Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (15 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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 hearsay. 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.”
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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.”
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What H.P.B. surrendered by returning to Nikifor provides some measure of her desperation. Generally able to land on her feet, she found herself at Tiflis in the humiliating position of having no means of support. Bending to her grandfather’s will for survival, she seethed with the resentments that would provoke her to indiscretion during the coming year. Blavatsky remained to her “a fool” who taxed her patience to the limits, and he himself must have soon realized that his sacrifice of job and home in Erivan were all for nothing. Helena may have agreed to live with Nikifor, but one gets the impression that she spent precious little of her time in his company. Most evenings she could be found at the Fadeyev mansion where the importance of the older generation was inevitably giving way to the younger. The Princess was gone, her herbarium had been donated to the University of St. Petersburg, her collection of antiquities and artifacts bequeathed to Nadyezhda. At seventy-one, Andrey Fadeyev was serving as a member of the viceroy’s Board of the Caucasus, but he had begun to feel his age, physically and mentally. As befitted an eminent civil servant with a fifty-year career behind him, he began to compose the obligatory memoirs. By the time Helena appeared on the scene, it was Nadyezhda and Rostislav, both unmarried, who did the entertaining and upheld the Fadeyev reputation as being one of the most socially sought-after salons in the city.

After a faltering beginning, Rostislav had resumed his military career and had gone on to distinguish himself during the conquest of the Caucasus and the Turkish wars. Now a colonel, he had been appointed an aide to the viceroy and was also writing a history,
Sixty Years of the Caucasian War.
And Nadyezhda, too, had not been idle. In her private apartment in the mansion, she had established a remarkable museum: arms and weapons from all over the world, ancient crockery, Chinese and Japanese idols, Byzantine mosaics, Persian carpets, not to mention statues, paintings, petrified fossils and a library of rare books. Both Nadyezhda and Rostislav cherished Helena and welcomed her back, allowing her to do as she pleased even when it meant going against their father’s wishes.

“Every evening,” remembered Sergei Witte, “the Tiflis society folks would foregather in our house around Yelena Petrovna,” and the reason of course was that everybody wanted to attend a séance. In the 1860s, Russian intellectuals were just beginning to interest themselves in the paranormal and, even though the waves of Spiritualism that had spread over western Europe would not strike them until a decade hence, still they were fascinated by such phenomena. Helena’s séances, wrote Witte, 

would last the whole evening and oftentimes the whole night. My cousin did not confine the demonstrations of her power to table rapping, evocation of spirits and similar mediumistic hocus-pocus. On one occasion she caused a closed piano in an adjacent room to emit sounds as if invisible hands were playing upon it. This was done in my presence, at the insistence of one of the guests.

His boyhood attitude toward these performances he describes as “decidedly critical.”
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All knowledge of the séances was kept from Andrey. Each night, at precisely fifteen minutes before eleven, he would say goodnight to the assemblage, one of whom retained a memory of the old man “brushing along the parquets with his warmly muffled-up feet.”
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Once Andrey had retired, the servants would rush in silently with supper trays and close the doors of the drawing room to signal the animated talk to begin.

At the Fadeyevs, as elsewhere in the 1860s, intellectual aristocrats chewed over deep philosophical and political issues as enthusiastically as they downed kvass and tea. Although the emancipation of fifty-two million serfs was only a few months away, these men much preferred to ruminate over the meaning of history, art and life itself. They meditated as well upon Russia’s cultural separateness and special political destiny, and these meditations would come to be the Pan-Slavism of which Rostislav Fadeyev was a leading advocate.

An odd mixture of types participated in the discussions in the Fadeyev drawing room; sunburned officers from the Caucasus battlefields, Freemasons, attaches and generals, foreign visitors, and the intellectual counts and princes who had never found an adequate profession. Once Helena Petrovna made her entrance,