by Marion Meade
In 1850, soon after arriving in Constantinople, she met a middle-aged opera singer with whom she formed an off-and-on relationship that would last twenty years. Agardi Metrovitch, a man in his late forties and the illegitimate son of the Duke of Lucea, had been brought up in the Hungarian town of Metrovitz (now Sremska Mitrovica in Yugoslavia) whose name he adopted as his stage name. H.P.B.’s claim that he was a hothead— “0 Carbonaro, a revolutionist of the worst kind, a fanatic rebel”—indicates that his politics were far left. According to Helena, their first encounter took place one evening when, returning to Missire’s Hotel, she stumbled over his seemingly dead body. “He had received three good stabs in his back from one, or two, or more Maltese ruffians, and a Corsican, who were paid for it by the Jesuits.”31 She had to guard him four hours with a revolver before finding someone to assist her. According to her cousin Sergei Witte, Agardi Metrovitch fell in love after seeing her perform in the circus.32
Since Helena spent the rest of 1850 and also 1851 in Egypt, France and England, she could not have been intimately involved with him during that period. But after finding herself footloose in London, she joined Metrovitch and accompanied him to various cities and towns where he had singing engagements. That she should have been attracted to a musician is understandable, for she herself was an ardent lover of music and a talented pianist. An opera singer’s mode of life with its constant traveling and its theatricality would have appealed to Helena, even if she had to be a backstage mistress. She could not abide dullness, and life with Metrovitch offered compensations that being the wife of the vice-governor of Erivan had not.
In the same sketchbook that H.P.B. began at Ramsgate there is a sketch of Metrovitch in a scene from Faust but it is difficult to determine how much is Mephistopheles’ makeup and how much Metrovitch. His features are sharp, almost emaciated, with a high brow, long nose, and thin-lipped mouth. Helena’s cousin claimed that as one of the most celebrated bassos of the time he enjoyed a brilliant career until his voice began to deteriorate. If that is true, he escaped the notice of nineteenth-century music historians because none of the biographical dictionaries compiled at the time mention his name.
Even though H.P.B. liked to paint herself as passionless, there is no doubt that she loved Metrovitch, and he, her. He is supposed to have written several letters to Andrey Fadeyev announcing that he had married Helena and calling himself “grandson.” Apparently he did not realize that his “wife” had another husband, or if he did know, it does not seem to have troubled him.
One of H.P.B.’s more refreshing traits was her utter disregard for the Victorian code of morality; she did as she pleased when she pleased, even if it meant a bigamous or common-law marriage, or simply “free love” as it was then termed. However, it would be a mistake to assume that she was never troubled by pricks of conscience, for later she would moan that “just because the devil got me into trouble in my youth, I really cannot go and rip up my stomach now like a Japanese suicide.”33 She could not have condoned Metrovitch’s indiscreet letters to her grandfather, and H.P.B.’s temper being what it was, their life together must often have been stormy. She may not have been sexually faithful to him either, because her cousin stated that, several years after the Fadeyevs heard from Metrovitch, they received mail from a second man. “A certain Englishman from London informed them in a letter bearing an American stamp that he had been married to Mme. Blavatski, who had gone with him on a business trip to the United States.”34 If this occurred at all, it must have been an unimportant interlude because Helena returned to Metrovitch.
These years of apparently aimless wandering would prove an embarrassment to H.P.B.’s followers, who offered by way of apology the theory that the 1850s were “a preparation for discipleship, then discipleship itself.”35 Technically this was true, although certainly not in the sense meant by the Theosophists. She was constantly preparing herself, though for what end she could not say. In 1888, in a prospectus for The Secret Doctrine, she would state that “the author of this work has devoted more than forty years of her life to the study and acquisition of this knowledge,”36 adding that it had been acquired in various secret schools of wisdom. This mysterious assertion cannot completely disguise the fact that esoteric knowledge was contained in books, which were available to any scholar who troubled to visit the major libraries of Europe. Not only was H.P.B. an insatiable reader, she also had a bloodhound’s nose for sniffing out obscure works known mainly to librarians and curators, books that had lain dust-covered for decades.
As a student she loved anything that moved her soul and forced her to plunge into thought. Interested mainly in science and theology, she familiarized herself with the standard works in these areas, not because she accepted conventional ideas, but the better to pick them apart. Her passion, however, was for hidden or occult knowledge, either that rejected by the Establishment, or knowledge that voluntarily exiled itself because it had to be hidden from the eyes of the profane. The secret meaning of everything fascinated H.P.B.; myths and traditions she took for actual history, and those who viewed them as fantasies she dismissed as superficial thinkers. It is not surprising that a person as defiant of convention as H.P.B. should dote on knowledge that was rejected and subversive.
In the midnineteenth century, no student of Masonic, Hermetic, Cabalistic or Rosicrucian literature could have missed an idea that repeated itself constantly: namely, that there exists a secret tradition, also called the Ancient Wisdom, Secret Doctrine, and a dozen other names, which explains the great plan of the universe and mankind’s place in God’s scheme. Although no two interpretations of the secret wisdom were the same, one thread weaving through them all was the idea that the keys to the secrets have been entrusted to a brotherhood of supermen. This intriguing notion was, of course, the basis of the Rosicrucian order whose founder, Christian Rosenkreutz, sought the wise men in their Arabian home, learned the secrets of the Book M, and in turn became himself a keeper of the wisdom.
Years later, Helena would tell a Russian compatriot that, before the age of thirty, she had been a materialist who did not believe in God,37 a curious admission for one who was to insist that Theosophy was not a religion, it was religion. Nevertheless, even in her twenties, she was obsessed by God and His divine plan, and would remain so for the rest of her life. Why this should be so is easily understandable in terms of her background for even though she had abandoned Russia, it had not abandoned her, and at heart she remained quintessentially Russian. Atheist though she may have considered herself at times, she was soaked in the mysticism of the Russian people, their eagerness to grasp the intricate and subtle questions of life, their addiction for all-encompassing philosophic systems. Her religious training as a child had been conventionally pious, even rigid, and in alienating herself from the Fadeyevs, she not only rejected the gorgeous pomposity of the Byzantine Church but Christianity as well, which left her with the problem of finding a more compatible system. There were, after all, other religions she might have embraced, but none of them truly satisfied her. In the end she would be obliged to tailor Hinduism and Buddhism to her own needs.
While Helena’s life with Metrovitch left ample time to pursue her occult studies, it did not rule out other activities and interests. According to her cousin, the Fadeyevs learned from the newspapers that Helena was giving piano concerts in London and Paris and, for a time, managed the Serbian royal choir, all of which might have been possible considering the musical circles in which she traveled. At the same time, according to Witte, she also became “the right hand”38 of the renowned medium Daniel Dunglas Home. Toward the end of her life, Helena vehemently denied knowing Home, let alone working for him, but the denials contradict her own earlier claims.
“In 1858,” she told the New York Daily Graphic, “I returned to Paris and made the acquaintance of Daniel Home. He had married the Countess Krohle, (Countess Alexandrine [Sasha] de Kroll) a sister of the Countess Koucheleff Bezborrodke, a lady with whom I had been very int
imate in my youth. Home converted me to Spiritualism.”
Spiritualism, an essentially American religious movement, held that human personality survives death as a discarnate, who can demonstrate individual survival by communications such as raps and various other materializations. It was necessary, however, for psychically gifted individuals such as Home to act as intermediaries between the two spheres of existence.
Asked the reporter, “Did you ever see any of his levitations?”
“Yes, but give me a light. [Puff, puff.] Thanks. Yes, I have seen him carried out of a four-story window.”39
Home, born in Scotland but raised in the United States, returned to Europe in 1855 where he became the darling of high society. A tall slim youth of twenty-two with an elegance of bearing and fastidious taste in dress, he was not, strictly speaking, a professional medium because he did not charge fees for his sittings. Yet there were certain gifts from royalty which cannot be refused without boorishness, and Home rapidly became a rich man. Even though he possessed considerable talent as a mental medium, Home’s most astounding feats, not yet satisfactorily explained, were physical phenomena— partial materialization, psychokinetic effects, bodily elongation and levita-tion—all demonstrated in full light as contrasted to virtually every other physical medium’s requirement for darkness.
Home was able to levitate tables, chairs, and himself. It was nothing for him to drift to the ceiling, leave a pencil mark, and slowly descend to the ground; on one occasion, the entranced Home floated out a bedroom window, hovered seventy feet above the ground, and bobbed back into a drawing-room window. Or so his awed witnesses claimed. Although Robert Browning, attending a seance with Elizabeth, thought Home a charlatan and savagely portrayed him in Mr. Sludge, the “Medium,” his wife was greatly impressed, and so was almost everyone else who saw him. Certainly Home was no Mr. Sludge using tacky mediums’ tricks. Despite numerous attempts to discover fraud in his mediumship (he was investigated by such distinguished scientists as Sir William Crookes), Home is alone among the principal physical mediums in never having been detected in the use of trickery or devices. His mediumship remains the most impressive instance of physical phenomena on record; skeptics, however, claim mass hypnosis as the explanation. By coincidence, Madame Blavatsky has also been charged with using mass hypnotism to achieve some of her phenomena, so perhaps she owed a greater debt to Home than she wished to admit.
The effete, consumptive Home was personally offended by anyone lacking refinement. At Paris, he did not find the earthy Helena to his taste. “I took no interest in her,” he said, and it was “most repulsive to me that in order to attract attention she pretended to be a medium.”40 His harsh assessment is not remarkable, for he was jealous of all other mediums and denounced all psychic phenomena that did not exactly correspond to his own. The real reason for his attacks on H.P.B. was that he believed her coarse and immoral.
Whatever her relationship with Home and the rest of the Spiritualist crowd in Paris, Helena did not find the atmosphere congenial. She remained long enough to pick up the fine points of conducting séances, table-turning, and so forth, and she learned, too, how a medium could parlay a little genuine talent into a fashionable drawing-room attraction. But, as an insider, she noticed that even genuine mediums were not above using a judicious bit of trickery now and again to bolster their feats, and she began to develop a low opinion of them, and of the mediumistic abilities that she herself possessed. She did not like to think of herself as a medium if it meant admitting that discarnate entities could “guide” and speak through her. The idea of being manipulated by anyone, dead or alive, was abhorrent to her, and for that reason alone she always bristled when anyone called her a medium.
By 1858, Helena was twenty-seven; nearly nine years had sped by since she had left Russia and she was experiencing homesickness for her country and family. At least she felt sufficiently nostalgic to write to Nadyezhda Fadeyev and cautiously explore the possibility of returning for a visit. She wondered, too, if there would be trouble from Nikifor Blavatsky, who might try to reclaim her as his legal wife.
Changes had taken place in Russia since her departure. Czar Nicholas had died after suddenly contracting influenza from Count Paul Kiselev, the husband of Helena’s old traveling companion. Everybody was talking about Czar Alexander’s plan to liberate the serfs, but nobody seriously believed that such an epochal event would come to pass. Much had changed, too, within Helena’s family. The year after she had left, her father’s second wife died, leaving him with an infant daughter, Liza, and that same year Peter von Hahn had retrieved his two children from the Fadeyevs. Eleven-year-old Leonid had been placed in a St. Petersburg school; negotiations were begun for Vera, then sixteen, to eventually marry a son of General Nikolay de Yahontov.
Vera would later say that she had completely lost track of Helena and believed her dead.41 Possibly what she actually meant was that the Fadeyevs counted Helena as one who is dead, just as any respectable family at that time would have shied away from acknowledging their relationship with a notorious black sheep. Nobody, however, believed for a moment that Helena had died, not with the letters from Metrovitch, the unpleasant tales carried home by the Kiselevs and Bagrations, the newspaper clippings sent by Russian friends traveling abroad (or possibly by H.P.B. herself) about her musical activities. No, they did not think her dead, but on the other hand they never expected her to have the nerve to come back.
Sometime during the summer or early autumn of 1858, Helena parted from Metrovitch and traveled to Russian territory, but the city in which she temporarily halted is unknown. Apprehensive, unsure of what sort of welcome she might expect from her family, she turned to Nadyezhda for help in smoothing the way. In October, Nadyezhda wrote to Nikifor at Erivan, informing him of his wife’s return and asking him not to bother Helena. In a stoic, rather bitter response of November 13 (Old Style), he wrote that Helena “ceased to interest me long ago. Time smooths out everything, even every memory.”42
He had no intention of causing unpleasantness for his wife:
You may assure H.P. on my word of honor that I will never pursue her. I wish ardently that our marriage be annulled, and that she may marry again. It is possible that I too may marry again, from calculation or inclination, feeling myself not yet unsuited to family life. So make every effort, by exerting your forces, and let her also do her best to annul the marriage. I did my best, but Exarch Isador refused to do it. Therefore I do not intend to start a new lawsuit any more, or even to obtain the divorce by applying to the Emperor.
Repeating that he would not contact Helena, or make inquiries as to her whereabouts, he went on to call his marriage “a misfortune” and for him it no doubt was. Now nearly fifty, he had no wife or family, and after his futile attempts to obtain a divorce, no longer even the hope of either.
One can become accustomed to anything. So I have got used to a joyless life in Erivan. Whatsoever may happen I shall remain unaffected. My plan is to retire entirely from active service. I would then go to my estate, in that hidden corner which nobody knows of, and live there surrounded by the delights of a lonely life.43
Nadyezhda had less luck with the Fadeyevs. Andrey absolutely refused to have his granddaughter in Tiflis; in the end, Nadyezhda had to send Helena the address of her sister. In February, Vera’s thirty-one-year-old husband had died suddenly, leaving her utterly distraught over the loss of “he who loved me more than anyone on this earth.”44 She had a four-year-old son, Feodor, and an infant, Rostislav, who had been born posthumously. While her late husband had left her some property, temporarily Vera was living with her father-in-law at Pskov, in northwest Russia near the Baltic.
Writing to Vera, Helena announced that she planned to travel after the first of the year, but at the last minute, perhaps reluctant to spend the holidays alone, she moved up her schedule by several weeks and turned up at Pskov on Christmas Day.
III
Yuri
Aside from Christmas, t
he Yahontovs were celebrating the marriage of their daughter that evening. There was a stream of guests and even though the wedding banquet had begun, the doorbell continued to ring every few minutes. Just as the bridegroom’s best man rose, champagne glass in hand, to begin the ritual toasts, the bell was heard again. Something about the impatience of the last ring must have alerted Vera for, despite the many servants and to the astonishment of the guests, she jumped up from the table and rushed to open the door. “Overcome with joy,” Vera forgot the wedding and took Helena to her room. Almost immediately unusual happenings began to occur for, Vera recalled, “that very evening I was convinced that my sister had acquired strange powers.” (See Appendix A.) To be sure, she had always associated strangeness with Helena but now the happenings were so startling, so flamboyant, that they could not be easily dismissed. Awake or asleep, her sister “was constantly surrounded with mysterious movements, strange sounds.” Distinct little taps came from the furniture, windowpanes, floors and walls, and it did not take Vera long to discover that the knocks possessed an intelligence of their own. When asked a question, “they tapped three times for ‘yes,’ twice for ‘no.’”45
Successfully upstaging the bridal couple, Helena quickly became the center of attention with her rappings and poltergeist effects. Now, as later, H.P.B. would bolster temporary insecurities by overwhelming people with phenomena, an attention-getting device that usually worked well. On this occasion, however, it was not the Yahontovs that she wished to impress but Peter von Hahn, who was attending the wedding with her brother Leonid and half-sister Liza.