The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

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  * Anne Swartz, Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century (Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 2014).

  † One of the most interesting results was Tobolsk’s Erard piano – serial number 75796, damaged on 22 March 1988 by a burst hot-water pipe. My research in the factory archives led back to an 1896 buyer in Poland.

  * Unwittingly, Steller also helped to bring about the manatees’ demise. Just twenty-seven years after his discovery, these toothless giants, which grazed peacefully close to shore moving at a ‘half-swim, half-walk’, were rendered extinct by incoming fur-hunters after an easy meal.

  * In 1931, the American aviators Charles and Anne Lindbergh were towed to Simushir in their floatplane by a Japanese ship after making an unscheduled landing on a flight from New York to Nanking. Otherwise the island’s existence has gone by more or less unnoted in Western sources.

  17

  Provenance Regained: Khabarovsk

  AT THE BEGINNING OF my search, shortly after being dazzled by the burning orange of the tiger in the snow, I had a night to kill in Khabarovsk before making my way home to England. On that dead, wintry evening, I met up with the only piano tuner I could find in the city. He was stiff, even a little anxious. In an attempt to win him over, I invited him to a piano recital advertised at the city’s Philharmonic – a hall Richter played in (and complained about) during his Siberian tour in the late 1980s.

  The Khabarovsk recital I had bought tickets for was no Richter sensation. It was musically thin and indifferently attended. The concert hall had no more than the first few rows filled, mostly with neatly attired women smelling of fur and talcum powder. In the hum of conversation in the foyer, I felt insincere looking for music in a sleepy place a long time after Lisztomania had first swept through Europe. During the recital’s second half, I listened to a crooning version of a Rod Stewart classic. In the seat next to me, the tuner’s eyelids lowered, until I suspected he had nodded off. Only when we were parting did my gentle prodding generate anything like a lead.

  The tuner knew of one interesting Russian grand piano: a nineteenth-century Stürzwage built by a maker of Finnish descent, Léopold Stürzwage, who opened a Moscow workshop in the same year Liszt made his Russian debut. The piano maker had entered a ready market. For sixty years, the factory whirred and banged to keep up with demand. Then Stürzwage’s heir, also called Léopold, born in 1879, abandoned the family business for a career in painting. In the early twentieth century he left Moscow for Paris, where he changed his name to Léopold Survage, worked as a tuner at the Pleyel concert hall in Paris to help make ends meet, and trained with Henri Matisse. He exhibited his musically inspired ‘colour symphonies’ with Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky, and got employment designing stage sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, where Nicholas Roerich had also worked. He designed fabrics for Coco Chanel, and shared a studio (and drinking habit) with the painter Amedeo Modigliani. In a 1918 Modigliani portrait of the Russian émigré, one of Survage’s eyes is smudged. When Survage asked why he had been given only one eye, Modigliani replied: ‘You regard the world with one eye, and with the other you look inside yourself.’ For an emigrant watching the October Revolution tear the old order asunder, those words must have resonated with a deeper kind of ache, echoing the sentiment given by the literary critic Edward Said in his description of the exile’s divided psyche. ‘Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience,’ he writes.

  It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement. The achievements of exiles are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.

  The Stürzwage piano fascinated me – partly because I had always loved that Modigliani portrait but had never taken heed of the sitter’s identity, and partly because somewhere deep in the piano’s past I could picture the elegant fingers of the artist fixing its strings – the disillusioned piano maker who had left his father’s business to train as a painter.

  With the tuner’s help, I eventually found the piano’s owner: a local philanthropist called Valery Khidirov, an Ossetian originally from the Caucasus Mountains. Khidirov was attached to the instrument, even if he didn’t play himself. In the early nineties, he had bought the Stürzwage for his daughter for less than a hundred dollars.

  Valery Khidirov’s daughter, Anna, photographed with the Stürzwage piano in the family house in Khabarovsk.

  Every time I passed through Khabarovsk, I visited the Khidirov family, who fed me generously and helped with my attempts to trace the Stürzwage’s provenance. The piano was glorious, and very, very old. It was a baby grand with its original strings and a shallower than usual depth of touch. The mechanical action was the lighter Viennese type, as opposed to the heavier English version. It lacked the sophisticated overstringing that revolutionized piano technology in the 1850s, which gave pianos greater resonance.* There was no serial number to date the instrument accurately, nor the signature of the individual maker, which is occasionally found written in pencil on the side of the white keys.

  Valery Khidirov remembered the piano’s previous owner being a teacher, and the rough direction of the Khabarovsk suburb where she lived. But that was in 1991, more than twenty-five years ago. He said he didn’t know what I would find now. Nor could he remember the name of the school where the piano had sat for years. Besides, in a country as big as Russia, people move about. What he did recall was an interesting history: the piano first came to Siberia by sledge, travelling from St Petersburg to Tobolsk.

  On my second visit to Khabarovsk a few months later, I took a taxi to knock on the door of one of the kindergartens in the neighbourhood Valery had described. I negotiated my way into the principal’s office, where I was met by a woman with a droopy beehive hairstyle and a face as blank as putty. She had never heard of such a story, reminding me that there were a great many people who had sold everything they owned to survive the dark days of Russia’s near-bankruptcy. As she peered at me across her desk, I could tell she thought I had lost my mind. There would be other Stürzwages, I told myself. So I put the piano behind me and focused my energies elsewhere until I returned to Khabarovsk a third time towards the very end of my two-year search.

  I made an appeal to find the Stürzwage’s original owner on a TV news channel broadcast throughout the Russian Far East. Two days later, I got a call – from a man who said he remembered the piano from the perestroika times. It had belonged to his ex-wife. The man then rang back with her telephone details.

  I called the number. The woman who picked up the phone was suspicious at first. She wanted to know how I had found her. When I explained, she went silent. Then: ‘He’s still alive?’ she asked.

  The woman’s name was Irina Zhdanova-Kamenska. She agreed to meet me, along with her eighty-six-year-old mother, Nina Alexandrovna. They lived together on the third floor of a Soviet-era block on the outskirts of Khabarovsk, in the same general direction where I had looked before, but about half a mile off. An arsenic-green staircase led to the two-room apartment with six cats or more curled up on the wardrobe and linoleum floor. In a small bedroom, Irina introduced me to her mother, who sat on a swivel chair, her feet swinging from the seat like a child’s. Her cheekbones looked sharp from the way her hair was pulled back from her forehead. Her eyes were hollows, sunk into the back of her head. She was blind, she said. She wore a floral suit jacket, matching skirt and thick woollen socks. Her smile was warm and kind.

  Nina began to talk, her emptied eyes belying a sharp recollection of detail about the piano she had been given by her aunt, who in 1970 had sent the instrument to Khabarovsk on a train from Tobolsk. Except when the piano arrived at Nina’s
address in the Russian Far East, she couldn’t fit it through the narrow corridor of her flat. So Nina talked to the director of her children’s kindergarten, and asked them to take care of the Stürzwage instead. But they abused it. They put flowers on it. The water damaged the piano’s case.

  ‘So one day I went in there and grabbed it,’ she said. ‘I pushed it into the apartment, and forced my girls to learn how to play. Then when times got tough, my daughter sold it.’

  ‘That piano is the story of my childhood,’ said Nina.

  I took off my coat.

  One side of Nina’s family was descended from exiles. The other branch was of noble birth. In the nineteenth century, they made their mark as prominent educators in Tobolsk. This was the family the piano came from.

  Nina’s great-grandfather had three children. The oldest died of starvation in the Leningrad blockade, which Nina remembered from a letter the family received in 1942; it described how when a woman gave birth to a child in the hospital, others made a rush at her and ate the afterbirth. The second son, who was an officer on a ship in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, was killed in action. The third child was Nina’s grandmother. She had married the son of a Pole captured during one of the later Polish revolts. She had met him at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk, where the Tsar and his family were later incarcerated. As Nina talked me through the family tree, it started to feel as if all the fragments scattered throughout my piano hunt were finally coming together like Russian dolls in one neatly organized, close-fitting stack.

  Nina’s grandfather was a well-regarded academic among the citizens of Tobolsk. He was executed during the Revolution by the Reds because, as city treasurer, he had refused to hand over the keys to Tobolsk’s coffers. In December 1920, he was shot in the prison at Tyumen, then thrown into a hole cut into the ice of the river. At least that is what they think happened to him, based on witness accounts.

  Nina Alexandrovna’s ancestors, photographed in 1899. In the centre is her great-great-grandfather, Illarion Slavuta. In front on the right is her father, Aleksandr Ternovskiy, aged four. On the left is Nina’s Aunt Lena.

  Nina’s father, Aleksandr, escaped any further revenge by the Bolsheviks. He fought for Russia in the First World War. After the Revolution, he went to work as a geologist in the goldmines in Yakutia. He later transferred as a free worker to Kolyma.

  Living in such extreme locations worried Nina’s mother, who by now had children to raise. So in 1932, the year after Nina was born, Nina was sent to live with her widowed Aunt Lena in Tobolsk, who was a biologist and musician. Aunt Lena had ordered the Stürzwage baby grand from St Petersburg before the Revolution, and had it delivered by sledge from the train station at Tyumen to Tobolsk, which was one hundred and sixty miles north of the main Trans-Siberian Railway. Aunt Lena had lost three sons in a week in 1920 to a typhus epidemic; it was decided she could care for Nina while her parents settled in Kolyma. From that day on, Nina, her beloved aunt and the Stürzwage were tightly bound.

  ‘On the day I arrived in Tobolsk, I cried and cried,’ said Nina. ‘Then they pressed my baby fingers on the keyboard. Apparently, only the noise from the piano would calm me down.’

  The piano sat in the dining room of the family home, which looked up at the escarpment where the Tobolsk priest used to do roly-polies when he was training at the seminary. The piano was shaded by a huge pot-plant – a fig tree Nina’s aunt had grown from seed.

  ‘It was like a jungle,’ said Nina. ‘The top board of the piano looked like the shape of the African continent. Which is why we named the piano Africa.’

  Nina had only a few toys, including models of monkeys, birds and crocodiles, which were placed on top of the instrument. On Sundays the arrangement was cleared away, the lid opened up and Aunt Lena played. There was singing and dancing. There was Mozart, Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven. They invited other children to listen, including a Tatar family who lived in poverty opposite their house. She described exploring a river meadow close to where the Cossack adventurer Ermak Timofeevich is said to have drowned. She remembered being alone in the forest, listening to the cuckoos.

  ‘I loved animals,’ she said. ‘I always have. When I was a child, we had a map called “Animal World of the USSR”, which we hung above the piano. I knew the territory where each animal belonged.’

  In 1946, Nina was sent to join her parents. To get to Kolyma, she had to wait with her mother in Nakhodka, one of the ports that also processed the Gulag ships. The families were given flour, but no stoves to cook on. They slept in canvas camps, waiting for transport to Magadan. When the first ship caught fire, killing more than a hundred people and causing the sky to rain oil, they waited for an alternative ship to make safe passage across the Sea of Okhotsk. She described the campfires pinpricking the hillside, her mother making pies, and the suck and croak of frogs. She remembered how, in the middle of the night, a chicken’s hysterical cackle woke everyone up just in time to prevent thieves stealing from their luggage.

  Nina’s mother brought the chicken with them to Kolyma. When the family settled in the gold-mining town of Susuman – the same stop on the Kolyma Highway where I had spent a sleepless night in a bed that smelled of other people’s sweat – they fed the chicken cockroaches. Nina’s mother gathered them by slathering a bowl in fat. When the cockroaches came to feed in the night, they got stuck in the grease.

  The family home in Susuman was small: two bedrooms and a kitchen. There was only one piano in the entire settlement, located in the House of Culture. Nina heard the singer Vadim Kozin when he came to perform. She remembered how nothing would grow, and the coldest winter, which hit minus sixty-two. She remembered swimming in spring in the icy river, and the freezing burn. She imagined being Tom Sawyer and moving along the Mississippi in a boat. She wanted to know what people lived for: love, society, Stalin. She wasn’t sure herself. She learned Eugene Onegin by heart. She wrote poetry, and still does. She became a zoologist, specializing in fish. All she wanted to do was travel – an interest inspired by the map of Africa laid out on the top of the Stürzwage at Aunt Lena’s house in Tobolsk.

  ‘I travelled all over the USSR. Magadan, Novosibirsk, Barnaul, Khabarovsk, Tyumen, Perm, Ekaterinburg, Astrakhan, Kharkov, Yaroslavl, Ussuriysk, Vladivostok, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Ulan-Ude, Ust-Barguzin . . .’ The words kept rolling off her tongue, the litany as alluring as when I had first looked over a map of Russia. Since then, I had run into numerous people in Siberia who had little to say about a place where they didn’t intend to remain. I had also met plenty others who didn’t want to remember why they had come. Repression. Migration. Conflict. So much of what happens, happens without trace. Siberia can feel like a country within a country. Sometimes, however, the truth is more banal than all of this, and Siberia is like anywhere else – a place where people get bound to the territory, not knowing quite when, why or how. There were times when I came to think of Siberia not only as a physical location, but also as the word to describe what happens if you stay too long in a place that is not your own, sticking around for one winter too many until you realize you have gone too far to turn back. But now I’d spent more time here, I realized that there was more to it than loveless migration, that when it came to the best of people – the staunch, steadfast Russians who had helped me with my search − Siberia was really something else. There had been the Lomatchenko family in Novosibirsk, the singing priests in Tobolsk and the siege survivor in Akademgorodok. And now Nina – this blind, bent, brilliant old woman, who was so frail and vulnerable, yet so full of fire for the things she loved. Nina was an encyclopaedia of twentieth-century Russia, who said there was only one thing she hated about her life. When she was a child in Kolyma, her father would punish her bad behaviour by making her sort through jars of sand. She would have to sit at the table and pick through the grains for flakes of gold while her friends played outside. It was agony to Nina; all she wanted to do was run wild, to jump into the water, even in the fearful Kolyma cold. As she talked,
it was as if there was a kind of burning heat inside her, a glow behind her hollowed eyes. To Nina, Siberia was no heart of darkness: it was the Appassionata – an experience of such intensity, it had worked its way deep into her magnificent Russian soul.

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  * English piano manufacturers say ‘over-strung’; US piano manufacturers say ‘cross-strung’. I have generally used the English piano industry’s terminology.

  Epilogue

  ‘You cannot fathom Russia with the mind . . . You can only believe in it.’

  – Fyodor Tyutchev

  ‘I never choose a piano and don’t try them out before a concert. It’s useless and demoralizing. I place myself in the hands of the piano tuner. If I’m on form, I can adapt to no matter what instrument, whereas if I’m in doubt, I never succeed in doing so. You have to believe, more than St Peter, that you’ll walk on water.’