Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [490]
Everyone was busy. Dimitri had two music professors now and was making rapid strides. Karpenko had entered the School of Art and was already gaining a reputation as a fellow of ideas. As was his custom, kindly Vladimir had given the young man a helping hand, inviting him frequently to his house when distinguished members of the art world were gathered there, and introducing him to several artists. And Peter Suvorin himself was particularly busy: for it was during these years that he wrote his classic textbook, Physics for Students, which was to make his name familiar to a whole generation of Russian schoolboys.
These were quiet times for Russia too. To Dimitri, as he walked into the shady courtyard of the apartment building, if often seemed that, if great events were stirring in the world, their sounds had been muffled by the time they reached the narrow, tree-lined streets of Moscow. Of the doings of the Tsar, his German wife and their children in their private palaces in St Petersburg, he heard hardly anything.
Dimitri knew, too, that Stolypin and the Duma continued on their road of slow reform; though when he read the newspapers it seemed to him that the great minister, though he brought peace and prosperity, had few friends. ‘The liberals hate him for clamping down,’ Vladimir explained, ‘but the reactionaries hate him because his system of governing seems to weaken the absolute autocracy of the Tsar. He’s winning through though,’ he added.
To Dimitri, the evenings were the best of times, when the family sat together round the table and discussed the day’s events. How delightful it was, especially in the spring and summer months when his mother would prepare tea, served with raspberries, and through the open window one could see the mellow turquoise sky and hear, faintly, the singing of vespers from the church next door.
Karpenko was a constant source of conversation. While Dimitri’s studies at this time were of a gradual and private nature – he would be immersed for weeks at a time in the Beethoven piano sonatas, or in a Tchaikovsky symphony, which profound joys could not easily be shared in words – Karpenko was in a continual ferment of intellectual excitement, and hardly a week seemed to pass when he did not bring home some new discovery which changed the world. Sometimes it was a new school of painting, inaugurated in an exhibition with some name like The Blue Rose, or The Golden Fleece. One month he read the Confessions of the writer Gorky and some writings of a new group in St Petersburg who called themselves the God Builders, and each evening he would lecture the family: ‘Don’t you see, all through the centuries man has been like Prometheus, chained to a rock of superstition. But now, Dimitri, man is risen. The people is God. The people will be immortal. Think of it, Professor: first the people will create the revolution and be free; then, maybe one day we’ll even take over other planets, the universe.’ And afterwards he and Dimitri would continue these weighty discussions in the room they shared, late into the night.
But the discovery of Karpenko’s that meant the most to Dimitri was something more modest. There were many poets in Moscow and St Petersburg just then; indeed, poetry was so popular that poets could even make a living at their craft. And one night Karpenko arrived with a collection of verses by some people Dimitri had not heard of before. ‘They’re a new school,’ he explained. ‘Instead of using symbols and abstract ideas they write more directly, about experience.’ Two of these in particular Dimitri loved at once. ‘I feel as if they’re writing about this very street, this very apartment and family,’ he said, delightedly. And so, at the start of their careers, he discovered two of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets: Osip Mandelstamm and Anna Akhmatova.
Yet despite Karpenko’s brilliance, it was during these evenings that Dimitri gradually came, as never before, to appreciate one other member of his close-knit family: this