Siberia is a feeling to me

Photo Michael Turek / Courtesy of Sophy Roberts

And the piano story?

I believe that music and its power transcend knowledge of it. You don’t have to be a musician who can read a note of music to be able to feel its power. I don’t like that elitism that can sometimes belong to a cultural phenomenon like literature or music. And I found it exciting in a place like Russia where they are far less snobbish about [culture] than in the West, where there is often an attitude among the top of society which has access to classical music. So with this book I felt I was able to explore the effects of music on everyday people. I started trying to find a grand instrument, but I understood that the humblest of instrument can have an equally profound effect on its owner, player or listener.            

You also refer to Siberia as more significant than a place on the map, but as a feeling. What do you mean by that?

Siberia is a feeling to me. So many places have been defined by tourism, social media or really powerful voices. Siberia’s cultural history is not definitive in the way that other places are. And I think of it as a place of potential and optimism. It’s also exciting to be in places where people haven’t always told their story before.  

Traveling across Siberia: what were your impressions of the landscape?

So much about travel is about how it stimulates your senses. The Siberian landscape in winter is a blanket of snow. It covers up a lot of things and takes it back to a white, prelapsarian state. It’s easy to be seduced by its romance. The shamanistic history in Siberia and the high levels of spiritualism in the culture is firmly rooted to those sensory experiences of landscape. That’s what I mean when I say Siberia is a feeling: to me that is where it all connects. The landscape of Siberia moved me emotionally before it moved me intellectually. And that is a really exciting thing in a world where we think there is nothing new under the sun as travellers. Siberia made me see a place that is not processed by tourism or overexposure.     

How about the people you met?

What I found with the people mostly was a kind of quiet privacy. They don’t have a constant need to be seen and heard like people in the West do. There is also a very strong sense of community. People get on with life. Yes, there is darkness. Yes, there is tricky politics. But they are profoundly humble people.     

You mention how empathy has always been seared into the Siberian psyche from the start. That seems paradoxical considering that it has been a destination for prisoners for many centuries?

There is a sense there that people are in it together. There is a community aspect in Siberia where people know their neighbours. That isn’t true in my culture. When you are in severe circumstances you need your community. Back in the Tsarist exile period, it didn’t matter if you were guilty or innocent: you were in Siberia. That degree of human empathy and compassion still exists today.    

Another interesting aspect to Siberia is how many people of significance in Russian culture and history have spent time there as prisoners: the Decembrists, Dostoevsky, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Solzhenitsyn to name a few. Presumably this was something that interested you when researching for your book?

Those particular characters you have listed, yes, because they are the rare individuals who left evidence of their time spent in Siberia, and they have the capacity as creative people to express it. But the vast majority of people only suffered and went to the grave with silence and hell. But the expression left from people like Dostoevsky is what remains for people like me to work with as a storyteller. I’m an optimist. And I look for the best in people. As a traveller that helps me. I was naturally drawn to stories where people made the best of a bad situation. That is why I like the Decembrists so much.         

You dedicate nearly an entire chapter in your book to those Russian military officers and noblemen who organised the Decembrist revolt of 1825. You mention that they even had a music room for a piano in Siberia in political exile?

Yes. Their exile was a privileged exile. For some of them at least. Some were sent to Yakutia without any of their fellow Decembrists. And others went mad. So everyone’s story is not the same. But the Decembrists story that I focus on are the ones who end up in Chita, and the Volkonsky family in particular. They had the camaraderie where a few of them together could collectively make an academy. One was an astronomer. One was a painter. One was a musician. So they could benefit from each other’s knowledge when they were in prison together. That is what made that particular group so interesting. Music was a really important strand of that academy they created in prison.           

The Trans-Siberian railway began in 1891. How did it change Siberia?

Travel for starters. Travelling across Siberia prior to the Trans-Siberian railway was extraordinary. The rivers flow south to north, not east to west. So you are constantly having to traverse a piece of ground and then [move] your material over rivers. So you can never flow along a river. Prior to the Trans-Siberian railway, getting goods of any significance was difficult. You had to move goods when everything was frozen. The railway enabled that continuous journey all year round. So it completely changed the fortunes of Russia. But the railway is only one tiny thread through a vast amount of territory. And the decisions made on where that thread went affected the development of towns and the destruction of others. Only cities on that railway bloomed and blossomed. Most people’s knowledge today of Siberia comes from hopping on and off that train. What I found interesting as a traveller was going beyond the train. And thinking about creative ways to get beyond into the back country into places that otherwise were not easily accessible.           

The Russian writer Anton Chekhov pops up quite a few times in your book. What was it about his stay in Siberia that you found particularly interesting?

He’s a huge resource because he made the trip to Siberia all the way to Sakhalin (a Russian island in the Pacific Ocean, north of Japan). His book Sakhalin Island is an incredibly brave piece of investigate journalism. He knew he was dying of TB at the time – was that what made him so brave? I don’t know. But when I started to read his work on Sakhalin I began to see echoes of characters from his other works. I love his writing as a traveller. His sense of irony is very modern. You also trust him as a travel writer because he is not giving you the puff of the modern travel writing industry, which says everything is brilliant. I find his writing profoundly honest, amusing and sharp witted. He says he would rather die than spend another night in certain towns: where the brothels are grim and the women are ugly.

 You also look at the Romanovs languishing in Siberia before their brutal murder at Yekaterinburg by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Can you tell me about your search for a grand piano that was supposed to have made its way along with the family?

Finding records of instruments in history is difficult. There was one particular instrument that was noted in detail because it was present in the last home the Romanovs lived in where they were killed. It was documented because it was an official document that was made by the investigators. So that gave me a physical fact that this instrument existed. In trying to find out where it could have gone, I followed a number of false rumours, claims and leads. That was a really important moment for me in the research because it made me realise that the piano was a means for me to tell a bigger story about Russia. It was a mechanism to go into the history of a country over the last 200 years. Even though I didn’t find that Tsar piano, I realised it didn’t matter because it led me to deeper stories about what changed Russia.        

How has Siberia’s position changed since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991? Did it become less relevant for Russia?

No, it has become more relevant to Russia, not culturally but economically. Siberia’s relevance to Russia is huge and it’s going to get even bigger. Over the next 20 years we are going to see a lot more developments in Siberia in the area of resource extraction. Its proximity to China is also important. Especially with shifting changing politics of Eurasia. It’s a really interesting part of that world for that reason. It’s a crucible.    

Sophy Roberts is a British writer and journalist. Her debut book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia,focuses on aquest to find an instrument for a talented musician she meets in Mongolia, whose family fled Siberia in the 1930s. The book subsequently explores 200 years of Russian history.

JP O’Malley is a freelance journalist and cultural critic.

Siberia, Sophy Roberts, travel writing