by Marion Meade
Astrakhan, in summer, baked under temperatures that rarely fell below a hundred degrees. At night people had to wrap themselves in gauze as protection against swarms of gnats. Situated on the shores of the Caspian Sea, at the mouth of the Volga, the city was a long-established trading center that had pretensions to being cosmopolitan. It boasted 146 streets, 3,883 houses, forty-six squares, a public garden, thirty-seven churches and fifteen mosques. People subscribed to French magazines from Brussels; they read de Lamartine, Balzac, Dumas, Sand and de Musset; they drank champagne and danced the quadrille. The music of Donizetti, in high vogue then, was performed at Astrakhan’s theater—a tiny cramped hall whose orchestra contained a half-dozen trumpets and a single violin.18
While “society” consisted solely of Russians and Germans, one could walk down Astrakhan’s unpaved streets and see more Oriental faces than Caucasian. There were Persians, Armenians, and Kalmucks; and some years earlier Indian merchants had established a colony but by the time H.P.B. arrived, they were mostly gone. Years later she would claim that her disgust for Christianity and her admiration for the eastern races had their origins during this period of her life. “I was myself brought up with the Buddhist Kalmucks,” she wrote in a letter. “I was living in the steppes of Astrachan [Caspian Sea] till the age of ten.”19 This statement is an example of the surprisingly uneven nature of H.P.B.’s memory, as well as of her habit of rearranging her past to suit present convenience. Although she lived in Astrakhan for only about ten months during her fifth year, it obviously left a vivid impression. For the rest of her life she insisted on describing her broad face as resembling a Kalmuck peasant woman. And since she made the boast proudly, she must have remembered the Kalmucks with some fondness; although possibly she was also unconsciously acknowledging how little she took after her dainty mother.
Helena Andreyevna settled down in Astrakhan anxious to pursue her writing career. Self-confidence still shaky, she was acutely aware that a successful book could mean the difference between returning to Peter von Hahn and continuing life as an independent woman. Moreover, she may have felt uneasy about the subject of her novel, for it was a thinly disguised saga of her marital traumas and the hazards of being female. She could not, during these months of writing, have been the most attentive of mothers. Conscious of her children’s presence, she was nonetheless living far away in a world of ideas and words, where two little girls under the age of five could only be distracting. In any case, her presence, or lack of it, was perhaps of less importance in those days of extended families.
Life within the Fadeyev household was lively and bustling, largely owing to the nature of Andrey’s position. As second in command of the province and curator-general of the Kalmucks, he was able to reside in an aura of privilege and aristocratic sumptuousness. Aside from balls, soirees and dinners for foreign visitors, diplomatic relations had to be maintained with the Kalmuck chieftains. The wealthiest and most influential of the chieftains was a Prince Tumene, who owned an island a short distance up the Volga. The Prince, during the Napoleonic war of 1815, had raised a regiment at his own expense and led it to Paris, for which service the Czar had rewarded him with numerous decorations. Now he lived in a white palace that was half-Chinese, half- “Arabian Nights” in decor, but passed much of his day praying in a Buddhist temple he had erected nearby.
There was nothing about Tumene’s little enclave that was either Russian or Kalmuck; rather it suggested the court of a rich Asiatic nabob. An imaginative child like H.P.B. could easily be transported into a land of fairies and mysterious legends. Lost in a perfect playland, Helena observed with wonder the water-encircled palace—its exterior fretted with balconies and fantastic ornaments, its interior filled with tapestries and crystals—giving the appearance that a touch of a wand had produced this preposterous mirage from the bosom of the Volga. To complete the mystical illusion, the author of these marvels was supposedly a half-savage tribesman, a worshiper of Buddha, and a believer in reincarnation. It is doubtful that anyone took the trouble to explain Buddhism to Helena, but it is certain that the shaven-headed lamas and the painted effigies of Buddha stirred her a great deal more than the rituals and icons of the Russian Orthodox Church.
Excellent horsemen who delighted in reckless displays of agility, the Kalmucks disported themselves by lassoing a wild stallion, springing upon the horse’s back, and trying to keep from being thrown. Sometimes rider and horse rolled together on the grass; sometimes they skittered through the air with the speed of an arrow. These violent rodeo maneuvers, performed by women as well as men, impressed H.P.B. and it was most likely at this time that she first learned to ride. Clearly, her model of equestrianism was that of the Kalmuck daredevils. Ten years later, when conventional young ladies were sedately riding sidesaddle, she would still be straddling a horse like a tribesman, having near-fatal accidents, and causing her worried family to gnash their teeth. They could not deny, however, that she was a superb horsewoman.
While moving in the greater world as the curator-general’s granddaughter, H.P.B. was simultaneously drawing closer to her mother’s family and coming to think of it as her own. Her younger sister Vera held little interest for her; she was far more attracted to her uncle and aunts whose ages made it possible for her to regard them as older siblings. Her Aunt Katherine, seventeen and still unmarried, had no patience with Helena’s peculiar makeup, and never would. But it was a different story with twelve-year-old Uncle Rostislav who was almost as wild as H.P.B. herself. Highly talented since childhood, he was particularly interested in science, history, and the lives of famous generals. By the age of ten he had memorized long poems, by Russian and foreign writers. When H.P.B. lived with the family, Rostislav was being tutored privately, in preparation for his entry two years hence into the College of Artillery at St. Petersburg.
While Rostislav could understand his niece, it was the Princess’s youngest daughter, Nadyezhda, who adopted Helena as friend and sister—one for whom no sacrifice was too great. Lelinka, even at the age of five, was like no other person Nadyezhda had ever met. Her reckless defiance of adults astonished her well-brought-up aunt. But her good points did not go unrecognized: she was merry, quick minded, had an affectionate nature, and when no one opposed her she could be an extraordinarily delightful child. The family was making a mistake, Nadyezhda thought,
to regard and treat her as they would any other child. Her restless and very nervous temperament, one that led her into the most unheard-of, ungirlish mischief; her unaccountable—especially in those days—attraction to, and at the same time fear of, the dead; her passionate love and curiosity for everything unknown and mysterious, weird and fantastical; and foremost of all, her craving for independence and freedom of action—a craving that nothing and nobody could control; all this, combined with an exuberance of imagination and a wonderful sensitiveness, ought to have warned them that she was an exceptional creature, to be dealt with and controlled by means as exceptional.20
But it did not warn them and the quality most frequently noticed by the family was her genius for being exceptionally naughty. Still, H.P.B. had found a loyal ally in Nadyezhda, and their friendship must have compensated for the lack of sympathy she met elsewhere in the family.
By the spring of 1837, Helena Andreyevna had completed The Ideal, under the pseudonym “Zenaida R-va,” had seen it published in The Readers’ Library and had been invited to become a regular contributor to the magazine. At once she began collecting material for a novella, Memoirs of Gelesnobodsk. However, her health was poor and in May her parents took her, with the two children, for treatment at Zheleznovodsk—a hot spring spa in the Caucasus. There her condition must have improved because her literary output was copious: she finished the novella; began a second major novel, Umballa, about Kalmuck life; and began planning yet another story which would be set in the Caucasus.
Instead of returning to Astrakhan, Helena Andreyevna and her daughters settled at Poltava, a Ukrainian town famous only as t
he site of a battle in the reign of Peter the Great. It was there that she met and befriended a Russianized German woman, Antonya Christianovna Kuhlwein. The unmarried daughter of a Lutheran minister, Antonya Kuhlwein was an educated woman who had made her way without a man. Presumably she saw the logic in Helena Andreyevna’s feminist theories. As the two women became close friends, Antonya could not help but notice that Madame von Hahn was too frail both to work like a Trojan and to tutor her children. Now she offered to take charge of the education of Helena Petrovna and Vera.
The position of nursery governess required no skills other than elementary mastery of the three R’s, a smattering of geography, the basics of painting, and the obligatory piano. Given Madame von Hahn’s theories on the importance of education in attaining women’s rights, Antonya Kuhlwein was probably better qualified than the average governess. She must also have possessed a stouter than average character. When, several months later, the von Hahns left Poltava, Antonya accompanied them.
By now it was clear that Helena Andreyevna had contracted tuberculosis. On the advice of her physicians, she sought the milder climate and mineral-water treatments available in Odessa, although the city hardly offered ideal weather for an invalid: in winter, temperatures dropped to twenty-five degrees below zero, but still the Russians regarded Odessa as a Miami Beach. For Helena Andreyevna, the additional compensation of Odessa was the many well-known intellectuals who made their homes there. Despite her illness, she continued to work at a breakneck pace, and to provide the semblance of a home for her girls.
Facing the fact that her two daughters were too much for one governess to handle, she hired a second—Augusta Sophia Jeffries, an Englishwoman from Yorkshire. Even though Fraulein Kuhlwein remained in her position for at least ten years, she left little impression on H.P.B., or at least none that she later thought worth mentioning. But Miss Jeffries, who H.P.B. dubbed the “Yorkshire spinster,” would always be remembered as the one responsible for teaching her to speak English with a marked Yorkshire accent.21 Given this information, H.P.B.’s claim that she could not write and could barely speak English until the age of forty is unpersuasive.22 Impatient as Miss Jeffries must have been with her intractable pupil, she must nevertheless have been successful in imparting the rudiments of the language in which virtually all of H.P.B.’s vast literary output would be written.
How much seven-year-old Lelinka knew of her parent’s estrangement is unclear, but it must have been enough to cause her pain. By this time she was already experiencing somnambulism and somniloquence, and, recalled her aunt, conducting in her sleep “long conversations with unseen personages, some of which were amusing, some edifying, some terrifying for those who gathered around the child’s bed.”23 These nocturnal disturbances, in addition to nightmares, spontaneous trancelike states and psychosomatic illnesses, would continue to plague H.P.B. for years to come. Her unconscious mind had grasped the fact that the exciting figure who was her father had abandoned her, while her mother, too, “died when I was a baby.”24 In a sense, this was true, for Helena Andreyevna, always remote, had become even more inaccessible, abandoning H.P.B. this time to the Kuhlweins and Jeffries with their continual admonishments about self-control and decorum.
H.P.B.’s determination to kill her mother prematurely reveals something about her attitude toward her father. She could not have been shielded from the knowledge that Helena Andreyevna did not love Peter von Hahn; that indeed he had made her unhappy. She must have overheard a great deal in the small household at Odessa—all of it, naturally, from her mother’s side. Despite what she heard, however, her sympathies continued to lie with her father. The high points of her youth were the times spent with him. Life with the artillery battery, so distasteful to her mother, took on for her the colors of grand adventure. The masculine atmosphere with its hard drinking, outspoken talk and coarse humor seemed admissible in a girl who had all the bad qualities of an energetic boy and the men accepted her for what she was.
One of the men, whom she later identified only as D—-, went out of his way to play with her, showing her family portraits and allowing her to ransack his drawers and scatter his belongings. Once D—-showed her a miniature painting of his aunt, Tekla Lebendorff—an elderly woman in a cap and white curls, wearing a green shawl. When Helena declared that the woman was old and ugly, he teased her, saying that one day she would be just as old as his aunt. The episode, seemingly insignificant, stuck in her mind and would emerge several years later in a most curious form.
The eighteen-month interlude in Odessa abruptly terminated with the return of Peter von Hahn who made a sufficiently serious attempt at reconciliation to result in Helena Andreyevna’s fourth pregnancy. No sooner was she aware of the pregnancy, however, than she fled to be with her family, now living on the Volga at Saratov, where Andrey Fadeyev had been promoted to Governor of the Province. While living in Odessa, Helena Andreyevna had completed a third major novel, Djelaleddin, as well as a novella, Medallion, At Saratov she wrote her most important work, The World’s Judgment. It was quickly followed by a sequel, God’s Judgment, which she did not consider worthy of publication. In June, 1840, she gave birth to a son whom she named Leonid, and promptly went to work on Theophania Abiadjio, the novel which was to bring her recognition as a major writer.
By this time the novels of “Zenaida R-va” were being hailed as extraordinary events in the Russian literary world. She was called Russia’s George Sand and the feminine equal of the great poet Michael Lermontov. She was perused by Russia’s most influential literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, a radical who had no use for timid bourgeois thinkers, and who once wrote of himself: “For me, to think, feel, understand and suffer are one and the same thing.”25 Belinsky could not bear to see the cruelties human beings inflicted upon one another, whether in the name of government, religion or matrimony. The humiliation suffered by women at the hands of men lacerated him. It is little wonder that he adored the novels of Helena Andreyevna von Hahn:
There are writers who live apart from their books, and there are others whose lives are closely bound to their writings. While reading the former we delight in their God-given talents, but reading the latter, we delight in conception of the beautiful human individuality that interpenetrates the written word; we love it and aspire to meet it face to face; we long to know the details of their own lives. Zenaida R-va belongs to the latter class of writers.26
In Helena Andreyevna’s work, the humiliations of being female in a male-dominated society constitute a persistent theme—a theme drawn from the circumstances of her own life. And if there is one particularly dominant motif, it is the plight of the woman artist who wants desperately to break out of what society decrees to be her proper place and to use her talents productively. Every outstanding woman, observes the heroine of The Ideal, “especially a writer, will be persecuted by the world. In its eyes she will only be a monstrous caprice of Nature, a feminine monster.” Accordingly, the women Helena Andreyevna depicted lead double lives—searching for their psychic identity in their inner world, on the one hand; seeing their reflection in the mirror of public opinion, where their strivings are viewed as grotesque and unnatural, on the other. But as much as her characters wanted freedom, they also wanted love. Like Helena Andreyevna, they did not find it. “In vain will she look around for another soul, mutual in understanding,” but the men her heroines find are Peter von Hahns.
It is not difficult to reconstruct von Hahn’s feelings about his wife’s literary success and especially her conspicuous airing of their marital woes. It was shocking to him for a woman to write about the intimate details of her life, even under a pseudonym, and the rift between them widened further. When Helena Andreyevna speaks of the “hundred-headed monster of public opinion” that declared her heroines “immoral”27 and spatters them with mud, she may have been referring to public opinion in general, but she was certainly including the reactions of her husband. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1841, von Hahn made a final a
ttempt to reunite his family, and Helena Andreyevna agreed to visit him in the Ukraine with the three children. Perhaps she allowed herself to be persuaded for the sake of her son; perhaps she was simply too frail and weary to care. “I am not only ill in my body,” she wrote, “but in my soul also. I will not last long now.”28
The winter of 1842 was unusually mild, so mild that in St. Petersburg the Neva twice thawed and refroze—something that had not happened within memory. At Odessa, alone again with her children and the two governesses after the failed reconciliation with Peter, Helena Andreyevna was attended full-time by Dr. Vassily Benzenger, but there was little he could do for her. When her parents arrived in May, they found her at work on a new book, which she was calling The Flowergirl, but she had no illusions about completing it. She died in the arms of her mother on June 24, just twenty-eight years old.
Shortly before their mother died, Vera recalled, she looked pityingly at ten-year-old Helena Petrovna.
Ah well, perhaps it is best that I am dying, so at least I shall be spared seeing what befalls Helene. Of one thing I am certain: her life will not be as that of other women, and she will have much to suffer.29
The remark, Vera saw in retrospect, had the ring of true prophecy.