Pieter Waterdrinker

The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street Pieter Waterdrinker

In 1988, at the age of 26, Pieter Waterdrinker was at home in the Netherlands one day when a man knocked on his door and asked him to smuggle a shipment of bibles into the USSR. The resulting adventure would lead to a lifelong journey into Russia and its history.

Waterdrinker would eventually find himself living in Saint Petersburg, with his Russian wife and three cats, on a street which a hundred years earlier had been the epicentre of the 1917 Russian Revolution. In The Long Song of Tchaikovsky Street he tells its story, from the fall of the Tsar to the collapse of the USSR, blending history with memoir to create an ode to the divided soul of Russia and an unputdownable account of his own struggles with life, literature and love.


"Words by Waterdrinker are as amazing as a superior circus."
--Elsevier

"How evocatively Waterdrinker can write! A hundred years after the Russian Revolution, he makes this violent period of history shine once again."
--Zin