenty of lurid detail – the bodies turned crimson with bruising, and the chattering teeth of a prisoner who bit his glass cup compulsively whenever he was given his medicine – while also gathering histories of the most famous prisoners, some of whom Chekhov later turned into fictional characters in his work.

  Chekhov’s 1890 photograph of the notorious thief Sonka the Golden Hand being chained by her jailers on Sakhalin Island. Sonka – real name, Sophia Bliuvshtein – was a renowned con woman, remembered for charming wealthy men into giving her vast sums of money. Intense public interest resulted in a Russian movie serial about her exploits being produced in 1914.

  Despite the contemporary public’s appetite for sensational detail, Chekhov’s portrait of Sakhalin wasn’t entirely devoid of ‘civilized’ society. In one prison colony, Chekhov described a doctor who had amassed a ‘luxurious’ zoological collection over his ten-year sojourn on Sakhalin; in Chekhov’s opinion, the doctor’s elegant specimens would have made for an excellent museum. Usually Chekhov’s remarks were more acerbic. At another settlement, he described a governor’s wife sitting in the garden ‘majestic as a marquise’ with her daughters ‘dressed up like little angels’. They talked in soft words and pleasant tones while surveying their watermelons, tended by a convict who guarded the fruit deferentially.

  As for Aleksandrovsk, Chekhov depicted the town as the centre of Sakhalin society, made up not only of prisoners but also engineers, clerks, free settlers and military personnel. The ladies could purchase fashionable summer hats, along with stars for epaulettes, and Turkish delight. There were jewellers, upholsterers and watchmakers, with officials able to take on as many prisoner-servants as they liked.

  According to Grigory, one ex-murderer who ‘made good’ when his sentence was up became so successful in the construction trade he could afford to import Sakhalin’s first ever Ford motor car from America – a status symbol that before long would become a greater indicator of wealth than a piano in the parlour. There were a number of merchants who became members of Sakhalin’s nouveau riche; they would have almost definitely owned an instrument, said Grigory, who talked me through some of Aleksandrovsk’s forgotten biographies. Unfortunately, little of that world survived. In a single week of anarchy in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War, the convicts burnt down the colony’s two prisons, as well as the Governor’s Residence. It is hard to say how many instruments were lost to those flames, said Grigory. But there had been music in this prison colony, of an unexpected kind.

  The scene is described by Vlas Doroshevich, one of imperial Russia’s most celebrated journalists, who followed in Chekhov’s footsteps in 1897. ‘Penal labourer E’s wife’ was ‘a miniature young woman, nearly a child’, who had voluntarily joined her suitor in exile when he was sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour for murdering a friend. When they were married in Aleksandrovsk, the ten-minute wedding feast was celebrated drinking tea at the doctor’s house, where E’s wife stayed. Her husband was then returned to his shackles, and taken back to jail. When it was discovered that she had been a student at the conservatory in St Petersburg, her life became unbearable. Local officials in Aleksandrovsk dragged her out to play piano at evening events. The doctor’s family, who worried about her exhaustion, tried to stop her, but she feared officials would retaliate by making her husband’s prison term even worse if she didn’t perform to demand.

  ‘[T]he poor woman’s heart was obsessed by this one idea. She continued to play,’ wrote Doroshevich:

  The good administrators’ families considered it improper to shake hands with a ‘convict’s wife’ so she, arriving in the evening to play ‘as a courtesy,’ would give a curtsey to everyone and slowly sit down at the piano to await orders. ‘Play!’ One relentlessly cheerful figure especially pestered her – the chancery’s head clerk, already mentally ill at the time and soon to be sent to a madhouse. ‘Listen to how you play!’ he’d say with typically saturnine pomposity. ‘You’re not playing right! Not so fast! Play slower. Now play happier! Devil knows what you’re playing!’ She wept and played; played hunched low over the keys so her tears wouldn’t be noticed.

  Mrs E’s luck changed when an influential member of St Petersburg society arrived in Aleksandrovsk. The official recognized her from a past encounter back home as she stood beside the piano. He kissed her hand. The wives, who had spurned her before, became immediately solicitous. Her husband was released and put in charge of the meteorological station. In their apartment stood ‘a splendid piano’ that her relatives had sent from Russia, its whereabouts now unknown. It stood close to a garlanded portrait of her teacher, Anton Rubinstein. ‘Music – it is all that beautifies her life during long, long Sakhalin winter evenings,’ wrote Doroshevich, ‘when outside a blizzard whirls and moans and her wretched husband sits and draws or writes poems. Disciplined classical music is her only happiness, after her child – and she plays it as perhaps no one else can. Only very unfortunate persons can play very well. There is so much suffering, grief, torment and tears.’

  I took the road from Aleksandrovsk to nearby Dué Post, where the coal mines used to be. I passed by the high promontory where Chekhov liked to walk, and looked out from the old lighthouse on to the smudge of Russia’s mainland, which was close enough to see. I passed Voevodsk Chasm, a sunken mine-pit beside the coast road. During Tsarist times, the pit had been turned into a prison yard. Back then, it had also functioned as a kind of hideous entertainment zone where prisoners were executed, the spectacle watched from all sides by convicts and exile-settlers. ‘The condemned man is delivered in fetters,’ wrote Doroshevich; ‘In fetters, he listens to his sentence. Then they unshackle and put the shroud on him, and loop the lard-greased noose over the shroud.’ The gallows stood next to a hole where some of the ‘wheelbarrow-men’ worked. These recidivist offenders – the runaways and murderers – were chained to their wheelbarrows by their hands and feet for the rest of their sentence. They remained cuffed to the wheelbarrows even as they slept, with their instruments of torture placed beneath them in specially adapted bunks. In the rare event that a wheelbarrow-man was released from his burden, he was so broken, said Chekhov, he couldn’t hold a cup without slopping tea.

  The wheelbarrow-men of Sakhalin Island, photographed in 1903.

  Where the executions had once taken place, there was now a banana-yellow car sitting in the adjacent lay-by, and the smell of smoke from charred kebabs. On the beach below, a couple were holding hands as they took in the summer sun, lying on their backs. It was a bright June afternoon. The sky was cloudless, which did no
thing to help the coast throw off its grey pall. The strand was strafed with driftwood, the tideline of flotsam and jetsam marking the edge of an ocean as dead as standing water in a sink.

  ‘A dreadful, hideous place,’ wrote Chekhov, ‘wretched in every respect, in which only saints or profoundly perverse people could live of their own free will.’ ‘Perhaps the most foul hole as exists on earth,’ wrote Doroshevich. By the turn of the twentieth century, when a British anthropologist called Charles Hawes visited Dué, he said there wasn’t a girl over the age of nine who was still a virgin. Dué represented the ultimate depravity of the Tsarist regime, which at the end of the nineteenth century was under dramatically mounting pressure to change its ways. Exiled liberals, the impoverished peasantry and an exploited workforce were feeding the support base of organized radicalism. The turmoil, including strikes and public protest, culminated in St Petersburg in January 1905. ‘Bloody Sunday’ left a hundred and thirty peaceful protesters dead – a violent response on the Tsar’s part which triggered further unrest in the provinces.

  Even Russia’s musical culture was drawn into the political flux. In 1905, the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov signed a resolution written by leading Moscow musicians calling for political reform. ‘We are not free artists,’ they declared, ‘but like all other Russian citizens, the disenfranchised victims of today’s abnormal social conditions.’ Performances of Rimsky-Korsakov’s work were turned into political events. ‘Down with autocracy!’ shouted someone from the back of the auditorium at one of his St Petersburg premieres. After Bloody Sunday, the legitimacy of the Tsar’s reckless regime was disintegrating fast. It was under these circumstances – with the architects of the 1917 Revolution, Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin, now politically active – that Bolshevism was able to gain such rapid ground.