Travels through Siberia in Search of Pianos

 

Sophy Roberts, The Lost Pianos of Siberia. London: Transworld Publishers/ Penguin/Random House, 2020.  433 pp. profusely illustrated with maps and photographs.

Presented as a book similar to Edmund De Waal’s Hare with the Amber Eyes (2010) and The White Road (2015), family reminiscences and meditations on the makers and materials of art in a sensitive, if not often sensuous language, Sophy Roberts’ The Lost Pianos of Siberia (2020) is a wonder. She sets out to do something crazy: to travel across Siberia to locate the pianos that were sent there ever since the Russians decided to use it as a place of exile. Thereafter, with changes in government, wars, occupations and the building of railways and roads, the people of this vast territory—and some of it is or has been Chinese, Japanese and American—endure and love to play and hear the piano.

There is no real plot line to this book. The author moves from one end of Siberia to the other, meeting people, hearing their stories, looking for lost or hidden pianos, and retelling the history of the region and the people who live there. She tells many fascinating anecdotes, describes wonderful places, report the ordeals and sorrows of exiles, and fills up the vast supposedly empty stretches of Siberia with humanity and culture. She seems to read nearly every traveller’s book from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and gleaned many strange facts about the Decembrists, the Bolshevik and Soviet prisoners, the families that followed their condemned members and those who decided to stay rather than return to one type of tyranny or another, trusting that distance, freezing temperatures and lack of transport would keep them safe.

From the outside many towns and cities look drab and soul-less, but from the inside they vibrate like pianos to the generations-old enthusiasms and desperate memories of the inhabitants. She is a charming person for whom, sometimes after a little hesitation, the informants open up and tell their own and their family histories show her pianos they have taken care of and which are still playable, and let her use family photographs. Occasionally she meets indigenous natives and families that have come there of their own free will, and Sophy Roberts weaves their stories too in the fabric of her anatomy of Siberia. She also lists many interesting sources in notes at the back and these books, fictional and personal, point the way towards following up on the anecdotes she tells about in this most readable of books.