Published by Grove Press, 2020, 448 pages

“Siberia is a nightmare or a myth full of impenetrable forests and limitless plains, its murderous proportions strung with groaning oil derricks and sagging wires. Siberia is all those things, and more as well.”

It is also, surprisingly enough, a land of pianos. Those banished to Siberia sometimes brought the instruments with them to ease their exile.  

Sophy Roberts tells the story of this huge, remote region through the pianos scattered throughout it, using them to reveal the region’s history and its people, and the hold that music had over the country. 

The first Roberts heard of these pianos was in Mongolia, when she was listening to a young Mongolian pianist playing a modern Yamaha in a ger, a large tent. Her mentor was unhappy with the piano and whispered to Roberts, “We must find her one of the lost pianos of Siberia!” 

This led to a growing obsession in tracking down the pianos, an instrument that Roberts does not even play. Her quest takes her all over Siberia: sometimes she manages to find old pianos but more often than not, she is unsuccessful. But it is the journey that matters.

“I soon realized what is missing can sometimes tell you more about a country’s history than what remains. I also learned that Siberia is bigger, more alluring and far more complicated than the archetypes might suggest—much bigger, in fact, than all the assumptions I had made when my plans began to germinate, then proliferate, and I found myself caught up in the momentum of travelling a ravishingly surprising place.”

Siberia, spreading east from the Ural Mountains, makes up an eleventh of the entire world’s landmass. Dissidents and criminals were sent there from the 17th century, so it has a long history as a penal colony. But it was also a place that people moved to so they could be out of reach of Tsar and the church or, in later years, the state.

Among the exiles were the Decembrists, a group that rebelled against Tsar Nicholas II. They were caught, some were hanged, and the rest sent to Siberia. One of the exiles was Prince Sergei Volkonsky, once a playmate of the Tsar. His wife Maria abandoned her life in Moscow to accompany him and brought her piano with her. Sergei was eventually moved to a jail in Petrovsky Zavod, where the wives could share the prisoners’ cells. Maria moved in with her piano.

The women who followed their Decembrist husbands or lovers were formidable. In Nerchinsk, the men were not allowed packages, so the women furtively sewed money into their clothes to buy the prisoners extra privileges. The prison commander reportedly said that “he would rather deal with a hundred political exiles than a dozen of their wives”. 

In Khabarovsk, Roberts meets a piano tuner who leads her to 19th-century piano, owned by a local philanthropist who bought it for his daughter for a hundred dollars. In Akademgorodok, she tracks down the piano that once belonged to a French concert pianist, Vera Lotar-Shevchenko, who was arrested with her husband and sent to Siberia.

Each piano has a history and stories to tell. And Roberts makes sure that all of them, whether they survived the years or not, have a chance to shine. Through them, she uncovers the lives of the people who brought them to this land and those she meets along the way. 

This is a fascinating way of discovering a place and a book well worth reading.

This review first appeared on Women on the Road.