by Marion Meade
III
Visions and Voices
During the last six of her first ten years, Helena Petrovna von Hahn had lived with her father for a total of less than twelve months. And if she entertained hopes that her mother’s death might mean his return, they were quickly dashed. After the funeral, Peter returned at once to the Ukraine while Helena, Vera and Leonid accompanied their grandparents to Saratov. There is no indication that another arrangement was considered, and it was doubtless Helena Andreyevna’s wish to have her children raised by her own family.
At Saratov, Andrey Fadeyev, like all provincial governors, played the role of a petty king with courtiers, orderly officers and ostentatious protocol modeled on that of the Czar’s household at St. Petersburg. Socially, although the Fadeyevs were the most distinguished members of local society, Princess Helena preferred the seclusion of her study to the banal gossip of the drawing room, and her eldest granddaughter would have been miserable anywhere at that point.
For a girl about to enter puberty, the death of her mother must have come as a great emotional shock. However, the Princess, no matter how benevolent she may have been, was not about to tolerate her granddaughter’s nonsense. She warned that fits of temper would not be permitted; nor would Helena be allowed to do as she pleased. Intimidated by her dignified grandmother, H.P.B. tried hard to behave, but her self-restraint did not last long. One day she slapped a serf nurse who had been with the family all her life and news of the incident quickly reached the Princess.30
Physical violence toward serfs was so common a practice that even the young Tolstoy had struck a serf in anger, but the Princess did not subscribe to such behavior. She ordered the mansion’s bells to be rung and the household servants to assemble in the main hall. There she announced that Lelinka, by unjustly striking a serf, had violated the codes of good manners and common decency, and she commanded her to beg the nurse’s pardon and kiss her hand to show sincerity. Red-faced with shame, H.P.B. obstinately refused.
The Princess, countering with deliberate severity, told her that if she did not obey instantly, she would be sent away in disgrace. No noble lady would refuse to apologize for wronging a servant, especially one who had given her masters a lifetime of faithful service. Helena Petrovna’s defiance crumbled at once, and she burst into tears and knelt before the nurse. However extreme the Princess’s method—certainly her threat must have been an empty one—it served its purpose. H.P.B. herself would remember it as a valuable lesson, for it taught her the principle of doing justice to those incapable of defending themselves. Her sympathies would always be with the underdog.
H.P.B.’s existence between 1842, when she arrived at Saratov, and 1849, when she married Nikifor Blavatsky, was defined by commonplace routines, which she rebelled against, and a sense of security, which she refused to acknowledge. No one could compensate for the neglect of her father, whom she adored. She was not alone in her feeling of abandonment: Leonid, as it later turned out, would also be scarred by the suspicion that his father had not loved him. Only Vera seems to have been relatively indifferent to Peter’s absence.
Still, life for the von Hahn children was undeniably comfortable and far from uninteresting. The first floor of the governor’s mansion was a series of vast reception halls where the official business of the province—the Czar’s business—was conducted. A section of the ground floor had been requisitioned by the Princess, who turned it into a museum to house her historical antiquities and zoological collection. From behind the glass panes of gigantic cupboards, peered lifelike stuffed animals and birds, including an alligator, a silvery seal, and a flamingo with scarlet-lined wings. Every day at dusk the von Hahn children and their Aunt Nadyezhda passed through the museum to say their ceremonial good nights to the Princess, who could always be found in an adjoining study. Afterward the head nurse would shepherd her charges, followed by serfs with trays of food and coals, up flight after flight of stairs to the top-floor nursery. From the windows of their eyrie they could glimpse snow-covered rooftops. Around the fire, rounds of bread were toasted while the children listened to a serf nurse—whose “memory retained every idea connected with superstition”—regale them endlessly with fairy-tale people: the wicked magician Gray Wolf, Princess Meletressa, Ivan Zarewitch. Vera, a practical child, thought it ridiculous that her sister
thoroughly took to heart all the troubles of the heroes, and maintained that all their most wonderful adventures were quite natural. People could change into animals and take any form they liked, if they only knew how; men could fly, if they only wished so firmly.31
And when the children laughed at her gullibility, H.P.B. heatedly voiced her assurance that “such wise men had existed in all ages, and existed even in our own days, making themselves known, of course, only to those who were worthy of knowing and seeing them, and who believed in them.”
By now, the two-governess staff had expanded. Antonya Kuhlwein was still on the scene; Miss Jeffries had been replaced by a mousy young Englishwoman to whom none of the children paid any attention; and a Swiss woman joined the teaching staff. All the governesses, it was said, regarded themselves as martyrs. Helena Petrovna found the lessons tedious and had to be kept under surveillance lest she slip out of the house to play with uncouth street boys. “All of our teachers,” Vera said, “had exhausted their patience with Helene, who would never conform to fixed hours for lessons but who, notwithstanding, astonished them by the brilliance of her abilities,”32 especially the ease with which she mastered foreign languages and played the piano.
In summer, everything changed. With the first hint of mild weather, the whole household would pile into wagons for the annual emigration to the governor’s country villa outside Saratov. This exodus included not only the Fadeyev family with upwards of a hundred serfs, but also the family of Princess Helena’s daughter Katherine, who had recently married an obscure agronomist named Yuli Witte. The Wittes were Dutch Lutherans from the Baltic Provinces but Princess Helena insisted that Yuli convert to Russian Orthodoxy as a condition for the marriage—a small price to pay for marrying the daughter of a Dolgorukov princess. Drawn into the Fadeyev family circle, Witte had no objection to making his home with his in-laws, especially now that Katherine was pregnant.
Helena’s Uncle Rostislav, too, was back home. His hot temper had led to the termination of his studies at the Artillery College, from which he was asked to leave after a year. College was followed by a short, unhappy career in the army and even though he had finally passed the examination to become an officer, he returned to Saratov where he promptly resigned his commission and devoted his time to studying science. Helena Petrovna had great respect for Rostislav, despite his unrelieved succession of failures, and she was apparently more receptive to his advice than to anyone else’s.
In the country, everyone rode cossack horses, explored an abandoned park full of crumbling kiosks and pagodas, and delighted in nocturnal expeditions into the forest to catch night butterflies for the Princess’s entomological collection. Helena’s greatest joy was stealing off to visit Baranig Bouyrak, an old man frequently covered from head to foot with bees and said to be a sorcerer. The villa itself could fire any child’s imagination. Resembling a medieval castle more than an eighteenth-century house, it was a rambling building full of subterranean galleries, turrets, abandoned passages and weird nooks and crannies that offered unparalleled hiding places. The former residence of the Pantchoolidzef family, governors of Saratov for several generations, it apparently came gratis with the position of governor. Along with the mansion also came a fourth tutor—Madame Henriette Peigneur, who had been governess for the Pantchoolidzef family for twenty-five years. In her youth, during the French revolution, she had been chosen a “Goddess of Liberty” and ridden in processions through the streets of Paris. Now, a bent old woman, she was given to reminiscing about her former glory as a beauty queen and did not demand very much work from her pupils. She was also a veritable anthology of hair-raising legends abo
ut the villa. Vera wrote:
Our heads were full of stories about the ghosts of martyred serfs seen promenading in chains during nocturnal hours; of the phantom of a young girl, tortured to death for refusing her love to an old master, which was seen floating in and out of the little iron-bound door of the subterranean passage at twilight; and other stories that left us children and girls in an agony of fear whenever we had to cross a dark room or passage.33
The exception, of course, was Lelinka who had no fear, but boundless curiosity to know more. The Princess finally gave permission to the children to explore the underground labyrinths, accompanied by no less than a half-dozen men servants carrying torches and lanterns. Finding more broken wine bottles than human bones, however, they quickly lost their fascination with the dungeons and went back to their usual games. To Helena, however, the subterranean corridors offered the perfect refuge from the governesses. In a corner, under a barred window, she built a kind of tower from old broken chairs and tables. She would stay in this snug spot for hours at a time reading books, including one of popular legends called Solomon’s Wisdom. Eventually her hiding place was discovered, and then Andrey Fadeyev periodically would have to send a deputation of servants, headed by a police officer, to drag H.P.B. upstairs.
Undaunted and unrepentant, Helena Petrovna insisted that she was not afraid in the cellar and, in any case, had not been alone. Her companions were beings she called “playmates,” one of whom was a hunchbacked little boy.34 It was true that whenever the escort found her, she was usually deep in conversation with someone, but the someone was invisible. The family was loath to consider the possibility that anything more than imagination might have been operating. Actually, it is as common now as then for lonely youngsters to conjure up imaginary playmates. Reflecting a desire for companionship, or perhaps for someone to whom a child can transfer anger or blame, the invisible playmate is not necessarily evidence of emotional instability. On the contrary, it may be an indication of problem-solving, and in an ordinary child, one might perceive it as a struggle toward mental health.
But Helena Petrovna was not ordinary, and her family knew it. Vera, in Juvenile Reflections Compiled for My Children—a book based on her childhood diary—admits that her sister “was the strangest girl one has ever seen,”35 though later, in less guarded moments, she disparagingly referred to her as “crazy Helena.”36 It is more than probable that Helena was called “crazy” by the other children, and by the adults, and it was not without ample justification.
However fearless she might have been, Helena was now experiencing terrifying hallucinations in which she was pursued by the “terrible glaring eyes” of inanimate objects.
She would shut her eyes tight during such visions, and run away to hide from the ghostly glances thrown on her by pieces of furniture or articles of dress, screaming desperately, and frightening the whole household. At other times she would be seized with fits of laughter, explaining them as the amusing pranks of her invisible companions.37
That winter, back in Saratov, she would be discovered under the roof, amid nests of pigeons. When asked what she was doing, she explained that she was “putting them to sleep,” according to the rules set forth in Solomon’s Wisdom. At other times she would escort Vera, Leonid and Nadyezhda into the Princess’s museum at twilight and, straddling the seal, “narrated to us the most inconceivable tales about herself, the most unheard-of adventures of which she was the heroine,” Vera recalled. Each of the stuffed animals, Helena claimed, had taken her into its confidence and divulged the history of its life in previous incarnations. Where, Vera wondered later, could she have learned about “the superstitious mysteries of metempsychosis” in a family so Christian as theirs? Still, as a child, Vera believed every word that her sister uttered.
Never can I forget the life and adventures of a tall white flamingo . . , He had been ages ago, she told us, no bird, but a real man. He had committed fearful crimes and a murder, for which a great genius had changed him into a flamingo, a brainless bird, sprinkling his two wings with the blood of his victims, and thus condemning him to wander for ever in deserts and marshes.
After that, when Vera came into the museum, she closed her eyes and ran past quickly to avoid seeing the blood-covered murderer.
H.P.B.’s marvelous evocative powers carried away her audiences to the point where, even if vaguely, they saw what she saw. As a child, she frightened her sister “very nearly into fits.” Vera remembered that near the summer estate there was a sandy tract of land which appeared to have at one time been the bottom of a lake, since its soil yielded petrified relics of fishes and shells. Helena would stretch out on the ground, her elbows buried in the sand, and conjure underwater battles of long-dead sea monsters. Then she would abruptly switch her narrative from past to present tense. Suddenly the earth was opening. Around them the air was condensing into waves. Water surrounded them. They were standing on the bottom of the sea, amid coral reefs and caves with stalactites. She could feel the velvety water caressing her body. Then suddenly the sea was engulfing them; they were drowning. Helena could see it all.38
During the drama, her audience would be sure they were drowning. Afterward, they would feel abused and regard Helena Petrovna as quite mad. A notable exception to this critical view was held by her Aunt Nadyezhda who argued that H.P.B. was superior to everyone else in the family, and simply not appreciated. She spoke of the “envy and animosity of all those who, in their trivial inferiority, felt wounded by the splendor of the faculties and talents of this really marvellous”39 niece of hers. There is apparently much truth in Nadyezhda’s words, for Helena unquestionably had a superior intelligence. Her aversion to formal instruction notwithstanding, she had the facility of grasping and assimilating the most difficult subjects with speed and ease, subjects that took other people years of study to master. This is confirmed by independent testimony from other members of the family who were decidedly hostile to H.P.B., but who recall being “impressed by the extraordinary facility with which she acquired skill and knowledge of the most varied description. Her abilities in this respect verged on the uncanny.”40
Forty years later people on several continents would be arguing whether Helena Petrovna Blavatsky was a genius, a consummate fraud, or simply a lunatic. By that time, an excellent case could have been made for any of the three. To a great extent, the truth was confused by H.P.B. herself. Far from trying to pass herself off as a genius or a scholar, she went out of her way to insist that she had only normal intelligence and, furthermore, a relatively poor education. If Nadyezhda’s statements can be trusted—and in this instance it appears that they can be—her niece received the typical superficial education given to a girl of good family: she studied Russian, French and English. Afterwards, during her travels, she would pick up a smattering of Italian. As far as serious academic study was concerned, “there was no shadow of it, not even the least promise thereof.” Then where did Helena get her knowledge of hieroglyphics, of Hebrew, Sanskrit and Greek? “She never saw them even in a dream,” would declare Nadyezhda in 1881. “I can swear to it.”41
Forty years hence, when Nadyezhda would make that declaration, H.P.B. was flatly refusing to take any credit whatsoever for the complex philosophies coming from her pen. Rather, she insisted that she was but the passive instrument of others wiser and greater than herself. But in the 1840s, her brilliance was so obvious that the Fadeyevs did not view her abnormal behavior with excessive alarm. Helena was unquestionably strange, but, given her extraordinary intelligence, they must have hoped that she would outgrow her eccentricities, as children outgrow stammering or bed-wetting.
Maturity often does bring an end to such difficulties, but sometimes the problems simply take a different form. For several years, Helena had been receiving nightly visitations from an elderly woman who chose to make known her presence through H.P.B.’s handwriting. She called herself Tekla Lebenorff and gave a detailed account of her life, including her birthplace (Revel,in the B
altic Provinces), her marriage, the history of her daughter Z—-and her thrilling romance, and her son F—-who had committed suicide, and who in fact sometimes appeared in person to lament his sufferings. Tekla went on to describe her death and to give the name and address of the Lutheran pastor who had administered the last sacrament. In case that was not proof enough, she also reproduced a petition that she had presented to the Czar, writing it out verbatim and even including a remark Nicholas had written in the margin.
Tekla Lebendorff, it will be remembered, was the aunt of D—-, an officer in Peter von Hahn’s regiment who had befriended H.P.B. This was the woman whose portrait Helena had thought so ugly, but she had forgotten all that by then. All she knew was that when she sat down with paper and pen, she could produce pages of manuscript in Tekla’s “clear, old-fashioned, peculiar handwriting and grammar, in German (a language I had never learnt to write and could not even speak well) and in Russian.” The fact that some of the writing was in German and all of it clearly not in Helena’s own hand caught the Fadeyevs’ attention and led them to predictable conclusions.
“From the first,” Helena explained, “all around me were impressed with the belief that the spirit possessing me must be that of a dead person,”42 and H.P.B. agreed. The Fadeyevs knew nothing about mediumship or automatic writing, nor did they believe in seances and disembodied spirits as did some trendy intellectuals of that era. In their opinion, the writing was a by-product of possession and they sent for the family priest who attended the sessions, sprinkling holy water from an aspergillum. The priest unhesitatingly declared the messages to be devil’s work, but since Tekla insisted that she saw God, the Virgin Mary and a host of angels, he could not object strongly enough to halt the proceedings.