Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (10 page)

During the winter months, Nikifor Blavatsky called frequently on the Fadeyevs, and as time wore on it became apparent, even to Helena, that she was the main attraction. In those days, a man became designated a beau by the frequency of his visits and the length of time he spent chatting with a young woman. Nikifor was unquestionably a serious suitor, even though Helena, by then preoccupied by the loss of Golitsyn, failed to take him seriously.

At the same time, Helena was struggling to absorb another disturbing piece of news: her father had married again, to a Baroness von Lange. In view of his neglect of her during the previous years, she must have regarded the marriage as a second abandonment. Her temper and disposition, recalled Nadyezhda, were decidedly foul. When Blavatsky falteringly made advances, she spurned them. She told Nadyezhda and Vera that she did not love him and did not even like him. She found him old and physically unappealing, and nicknamed him “the plumeless raven,”
⁶⁸
because of his receding hairline or premature baldness.

However, Helena’s initial response to Nikifor Blavatsky failed to end matters between them. When her governess declared that she was too vile-tempered to ever find a husband, even one like “the plumeless raven,” Helena took up the challenge to prove her wrong. Three days later, prompted by the same impetuous madness that had led her to boil her foot, she wrung a marriage proposal out of Nikifor. Confused as he must have been, he was also pleased, because he loved her. The Fadeyevs must have breathed a deep sigh of relief over the engagement of their wild granddaughter to a mature, sensible bureaucrat who would put up with her varied aberrations.

“Then,” recalled Nadyezhda Fadeyev, “frightened at what she had done, she sought to escape from her joking acceptance of his offer. But it was too late.”
⁶⁹
Was it really too late to break the engagement? Had she really consented in jest? Whatever her later opinion of Blavatsky may have been, the truth was that at the time, he interested her. She found in him what she had found in no man except Golitsyn: he did not laugh at her belief in the occult. On the contrary, he seems to have shared it.

Whereas all the young men laughed at “magical” superstitions, he believed in them! He had so often talked to me about the sorcerers of Erivan, of the mysterious sciences of the Kourds
[sic]
and Persians, that I took him in order to use him as a latch key to the latter.
⁷⁰

Whether or not Nikifor genuinely shared her enthusiasms is debatable. It must have been apparent to him that an expression of belief was the only way to her heart.

Nikifor’s unwavering persistence, when he must have known how little Helena cared for him, is puzzling. Helena would later claim that she felt ashamed of being Madame Blavatsky, although the reasons are not readily apparent. Nikifor loved her, he had a kind disposition, and eventually he would support her, emotionally and financially, in socially untenable situations. According to Vera, he was “in all respects an excellent man, with but one fault”
⁷¹
—his insistence on marrying a girl who did not respect him.

Helena’s shame would come later. In the spring of 1849, she experienced panic. She must have realized that it was not marriage she wanted, but rather freedom from her grandparents’ authority and the unhindered pursuit of her occult studies. As it was, she would merely be exchanging one guardian for another. And, as the wife of a vice-governor, she would be obliged to perform the kinds of social duties she had always abhorred. She realized that she would be making a mistake, well before she made it. Why a person of such strong will could not have corrected it in time remains a mystery. In 1886, she wrote to her biographer, Alfred Sinnett:

Details about my marriage? Well, now they say that I wanted to marry the old whistlebreeches
myself.
Let it be. My father was four thousand miles off. My grandmother was too ill. It was as I told you. I had engaged myself to spite the governess, never thinking I could no longer
disengage
myself. Well, Karma followed sin.
⁷²

It turned out that Helena could not disengage herself without seriously entangling her family, which was already under a great deal of strain. The Princess, apparently too ill to give the matter her undivided attention, left it to Katherine and Andrey, neither of whom would listen to Helena’s “prayers and supplications not to be married to old B—-.”
⁷³
In their view, she had made her choice and now must stick by it. Many harsh words passed between Helena and the rest of the family in this battle of wills: Vera accused Helena of slandering their mother; there were quarrels between Vera and Nadyezhda, who had never liked each other, when Nadyezhda took Lelinka’s side. The betrothal brought out the worst in everyone.

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 Yulyevich
⁷⁵
. 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 tactfully refrained from making any public comment whatsoever about the woman who would make his name world famous.

THE VEILED YEARS

1849-1873