The Lit Fix
Marshwood Vale based author, Sophy Roberts, highlights her slim pickings for February. In this case, ‘one of the most inspiring books’ she has ever read.
L
ike every author publishing a new book in the last 12 months, Covid-19 has been a rattling experience. It has often felt pointless to even talk about culture when there have been much more immediate issues at hand. I then remind myself about the topic I’ve just given four years of my life to—in search of a remarkable piano in Siberia on behalf of a friend, a Mongolian concert pianist—and I take a leaf out of my own book: the inspirational life of Maria Volkonsky, a nineteenth-century Russian princess who in extreme isolation, found her simple pleasure in music. The daughter of one of Russia’s most decorated generals, Maria was a society beauty. Her husband, Prince Sergei Volkonsky, was a childhood friend of the Tsar’s. Then in 1825, their glittering existence— from holidays in Crimea, to balls in St. Petersburg— was drowned by the sound of canon-fire and fetters in the snow. It happened on the day of the winter solstice: Volkonsky and a group of well-born political liberals rose up in a failed coup against the despotic Romanovs. Five were hanged. A hundred-or-so ‘Decembrist’ nobles, including Volkonsky, were sent to Siberia. They were stripped of their children, wealth and privileges. If their wives went with them, warned the Tsar, they too would be banned from returning to European Russia. When Maria chose to do just that, abandoning their two-year-old son to follow her husband, she became the cover girl for what is sometimes called the First Russian Revolution.
48 The Marshwood Vale Magazine February 2021 Tel. 01308 423031
And on the back of her sledge? A little piano. It was a remarkably brave endeavour, with both princess and instrument surviving a four-thousandmile journey from Moscow along the infamous Great Siberia Trakt, their passage over a frozen Lake Baikal a feat of endurance in one of the last places on Earth you would expect heroics, or to hear a note of Bach. From 1801 to 1917, more than a million subjects were banished under the Tsarist penal exile system. From 1929 to 1953, around 2.7 million forced labourers died in the Soviet Gulag. Varlam Shalamov, a poet who spent seventeen years in a Siberian camp, described the terror of indifference, how the cold that froze a man’s spit could also freeze the soul. But not Maria, who moved her instrument into the windowless cell she shared with her husband. When the couple later lived in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, Maria held musical salons using a Lichtenthal grand piano sent by her brother, which survives to this day. She fought for musical education in schools, and raised money to build the town’s first purpose-built concert hall—civic philanthropy that earned her the spontaneous applause of the public. At the inaugural concert, locals rose to their feet to thank her, in spite of her exile status. In Siberia, music took on a renewed purpose. It’s what Maria cherished, an impulse the Decembrists shared when they set up a music school in prison. The same happened with literature. The Decembrists building an extraordinary library, with their powerful libertarian principles disseminated through the
