Madame Blavatsky

by Marion Meade

  During this period, no more is heard of poltergeists or high-gloss society seances. After returning from Pskov, she settled in Tiflis, living quietly with Rostislav, who, still unmarried, had his own residence. It was a domestic, stable interlude unlike any she had experienced before or would afterward, one limited mainly to “Yuourotita,” Rostislav and Nadyezhda. Nikifor Blavatsky continued to live in Tiflis but in December, 1864, he resigned his position and retired to a small estate he owned in the Province of Poltava. It is doubtful, however, that H.P.B. had anything to do with him before his departure.

  In 1864 or ‘65, she and Yuri joined Agardi Metrovitch in Italy. How or why this came about is impossible to reconstruct. She was never content to remain in one place long, and perhaps she merely needed a change of scenery; perhaps Metrovitch had been seeking a reconciliation for some time, for despite lengthy separations and her flings with other men, there remained a strong bond between them.

  Metrovitch’s life, now as before, was composed of steamers, trains and coaches, of hotels and theaters, of conductors, composers and singers. But unlike the 1850s, his touring was now confined to second-rate companies in third-rate towns of eastern Europe. A glimpse of H.P.B.’s life with him is gleaned from a sort of diary she kept during the winter and spring of 1867 when Metrovitch was touring the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The two-and-a-half by four-inch notebook, purchased at a chemist in Budapest, is hardly a record of travel impressions kept by an ordinary tourist, as some of Helena’s biographers would claim. Rather, the notations are those made by a person deeply involved in the music world with its petty jealousies and rivalries, and nearly all the people H.P.B. met or mentions have something to do with music: “Adolf Benedict, Hungarian Jew, pretending to be the foremost baritone of the world” [Karlsburg]; “Philipovich M. Heksh, the hissed baritone”... “the last day of the Terreur of Robespierre” [Klausenburg]; “Mme. Kirchberger, prima donna and admirable Lucretia. Baritone Male-chevsky. Tenor Rossi. German Opera” [Temesvar].

  They always sought clean, reasonably priced hotels, but very often they were obliged to settle for “expensive and bad” ones. In Belgrade their accommodations were downright “dirty and disgusting.” In Debrecen, which had “the most beautiful theatre in Hungary,”84 she went to two balls; in Oberstadt, she was delighted when people on the street said a friendly hello without knowing her, but more often the towns were “small, dirty and boring.” Much of their time was spent traveling, but she did some sightseeing, and socialized briefly with locals she met at the theaters. Mainly, the life was boring, especially since they had no money to waste. It was often abysmally cold in the coaches and sleazy hotels, and the constant moving about could not have been ideal for a sickly five-year-old. In fact, Yuri’s health took a turn for the worse, if not during this tour, then shortly afterward. In the autumn, “I took the poor child to Bologna to see if I could save him.” Metrovitch accompanied them,

  doing all he could for me, more than a brother. Then the child died; and as it had no papers, nor documents, and I did not care to give my name in food to the kind gossips, it was he, Metrovitch who undertook all the job, who buried the aristocratic Baron’s child—under his, Metrovitch’s, name saying “he did not care,” in a small town of Southern Russia in 1867.

  Regardless of her very vocal disdain for Russia at times, she had deep roots in her homeland and could not conceive of her son’s burial in foreign soil. The macabre journey ended in an unidentified town in the south, probably near Kiev. “After this,” she wrote,

  without notifying my relatives of having returned to Russia to bring back the unfortunate little boy whom I did not succeed to bring back alive to the governess chosen for him by the Baron, I simply wrote to the child’s father to notify him of this pleasant occurrence for him and returned to Italy with the same passport. Then comes Venice, Florence, Menta-na.85

  At the time she wrote those words, in 1886, she had been saying for a dozen years that she had fought with Giuseppe Garibaldi’s army at the battle of Mentana,86 which had taken place thirteen miles northeast of Rome on November 3, 1867, and claimed that she had been wounded five times: her left arm was broken in two places by a saber stroke, she had a musket bullet embedded in her right shoulder and another in her leg. Finally she had been left for dead in a ditch. The far-fetched story of her mutilation must have been how she experienced Yuri’s passing, distorting it into her own symbolic death as a punishment for having denied she had borne him.

  Actually, after Yuri’s death, she and Metrovitch settled in Kiev where, under Helena’s guidance, he learned enough Russian to succeed in such operas as Life for the Tzar and Rusalka. At that time the most powerful person in town was Prince Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff, Helena’s girlhood friend, now governor-general of Kiev. Never shy about requesting favors from influential friends, she asked Alexander to exert his influence on Metrovitch’s behalf. Sergei Witte insinuates their relationship was more than platonic, but whatever its nature, they soon quarreled over Helena’s poems lampooning the Prince which were posted on doors and telegraph posts. As a result, she and Metrovitch, in the words of her cousin, “had to clear out.”87 Thirteen years later she wrote to the Prince from Bombay, again to ask a favor, and begged: “Let us not talk of that dreadful time and I implore you to forget it forever,”88 reminding him that she had just “lost all that was dear to me in the world and nearly became insane.”

  In letters to friends and family, she would allude to her breakdown after Yuri passed away, mentioning her mental suffering, guilt, and the persistent sense of having been punished for her sins. In her mind there was no doubt that she had “covered with shame the heads of... the whole family.” After returning home to Tiflis and going to confession and communion, she had thought that one sin more or less would not matter and “I still continued to stain my soul.” In 1877, confiding to Nadyezhda her rejection of Christianity, she wrote that the Russian Orthodox god had died for her on the day of Yuri’s death. Even though she had never truly felt at home with Christianity, still “there were moments when I believed deeply that sins can be remitted by the Church, and that the blood of Christ has redeemed me, together with the whole race of Adam.” And then look what happened. “No! It is bitter and painful to remember this past. You know at what facts I am hinting.”89 For a long while Helena could neither accept her son’s death nor forgive the God who had permitted him to perish.

  Meanwhile, she and Metrovitch had to live, but his days as a money-earner seemed at an end. She was faced with the grim necessity of supporting both of them. But how? By holding séances? By reading cards and telling fortunes? There were plenty of gypsies who could do it for a few kopecks. Write? It never occurred to her. Having no one to fall back upon except herself, she began to hunt for business ventures that might produce ready cash. She later described the years 1868-1870 as the time when she went to India and finally to Tibet, where she met Master Koot Hoomi for the first time and lived in the house of his sister at Shigatse.90 But there is no documentation of such a trip, and from Sergei Witte’s memoirs it appears that what happened was, in truth, very different.

  By 1869 the Fadeyev and Witte families had shrunk; Andrey Fadeyev had died and so had Yuli Witte, and with them had disappeared the opulent mode of life in which Helena had grown up. After the Emancipation, Andrey had kept his eighty-four domestic serfs by paying them wages, something he could not really afford, and he had also invested heavily in the Caucasian oil and mineral deposits that would enrich future generations but not his own. At his death, the estate was in ruins; Witte, of course, had never been anything but a salaried civil servant. Katherine Witte and Nadyezhda Fadeyev pooled their assets and moved to Odessa, where they enrolled Sergei and Boris in the university. Helena and Agardi, who soon joined them, appeared to Sergei Witte’s twenty-year-old eyes “a rather sorry sight, he a toothless lion, perennially at the feet of his mistress, an aged lady, stout and slovenly.”91 There was no question that they were in exceedingly poor
financial straits. Helena (and Agardi as well one supposes) would come to her aunts’ house for dinner, then spend the evening quarreling with Katherine about religion.

  Helena’s insecurity is evident from the haphazard way in which she went about trying to earn a living; she would start one thing, then drop it when something better came along. First she somehow came upon a cheap process for manufacturing ink and opened a retail shop to distribute her product. From there she jumped to making and selling artificial flowers, and still later she imported various woods from Mingrelia. According to Vera, all of these short-lived commercial enterprises were great successes. Sergei Witte remembered them as “dismal failures.”92 Witte’s account rings somewhat truer, if only because the difficulties facing any woman who tried to engage in trade were virtually insurmountable. In the summer of 1871, Helena suddenly abandoned business. Agardi, still trying to make a comeback, had succeeded in obtaining an engagement with the Italian opera of Cairo, and the two of them hurriedly left for Egypt.

  IV

  Russia for the Last Time

  The SS Eumonia, bound for Alexandria, carried four hundred passengers and a cargo of gunpowder and fireworks. On July 4, 1871, in the Gulf of Nauplia just off the island of Spetsai, the ship’s powder magazine exploded. Only seventeen passengers survived, H.P.B. among them; Agardi Metrovitch lost his life. Her mind dazed with the horror of limbs and heads raining about her, Helena was hauled from the water and taken ashore with the other lucky survivors. Medical care and shelter were provided by the Greek government and, finally, an offer of free passage to their destinations or back to their homes. H.P.B., baggageless and penniless, chose to continue to Egypt.

  Witte heard that Metrovitch had drowned while trying to save Helena’s life. Whatever the exact circumstances, she must have felt that he would have wanted her to go on, and there is evidence to suggest that she transported his remains to Alexandria for burial. In an 1884 letter to Henry Olcott, she made a brief reference to Agardi’s burial there.93 It may also be the factual basis for her fanciful, totally disjointed tale of how Metrovitch had been poisoned by agents of the Pope by drinking a glass of lemonade. She claimed to have buried him near Alexandria “under a tree on the sea shore.”94

  From Alexandria, she drifted south to Cairo in October. Since her visit twenty years earlier, the city had changed; ancient ruins and the quaint old latticework houses were being replaced by modern buildings, boulevards and mosaic sidewalks, and all day long the chipping and hammering of the masons could be heard. Soon Helena made friends with a French woman, Madame Sebir, who happened to be a medium. Although it was comforting to find someone with whom she had something in common, Helena quickly discovered that Madame Sebir’s resources were more meager than her own. For economy’s sake, they took an apartment together in Sekke el Ghamma el harmar (The Street of the Red Mosque) and H.P.B., needing something as an outlet for her affection, bought several monkeys, one of whom she named Koko.

  Hooking up with a medium was the worst thing she could have done, though at the time it must have seemed logical. Convinced that mediumship was abnormal, she had learned to control her tendencies through a tremendous act of will. Now, however, she found herself gravitating toward the city’s amateur French mediums who were, she felt, “mostly beggarly tramps when not adventuresses in the rear of M. de Lesseps’ army of engineers and workmen on the canal of Suez.”95 Unwilling to be identified with these women, she decided to organize a society for the investigation of Spiritualistic phenomena, which would be based on the doctrines of Allan Kardec, a French metaphysical theorist who believed that the soul, after death, becomes a spirit that reveals itself through certain privileged beings (mediums) who are capable of receiving its messages.

  Following Kardec’s rule manual, Helena emphasized that her society would be a serious study group. Curiosity seekers, skeptics and potential troublemakers would not be admitted to membership. At the séances, during which concentration and respectful silence were mandatory, the spirits were questioned on the subjects of history, philosophy and science. Notes were taken. The proceedings were orderly and high-toned, at least they would have been if she had been able to follow Kardec’s instructions. As it was, she had no decent mediums, which Kardec had listed as an essential, and trouble was not long in following.

  In the meantime, however, Helena had widened her circle of acquaintances. She renewed her contacts with the Coptic magician Paulos Mentamon, and she also struck up a warm friendship with Lydia Paschkoff, the Russian explorer and traveler who would one day make explorations in the regions of the Upper Nile and become St. Petersburg correspondent for Le Figaro. Eccentric and worldly, Madame Paschkoff was an ardent feminist and, like Helena, a lover of the weird and fantastical. A decidedly less vivid personality was Emma Cutting, a young Levantine woman of English extraction, who until recently had been working as a nursery governess in an Egyptian family. Dismissed, she had found a menial position at the Hotel d’Orient. She spoke Italian and French and knew some English, but was otherwise of limited intellectuality, at least she was not the type of sophisticated woman whom H.P.B. ordinarily found compatible.

  Emma met Madame Blavatsky accidentally. While walking one day along the Street of the Red Mosque, she was almost knocked over “by something that brushed by me very swiftly” and upon inquiry learned that she was “that Russian Spiritist who calls the dead and makes them answer your questions.” At that time Emma was feeling depressed over the death of her only brother who had killed himself. While she was an orthodox Christian who had never so much as dabbled along the shores of Spiritualism, “the idea of being able to hear his voice was for me heavenly delight,” she thought. In any case, she had heard of H.P.B.’s Societe Spirite [sic] from a Greek acquaintance who happened to be its secretary, and she asked for an introduction to the Madame.

  Dazzled, Emma decided that Madame Blavatsky was “very interesting and very clever,” but the séance she attended at Helena’s apartment in Abdeen Street turned out to be a disappointment. Expecting her brother’s voice, she got only a few raps. The secretary told her that the spirits preferred to appear in a room that had been especially purified and set aside for them; the Madame was now preparing such a séance chamber and if Emma returned in a few days, she would see wonders.

  I called again when the closet was ready, but what was my surprise when, instead of finding the kind spirits there to answer our questions, I found a room full of people, all alive, and using most offensive language towards the founder of the Society, saying that she had taken their money and had left them only with this, pointing at the space between the wall and the cloth, where several pieces of twine were still hanging which had served to pull through the ceiling a long glove stuffed with cotton, which was to represent the materialized hand and arm of some spirit. I went away, leaving the crowd red as fire, ready to knock her down when she came back.

  Soon afterward Emma ran into Madame Blavatsky and asked why she had pulled such a lousy trick. Helena, looking “very unhappy,”96 blamed it on Madame Sebir.

  Writing to Nadyezhda, she castigated the Society’s amateur mediums who stole her money, drank too much “and now I caught them cheating most shamefully our members who come to investigate the phenomena by bogus manifestations. I had very disagreeable scenes with several persons who held me alone responsible for all this.”97 During one of these episodes, it seems that a Greek man, “possessed, I suppose, by some vile spook,” rushed into her apartment with a revolver, “and finding me in the breakfast room, declared that he had come to shoot me but would wait till I had done with my meal.” Fortunately, she assured Nadyezhda, she had been able to wrest away the pistol and “he is now shut up in a lunatic asylum.” Despite the jocular tone of the letter, she was upset enough to swear off séances. “They are too dangerous and I am not practised and strong enough to control the wicked spooks that may approach my friends during such sittings.”98

  She was, in fact, extremely discouraged. News of
the fraudulent séance must have spread because attendance at the Society’s meetings dropped off sharply. So did her only source of income. Emma, evidently harboring no ill feelings, dropped around to see her. “On hearing that she was really in want I gave her pecuniary help, and continued doing so for some time.”99

  Throughout the winter of 1872, Helena found herself in increasing difficulties. She and Madame Sebir moved to a cheaper apartment in Kantara el dick Street. A sympathetic Emma continued to lend her money, even though she herself had little to spare and H.P.B. warned her that she was in no position to repay the loans. One cannot escape the impression that Emma felt fond of Madame Blavatsky and that it was a reciprocated affection. Later Emma would make the mystifying remark that she had known Agardi Metrovitch in Cairo, but it was only talk. She and Helena were confidantes, and what she knew of Agardi was what the Madame had told her, no doubt with characteristic exaggeration: how they had been secretly married and performed together on the stage, how Yuri had died, in short the whole litany of her woes. And why should Helena have not poured out her troubles to Emma? She had nothing to hide, and she had, after all, lost her child, and her lover/ husband, the only family of her own that she would ever have.