by Marion Meade
During the next few weeks the drawing room of Vera’s prominent in-laws was full of visitors, playing cards or singing around the piano, but most of the guests surrounded Helena Petrovna, who sat quietly in an armchair with her embroidery. Even in provincial Russia, people had heard about Spiritualism, and while there had been reports of mediums in St. Petersburg, none had penetrated so far as Pskov. Certainly nobody had ever actually heard the rappings of a so-called spirit, and for this reason Helena became an overnight sensation.
To Helena’s disappointment, her most enthusiastic detractors were her father and brother. Peter von Hahn, perhaps remembering Tekla Lebendorff, would have nothing to do with the rapping sessions, remarking that such nonsense was beneath the concern of serious people. Leonid, now eighteen, and a law student at the University of Dorpat, proclaimed himself a believer “in no one and nothing.” One evening, when Helena was describing how mediums could make light objects become so heavy they could not be lifted, Leonid hovered behind his sister’s chair. “And you mean to say that you can do it?” he demanded.
Helena’s answer was guarded. “I have done it occasionally, though I cannot always answer for its success.”
When the guests pressed her to try, she agreed, but warned that she promised nothing. A three-legged table was positioned in the center of the room. Helena fixed it with an intense stare and then, still staring, she motioned one of the young men present to remove it. Even though he seized it with both hands, the table could not be moved and finally he gave up.
Suspecting collusion, Leonid approached the table; he tugged, he kicked, he shook until the wood began to splinter. But the table refused to budge. “How strange,” was his only concession.
Finally, Helena asked him to try again. Leonid gave a tremendous pull, this time almost dislocating his arm because the table was light as a feather. Years later, H.P.B. explained the feat, saying that it could be produced by the exercise of her own will directing the magnetic currents, or by the aid of unseen beings from Tibet, but she did not specify which method she had used at Pskov. (It should be noted that similar phenomena have been performed by hypnotists who have good subjects.)
While Leonid had been grudgingly won over, Helena wanted badly to impress her father. Winning his respect was important to her but nothing seemed to work, not her thought-reading, not her Latin prescriptions for the treatment of various diseases, not even the excitement when Liza’s governess, Leontine, wanted to know what had happened to a young man who had jilted her, and she found the answer in a letter locked inside a trunk in her room. Von Hahn ignored all of it. Secretly, Helena could not blame him because she, too, had little respect for mediums. When anyone at the Yahontovs was indiscreet enough to call her one, she indignantly denied it, declaring that she was a mediator between mortals and beings they knew nothing about. “But I could never understand the difference,”46 confessed Vera, and neither could anyone else.
Meanwhile, Vera was in the midst of organizing her affairs and trying to adjust to widowhood. Her late husband, shortly before his death, had purchased a village of a hundred serfs at Rougodevo, in the Province of Pskov. The place had been bought sight unseen through an agent. There was, however, a sizable mansion on the property and Vera proposed to settle there with her sons, her father and half-sister Liza. Now, of course, Helena Petrovna was invited to join the menage. Before settling in their new home, they spent a few weeks in St. Petersburg where Peter von Hahn had business to look after.
Their first weeks in the capital, at the Hotel de Paris, were lived at a highly accelerated pace. In the mornings von Hahn was occupied with his business affairs; in the afternoons and evenings everyone made and received social calls. “There was,” Vera recalled, “no time for, or even mention of, phenomena,” which suggests that Helena had managed to restrain the rapping. This moratorium lasted, however, until the evening when two old friends of her father’s came to visit. Having heard about Spiritualism, they were anxious to see something and Helena obliged. The old gentlemen professed amazement at her powers and later they began to castigate von Hahn because, while the rapping and “mind-reading” had been going on, he had been engrossed in his game of patience. “Old women’s superstition,” he barked. Nonetheless, his friends convinced him to participate in an experiment. He must go into the next room, write a message on paper, and place it in his pocket. Then they would see whether Helena’s spirits could spell out the message.
In hopes of proving his friends wrong, von Hahn did as requested and then returned to his cards. “What shall you say, old friend,” asked one of his cronies, “if the word written by you is correctly repeated? Will you not feel compelled to believe in such a case?”
If that happened, von Hahn replied scathingly, “you may prepare to offer me as an inmate of a lunatic asylum.”
The raps produced only one word, Zaitchik, but that word, Vera reported, left her father trembling. Showing them the paper, he read, “What was the name of my favourite war-horse which I rode during my first Turkish Campaign?” and below, in parenthesis, he had written Zaitchik.47 As a consequence, von Hahn did a complete about-face and after that he “became passionately fond of experimenting with his daughter’s powers. Once he inquired of the date of a certain event in his family that had occurred several hundred years before. He received it. From that time he set himself and Madame Blavatsky the difficult task of restoring the family chronology.”48 The entire genealogical tree of the counts of Rotternstern and the Hahn-Hahn family had to be traced back to the first crusade, a task which occupied his attention until finally in the early summer they departed for Rougodevo, 132 miles from St. Petersburg.
The days when the gentry could buy a village with its inhabitants was quickly running out, but in the summer of 1859, Vera and her family were still able to live in feudal style. The imposing country house, surrounded by lakes and pine forests, offered a sweeping view of the countryside for 20 miles around. A suite of rooms on the ground floor was given to von Hahn, while the rest of them occupied the ten large rooms on the first floor, and the servants lived at the back. The second or third evening after their arrival, Vera and Helena were strolling through the flower gardens at the front of the house. Helena kept smiling furtively through the windows into some empty rooms and finally told Vera that she could see people inside: a long-haired German student in a velvet blouse, a fat old woman in a frilled cap, an old man with extraordinarily long nails that looked like claws.
Vera, unamused, began to shriek aloud about the Devil and when Helena said they were only lingering reflections of those who had once inhabited the rooms, she was not a bit comforted and worried about the spirits loitering in the children’s rooms. Helena suggested that she send for two old serfs and give them a description of the ghosts. As it turned out, the peasants knew exactly who was meant and assured their mistress that a German student from Gottingen and a fat housekeeper had once lived there. The man with the long nails was their former master, who had contracted a skin disease in Lithuania and could not cut his nails without bleeding to death.
That matter taken care of, the household settled down to normal, if any house in which H.P.B. lived could be termed normal. “All the persons living on the premises,” recalled Vera, “saw constantly, even in full noonday, vague human shadows walking about the rooms, appearing in the gardens, in the flower beds in front of the house, and near the old chapel.”49 More mysteriously, Mademoiselle Leontine discovered in her locked drawers letters containing family secrets known only to herself. Evidently Helena was having a busy time because hardly a day passed without some unexplained event: a locked piano hammering out a march, lamps suddenly extinguished as though a gale wind had blown through the house, objects ripping through the air, sofas and tables performing somersaults. Traditionally, these acoustical and kinetic effects have been attributed to a noisy, boisterous spirit called a poltergeist; today, however, they are termed Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis or RSPK by parapsychologists who theo
rize that in certain unstable persons, or places, intense reservoirs of energy dam up. When, or if, these reserves are released, energy is transmitted from the psychical to the physical plane.
It is difficult, as usual, to pin down Madame Blavatsky’s own views on these manifestations. According to Vera, Helena made a distinction between two kinds of invisible entities: brainless elementals, the shells of departed beings whom she mockingly referred to as spooks; and superhuman men with whom she was in constant communication and who visited her in their astral bodies. But whether she actually made this distinction at Rougodevo in 1859 is doubtful, since she evolved her theories gradually and in a piecemeal fashion. Moreover, H.P.B. translated Vera’s recollections of this period and she did not hesitate to correct and revise the material as she went along, claiming that Vera did not know what she was talking about.
Poltergeists aside, daily life at Rougodevo was generally quiet, perhaps too quiet for a restless person like H.P.B. She spent her time reading and studying, and working with her father on the family genealogy. After supper the family would gather around the dining table and read aloud, Helena chain-smoking cigarettes, her father puffing on cigars or a long Turkish pipe. Occasionally one of these soporific evenings would be interrupted by author-spirits who obligingly made additional comments on the text being read. One night Alexander Pushkin appeared to recite a very bad poem and generally to make a fool of himself.
One afternoon when the local superintendent of police came to the house to investigate the murder of a man in a gin shop, von Hahn suggested that Helena might help locate the murderer. The name Samoylo Ivanof was rapped out, plus a few details about the criminal and his current hiding place. As a result, the man was eventually arrested. Unfortunately, the St. Petersburg police questioned Madame Blavatsky’s sources of information, and it took von Hahn quite a while to convince them his daughter had had no part in the crime.
A year dragged by and toward the spring of 1860, Helena fell ill. As with all her illnesses, the nature of this one remains unclear. Below her heart the wound from Constantinople occasionally reopened, bringing on intense agony, convulsions and a deathlike trance for three or four days. Possibly this wound had not resulted from the riding accident, for H.P.B., as we shall see, gave various explanations at different times. A doctor was sent for, but when he stepped into Helena’s room, he was attacked by a bombardment of poltergeist noises, which terrorized him into complete uselessness. Without his aid, Helena’s wound healed as suddenly as it had reopened.
“The quiet life of the sisters at Rougodevo,” Vera wrote, “was brought to an end by a terrible illness which befell Mme. Blavatsky.”50 It was also ended by the news that Princess Helena Pavlovna Fadeyev was dying. Even before H.P.B. had left Russia, her grandmother had been partially paralyzed, but her brain was still active at seventy-one. She taught religion and reading to Katherine Witte’s three sons, and the youngest, Sergei, recalls that “as she could not move, I would kneel by her with a primer in my hands.”51
Helena had not seen her grandmother for eleven years, and it had been almost that long since Vera had left Tiflis; both of them wanted to return, and under the circumstances, Andrey Fadeyev could hardly refuse Helena the wish to see her grandmother one last time. The two women left Rougodevo in the spring, journeying first to Moscow, then embarking on a grueling three-week trip to Tiflis in a coach with post-horses. At one of the stations where they stopped to change horses, a surly stationmaster declared that he would have no fresh ones for several hours. Worse yet, they would have to wait outside, for the travelers’ waiting room was locked.
“Well, this is fine!” Helena fumed. Flattening her face against the window, she exclaimed, “Aha! That’s what it is. Very well, then, and now I can force the drunken brute to give us horses in five minutes.”
Ten minutes later, Vera remembered, the stationmaster led up three strong post-horses and politely waved them on their way. The next day Helena revealed that she had told the man of seeing in the waiting room the ghost of his dead wife, who would remain there until he had given the sisters fresh horses.52
In certain situations, Vera realized, Helena’s mediumistic talents could come in handy, but that was not the case at Zadonsk, a shrine in cossack country, where they paused to rest a few days. Naturally Vera was eager to hear mass in the church, while Helena was not, until she learned that services were to be conducted by Isadore, the Metropolitan of Kiev. During their childhood, when Isadore had been Exarch of Georgia, he had frequently dined at the Fadeyevs, and after services, they sent him a note asking for an audience. On the way to the Archbishop’s residence, Vera warned Helena to “please take care that your little devils keep themselves quiet while we are with the Metropolitan.”53
Helena laughed and promised to try, but reminded her sister that she could not control the poltergeists. So Vera “was not astonished, but all the same suffered agonies when I heard the tapping begin as soon as the venerable old man began to question my sister about her travels. One! Two! One! Two! Three!” The chandelier began to swing, their teacups rattled, even the Metropolitan’s amber rosary beads were jumping. Vera was both horribly embarrassed and annoyed because “my irreverent sister’s embarrassment was tempered with a greater expression of fun than I would have wished for.” When Isadore asked which of them was the medium, Vera “hastened to fit the cap on my sister’s head.”
Isadore spent an hour with them, asking questions about Spiritualism. While he certainly recalled the von Hahn sisters from his days in Tiflis, he had an even better reason to be interested in Helena Petrovna. For years Nikifor Blavatsky had been pestering him to grant a divorce, which he had refused. Now he did not allow the opportunity to pass without mentioning Madame Blavatsky’s irregular marital status. What he probably did was advise her to return to her husband, although Vera, all discretion, only mentions Isadore admonishing H.P.B. to use her gifts wisely and dismissing the two of them with a blessing.
Princess Helena died on August 24. Shortly after, Vera must have returned to Rougodevo, but Helena remained behind in Tiflis. The reason was not at all owing to Andrey Fadeyev’s sudden amicability toward his granddaughter, but rather to the fact that it had become impossible for Helena to share her sister’s life. Probably during their visit to St. Petersburg, Vera had met Vladimir Ivanovich Zhelihovsky, a first cousin on the von Hahn side. Being a practical young woman of twenty-six with two small children, she decided to marry him. Obviously Helena could not tag along; she might have returned to her father and stepsister, but this prospect must have seemed dull compared to life in Tiflis, where young bluebloods from Moscow and St. Petersburg were suddenly flocking in pursuit of pleasure and adventure.
It was during the summer of 1860 that Helena became acquainted with her first cousin, Sergei Yulyevich Witte, and vice versa. Katherine’s third son, an infant when she left Russia, was now twelve years old and Andrey Fadeyev’s pet. A great future lay in store for Sergei, because, as Minister of Finance under Alexander III and Nicholas II, he would become the chief architect of Russia’s industrial revolution, the man who changed the face of the empire and brought her to the threshold of the twentieth century. Count Witte was not a particularly lovable person; he was said to be cold, boastful, treacherous and capable of extreme pettiness. On the more attractive side, however, the statesman shared with H.P.B. many of the Fadeyev-Dolgorukov traits. Both of them were gifted with brilliant intellects, stupendous energy, and visions that they believed would transform society. Both had their passions and romantic dreams; both, alas, were unstable at times.
Writing his memoirs in 1911, at the age of sixty-two, Count Witte had little that was flattering to say of his kinswoman, but it is curious all the same that he devotes a major portion of the chapter on his childhood to Helena Petrovna. In an otherwise uneventful boyhood, she must have stood out as the most exciting figure he had encountered up to that point, and he could not, evidently, resist telling what he knew of her, both personal and he
arsay. His account, enraging to H.P.B.’s followers, is, nevertheless, exactly what he said it was—”stories current in our family,” “family tradition”—and as such too valuable to disregard. True, he did not know her intimately, true also that he had some facts wrong about her later career, but he was privy to the same information as the rest of the Fadeyevs and Wittes. No doubt Nadyezhda and Vera, had they been more candid, could have told similar stories; for that matter, Vera, speaking privately to friends, would be far more vicious than Sergei.
Helena, at the age of twenty-nine, was in the eyes of her pubescent cousin a great disappointment, despite the wild tales he had heard about her amatory adventures. Expecting some glamorous courtesan, he found her fat, frumpy,
a ruin of her former self. Her face, apparently once of great beauty, bore all the traces of a tempestuous and passionate life, and her form was marred by an early obesity. Besides, she paid but scant attention to her appearance and preferred loose morning dresses to elaborate apparel. But her eyes were extraordinary. She had enormous, azure colored eyes, and when she spoke with animation, they sparkled in a fashion which is altogether indescribable. Never in my life have I seen anything like that pair of eyes.
As Witte recalled the sequence of events, Helena won their grandfather’s permission to remain in Tiflis by promising “to go back to her legitimate husband.”54 Nikifor Blavatsky, faithful to his word, had not attempted to contact Helena and was currently in Berlin seeking medical treatment for an unidentified ailment. By November, however, he had suddenly resigned his post in Erivan and returned to Tiflis where he got a job as an attache to the viceroy and he moved into a house. Presumably he made this drastic downward career change for a good reason, about which H.P.B. was explicit. “Blavatsky and I were reconciled and I lived for one year in the same house as he; but I lacked the patience to live with such a fool and I again went away.”55