Prince Demidoff with his wife and St George Littledale in Petropavlovsk, taken from Demidoff’s 1904 work, A Shooting Trip to Kamchatka.
‘Lerner said it was the equivalent of taking a piano to the moon,’ said Valery.
The journey took about three months, travelling first by train to Vladivostok, then on a boat. The Ibach was played on the radio and heard all over the peninsula. Then in 1937, Lerner was arrested and accused of ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities. He was released two years later. At the age of eighty-six, Lerner was named a People’s Artist of Russia. He and Valery became close friends.
‘Music, nature – there are no borders to its effects,’ said Valery.
He opened the Ibach’s lid to play some Chopin, the piano’s warm depth of tone made all the more melancholy by the purple sky outside.
I followed through on my attempt to find the bathhouse piano spotted by Demidoff’s hunting party. The next day, I ventured off in a snowmobile to the foot of Mutnovsky volcano, where Demidoff had roamed, looking for his sheep. I had marked up a map in an attempt to identify the volcanic pools where the hunters rested up, though it was difficult to be exactly sure of their stopping points, given the number of springs and tributaries of the Paratunka River half described in Demidoff’s account. All I encountered was a babbling stream and two Russians sunbathing on plastic camping mats. They wore their swimmers – he in tight blue briefs, she in a black bikini – while a bear on the other side of the valley walked the edge of the snowline.
Valery Kravchenko playing the Kamchatka Ibach, 2017.
When I returned to the city, Valery and I talked some more as he came and went from his kitchen with tea, and white bread laden with juicy beads of caviar. He wasn’t born in Kamchatka, he said, but on a beach on the Caspian Sea during the Great Patriotic War. With his father away fighting, his mother fled the region where Nazi SS execution squads were shooting, hanging and burning communist partisans. He learned to play the piano because of an army wife who had set up a music school in the barracks where Valery’s family had gone to live after the war.
It wasn’t until the sixties that Valery was drawn from Western Russia to the country’s Far East. The Soviet journalist Vasily Peskov – the same man who had written about the family of Old Believers living in isolation in Siberia – gave such alluring descriptions of Kamchatka that when a job came up teaching piano in Petropavlovsk’s music college, Valery leapt at the opportunity. Like his friend David Lerner, who brought the Ibach to this peninsula, Valery’s role was to spread piano culture to the farthest boundaries of the USSR – to take Chopin to the back of the proverbial classroom.
We watched a short film about the piano expeditions into the wilderness which Valery had helped organize every summer for the last decade. The footage showed a piano being carried on a palanquin up the slopes of Gorely volcano. Valery urged me to return to Kamchatka for an expedition with his friend Vladimir Shevtsov – an alpinist who introduced heli-skiing to the region when Gorbachev’s reforms opened the slopes to foreigners. It was Shevtsov’s idea to take a piano to Gorely. The volcano had a natural amphitheatre, said Valery. Shevtsov envisioned people sitting on its slopes listening to classical music. The first year, the instrument was delivered to the cave in an off-road truck. Thereafter, it was carried by local volunteers on home-made litters.
‘It’s a private thing,’ he said, ‘but if strangers should happen upon a performance, it gives intense pleasure.’
Valery encouraged me to keep on with my search. He said the stories were as good as gone if I didn’t try to grab their disappearing parts.
‘I do not think some ideas are impossible,’ he said.
He told me about a brand new Primorskii piano he was the first to play in the Commander Islands in 1969, in the main settlement’s wooden club. But it wasn’t music that pulled him all the way out there, he said; it was the seabirds.
Valery reached for a book – a grey, hardback volume, The Edge of the Earth, which he kept wrapped inside a bag. He flicked to a page showing a black-and-white photograph – the silhouette of a seagull standing on the shoulder of a child. Called ‘The Boy and the Bird’, it was a true story told by the journalist Peskov.
The boy finds an injured bird on the beach and nurses it back to health. Every time the boy returns to the seashore, the bird flies out of the colony and sits on the boy’s shoulders. The bird and the boy become friends. Valery Kravchenko grew so fond of the story that he wrote to the boy, using just his name on the envelope. The address line was ‘The Commanders’ – no house number, nothing.
The boy and the bird, photographed by Vasily Peskov, March 1966.
‘We corresponded for a number of years,’ said Valery. ‘I sent him camera film, which he couldn’t buy on the islands. We finally met when I arrived in the Commanders to perform.’
We ate more caviar. Valery smoked one half-cigarette after another on his balcony. We looked at a photograph of Valery playing the piano to television cameras in the sixties, and one of him in a trench coat, standing face to face with a bear on its hind legs.
We flicked through images of his father in flying goggles in 1939, and another of him playing a guitar, one foot propped up on a park bench. He told me about how his real father had died in the war, and that he had been brought up by another man. Valery didn’t know this had happened until years later when he chanced upon some papers in one of his mother’s cupboards, which revealed the truth about the switch in fathers he had been too young to recognize for himself.
Valery Kravchenko, photographed with a bear in the Kamchatkan village of Esso in 1975.
‘Whenever I play Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 13, I devote it to the father I didn’t know,’ said Valery; ‘It is impossible to get rid of the past. That is a very important feeling for artistic people.’
Back at my hotel, I gathered my bag’s contents spread about the floor of my room – a muddled heap of books on piano history, Demidoff’s hunting notes, and the numerous pieces of red-tape paperwork which Russian authorities make a habit of for foreigners. Water beads had dried on my coat, leaving spots of salt. Pieces of sea-wrack clung to my boots. I was excited about this next stage in my travels. The Commanders are a sensitive border area still tightly wrapped in special permits. I would then travel south through the Kuril Islands, where permission to visit can be hard to obtain. I was joining a tourist birding cruise, taking one of just a handful of ships out of Kamchatka that make this journey each year. I hoped there might be one or two instruments, given the islands’ position as a staging post on the old sea route from Siberia to America. By now I also had two good leads: Valery Kravchenko’s Soviet-era upright which he had played fifty years ago in the settlement’s wooden club in Nikolskoye village on Bering Island, and an instrument I was tipped off about by a former soldier who had been posted to the Kurils. He remembered a pre-Revolution piano on Kunashir in the archipelago’s southern reaches. He last saw it inside an old boat, which stood on the foreshore. He even played it, back in the eighties. It will still be there, he wagered. Once on the Kurils, always on the Kurils, went the conversation, as if there were no other place left to go.
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* Since 1964 there had been only one official record label in the Soviet Union: Melodiya. Foreign music was strictly regulated.
16
Siberia’s Last Piano: The Commanders to the Kurils
IN 2011, THE BRITISH author Horatio Clare began a hunt across Europe’s wetlands to find a small, possibly extinct bird, the migratory slender-billed curlew. As it happened, Clare never got a glimpse of the bird’s thin, down-curving beak, but if there were any of these creatures left, they might be in Siberia. Orison for a Curlew is Clare’s elegant prayer for an outside chance – that this delicate little creature, teetering on the brink of extinction, is still alive in the taiga beyond the sight of man. Clare argues with unassailable conviction that ‘too much certainty is a miserable thing’. I clung to the same idea when I j
oined a ship of birders with whom I had nothing in common other than the desire to find a rarity.
At the end of May, our ship, built as a scientific research vessel, left Petropavlovsk to sail east for the Commanders. They are made up of two main islands, Bering and Medny, and a clutch of smaller islets. The ropes from the pilot boat creaked as we slipped out of the slender neck of Avacha Bay to cross the northern tip of the Kuril–Kamchatka Trench. In the nineteenth century, this oceanic gully was the deepest on record, measured using a mechanism fashioned from piano wire. If there was a hint of nonsense in this method of sounding the depths of the North Pacific, there was also a shiver of darkness: piano wire was also used by the Soviets to hang traitors during the Second World War.
We crossed the line where the Asian continental shelf rubs up against the Pacific’s mighty sea trough, the pressures of subduction inducing all manner of restless waters, freak waves and unpredictable eruptions. Bleeping dials flickered on the ship’s bridge, which was furnished with phone receivers, screens and buttons marked with Cyrillic script. At the back of the bridge, the first mate worked with protractors and rulers to mark our line on a paper map pooled in light. Someone had written in pencil ‘Whale’ in the fold-line, as if it were always there – a Moby Dick forever loitering in the chasm.
Two days later we made landfall at the Commanders. Sitting at the western end of the Aleutian chain, they hang like a string of beads between Russia and Alaska. We anchored off Medny first. Darkly alluring, this is about as far as you can go in Russia – the silent, final ellipsis at the end of this vast country’s turbulent story. It is Siberia’s last frontier, a tiny continental fragment where sea and land fight against each other in a state of constant tension and unease. Medny is where Eurasia runs out entirely, a high-walled, fortress-like rock some two hundred miles off America. Deep-water channels both here and in the Kurils provide corridors for submarines to patrol the North Pacific’s lower latitudes.
With thin evidence of any significant human habitation, I pinned my hopes on the skipper’s proven success rate in uncovering the last possibilities at Russia’s limits – be they one of the rare species the birders were after, or in my case, pianos. Rodney Russ, the New Zealander who had chartered our Russian ship, was a Nansen-like character: attractive, broad shouldered, with weather-creased eyes. He spent half his year in the Southern Ocean, the other half in Russia. He was rarely out of his orange waders, and his small cabin was filled with the finest English-language books I had yet found on Siberia outside the British Library. In twenty years of travelling Russia’s Pacific and Arctic fringes, Russ had undertaken vital scientific research. He had made important sightings of North Atlantic right whales (fifteen years ago, it was thought only several dozen of these creatures remained). He and his colleagues had also identified a new breeding site of the critically endangered spoon-billed sandpiper. The bird is exceptional, its long, slim beak tipped with what looks like a black ace of spades. Current research suggests there are no more than two hundred and fifty nesting pairs left in the world, making this discovery of sandpiper eggs in a field of cloudberry tundra akin to finding life on another planet.
Everyone on the ship knew about the sandpiper story: a birder who used to collect policemen’s helmets; a man who was another of the expedition’s ‘big-listers’ (number thirty-something in the world, whispered his nemesis); a former schoolteacher who made a career change to give him more time to bird. They conversed in a private language. They talked about ‘gripping off’ (showing off about a find another birder missed), ‘stringing’ (pretending you have seen a rare bird), ‘dipping’ (when you travel to see a rare bird, and miss it), and ‘twitching’ (a twitcher chases a rare bird for his ‘list’, including one-off vagrants, which is different to a birder, who makes a sighting in a bird’s natural habitat). Each evening the group compared notes in the ship’s bar. Petty jealousies, barely concealed under a thin layer of civility, erupted into accusations of bad etiquette. Before long, two travellers weren’t talking to each other over some incident of sabotage, or ‘flushing’, when one birder spooks another birder’s quarry. Both men told different versions of the same event.
Initially, I avoided people’s direct questions about what I was doing here; I didn’t want to be too friendly in order to give me time to write. It turned out I had nothing to fear from my fellow travellers’ attentions. When I eventually revealed my true motives for making this journey, I realized my piano quest lay so entirely off the birding spectrum that no one but Mary, my eighty-year-old cabin-share, wanted to sit next to me at mealtimes anyway.
Mary and I got along like a house on fire. When we were at sea, we would both rest in the cabin. She would kill time organizing her list, familiarizing herself with the new species she hoped to find, their images detailed in her heavily annotated book on birds of the Russian Far East. I would do the same, my list comprising all the instruments I had already ticked off during my travels, each brand’s history explained by my field guide to Russia’s great piano makers.*
By now, I had a shortlist of about fifteen possibilities. Among them were the pianos I needed to scout out further, like the Kiakhta Bechstein. Then there were the ‘extinct’ pianos – the truly lost, like the Magadan grand, which I kept on my list just in case because I found its presence in that photograph so compelling. There were three or four instruments simply weighed down with too much history – among them, the Bechstein from Ekaterinburg marked up with ‘House of Revolution’ on its soundboard, and Vera’s Mühlbach grand. These were the untouchable treasures belonging to Russia’s national history, which I was glad I had found, if only to draw attention to their memory. I had a list of pianos which were never going to be cleaved from their owners, like Olga’s Bechstein, originally bought for a bag of potatoes. In return for all the time they had given me, I owed these people some of my reporting, which included information I would later glean from foreign piano factory archives.† Then there was the longlist: plain pianos, often with an untrustworthy provenance, most of them tracked down by my occasional appeals on Siberian media. Not all of them were successful. It was one of these media pushes which had led to a run of pest calls from a man who claimed to be calling from inside a Krasnoyarsk prison. Highest on my list were two instruments I kept on coming back to: the Novosibirsk Grotrian-Steinweg upright in Igor Lomatchenko’s Room 1037 in the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, and a fascinating Stürzwage grand in Khabarovsk which I still needed to dig into further.
As I surveyed my findings, I saw all the surprises my search had thrown up – and how each piano had reduced Russia’s illimitable size to a human scale. Drawn in by the Siberians who play, tune, keep, fix, break, love and live with pianos, it was difficult for me to cross their half-finished stories off my list. I longed to find the true history of the Novosibirsk Steinway which the Leningrad Philharmonic-in-exile might have played. As I sailed south, I obsessed about the instruments I hadn’t tracked to their reliable beginning. I complained to Mary that while her list was building, mine felt incomplete. I wanted to find more of those people who had allowed me to make trespasses into their homes: Russians like the tiger protector in his forest who showed me the tuft of golden hair; the Aeroflot navigator building his concert hall of Siberian larch; or the jazz pianist I met in the Altai, whose rich American rhythms disturbed the snow on his dacha’s roof until it slipped off in slabs to the fright of the dog outside. I tried explaining to Mary how Siberia’s humps of snow, like funerary barrows, conceal everything and nothing, how humble village houses hold stories no one will ever know. That was the part of me I had lost to Siberia – the distracting knowledge that there is always further to go.
The nineteenth-century philosopher, writer and ecologist Henry David Thoreau criticized such esoteric adventuring in his private journal: ‘By another spring I may be a mail-carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a Siberian exile . . . But what of all this? . . . Our limbs, indeed, have room enough, but it is our souls
that rust in a corner. Let us migrate interiorly without intermission.’ I knew I needed to sit still, to read beside a porthole and watch the skies moving past. I needed to allow myself the indulgence of being sucked back into other writers’ literary adventures in Siberia, taking me to all the places I couldn’t get to – the islands of the Laptev Sea, Chukotka, the Putorana Plateau. I wanted to capture that moment in history when I most wish I had been a traveller in Russia: the second half of the nineteenth century, when Chekhov was on the road, and the nation’s pianos were in full voice. The stories from this period are of course troubling, given the brutality of the exile system, but they are also full of wonder. Among them is one book I adore: On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers by Kate Marsden, a spinster nurse who left England for a leper colony near Yakutsk in the same year as Chekhov. On her hand-drawn map, the path she took from St Petersburg to Yakutsk is marked up as ‘accomplished’; her other route, a line over the top of Siberia into Kamchatka’s narrow neck, is marked with a wistful ‘contemplated’.
Marsden claimed she was going to find a Siberian herb that might cure leprosy. Before long, however, the magic herb all but disappears from her account. Telling asides in her memoir reveal her to be a Victorian adventurer trying to escape the shackles of her time and gender. She endures the slights of men – ‘of course, it was quite natural for the gentlemen to remark that, like most of my sex, I wanted to get at the end of the journey before setting off’. She also does the burgeoning feminist movement back in Britain no favours as she occasionally slips into asides the ‘lady tourist’ might want to hear, with eulogies about her Jaeger stockings: ‘Even my own attention, I must confess, was diverted from the lepers for a moment in thinking what to wear.’ Still, her Siberian journey is one of the toughest on record. She enters a prison cell of twenty murderers, and remarks on the politeness of the convict who takes her by the hand to show her through the darkness of the jail. She challenges a local paper-mill magnate, who is polluting a river. She describes an outcast leper child who died alone, with clay in his belly, unable to scavenge anything to eat. I found much to admire in Marsden’s story – most of all her courage. But I also had to heed the warning bell she sounded loud and clear: the more this English nurse was taken in by Siberia, the more she lost sight of the object she had come to find.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 24
