by Marion Meade
Innocent of deception, Helena also apparently rejected the devil theory. But she was helpless to come up with anything remotely approaching a satisfactory explanation. It would be many years before she would be able to account for the writing, describing it as “the work of my mind,” and calling the facts relayed by Tekla “the objective reproduction of what my own mind read and saw in the astral light.”52 At the time, however, her sense of chagrin and confusion must have been acute. Only one thing was certain: the writing career of Tekla Lebendorff was finished.
If Helena’s belief in spirits was somewhat battered by that experience, it was not completely demolished and she continued to indulge her passion for the mystical in other ways. For all her distaste of lessons, no scholar was more ardent a reader. According to Vera, “she could not be prevailed to give up her books, which she would devour night and day as long as the impulse lasted. The enormous library of her grandparents seemed then hardly large enough to satisfy her cravings.”53 Judging by the breadth of references in H.P.B.’s adult writings, the Fadeyev library must have been filled with works on science, history and philosophy. But what Vera does not mention is that it also included the occult collection that belonged to their great-grandfather Prince Paul Dolgorukov.
On Dolgorukov’s death in 1837, the library had been inherited by his daughter, Princess Helena, and while it is safe to assume that she had no interest in this type of literature, her granddaughter had a passion for it. Undoubtedly it was in the Prince’s collection that Helena found Solomon’s Wisdom, the book that inspired her hypnotic experiments with pigeons. Altogether the library contained hundreds of books on alchemy, magic, and occult sciences, and H.P.B. conceded that she “had read them with the keenest interest before the age of fifteen. All the devilries of the Middle Ages had found refuge in my head and soon neither Paracelsus, Kunrath, nor C. Agrippa would have had anything to teach me.”54
H.P.B.’s admission that she was strongly influenced by the medieval alchemists, whose works she regarded as sources of revelation equal to the Bible, sheds an interesting light on the development of her philosophy. Significantly, she made that statement in a letter written in 1882 to a friend of her youth, Prince Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff, which was not made public until 1951. She would not have willingly publicized this bit of information, for she was generally reluctant to admit where she had learned things, preferring to give the impression that they came to her by mysterious means. The fact is, she seems to have acquired information from the same places as most of us—books.
At fifteen and sixteen years old Helena’s escape into the absorbing world of alchemy must have proved a comfort, for in these volumes, she at last encountered individuals with mental powers similar to her own. Nevertheless, she still had to spend most of her waking hours with the Fadeyevs who by this time had made it abundantly clear that they expected more from her than she seemed willing to concede. They pressured her to behave like a well-bred young lady and to participate in the social life appropriate for a girl of her age and station. Throughout the winter season, young ladies displayed themselves at weekly assemblies dubbed “brides’ fairs,” where predatory mothers paraded arm in arm with their daughters, hoping to catch the eye of an eligible young gentleman. In addition, there was an endless succession of balls, private parties and midnight suppers, to most of which Helena Petrovna received invitations.
Princess Helena must have had premonitions about launching into society a granddaughter who not only shunned parties, but who also displayed a marked aversion for ribbons, and silks, and all other female accoutrements. It would be another six years before Paris introduced horsehair crinolines, but styles were already moving toward billowing skirts, tight-laced wasp waists, and extremely low décolletage. This particular fashion, so feminine and utterly impractical for normal activity, was clearly not created with girls like Helena Petrovna in mind. In a photograph dating from this period, we see her looking like a baby lamb in a rumpled bathrobe. She is wearing an obviously expensive, well-made gown, but with her wooly hair, her thick waist and a strand of pearls slung over her left breast in what is perhaps a calculated gesture of defiance, she appears the very model of what a fashionable Russian girl was not supposed to look like. She is not smiling.
Throughout her life, H.P.B. was to regard social duties lightly and often scornfully, avoiding formal functions when she could, and, when she could not, behaving so outrageously that her hosts wished she would go home. The contrived rituals of the drawing room and the ballroom struck her as the worst sort of hypocrisy, “ergo, I ran amuck against society and the established proprieties.” At sixteen, however, she was proving most trying to her grandmother and her Aunt Katherine, who were facing the fact that Peter von Hahn could not be counted on to shape Lelinka’s future and that they, therefore, must assume this responsibility themselves. Helena Petrovna did not appreciate their efforts: “I hate dress, finery, and civilized society. I despise a ballroom, and how much I despise it will be proved... by the following:
When hardly sixteen I was forced one day to go to a dancing party, a great ball at the Viceroy’s. My protests were not listened to by my parents [sic], who told me they would have me dressed up—or rather, according to fashion, undressed—for the ball by servants by force, if I did not go willingly. I then deliberately plunged my foot and leg into a kettle of boiling water, and held it there till it nearly boiled raw. Of course I scalded it horribly, and remained at home for six months.55
Of course this assault upon her body effectively put an end to dancing that winter, and the months she spent recuperating from the burns were undoubtedly devoted to her alchemy books. Still, while entry into the world of young men and marriage might be postponed by boiling an appendage, it could not be permanently canceled. And the prospect was frightening to Helena. Many years later, she said:
“There is nothing of the woman in me. When I was young, if a young man had dared to speak to me of love, I would have shot him like a dog who bit me.”56
Yet there were exceptions. The following summer, in 1848, a young man named Constantine Petrovitch Kauffmann “used to make vain declarations of love to me on a heap of potatoes and carrots at Abaz-Touman,” the vacation resort near Tiflis. Since she referred to him, in 1881, as “my poor innocent red-nosed friend,”57 there seems to have been no question of shooting him. Perhaps she was feeling sorry for her tepid cavalier, or perhaps she was merely boasting: Constantine had become General Petrovitch Kauffmann, whose daring exploits in the conquest of Turkestan made him a national hero.
H.P.B. cannot be taken at her word on the subject of men. In her adult letters, she liked to present herself as non-sexual—there are frequent references to her being frigid, unfeminine and sexless. “Never—physically speaking—has there ever existed a girl or woman colder than I. I had a volcano in constant eruption in my brain and—a glacier—at the foot of the mountain.”58 But glacial as she might have felt at the age of fifty, when those words were written, it would be a mistake to assume that she experienced none of the normal adolescent’s yearning for romantic love. In her letters to Prince Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff, one is struck by a gushing tone so far removed from her normal tartness that it suggests she may have unconsciously regressed to her manner of speaking in those distant days in Tiflis, when she first knew the Prince. She is at once flirtatious, coy, sycophantic, silly and simpering; she repeatedly quotes a Russian proverb: “The prettiest girl in the world cannot give more than she has.”59 She playfully alludes to the Prince’s virility, calling him “Don Juan” and “sinner”; and she signs her name Elena, instead of her customary and much more masculine signature H. P. Blavatsky.60 All of this is so unlike H.P.B., that it seems to be another person speaking. And in a sense it was—Helena Petrovna von Hahn.
But, buried in her anti-male, anti-sex diatribes, there was an important nugget of self-awareness. Even as a young girl, she had an aversion to the traditional female preoccupations with home, husband, adornm
ent and children. Not only had she had a firsthand view of marital failure in her own family, but those ten years with her mother had also infected her. While she never admitted to having read Zenaida R-va’s books—she rarely mentioned that her mother was an author, much less a well-known one—she must have perused those nine volumes of feminist despair with more than passing interest. H.P.B. never marched in a suffragist parade, nor did she throw even verbal support behind the flourishing nineteenth-century women’s movement. Still, she absorbed the message. There may have been, as she remarked, “nothing of the woman in me” in the Victorian definition, but there was a greal deal of Helena Andreyevna von Hahn in her.
The spring and summer of her seventeenth year, H.P.B. and Vera accompanied Nadyezhda and the Wittes first to Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk for water cures, on the way to which they narrowly escaped injury from an avalanche. A few weeks after her birthday, they moved on to the German colony of Elizabethal to join her grandparents and they wound up, finally, at the water resort of Ekatarinenfeld. This summer holiday at the spas had a serious purpose, for Princess Helena, now fifty-nine, was in poor health and had possibly already suffered the first of several crippling strokes that would eventually confine her to a wheelchair.
In the early autumn, back in Tiflis, the Fadeyevs moved to a luxurious old mansion that had once belonged to the Chavchavadze princes. One visitor recalled that it was a melancholy place, “carrying the imprint of something weird or peculiar about it—something that carried one back to the epoch of Catherine the Great.”61
The deep gloom of the new house must have added to Helena’s uneasiness. She later described herself as living, during that time, “a double existence, mysterious, incomprehensible even to myself,”62 in which she spent “the day in my physical body and my nights in my astral body.” She could not define what she was seeking any more precisely than as “the unknown.” But she may well have sensed, by that time, that her whole life would be devoted to a ceaseless investigation of “the powers of nature that are inaccessible to our reason.”63 Such unorthodox ambitions obviously required the complete freedom her grandparents were never likely to grant.
The tradition of female intellectuality in her family notwithstanding, Helena was expected, sooner or later, to marry. Despite her weight problem, her widely proclaimed anti-male sentiments, and her general unconventionality, she was not unattractive to men. Even as a young woman she was an indefatigable conversationalist who always had something interesting to say—a refreshing change from the usual adolescent inanities and one that appealed to a number of young men in her social set. The red-nosed Constantine Petrovitch, with whom she had dallied at Abbas-Tuman the previous summer, must have been intrigued, as was Prince Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff— however much they also may have teased her to her face, laughed behind her back, and called it all magical superstition and humbug. What other girl of their acquaintance expounded on philosophers’ stones,64 sibyls and Red Virgins? Who else would dare sneak off to visit Maria Solomonovna Babuna, in whose home congregated the sorcerers of Tiflis with their “love potions and other horrors”?65
Prince Alexander Golitsyn, who often visited the Fadeyevs, appreciated Helena Petrovna’s originality from a very different perspective than the others. While little is known about this young man, an acquaintance of the Fadeyevs would later describe him as “either a Freemason or a magician or a fortune-teller”66 and given his family background, the Prince’s interest in the occult was natural. The Prince’s grandfather, also named Alexander Golitsyn, was an aristocrat who had been a favorite of Alexander I. In the 1820s, the elder Golitsyn had been strongly affected by certain mystical and pietistic trends then current in Europe and, rejecting Orthodoxy as irrelevant, he had formed a Bible Society which embraced the idea that spiritual forces ruled the world and that a new universal church would spring up in Russia. So persuasive was Golitsyn that Alexander I gave him the unprecedented title of Minister of Education and Spiritual Affairs. Some years later, however, when a schism in the Orthodox Church was imminent, Golitsyn fell from the Czar’s grace and his Bible Society was suppressed. Nevertheless, his interest in the occult persisted and became shared by the grandson who was so taken with Helena Petrovna.
Not only did young Prince Golitsyn talk knowledgeably about mediumship and clairvoyance, he must also have discussed his grandfather’s dream of a universal occult church. This concept, albeit somewhat distorted, would stay in Helena Petrovna’s mind and become one of the many strands influencing her life’s work.
Despite Golitsyn’s impressive lineage, the Fadeyevs could not have approved of his growing influence on Helena. While it is impossible to determine the exact nature of their relationship, the evidence indicates that he was not a romantic suitor. In any case, he suddenly left Tiflis in that winter of 1849, to Helena’s dismay and probably to the Fadeyevs’ relief. In 1874, twenty-five years later—Helena would claim that she had been betrothed to the Prince, but that he had died.67
In the meantime, another gentleman had appeared on the scene who, from the Fadeyevs’ point of view, was more suitable. Engrossed in Golitsyn, Helena Petrovna had not paid much attention to Nikifor Blavatsky, an old friend of her grandparents. He came from the landed gentry of Poltava and had started his career as a clerk—first in the office of the civil governor of Poltava and then of the Caucasus. There followed a succession of bureaucratic jobs with the military and civil government of Trans-Caucasia. From 1840 to 1842, he had been Inspector of Police at Shemaha, in the Caucasus, near Baku, and, immediately before meeting Helena, he had lived in Persia. Now, in the winter of 1848-1849, he had settled temporarily in Tiflis, before taking up the most prestigious assignment of his career: vice-governor of the newly formed Province of Erivan, which lay directly to the south of Tiflis.
During the winter months, Nikifor Blavatsky called frequently on the Fadeyevs, and as time wore on it became apparent, even to Helena, that she was the main attraction. In those days, a man became designated a beau by the frequency of his visits and the length of time he spent chatting with a young woman. Nikifor was unquestionably a serious suitor, even though Helena, by then preoccupied by the loss of Golitsyn, failed to take him seriously.
At the same time, Helena was struggling to absorb another disturbing piece of news: her father had married again, to a Baroness von Lange. In view of his neglect of her during the previous years, she must have regarded the marriage as a second abandonment. Her temper and disposition, recalled Nadyezhda, were decidedly foul. When Blavatsky falteringly made advances, she spurned them. She told Nadyezhda and Vera that she did not love him and did not even like him. She found him old and physically unappealing, and nicknamed him “the plumeless raven,”68 because of his receding hairline or premature baldness.
However, Helena’s initial response to Nikifor Blavatsky failed to end matters between them. When her governess declared that she was too vile-tempered to ever find a husband, even one like “the plumeless raven,” Helena took up the challenge to prove her wrong. Three days later, prompted by the same impetuous madness that had led her to boil her foot, she wrung a marriage proposal out of Nikifor. Confused as he must have been, he was also pleased, because he loved her. The Fadeyevs must have breathed a deep sigh of relief over the engagement of their wild granddaughter to a mature, sensible bureaucrat who would put up with her varied aberrations.
“Then,” recalled Nadyezhda Fadeyev, “frightened at what she had done, she sought to escape from her joking acceptance of his offer. But it was too late.”69 Was it really too late to break the engagement? Had she really consented in jest? Whatever her later opinion of Blavatsky may have been, the truth was that at the time, he interested her. She found in him what she had found in no man except Golitsyn: he did not laugh at her belief in the occult. On the contrary, he seems to have shared it.
Whereas all the young men laughed at “magical” superstitions, he believed in them! He had so often talked to me about the sorcerers of Erivan, of
the mysterious sciences of the Kourds [sic] and Persians, that I took him in order to use him as a latch key to the latter.70
Whether or not Nikifor genuinely shared her enthusiasms is debatable. It must have been apparent to him that an expression of belief was the only way to her heart.
Nikifor’s unwavering persistence, when he must have known how little Helena cared for him, is puzzling. Helena would later claim that she felt ashamed of being Madame Blavatsky, although the reasons are not readily apparent. Nikifor loved her, he had a kind disposition, and eventually he would support her, emotionally and financially, in socially untenable situations. According to Vera, he was “in all respects an excellent man, with but one fault”71—his insistence on marrying a girl who did not respect him.
Helena’s shame would come later. In the spring of 1849, she experienced panic. She must have realized that it was not marriage she wanted, but rather freedom from her grandparents’ authority and the unhindered pursuit of her occult studies. As it was, she would merely be exchanging one guardian for another. And, as the wife of a vice-governor, she would be obliged to perform the kinds of social duties she had always abhorred. She realized that she would be making a mistake, well before she made it. Why a person of such strong will could not have corrected it in time remains a mystery. In 1886, she wrote to her biographer, Alfred Sinnett:
Details about my marriage? Well, now they say that I wanted to marry the old whistlebreeches myself. Let it be. My father was four thousand miles off. My grandmother was too ill. It was as I told you. I had engaged myself to spite the governess, never thinking I could no longer disengage myself. Well, Karma followed sin.72
It turned out that Helena could not disengage herself without seriously entangling her family, which was already under a great deal of strain. The Princess, apparently too ill to give the matter her undivided attention, left it to Katherine and Andrey, neither of whom would listen to Helena’s “prayers and supplications not to be married to old B—-.”73 In their view, she had made her choice and now must stick by it. Many harsh words passed between Helena and the rest of the family in this battle of wills: Vera accused Helena of slandering their mother; there were quarrels between Vera and Nadyezhda, who had never liked each other, when Nadyezhda took Lelinka’s side. The betrothal brought out the worst in everyone.
