Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (3 page)

For a person addicted to plumbing the depths of her own emotions, Helena Andreyevna does not seem to have submitted the dashing Captain von Hahn to a thorough examination. Swept away, she evidently had no clear sense that marriage would mean leaving home and following the army from one barracks and backwater town to the next, many far worse than Ekaterinoslav. The power of physical attraction prevailed and when he proposed, she enthusiastically accepted.

There is no record of von Hahn’s feelings. However, he does not seem to have been an unusually sensitive man, and it would not be unfair to surmise that he, like any other professional soldier, failed to take women seriously. If he noticed at all that Helena Andreyevna’s view of men was foggy with illusions, he must have dismissed it as girlish romanticism that she would soon outgrow.

Von Hahn’s pedigree seemed sufficiently impressive for a daughter of a Dolgorukov. His solidly military family was descended from an old Mecklenburg family—the Counts Hahn von Rotternstern-Hahn, one branch of which had migrated to Russia a century earlier. Peter’s father, Alexis Gustavovich von Hahn, was a well-known general in the army of Field Marshal Alexander Suvorov and had won a decisive battle in the Swiss Alps. For a time he had been commandant of the city of Zurich. Peter von Hahn’s mother had been a countess before her marriage; one of his brothers was Postmaster General of St. Petersburg; and other members of the family were sprinkled in high positions throughout the army and civilian government.
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It is not surprising that Princess Helena, despite a natural reluctance to part with her favorite child, should have reacted favorably to her daughter’s choice of a mate. The couple was married toward the end of 1830, and by Christmas, Helena Andreyevna was pregnant.

A thousand miles to the north of Ekaterinoslav, at the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Czar Nicholas I was seething with frustration—if a man known for his outward detachment could be described as seething. More than six feet tall, utterly humorless, he ruled with an iron rod the fifty-five million souls— nearly half of them slaves—who populated an immense empire that stretched from eastern Poland to the Pacific Ocean. Once, in a letter to Empress Alexandra, he protested, “I am not your salvation, as you say. Our salvation is over there yonder where we shall all be admitted to rest from the tribulations of life.”
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Yet to his subjects, the thirty-four-year-old monarch appeared only slightly less awesome than the Almighty, a fact of which Nicholas was all too clearly aware.

Despite his philosophic acceptance of life’s inevitable pain, Nicholas was gripped by alarm in 1830. Europe, in his opinion, had gone mad. Earlier that year he had been outraged by the French revolution, which had overthrown Bourbon King Charles X in favor of Louis Philippe. The kindest words he could find for the usurper were “traitor” and “scoundrel.” In what seemed to him an epidemic, a revolution in Belgium had won that country its independence from the Netherlands. Now, on the heels of these ominous events, Nicholas was forced to contend with a major insurrection in his own domain. A man who struck people as autocracy personified, he was deeply worried and, although he had once lamented, “I was born to suffer,” the “Iron Czar” did not welcome needless aggravation.

Among the peoples who Nicholas detested, such as Jews, Greeks, and Poles, the Poles had stood first on the list since their 1829 assassination attempt during his coronation in Warsaw. To be sure, the Poles had no reason to love him: in 1795 the kingdom of Poland had been partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia and its name erased from the map of Europe in one stroke. Token moves to do something for the unfortunate Poles had been attempted by Napoleon, and even by Nicholas’s elder brother, Alexander I, who had given his eastern slice of Poland a constitution and a parliament. Nevertheless, rumbles of discontent persisted.

On November 29, 1830, a military revolt erupted in Warsaw. It was sparked by student cadets at the officers’ training school, who murdered several senior officers loyal to the Russian government. Army regiments and masses of civilians were quick to join the uprising. The Russian viceroy and commander-in-chief, Nicholas’s brother Grand Duke Constantine, did nothing to stanch the momentum and within weeks the Russian army was forced to flee the country. At first, Nicholas observed helplessly. But by January 1831, in a belated move to grab back his lost property, he began mobilizing troops and shipping them to the Polish border. Peter von Hahn’s battery was among them.

During these unforeseen events, Helena Andreyevna returned home with her family. She continued her studies as before, but now she was pregnant. In addition to her fear that Peter might be killed in combat, she had another anxiety: a cholera epidemic of serious proportions broke out that winter, accounting for more deaths among the regiments than the Poles. Grand Duke Constantine was its most notable victim.

This was an interlude of national terror that did not confine itself to any single area of the country. In villages and cities, among peasants and royal families, the disease swept away its victims with startling rapidity. At St. Petersburg, in the belief that the government was deliberately poisoning the water, citizens mobbed Haymarket Square. The Emperor, driving up in an open carriage, rose to his feet. “Wretches,” he screamed, “is this your gratitude? The Almighty looks down upon you. On your knees, wretched people, on your knees.”
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Ten thousand fell to the cobbles, crossed themselves, and went home, abandoning questions about the provisions he was making to check the epidemic.

In Ekaterinoslav, where the plague did not strike until summer, hardly a day went by without news of somebody dead or dying. Inevitably, tragedy knocked on the Fadeyevs’ door and a number of serfs fell ill. The disease began with convulsions, stomach pains and vomiting, and ended a few days later with coffins and funerals. Once cholera entered a house, it generally spread rapidly, making no distinction between servant and master.

It was in this morbid atmosphere that Helena Andreyevna gave birth to a premature child during the night between July 30 and 31, 1831.
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Not only did the infant girl arrive weeks ahead of schedule, but she appeared to be far from healthy. Plans were immediately made for baptism, lest she be carried off by natural causes or cholera with the burden of original sin on her soul. Hasty though the baptism may have been, it was conducted with all the customary paraphernalia of the Greek Orthodox ritual: lighted tapers, three pairs of godparents, participants and spectators standing with consecrated candles during the lengthy ceremony. In the center of the room stood the priest with his three assistants, all in golden robes and long hair, as well as the three pairs of sponsors and the household serfs.

In the first row behind the priest was the baby’s child-aunt, Princess Helena Pavlovna Dolgorukova’s three-year-old daughter, Nadyezhda. She must have grown weary of standing in the hot, overcrowded room for more than an hour and, unnoticed by the adults, had sat down on the floor and begun to play with her candle. As the ceremony drew to a close, while the sponsors symbolically renounced Satan by spitting three times at an invisible enemy, the flames of Nadyezhda’s candle lit the bottom of the priest’s robe. Nobody noticed until it was too late: the priest and several bystanders were severely burned.
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For this reason among others, it would be remarked that Helena Petrovna Blavatsky had been born under exceedingly bad omens. Indeed, according to the superstitious beliefs of orthodox Russia, she was doomed from that day forward to a life of trouble and vicissitude.

In the short run, precisely the opposite seemed to be the case. The cholera infection died out in the Fadeyev household without having stricken a single member of the family, and as the summer of 1831 ended, the tide of war had already turned against Poland. However, it was not until the following summer that Peter von Hahn returned home to the bride he had left eighteen months earlier and the daughter he had never seen.

By eighteen, Helena Andreyevna von Hahn had plunged into married life with a man who was still virtually a stranger to her. Their first home was the small garrison town of Romankovo, whose single advantage was its proximity to the Fadeyevs. But just as Madame von Hahn was struggling to accustom herself to her new surroundings and friends, the captain was transferred to Oposhnya, a tiny community in the Province of Kiev. The stay in Oposhnya proved equally brief, and over the next two years there was a succession of further moves. During that time, Helena Andreyevna gave birth to her second child, a son named Alexander, nicknamed Sasha.

In the early years with Peter, Helena Andreyevna must have made an effort to adjust, but an army wife’s rootless mode of life was not to her taste. Russian cavalry officers, as a group, were known neither for their intellect nor even for their serious interest in military strategy. Trained to serve with blind obedience, they were not encouraged to display initiative, and most of them frittered away their time drinking and gambling. How closely Captain von Hahn fit into the general ambience is unknown, but his wife found the existence empty and unimaginative, and decried the boring dinner parties and the endless conversations about horses, dogs and guns. One imagines that these provincial towns were the sort Chekhov depicted in
The Three Sisters
and that like Masha, whose knowledge of three languages was an unnecessary luxury, Helena Andreyevna found she knew “a lot too much” to fit in.

Nineteenth-century Russia was a land of aristocratic indolence, where no patrician did anything for himself that a serf could do for him. A husband asked nothing from his wife but that she be pretty, dress with taste, and appear elegantly attired the first thing in the morning. For the remainder of the day, her sole function was to sit in a stately pose upon the sofa while sewing, reading a novel, or receiving guests. If she needed the cushions rearranged or her cigarette lit, she was expected to call for a servant. No Russian “lady” would dream of violating polite rules of conduct by entering the kitchen or attending to her children’s daily needs. Intellectual stimulation of the type sought by Helena Andreyevna did exist, but certainly not in an army town. Still, such lofty deprivations might have been tolerable had there not been other problems in her marriage.

What Helena Andreyevna may have suspected in the first weeks after the wedding, she knew for certain after her reunion with Peter in 1832: Peter was less spiritual than she; in fact, he professed to be something of an agnostic. But even more distressing to the strong-willed young woman was the realization that her husband had no respect for her. The low status of women in Russian society could not have completely escaped her notice, but she had persisted in envisioning her spouse as a friend and companion who would echo her own aspirations. Now she had to deal with the consequences of her error, for Peter had no patience with her. “The fine, sharp and fast mind of my husband,” she recalled, “as a rule accompanied by a cutting irony, smashed every day one of my brightest, my most innocent and pure aspirations and feelings.” Worse, he ridiculed her:

All that I admired, all that I aspired to from my childhood, all that was sacred to my heart was either laughed at, or was shown to me in the pitiless and cynical light of his cold and cruel reasoning.

Whenever she expressed feelings or opinions, he either belittled them or, yawning, turned the subject to dinner menus and other domestic trivia. In time she was able to pretend indifference to his disdain but her apparent submission really derived from lack of an alternative: she was still totally unaware of how to extricate herself from the situation. As his insensitivity wounded her ever more deeply, she grew increasingly disenchanted by both her husband and marriage.

It should be remembered that Peter von Hahn’s treatment of his wife was neither deliberately cruel nor unusual. He behaved like a typical Russian husband of his class. It was Helena Andreyevna who was different. She insisted upon making demands that a man could not possibly fulfill, even if he had wanted to, and it was these demands that made her a misfit. Interestingly, she did not use that insight against herself. Instead of feeling guilty, she tried to cope with the outrage of a woman of sensitive temperament for whom there was no place in the world. Like countless other women, she directed her rage toward her husband; unlike them, she did not stop at the obvious source of her discontent but went on to aim her anger at society. What is to be marveled at is that the nineteen-year-old woman was able to rise above commonplace marital anguish by looking beyond the personal to the universal. It seemed clear to her that a woman’s intelligence and talents “are in vain before the crowd; she will be like a criminal rejected by Society,” and she posed a question:

Why, then, does Nature endow her so lavishly with her penetrating mind, her abilities and talents, her perceptions of higher purposes of life, her deep feeling for beauty?

And she answered it:

It is not Nature who hinders her... but man—man-made laws and social conditions.
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In the 1830s few women asked such questions, let alone answered them, and those who wrote about them were fewer still: George Sand in France and the Countess Ida Hahn-Hahn
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in Germany.

The first three or four years of Helena Andreyevna’s marriage may be summed up as the radicalization of a Russian wife. It was a self-administered process that offered no solutions or remedies and would leave her more miserable than before. Not surprisingly, the chronic tension in the von Hahn household was escalating rapidly. Toward the middle of 1834, Helena Andreyevna and Peter returned to Romankovo where she became pregnant for the third time. Shortly after their arrival, their son Sasha fell ill and died, contributing a fresh sorrow to her already acute sense of despair.