by Marion Meade
Taking matters into her own hands, Helena finally appealed to Nikifor himself, warning him that he was making a mistake. However, instead of openly stating her feelings, she apparently tried to force him to break off the engagement. She told him, according to Vera, that the only reason she had chosen him over other suitors was that she would feel fewer compunctions about making him miserable. “You make a great mistake in marrying me,” she said to him before the marriage. “You know perfectly well that you are old enough to be my grandfather. You will make somebody unhappy, but it won’t be me. As for me, I am not afraid of you, but I warn you that it is not you that will gain anything from our union.”74 Vera’s secondhand account of this conversation perpetuates H.P.B.’s misleading claim that Nikifor was a doddering old man who, though close to seventy, was reluctant to acknowledge being older than about fifty. In fact, he was thirty-nine at the time.
Unmoved, Nikifor refused to break the engagement. A few weeks later, when he had departed for Erivan, Helena ran off in search of Prince Golitsyn. Where she went, and whether or not she actually located him, were unrecorded. However, if she did find him, their encounter must have been unsatisfying, because she returned home shortly.
While news of her escapade may not have immediately reached Blavatsky, unpleasant stories circulated in Tiflis. One day, on Princess Lydia Gagarin’s balcony, Alexander Dondoukoff-Korsakoff gave Helena a lecture on morality. The Fadeyevs, shaken by her flight and aware that she was gaining a reputation for looseness, were now doubly anxious to get her safely married and proceeded hastily with preparations for the wedding.
At the end of June of 1849, Helena was escorted to her wedding by the whole family, including Katherine who only ten days earlier had given birth to her third son—Sergei Yulyevich75. The only absent relative—the one most important to Helena—was her father, who did not make the long journey from St. Petersburg, where he was living with his new wife. This impressive family cavalcade was organized less for the sake of appearances than for security reasons, since it was not in Helena’s nature to yield gracefully and she continued to entertain strategies for escape. Seized by a “great horror,”76 she felt as if she were being swept toward the threshold of mortal danger. But even though her instinct warned her to run, a kind of paralysis prevented her from taking any action.
Leaving Tiflis, the wedding party rode south along the Kura River and then began to climb up into the mountain ranges of the southern Caucasus where the scenery was breathtaking: sharp peaks, romantic valleys watered by torrential streams, the forest-encircled Blue Sea. The area was popular with residents of Tiflis, who flocked there in summer for their holidays. Halfway to Erivan, the party reached the small town of Gerger (now Armansky Gerger), and then headed toward the settlement of Dzhelal-ogli (now Kamenka), where Nikifor was to join them for the nuptials on July 7 (Old Style).
Much later in her life, H.P.B. became quite censorious about sex. At seventeen, it can be assumed that she was merely ignorant and scared. Young girls were invariably uninformed about the sexual side of marriage. It was not uncommon for new brides to rush home after their wedding night, declaring that their husbands had been rude. Helena, however, was more fortunate than most. On the day of her wedding, either her grandmother or her Aunt Katherine made “a distinct attempt to impress her with the solemnity of marriage, with her future obligations and her duties to her husband and married life.”77 Instead of assuaging her dread, however, this last-minute lecture merely heightened it. A few hours later, standing at the altar with Nikifor, when she heard the priest say, “Thou shalt honour and obey thy husband,” the word “shalt” proved to be the proverbial last straw. Forgetting where she was, she flushed angrily and breached every code of manners by muttering in a perfectly audible voice: “Surely, I shall not.”78
Puzzled as Nikifor Blavatsky may have been by his bride’s extraordinary outburst, he seems to have spared no effort or expense to make the honeymoon pleasant. Immediately after the ceremony, the couple set off for Darachichag—a fashionable mountain resort whose name means “valley of flowers”—where he planned for them to spend July and August, before he had to take up his duties at Erivan.
There is no question that the marriage was a disaster from the start. Despite their romantic surroundings, the couple “came into violent conflict from the day of the wedding—a day of unforeseen revelations, furious indignation, dismay and belated repentance.” With all due consideration for a bride’s natural modesty, Nikifor naturally wished to assert his marital rights. To his bewilderment, Helena would not allow him to touch her.79
H.P.B. adamantly insisted that: “/ never was his wife, I swear it up to the hour of my death. NEVER have I been WIFE Blavatsky although I lived for a year under his roof.”80 The marriage actually lasted for three months, but there is small doubt that it was ever consummated. During those months when Blavatsky repeatedly attempted to initiate a sexual relationship, he must at last have understood the true meaning of Helena’s threat that he would get nothing from the marriage. She was equally unwilling to give anything outside the bedroom and their relationship soon deteriorated into a battlefield devoid of ordinary civility. Whatever pretenses Nikifor had formerly made about interest in the occult quickly evaporated. He no longer had patience for lengthy metaphysical discussions and it became clear to Helena that he knew nothing about the sorcerers of Erivan. All he wanted was a normal marriage with a normal wife. “What I wanted and searched for,” H.P.B. wrote, “was the subtle magnetism that one exchanges, the human ‘salt,’ and father Blavatsky did not have it.” As far as her occult studies were concerned, “this did not suit the old man, hence quarrels, nearly battles.”81
Toward the end of August, they received a visit from her family, which had remained in the vicinity vacationing. While nothing was said about the true state of affairs, her relatives could not have supposed the marriage happy. At the end of the month, the Fadeyevs accompanied the newlyweds to Erivan, stopping on the way to visit the monastery of Echmiadzin—the headquarters of the Armenian Church—with its Tibetan bell inscribed Om Mani Padme Hum; they gawked at Mount Ararat, on whose summit Noah was supposed to have landed his ark; and they visited the nearby ruins of Bashgarni. It was all very interesting and educational, but it did not succeed in alleviating Helena’s misery. The Fadeyevs went back home, and she was left alone with her husband.
The Armenian city of Erivan was old and Asiatic in character, with only a few newly built houses and occasional Russian soldiers in the streets. After Helena had strolled about the town, visiting the dozens of canals and the bazaar where merchants sat with tame falcons on their wrists, there was little to do. Preoccupied by fantasies of escape, she persuaded Nikifor to allow her to take horseback trips around Mount Ararat and the neighboring countryside. Rightfully wary, Nikifor designated a Kurd named Safar Ali Bel Ibrahim Bek Ogli to be her personal escort, but in reality, he was to function as her guard. Apparently unaware of Safar Ali’s real job, Helena confided to him her plans for escape, which he promptly reported to his employer. By this time, it must have been painfully clear to Nikifor that only a full-time police officer could keep his wife from running away, and it could hardly have come as a surprise when she suddenly disappeared one day.
H.P.B. liked to give the impression that she rode through the mountains back to Tiflis all alone. Such a journey would have been difficult for an eighteen-year-old girl unfamiliar with the trails, no matter how expert a horsewoman she may have been. But she may have felt her situation desperate enough to warrant a few risks in fleeing from what she considered imprisonment. If she had disliked Nikifor at the beginning of the marriage, she now despised him.
I, hating my husband, N. V. Blavatsky (it may have been wrong, but still such was the nature God gave me), left him, abandoned him—a virgin (I shall produce documents and letters proving this, although he himself is not such a swine as to deny it).82
He was not at all a swine. In fact, for the rest of his life, he tactf
ully refrained from making any public comment whatsoever about the woman who would make his name world famous.
THE VEILED YEARS
1849-1873
I
The Hindu at Ramsgate
In Tiflis, Helena Petrovna went noisily to pieces, swearing that “I would kill myself if I was forced to return”1 to Erivan. Her grandfather was embarrassed, unnerved, and finally, furious. Helena’s flight was not only an affront to his friend, it was also a social disgrace. With her indiscreet pursuit of Prince Golitsyn—a scandal narrowly averted by marriage—still fresh in his memory, he could now foresee a whole chain of headaches looming ahead. Fadeyev decided that he could no longer be responsible for his troublesome granddaughter.
The problem, however, was what to do with her. An eighteen-year-old woman, married or not, could not be permitted to run loose. Shipping her back to Blavatsky seemed out of the question, and the ailing Princess Helena was in no condition to supervise her. By process of elimination, Helena’s father became the only alternative. Writing to von Hahn at St. Petersburg, Fadeyev outlined both the situation and the proposed solution in terms that did not brook refusal. Von Hahn, finally settled at fifty-one with his second wife, the Baroness von Lange, who was expecting their first child, could hardly have welcomed the news. But after a further exchange of letters, it was agreed that Fadeyev would have Helena sent overland to Poti, a port on the Black Sea, and from there she would travel by steamer to Odessa, where von Hahn would collect her. Having no trust in Helena, Fadeyev placed her in the custody of four serfs— one of them his personal steward—and dispatched this convoy, amounting to nothing less than an armed guard, in a capacious four-in-hand.
Helena left Tiflis feeling “sick at heart.”2 After years of phantasizing a reunion with her father, she realized that it was, of course, too late. If he had not wanted her before, she now discovered that she no longer wanted him. She felt sure that he would begin by moralizing and end by returning her to Nikifor. These were not unrealistic fears and by the time they approached Poti, her mind was hard at work on schemes to slip away from her escort.
On the westward trip through Georgia, she had caused sufficient delays to make the party miss the steamer for Odessa at Poti. In the harbor was an English vessel, the SS Commodore, from whose skipper Helena learned it was headed first for Kerch in the Crimea, and from there would sail north-eastward to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, before turning south again for Constantinople. She devised a two-stage plan: she would book passage to Kerch for the servants, and to Constantinople for herself. When she proposed this idea to the skipper, he at first refused to have anything to do with it. She succeeded in convincing him, she claimed, by a liberal outlay of rubles. But there were also other reasons for his change of mind.
Kerch, viewed from the steamer, was an extremely pretty town which rose like an amphitheater surrounding the bay: the church cupolas were painted green and topped with immense gilded crosses, and on a steep hill to the left stood a museum modeled after a Greek temple. Telling them that she would join them in the morning, Helena sent the serfs ashore to find lodgings for their layover while they allegedly would await a ship to Odessa.
That night the Commodore slipped quietly out of the harbor and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky finally managed to shake free of all restrictions. Hungry for life, she could plunge into the adventures and travels she had dreamed about. “My soul needed space,”3 as she put it, but she did not bargain for the steep price she would have to pay. No sooner had they reached Taganrog than the skipper suggested it would be best if the harbor police, who would be coming aboard, did not see her. The reason remains obscure: either she had not paid for her passage, or there was some irregularity in her papers, or perhaps, as an unchaperoned female minor, she was a “suspicious person.” The skipper instructed her to conceal herself in a coal bin and, when she balked, he had her dress as a cabin boy and huddle in a bunk feigning illness.
It should have been clear by now that more than respectful regard was motivating the captain to perform these services for a stowaway, and one wonders if she naively believed he would smuggle her into Turkey without asking recompense. She told Alfred Sinnett that “further embarrassments developed” once the Commodore dropped anchor in Constantinople harbor, and she was forced to “fly ashore precipitately in a caique with the connivance of the steward to escape the persecutions of the skipper.”4 Thus, with uncharacteristic delicacy, she surmounted this final obstacle to her freedom. She was not the least bit daunted by having to enter Constantinople in a rowboat; nor, apparently was she concerned about the livid, outwitted men she had left in her wake—least of all the amorous skipper of the Commodore.
Working to earn one’s living was socially unacceptable for upper-class women in the 1840s. The fact that only the meanest kinds of employment were open to them served as further discouragement. Indeed, it was commonly accepted that if a woman worked, she was making a statement: either her father had provided insufficiently for her support, or that she had failed to find a husband. In a foreign country, the odds against finding employment were vastly increased.
How Helena supported herself after she left Russia remains a mystery. Not only did H.P.B. provide no illumination, she did her best to add to the confusion. Her biographer dutifully set down what she told him: that she “communicated privately with her father and secured his consent to her vague programme of foreign travel.” Von Hahn, according to Sinnett, “supplied his fugitive daughter with money, and kept her counsel in regard to her subsequent movements.”5 Yet, from everything that is known of Peter von Hahn, left fuming at the Odessa docks, this account seems wildly out of character. The unromantic fact was she found herself stranded in Turkey with little or no funds, and she had to live by her wits. Even for a person as clever as H.P.B., income-producing activities were limited to three: governess, lady’s companion, or mistress—being kept by a man. Helena could never have endured the restricted life of a governess and, although she was not really suited for the remaining two “careers” either, these appear to be among those that she eventually settled for.
First, however, she apparently tried to capitalize on the only talent of which she was then aware—horseback riding. Gossip reported much later, some of it by her own relatives, has her joining the circus as a bareback rider. H.P.B. herself admitted that she did have an experience with horses at Constantinople, but she gave a rather different account:
At Constantinople I was in need of money and I wanted to earn the 100 offered to the one who won the steeplechase— eighteen hedges to jump with a wild horse which had just killed two grooms. I jumped sixteen but at the seventeenth my horse reared, fell backwards and crushed me. It was in 1851. I came to myself six weeks later; but before entering my Nirvana (for it was fully one), I saw a man, a giant, dressed differently from the Turks, who lifted my tattered and bloody garments from under the horse and—nothing more, nothing but the memory of a face I had seen somewhere.6
Allowing for exaggeration, and understanding that the main point of this tale is that unseen forces protected her, it is still possible to extract a few nuggets of plain truth from it: that she rode for money in Constantinople and, in the course of this activity, suffered an injury which left her with a chest scar that would still be troubling her twenty years later.
There is evidence that most of Helena’s time for the next two years was spent as companion to various wealthy old women. She soon attached herself to the Russian community living in Constantinople. Such enclaves of Slav expatriates—temporary transplants or permanent residents—flourished in London, Paris, Rome and in nearly every large European city. They gathered around the samovar, smoked cigarettes and engaged in interminable discussions about God, politics and music, all of them tinged with nostalgia for the homeland they had abandoned in favor of the palmy lobbies of first-class European hotels. Given Helena’s family background, it was natural for her to gravitate toward this group, and equally natural for them to befriend her.
H.P.B. was fortunate to meet in Constantinople a Countess Kiselev, an eccentric woman in her sixties who happened to be well connected in Russia. Her husband, Count Paul Kiselev, was both a liberal reformer who had devoted most of his life to the unsuccessful cause of serf liberation, and an intimate of Czar Nicholas—seemingly incompatible roles, but this was nevertheless a fact. The countess’s interests ran, evidently, to the more exotic, and in particular, to the occult. H.P.B. would later waggishly declare that when the countess died, she left “millions and all her medium apparatuses, writing tables and tarots to the Church of Rome.”7 The countess took on Helena as her companion, dressed her in trousers because she thought it to be chic to be seen with “a gentleman student,”8 and the two of them moved on to Egypt.
Once she became famous, Madame Blavatsky would contend that she had spent twenty years wandering the globe in pursuit of esoteric knowledge. However, only a handful of individuals came forward to support her claim, stating they had encountered her during this period. One of them was Albert Leighton Rawson, a young American artist, scholar and traveler who was just as fascinated by the mysteries of the East as was Helena. A native of Chester, Vermont, who had once disguised himself as a Moslem divinity student and joined a caravan making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, Rawson had a weakness for wild ventures, disguises, and colorful women. In 1850, when he met Helena in Cairo, he found her “charming,” “companionable,” and “almost irresistible” (later adding the qualification that she was all those things “when not ‘possessed’”)9 and he offered to squire her around the city.