The Lost Pianos of Siberia

In this luminous travelogue, journalist Roberts travels through Siberia looking for historically significant pianos, which she sees as symbols of civilization, refinement, and artistic freedom amid vast, frigid wildernesses and primitive settlements scarred by Russia’s bloody revolutions and barbaric gulags. Her quest also serves as a vehicle for her to investigate Siberia’s dramatic past. Episodes include mid-19th-century noblewoman Maria Volkhonsky’s journey into political exile, piano in tow, with her liberal Decembrist husband; the disappearance of a piano in the Ekaterinburg house where Bolsheviks executed Czar Nicholas II and his family; the somber picaresque of musicians and dancers incarcerated in Soviet prison camps, performing in the Arctic wastes; and the fate of a concert grand used by the Leningrad Philharmonic during its exile during WWII. The instruments often elude Roberts, but her quest sometimes achieves inspiring musical fruition, as when she arranges for a family of piano technicians in Novosibirsk to truck a resonant upright 2,000 miles to a pianist in Mongolia. The book is an eccentric meander, but Roberts’s mix of colorful history, rich reportage, and lyrical prose—“You can hear Siberia in the big, soft chords in Russian music that evoke the hush of silver birch trees and the billowing winter snows”—makes for a beguiling narrative. (Aug.)