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 was his father.
Peter Suvorin seldom spoke much, but he would sit, with his gold-rimmed spectacles propped below the bridge of his nose, quietly reading a paper or looking over the pages of his manuscript. His face was clean-shaven except for a small wedge of beard on his chin; and though his hair was grey and his face, somewhat drawn, had collected little lines upon it, he still looked less than his fifty-five years. With his look of kindly serenity, one might have taken him for a Swedish pastor.
And in his gentle way, he presided over everything. ‘Do you know what your father reminds me of?’ Karpenko once laughingly remarked to Dimitri. ‘He’s like one of those elders at a monastery. We all worship and make a noise and believe. But the elder in his hermitage, he’s quiet and serene: because unlike the rest of us, he knows. That’s how it is with your father and the revolution.’
Indeed, Peter Suvorin had reason to be content with his modest, steady course. The Bolsheviks in the last two years had little to show for their extremism. Police spies had infiltrated their ranks and made it hard for them to operate. Their lonely leader Lenin seemed to have been forced into permanent exile in Switzerland and their membership had plummeted. But the moderate, Menshevik Socialists had continued about their business, gradually building up support in the factories, organizing trade unions, educating and publishing – mostly legal activities. Some were ready to work with the Duma. There was even talk of changing the party’s name to the Workers’ Party. And Peter Suvorin was happy because, as he would tell his family: ‘It’s progress.
‘The new age is coming,’ he liked to say, ‘not because of your will, Karpenko, nor even the cunning of a fellow like Popov. You shouldn’t worry about the now or the when: we do not know the hour or the manner of its coming. The point is that we know the process is inevitable.’
Once, with a smile, the professor had remarked: ‘It occurred to me as I was working on my book the other day, that the Marxist Dialectic is like the laws of physics. Consider an electric current. It has a positive and negative charge: Thesis and Antithesis – they create a tension, the potential difference. They flow together, making a Synthesis. When Trotsky speaks of a permanent revolution in the world – a continuous process – I suppose it’s like an electric current: endless, dynamic, capable of powering anything.’ Listening to his father Dimitri would get a wonderful sense that all things in the universe were scientifically related, and that his little family, with their different forms of expression, were all moving along the great highway to an ultimate and marvellous destiny.
Nothing ever seemed to change the professor. He taught; he wrote; his pupils came to the house. His life was as quiet and ordered as his mind. Whatever else was going on, Peter’s activities gave the household a certain rhythm and purpose. It was comforting.
And, by the summer of 1910, Dimitri was certainly in need of comfort.
For by then it was clear that Rosa Suvorin was going mad.
For some months after Dimitri’s accident, Rosa’s habitual anxiousness seemed to have lessened. It was as if, fearing something worse, she was actually relieved that tragedy had struck and that now it was over. But then, just around the time Peter began writing his book, something began to change.
Why did she insist upon typing his book herself? Several times he had begged her to let him give the work to someone else, but on each occasion she had gone white with determination, as though he were somehow trying to violate her act of passionate devotion, and he had given up.
Each night, after supper was finished, she would set up her typewriter in the little dining room and start to work. She refused to do this during the day, saying she had no time then. Over and over again, she would type whatever Peter had written, until she was satisfied that it was perfect. Sometimes she would be done in an hour or so; but often she would continue, late into the night, lovingly placing her offering on the table in the hall in the early hours, and appear in the morning with eyes dark from lack of sleep. And how many nights, Dimitri wondered, had he fallen asleep to the faint sound of the typewriter going tap, tap, tap in the darkness?
Worse however than this obsessive behaviour, which wore Rosa down, was the reawakening of her old anxiousness, which now returned with a vengeance.
It took strange forms. If there were the faintest chill in the air, Peter must have an overcoat and a fur hat; if the sun was warm, she feared for sunstroke; whenever there was ice upon the ground, she knew he must have slipped and injured himself. This anxiety soon extended to cover Dimitri as well. Sometimes, to his great embarrassment, she would even insist that Karpenko go with him to school, in case anything should happen to him on the way. She could only relax, it seemed, in the evenings, when her husband and son were safely at home again.
Then she began to follow them. At first, they did not even realize that she was doing so: she would have some perfectly plausible excuse – a friend to visit, some shopping to do – for accompanying Peter to the university or Dimitri to school. But before long the excuses wore out and it became clear that she simply wanted to keep them in sight. Peter, who went in to the university only twice a week, decided to humour her; but Dimitri had to beg her to let him alone, and often thereafter he would turn irritably, to find her pale, wan face a hundred yards behind him.
More embarrassing were her suspicions.
They came, it seemed, from nowhere. Yet they tortured her. She would decide, quite suddenly, that a fellow professor was out to get Peter, or a neighbour with whom she was on friendly terms was a police spy, watching her whole family. She would earnestly warn Dimitri that there was a hidden conspiracy, coming from the Black Hundreds, to destroy all Jews and Socialists. ‘Anyone may be in it,’ she would warn him, ‘you never know.’ And no one, it seemed, was above suspicion.
In the first months of 1910, Karpenko became agitated because the government, having allowed the Ukraine some cultural freedom, became nervous of the growing sense of nationalism emerging there. ‘The word is that they are about to close all the Ukrainian cultural societies,’ he told them dejectedly. ‘We Cossacks should rise up again as we did under Bogdan,’ he added wryly, ‘and take over the Ukraine again.’