Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (2 page)

It was H.P.B.’s ill luck to live in the nineteenth century when aggressive women were judged by harsher standards than today. More than once during the writing of this book, I have pondered whether her success as a religious teacher might have been greater had she been a man. The fact that she sometimes provoked the most intense outbursts of hatred very likely can be attributed to her sex, but ultimately this sort of conjecture is futile and very much beside the point. She herself refused to abide by sexual stereotypes. Indeed, she ostentatiously thumbed her nose at them unless, of course, it suited her purpose to do otherwise. And I suspect she would have regarded this line of investigation as “flapdoodle,” to use her favorite expression.

She used to say that even though her contemporaries did not appreciate her, she would be vindicated in the twentieth century when her teachings and her person would finally be understood. While that prophecy has not been totally fulfilled, there is no doubt that we can understand her better than did the Victorians. Perhaps a final assessment of her must wait until the twenty-first century.

NATAL HOROSCOPE OF H.P. BLAVATSKY

Place of birth: Ekaterinoslav, Russia

35:01 E. Longitude; 48:27 N. Latitude

Date of birth:  
July 31, 1831, according to Julian calendar;  
August 12, 1831, according to Gregorian calendar

Local Time: 1:42:00 a.m.

G.M.T.: 11:21:56 p.m. (August 11)

Sid. Time: 23:00:43

Adjusted Calculation Date: February 2, 1831

Magnifying and applying come I,

Outbidding at the start the old cautious hucksters,

Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah,

Lithographing Kronos, Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson,

Buying drafts of Osiris, Isis, Belus, Brahma, Buddha,

In my portfolio placing Manito loose, Allah on a leaf, the crucifix engraved, 

With Oden and the hideous-faced Mexitli and every idol and image,

Taking them all for what they are worth and not a cent more,

Admitting they were alive and did the work of their days,

(They bore mites as for unfledg’d birds who have now to rise and fly and sing for themselves.)

Accepting the rough deific sketches to fill out better in myself, bestowing them freely on each man and woman I see,

* * *

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, 

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

Walt Whitman,
Song of Myself

RUSSIA 

1831-1849

I

The Fadeyevs and the von Hahns

In the fall of 1878, soon after she had become the first Russian woman naturalized as a citizen of the United States, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky fired off one of her periodic attempts to establish the truth about herself.

“To begin with,” she wrote caustically to a French journal, “I am not a
Countess
so far as I know. Without overlooking the fact that it would be more than ridiculous—it would be
unconstitutional
—in a citizen or citizeness of the Republic of the United States—who abjures all titles of nobility upon being naturalized—to claim one, above all which never belonged to him or her—I am too democratic, and I love and respect the people sufficiently, having devoted all my sympathy to them, and this without distinction of race or color, to trick myself out in any kind of title!”
¹

This wordy, not entirely insincere, protest was delivered with the self-assurance of one whose predecessors are so respectable that she need not descend to vulgar social-climbing. She was not a countess; she was, however, the granddaughter of a princess, and her family, prominent in Russian history since the High Middle Ages, had produced its share of warriors, saints, and rascals.

The noble family of Dolgorukov could trace its lineage back to the twelfth century canonized prince St. Mihail Vsevolodovich of Chernigov, and through him to the semilegendary Rurik, the first prince of Novgorod.
²
St. Mihail’s great-greatgrandson Prince Konstantin Ivanovich, ruled over the town of Obolensk and founded the renowned Obolensky family. It was his fiery grandson Prince Ivan who won the nickname “Dolgorukoy,” which meant “long-handed” or “far-reaching”—a tribute to his talent for detecting hidden enemies.

Until as recently as the early eighteenth century, the elder line of the Dolgorukovs continued to produce notable, and sometimes notorious, individuals: Prince Gregory, ambassador to Poland; Prince Yakov, the favorite of Peter the Great; Princess Katherine, who was betrothed to Czar Peter II and whose destiny was thwarted when Peter was poisoned on the eve of their marriage; Prince Serguey, executed for forgery and sundry political intrigues in 1739.

Apart from Princess Katherine, whose fame lay in the dubious distinction of having failed to reach the throne, the achievements the Dolgorukovs had always centered on the male side of the line. But by the nineteenth century the energies of the men seemed to have lapsed into comparative sluggishness, and whatever prestige the family could boast of was to be found only on the female side, a fact of some relevance in the life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

In the 1830s, Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope, the Englishwoman who roved the world dressed as a man, remarked about her travels in Russia:

In that barbarian land I met an outstanding woman-scientist, who would have been famous in Europe, but who is completely underestimated due to her misfortune of being born on the shores of the Volga River, where there was none to recognize her scientific value.
³

Not withstanding Lady Stanhope’s British chauvinism and her mistake about the woman’s birthplace, the scientist had not been totally unrecognized. Princess Helena Pavlovna Dolgorukova, H.P.B.’s maternal grandmother, would have been an unusual person in any nation or century. A noted botanist, a scholar who spoke five languages fluently, an excellent artist, she possessed endowments rare for a woman of her time. Even more unusual was the fact that she succeeded in exercising her talents. While natural science was her chief interest, she was also proficient in archaeology and numismatics, and during her lifetime accumulated valuable collections in these areas. For many years she carried on correspondence with European scientists, among them geologist Sir Roderick Murchison, who founded the Royal Geographic Society. A fossil shell, the Venus-Fadeef, was named in her honor.

The roots of Princess Helena’s scientific interests are unclear. Her father, Prince Paul Dolgorukov, had little interest in orthodox science. On the contrary, he spent most of his time on his estate at Rzishchevo, in the Province of Kiev, addicted to his library of works on alchemy and magic, and was considered somewhat odd by his neighbors.

Having been born into an atmosphere of privilege and blessed with outstanding intelligence, it was the misfortune of the Princess to have an irregular family life. Her mother, Henrietta, was of French descent. A beauty with a reputation for flightiness, she married Prince Paul in 1787, produced two daughters in less than two years, and promptly abandoned him, leaving her infants behind. Twenty years later, shortly before Henrietta’s death, she returned to her husband, but by that time Princess Helena was well past the age when she might have benefited from a mother’s nurturing.

At the advanced age of twenty-four, the Princess opposed her father by expressing her intent to marry a young man her own age, Andrey Mihailovich Fadeyev. Fadeyev was a bright, ambitious fellow, as much in love with Helena as she was with him, but he happened to be a commoner—a fact of considerable importance to her father, Prince Paul, but of none whatever to his daughter. Eventually the Prince relented, and the marriage took place in 1813. Their first child, Helena Andreyevna, the mother of H. P. Blavatsky, was born the following year.

After the birth of Helena Andreyevna, the Fadeyevs moved to Ekaterinoslav, a Southern Russian city on the Dnieper River now called Dnepropetrovsk, where Andrey joined the Czar’s bureaucracy as an officer in the Foreign Department of Immigration. Ekaterinoslav, in the words of a German visitor, seemed “partly like a portion of a great plan not completed, and partly like a town which has fallen from its former greatness.”
⁴
Originally founded by Catherine the Great as a summer residence, it was abandoned, along with other royal retreats, when she began to concentrate her architectural efforts on Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg. In the meantime, however, her lover Prince Gregory Potemkin had already laid out wide boulevards, built a palace which in luxury and Oriental splendor surpassed anything then known in Russia, and created a magnificent park stretching along the rocky banks of the Dnieper. A city planned on a gigantic scale, built to accommodate a million souls, it was actually inhabited by only a few thousand.

By the time of the Fadeyevs’ arrival, Catherine’s palace had fallen into ruins and, due to sand deposits, the Dnieper was navigable for only six weeks in the spring. In this provincial town, the Princess pursued her scientific studies and raised her daughter. Hers was an unusually happy marriage and the family was close knit. She had little taste for social calls on her neighbors, although apparently she responded cordially when they came to her. She paid no attention at all to fashionable modes of child-rearing. Generally Russian parents of the upper classes had little contact with their offspring, beyond morning and evening greetings, but the Princess, despite a retinue of serfs, refused to hand over her daughter to the care of nurses. Later, in a story which may be considered autobiographical, her daughter would write: “If I had to tell you that our mother was our nourisher, our caretaker, our teacher, and our guardian-angel, that, still, would not describe all her sacrificial, endless, selfless attachment, by which she constantly gladdened our lives.” Remembering Princess Helena’s own motherless childhood, it is unnecessary to look further for an explanation of her passionate attachment to her firstborn, Helena Andreyevna, and later, to her younger children: Katherine, Rostislav, and finally Nadyezhda, who was born when the Princess was thirty-nine.

Until the age of thirteen, Helena Andreyevna was educated by her mother, under whose supervision she studied history, language and literature. An ardent reader, she became a great admirer of French, German and Russian writers, whom she read in their own languages. Books induced in her visible emotional reactions. She could be found laughing and weeping over their pages. At an early age, she mastered the techniques of poetical composition and struggled to write her own verse, although at times she found this form of expression inadequate. “The thoughts would rush to her brain, powerless to be expressed in mere words, which only impeded their powerful and invisible flight, and she had to impatiently throw aside her impotent pen.”

A graceful, dreamy girl, delicate in health and indulged by her mother, she found plenty in books to fuel her imagination. She had a tendency to measure the heroic figures and settings of literature against her own surroundings: the barren steppes stretching on all sides to the horizon, the dry, blackish-gray soil with its parched grass and thistles, Ekaterinoslav itself with its unsophisticated residents. “My attention,” she recalled, “was taken up by historical events, by the aspirations, passions and actions of outstanding people who have contributed to the spiritual elevation of mankind.” In comparison, her everyday life “looked pale and insignificant as an ant-hill.”

Determinedly intellectual, she held herself aloof from the other young ladies of Ekaterinoslav, whose interests and goals were more commonplace. “I reached with my mind everywhere,” she later said of herself as she had been at fifteen. “I felt with my heart everything.” There is a portrait of Helena Andreyevna, whose date is unknown but appears to be from the period of her teens. Her dark hair is pulled back smoothly behind the ears and curled under; the filmy white gown, tight at the elbows in the current fashion, reveals a slim, childish figure; and around her neck is knotted, somewhat rakishly, a small scarf. The perfect oval face, with its button mouth and dreamy eyes, gives an impression of elegant hauteur. It is a pretty face, evidently composed demurely for the portrait, but it fails to give the smallest indication of the banked fires smoldering beneath the surface.

She had her share of admirers among the young men of the town, and would have had more if she had not clung to her impossibly lofty expectations about men. No doubt influenced by her parents’ loving relationship, she was also affected by her reading, and she fantasized herself the heroine of a romantic literary tale in which love and marriage were synonymous. As a result, she nourished dreams about “the possibility of eternal changeless love between two people.” There was nothing abstract about this conviction: “I had profound faith in it, I hoped for it, I waited for its realization, lovingly carrying in my heart the germ of the sacred fire.” Her love would be reserved for someone special: “I did not waste any of its sacred flame on temporary infatuations. No—I guarded it as a celestial gift, which I hoped would bring me happiness once and forever.”
⁵
Such was the idealistic concept on which she planned to base her marriage.

At sixteen, she encountered Captain Peter Alexeyeivich von Hahn of the horse artillery. Recently decorated in the Turkish Campaign
⁶
, von Hahn was twice her age, well educated, good-looking and charming, with the splendid masculinity that could be found among uniformed officers of Czar Nicholas’s regiments. That Helena felt dazzled by this heroic visitor is easily understandable. The captain, who was not based permanently in Ekaterinoslav, was immediately smitten by the refined Helena and set about courting her in the manner of a man who knows how to charm and amuse an inexperienced young woman.