The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  As Olcott later reported it, during the lecture, the idea of a group devoted to investigating ancient mysteries, secret societies, and magic occurred to him spontaneously. He passed Blavatsky a note suggesting it, she agreed, and he proposed it to the whole room. “I dwelt upon the materialistic tendencies of the age and the desire of mankind to get absolute proof of immortality; pointing to the enormous spread of the spiritualistic movement as the best evidence of that fact,” he writes. Everyone agreed, and the Theosophical Society was born.

  By the end of November, the Theosophical Society had adopted bylaws and elected officers. Olcott was president, while Blavatsky was corresponding secretary (and unofficial sage). The group devoted itself to a threefold purpose: promoting the brotherhood of man, studying comparative religion, and investigating “the unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in humanity.” These aims were vague enough to encompass all sorts of people, and Theosophy attracted freethinkers and liberal Christian clergy as well as spiritualists.

  Blavatsky and Olcott rented an apartment on West Forty-Seventh Street that served as her home and their headquarters and salon. It was a shambolic, extravagantly decorated place that journalists jokingly called “the Lamasery.” Besides its plush Victorian furniture, Persian rugs, profusion of Asian icons and ornaments, and tumbling piles of books and papers, the space was notable for the many taxidermist’s animals scattered about, most strikingly a bespectacled baboon in a shirt and tie. The baboon carried under its arm a manuscript of a lecture on Darwin; as Peter Washington notes, it stood for “the Folly of Science as opposed to the Wisdom of Religion.”

  Yet the Theosophical Society wasn’t antiscience in the manner of Christian fundamentalists. Instead, it aimed at a synthesis of religion, science, and philosophy, a theory of everything rooted in the secret wisdom of the ancients. Mystical forces were to be investigated, understood, and mastered, just like physical principles. There was widespread optimism that even as traditional religion was losing its prestige, the scientific method could open supernatural realms to human comprehension. The young inventor Thomas Edison, a Theosophist who attended Blavatsky’s salons, even dreamed of creating machines to test psychic powers and to communicate with the dead.

  Theosophy ostensibly aimed to unite the essential truths underlying all religions, but the society (following Blavatsky herself) was always particularly interested in the East. As a child, Blavatsky had come into contact with the Kalmuck tribe, who lived on the Astrakhan steppes and practiced Tibetan Buddhism. Her grandfather was the Russian government’s administrator for Kalmuck affairs, and her mother wrote a novel about the Kalmuck people. She almost certainly encountered Buddhist and Hindu teachers in her peripatetic thirties, and the Eastern element in her thinking grew more and more pronounced as time went on.

  Blavatsky described herself as a Buddhist and claimed to be in communication with a pantheon of superhuman “Masters,” Master Morya among them, who resided in the Himalayas. Letters from these Masters would materialize in Blavatsky’s possession, though some of them displayed a remarkable taste for the kind of American slang that Madame herself enjoyed. Still, at least one sympathetic scholar, K. Paul Johnson, has argued that it’s too simple to dismiss Blavatsky as merely a fraud. Instead, he argues, Blavatsky’s “Masters” were mythologized versions of real teachers, including several reformers and revolutionaries. Indeed, Blavatsky maintained a mail correspondence with the Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement that sought to purge the religion of practices such as caste discrimination, child marriage, and idol worship.

  In 1878, Blavatsky announced that she’d received orders from the Masters to move to India, and she and the ever-devoted Olcott promptly liquidated their possessions and set sail. It was a prescient decision: India was moving toward the center of the Western religious imagination and would soon become the preferred place of pilgrimage for Americans and Europeans seeking a transcendence they couldn’t find in their own traditions. Yet, like all pioneers, Blavatsky and Olcott were also taking a big risk. As Washington writes, “They were reversing the usual flow of emigration from east to west, they were not young, and they had no capital to speak of.”

  After she moved to India, Blavatsky’s fanciful accounts of sub-continental adventures were serialized in the Russian press. Madame Blavatsky, writes Sir Paul Dukes, “had many followers in her native land…Not a few there were who reveled in theories about other worlds because they fitted so ill into this one.” One of them was Eugenia, who would later read everything by Blavatsky that she could get her hands on.

  “The people at once had accepted her as one of their own,” Eugenia would write decades later of Blavatsky’s adventures in India. “They saw in her not a haughty foreigner but a loving friend.” She told herself, “It will be the same when I go there.”

  Blavatsky wasn’t the only major figure in Western esotericism to emerge from prerevolutionary Russia. Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a mysterious, somewhat diabolical figure from the Caucasus with a self-created legend to rival Blavatsky’s, had set himself up as a carpet dealer in Russia in 1912. Dukes met him while studying piano in St. Petersburg, before the start of Dukes’s espionage career. Their first encounter was in Gurdjieff’s modest apartment, decorated in his characteristic plush Orientalist style—intricate carpets, wrought-iron lamps, religious icons, nargilah (water pipes), and piles of multicolor cushions. Gurdjieff was thickset, with a bushy black beard and mischievous dark eyes, and wore a patterned silk dressing gown and a turban. He taught Dukes breathing techniques and the chanting of “Om,” and soon they had become, in Dukes’s words, chela and guru, or “student and master.”

  P. D. Ouspensky, then a journalist and a member of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia, met Gurdjieff in a Moscow café in 1915, not long after his own sojourn in India; he became Gurdjieff’s pupil and, later, a famous occult philosopher in his own right. Rudolf Steiner, a brilliant Austrian whose movement, Anthroposophy, was a more Eurocentric spin-off of Theosophy, had an elite following in Russia’s urban centers; the actor Michael Chekhov and the Russian poet and novelist Andrei Bely were both devotees (as was the man who would one day become Eugenia’s second husband).

  Yogic ideas, then, were part of a general mystical ferment during those last days of imperial Russia. Konstantin Balmont, one of the most important poets of the Silver Age, infused his work with Hindu notions and imagery, writing in the poem “Majja,” “For the ignorant, life is delusion; for the yogi / It is illusion, a soulless ocean of silence!” Moscow’s experimental Kamerny Theater opened at the end of 1914 with a performance of the Hindu classic drama Shakuntala, which Balmont translated from the Sanskrit.

  For a dreamy, adventurous, artistic Russian girl, India could easily appear as a utopia—one that, as Blavatsky showed, a woman with enough daring could actually reach. Eugenia’s fantasy India became a dream that would help her survive during the apocalypse that was soon upon her.

  · CHAPTER 2 ·

  BY THE SPRING of 1915, the front between Germany and Russia had reached Latvia. German troops would soon conquer the Latvian governorate of Courland. Worried that the Germans were about to march on Riga, Eugenia’s grandmother, who had been born in St. Petersburg, decided to move the two of them to her native city, which had recently been renamed Petrograd so as to sound less German. Eugenia probably welcomed their flight: now she would be closer than ever to her mother.

  Eugenia longed to follow her adored mother into a stage career. So, at sixteen, she enrolled in a school run by Claudia Isachenko, a former actress in Constantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater who, inspired by Isadora Duncan, had turned to modern dance. At the same time, Eugenia kept attending secondary school—her Riga school had relocated wholesale to Petrograd, so her education proceeded unbroken. She graduated with honors in 1916.

  Life in Petrograd was at once giddy and hideous. It was the coldest winter in years. The war was going badly, and refugees were pouring into Russia’s cities. Runaway infl
ation, coupled with the deterioration of the country’s transportation system, created widespread food shortages in the city. “Everyone was affected: the industrial and white-collar workers and, in time, the lower ranks of the bureaucracy and even police employees,” writes the historian Richard Pipes. Child prostitutes filled the streets. People slept outside food shops.

  Among the rich, a kind of nihilistic gaiety prevailed. They binged on champagne and caviar, had heedless affairs, and threw away their fortunes in casinos. “We do not take defeat amiss, / And victory gives us no delight / The source of all our cares is this: / Can we get vodka for tonight?” went an anonymous poem written that year. Everyone else suffered, nurturing fears of imminent apocalypse or wild hopes of spiritual and political salvation.

  By 1917, opposition to the decadent, callous, incompetent monarchy had become nearly universal, and in February, when a bread riot turned into the popular revolution that swept Russia’s rulers from power, the ecstasy was widespread. Cafés threw open their doors for fellow citizens to feast for free. People kissed and even made love in the streets. In a letter to his mother, the poet Alexander Blok exulted, “A miracle has happened, and we may expect more miracles.” There was an extraordinary feeling in the air, he writes, “that nothing is forbidden,” that “almost anything might happen.”

  The crowds were volatile, ecstatic but also angry; the czar’s hated police were a particular target of people’s long-suppressed fury. Armed mobs attacked police stations and prisons, setting inmates free and often burning the buildings to the ground. Police records were torched in bonfires in the streets.

  Eugenia grew up in a building owned by the police and surely understood that her beloved grandfather had been part of the system now being so deliriously destroyed. Yet she shared the thrill of February. “All of us who had dreams and projects,” she writes, felt carried along “by the reviving spirit of those times.” The last aristocratic constraints on her artistic ambitions had been swept away. Now nothing could stop her from becoming an actress like her mother.

  When her grandmother went to join Sasha in Moscow, Eugenia quickly followed. There, to her delight, she was accepted at Theodore Komisarjevsky’s theater school. Slight and intense, Komisarjevsky was an experimental director who set himself in opposition to Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian theater’s most titanic figure. He rejected Stanislavsky’s naturalism and his deeply psychological methods of creating characters, in favor of a far more stylized approach. Komisarjevsky’s work was, if anything, emboldened by the revolution. In March 1917 he staged On Alexis, Man of God, a religious comedy by Mikhail Kuzmin, Russia’s first openly gay writer, which had previously been banned by church censorship.

  Komisarjevsky was a demanding teacher, impatient with students who failed to grasp his instruction. During an improvisation class, he barked at one of Eugenia’s friends, “You twist like a rag doll and believe that is acting!” When it was Eugenia’s turn, she was terrified. Terror, as it happened, was just what was called for—she had to improvise on the theme “the great scare,” using only a table and chairs as props. Her scenario doesn’t seem terribly inspired: she imagined herself dressing to go out, opening a door to look at herself in the mirror, and being frightened by a darting mouse. Screaming, she feigned panic as she climbed onto a table.

  In a few moments, the maestro pronounced his verdict. Her improvisation was, he said, “more or less,” his voice trailing off. That was it. At first, Eugenia was crushed, but her friends assured her that anything short of her teacher’s all-out contempt was something to celebrate.

  It pained Eugenia’s grandmother to lose yet another family member to the stage, but she eventually resigned herself to her granddaughter’s career, perhaps because it was the least of her worries. Russia’s provisional government was weak, powerless to stop the strikes. Inflation and lawlessness paralyzed the country. There was anarchy in the streets, tempered only by ferocious outbursts of mob justice. Like everyone in the city, Eugenia waited on interminable lines for food and often returned home empty-handed.

  In October, the Bolsheviks staged their coup. Armed fighting broke out in the streets of Moscow, the opening act of the Russian Civil War. For several days people were afraid to leave their houses, but even staying home could be dangerous: once, as Eugenia climbed the stairs inside her building, a stray bullet broke the window, whizzing by her head and into the wall beside her.

  Like other aristocratic households, her family lost its fortune overnight. As a student, Eugenia was entitled to small rations of bread, oil, and sugar, which she shared with her grandmother, who finally had to admit that the young woman’s acting career had some benefits.

  For all the terror and volatility of those days, however, something in the unmoored atmosphere left Eugenia electrified. Forced for the first time in her life to be self-reliant, she was able to channel the idle anxiety of her childhood into action. She relished the freedom to go out at night on her own, attending theater premieres and hanging out at literary cafés, where she met futurist poets such as Vadim Shershenevich and Igor Severyanin, a decadent, flamboyantly cynical aesthete who always carried a lily in his hand.

  Still, by the time Eugenia became Indra Devi, her habits of relentlessly positive thinking and her buoyant, ingenuous approach to life could, at times, obscure reality. There is very little darkness in her memoirs, even when she writes about the bleakest of times. People are constantly praising her, and even the most harrowing episodes have a magical way of working themselves out. While it’s true that she had an astonishing ability to glide along the surface of earthshaking events, it’s extremely unlikely that she escaped from the revolution entirely unscathed. All around her, the country was turning into hell—and she was learning a lesson that would serve her for the rest of her long life: how to survive her world’s collapse by reinventing herself.

  By the winter of 1918, writes Antony Beevor, “So many horses had been slaughtered for meat that carts and drozhkys were hauled by women and children.” Members of the intelligentsia burned their books to stay warm. In the years to follow, writes Beevor, “[m]ost young actresses were forced to resort to part-time prostitution [,] and venereal disease was rife.”

  There’s no evidence that Eugenia was forced to prostitute herself, but she must have suffered far more than she later let on. Komisarjevsky described some of what Moscow actors endured during the revolution in his 1929 book, Myself and the Theatre: “One morning when a young actress of my Theatre did not turn up to rehearsal we discovered that she had died of typhus during the night alone in a freezing room…A scenery designer suddenly and mysteriously disappeared, and we were told later that as a former Imperial officer and involved in some conspiracy he had been arrested and shot during the night by the Cheka [secret police]. One of the greatest character actresses in Russia, O. O. Sadovskaya, died of vermin.”

  Eugenia’s mother had escaped Moscow’s privations by going on tour, and she was soon living in Kiev, Ukraine, which had recently been seized by the Germans. In the summer of 1918, Eugenia decided to join her. Initially, she tried to get a permit at the German embassy in Moscow, but the disorderly crowd horrified her—she had a lifelong inability to deal with bureaucracy—so, she wrote, she traveled without one. She would later tell a story about this trip that, if true, is typical of her combination of audacity, recklessness, and excellent luck; her ability to remain untouched by calamity.

  With a guide arranged by her mother, Eugenia made her way to the Ukrainian border, traveling partly on foot and partly in a packed, squalid third-class train car. Hunger tormented them, and her guide would read longingly from a cookbook he carried with him as if it were pornography.

  In Ukraine, Eugenia boarded a Kiev-bound train. Soon, a German guard started making his way down the compartment, checking everyone’s permits. For a moment, she didn’t know what would happen when he reached her. Then she had an idea. She got up and walked, confidently and purposefully, into the cars that were rese
rved for German officers, sat down as if she belonged there, and pretended to be engrossed in a book. When the guard entered the carriage, he believed she was the girlfriend of someone important and marked her ticket without asking for her papers.

  In Kiev, Eugenia joined her mother in a magnificent hotel, where food was in abundance. Teeming with refugees from the revolution, Kiev in the middle of 1918 “had an atmosphere of frenzied excitement, with everyone living as if there was no tomorrow,” as the historian Orlando Figes writes. Mikhail Bulgakov describes the scene in his semiautobiographical novel, The White Guard:

  All spring…the City had been filling up with new arrivals. They slept in apartments on sofas and chairs. They dined in large companies at tables in luxurious apartments. Innumerable shops opened selling comestibles and engaged in trade until late in the night, as did cafes where coffee was served and you could buy a woman, and there were new theaters…on whose boards increasingly famous actors who had fled the two capitals entertained and amused the public…[A]t night string music played in the cabarets…and faces of unearthly beauty shone on white, emaciated prostitutes hopped up on cocaine.

  For all the scene’s seediness, its familiarity must have been a terrific relief to Eugenia and Sasha. They stayed all summer and into the autumn, when Sasha got an acting job in another Ukrainian city, Kharkov, and Eugenia joined her. There, she befriended young poets and artists, including cabaret singer Alexander Vertinsky and the ravishing young actress Valentina Sanina. A star of prerevolutionary Moscow cabarets, Vertinsky was a slender, elegant man who powdered his face and darkened his eyes like a Russian Pierrot. He was famous for songs that mixed sorrowful melodrama with a louche touch of irony and exoticism; they had names such as “Cocaine Lady” and “Your Fingers Smell of Incense.” Vertinsky was desperately in love with the enchanting, aloof Sanina, rhapsodizing in his memoirs about her “[e]normous, serene blue eyes with long lashes…a slim hand with long fingers of rare beauty.” At his urging, he and Eugenia were constantly taking troikas, three-horse sleighs, to visit her. This friendship proved fortunate, for Sanina was to play a small but crucial role in Eugenia’s later life.