Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (6 page)

By this time the novels of “Zenaida R-va” were being hailed as extraordinary events in the Russian literary world. She was called Russia’s George Sand and the feminine equal of the great poet Michael Lermontov. She was perused by Russia’s most influential literary critic, Vissarion Belinsky, a radical who had no use for timid bourgeois thinkers, and who once wrote of himself: “For me, to think, feel, understand and suffer are one and the same thing.”
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Belinsky could not bear to see the cruelties human beings inflicted upon one another, whether in the name of government, religion or matrimony. The humiliation suffered by women at the hands of men lacerated him. It is little wonder that he adored the novels of Helena Andreyevna von Hahn:

There are writers who live apart from their books, and there are others whose lives are closely bound to their writings. While reading the former we delight in their God-given talents, but reading the latter, we delight in conception of the beautiful human individuality that interpenetrates the written word; we love it and aspire to meet it face to face; we long to know the details of their own lives. Zenaida R-va belongs to the latter class of writers.
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In Helena Andreyevna’s work, the humiliations of being female in a male-dominated society constitute a persistent theme—a theme drawn from the circumstances of her own life. And if there is one particularly dominant motif, it is the plight of the woman artist who wants desperately to break out of what society decrees to be her proper place and to use her talents productively. Every outstanding woman, observes the heroine of
The Ideal,
“especially a writer, will be persecuted by the world. In its eyes she will only be a monstrous caprice of Nature, a feminine monster.” Accordingly, the women Helena Andreyevna depicted lead double lives—searching for their psychic identity in their inner world, on the one hand; seeing their reflection in the mirror of public opinion, where their strivings are viewed as grotesque and unnatural, on the other. But as much as her characters wanted freedom, they also wanted love. Like Helena Andreyevna, they did not find it. “In vain will she look around for another soul, mutual in understanding,” but the men her heroines find are Peter von Hahns.

It is not difficult to reconstruct von Hahn’s feelings about his wife’s literary success and especially her conspicuous airing of their marital woes. It was shocking to him for a woman to write about the intimate details of her life, even under a pseudonym, and the rift between them widened further. When Helena Andreyevna speaks of the “hundred-headed monster of public opinion” that declared her heroines “immoral”
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and spatters them with mud, she may have been referring to public opinion in general, but she was certainly including the reactions of her husband. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1841, von Hahn made a final attempt to reunite his family, and Helena Andreyevna agreed to visit him in the Ukraine with the three children. Perhaps she allowed herself to be persuaded for the sake of her son; perhaps she was simply too frail and weary to care. “I am not only ill in my body,” she wrote, “but in my soul also. I will not last long now.”
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The winter of 1842 was unusually mild, so mild that in St. Petersburg the Neva twice thawed and refroze—something that had not happened within memory. At Odessa, alone again with her children and the two governesses after the failed reconciliation with Peter, Helena Andreyevna was attended full-time by Dr. Vassily Benzenger, but there was little he could do for her. When her parents arrived in May, they found her at work on a new book, which she was calling
The Flowergirl,
but she had no illusions about completing it. She died in the arms of her mother on June 24, just twenty-eight years old.

Shortly before their mother died, Vera recalled, she looked pityingly at ten-year-old Helena Petrovna.

Ah well, perhaps it is best that I am dying, so at least I shall be spared seeing what befalls Helene. Of one thing I am certain: her life will not be as that of other women, and she will have much to suffer.
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The remark, Vera saw in retrospect, had the ring of true prophecy.

III

Visions and Voices

During the last six of her first ten years, Helena Petrovna von Hahn had lived with her father for a total of less than twelve months. And if she entertained hopes that her mother’s death might mean his return, they were quickly dashed. After the funeral, Peter returned at once to the Ukraine while Helena, Vera and Leonid accompanied their grandparents to Saratov. There is no indication that another arrangement was considered, and it was doubtless Helena Andreyevna’s wish to have her children raised by her own family.

At Saratov, Andrey Fadeyev, like all provincial governors, played the role of a petty king with courtiers, orderly officers and ostentatious protocol modeled on that of the Czar’s household at St. Petersburg. Socially, although the Fadeyevs were the most distinguished members of local society, Princess Helena preferred the seclusion of her study to the banal gossip of the drawing room, and her eldest granddaughter would have been miserable anywhere at that point.

For a girl about to enter puberty, the death of her mother must have come as a great emotional shock. However, the Princess, no matter how benevolent she may have been, was not about to tolerate her granddaughter’s nonsense. She warned that fits of temper would not be permitted; nor would Helena be allowed to do as she pleased. Intimidated by her dignified grandmother, H.P.B. tried hard to behave, but her self-restraint did not last long. One day she slapped a serf nurse who had been with the family all her life and news of the incident quickly reached the Princess.
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Physical violence toward serfs was so common a practice that even the young Tolstoy had struck a serf in anger, but the Princess did not subscribe to such behavior. She ordered the mansion’s bells to be rung and the household servants to assemble in the main hall. There she announced that Lelinka, by unjustly striking a serf, had violated the codes of good manners and common decency, and she commanded her to beg the nurse’s pardon and kiss her hand to show sincerity. Red-faced with shame, H.P.B. obstinately refused.

The Princess, countering with deliberate severity, told her that if she did not obey instantly, she would be sent away in disgrace. No noble lady would refuse to apologize for wronging a servant, especially one who had given her masters a lifetime of faithful service. Helena Petrovna’s defiance crumbled at once, and she burst into tears and knelt before the nurse. However extreme the Princess’s method—certainly her threat must have been an empty one—it served its purpose. H.P.B. herself would remember it as a valuable lesson, for it taught her the principle of doing justice to those incapable of defending themselves. Her sympathies would always be with the underdog.

H.P.B.’s existence between 1842, when she arrived at Saratov, and 1849, when she married Nikifor Blavatsky, was defined by commonplace routines, which she rebelled against, and a sense of security, which she refused to acknowledge. No one could compensate for the neglect of her father, whom she adored. She was not alone in her feeling of abandonment: Leonid, as it later turned out, would also be scarred by the suspicion that his father had not loved him. Only Vera seems to have been relatively indifferent to Peter’s absence.

Still, life for the von Hahn children was undeniably comfortable and far from uninteresting. The first floor of the governor’s mansion was a series of vast reception halls where the official business of the province—the Czar’s business—was conducted. A section of the ground floor had been requisitioned by the Princess, who turned it into a museum to house her historical antiquities and zoological collection. From behind the glass panes of gigantic cupboards, peered lifelike stuffed animals and birds, including an alligator, a silvery seal, and a flamingo with scarlet-lined wings. Every day at dusk the von Hahn children and their Aunt Nadyezhda passed through the museum to say their ceremonial good nights to the Princess, who could always be found in an adjoining study. Afterward the head nurse would shepherd her charges, followed by serfs with trays of food and coals, up flight after flight of stairs to the top-floor nursery. From the windows of their eyrie they could glimpse snow-covered rooftops. Around the fire, rounds of bread were toasted while the children listened to a serf nurse—whose “memory retained every idea connected with superstition”—regale them endlessly with fairy-tale people: the wicked magician Gray Wolf, Princess Meletressa, Ivan Zarewitch. Vera, a practical child, thought it ridiculous that her sister

thoroughly took to heart all the troubles of the heroes, and maintained that all their most wonderful adventures were quite natural. People
could
change into animals and take any form they liked,
if they only knew how;
men
could
fly, if they only wished so
firmly.
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And when the children laughed at her gullibility, H.P.B. heatedly voiced her assurance that “such wise men had existed in all ages, and existed even in our own days, making themselves known, of course, only to those who were worthy of knowing and seeing them, and who believed in them.”

By now, the two-governess staff had expanded. Antonya Kuhlwein was still on the scene; Miss Jeffries had been replaced by a mousy young Englishwoman to whom none of the children paid any attention; and a Swiss woman joined the teaching staff. All the governesses, it was said, regarded themselves as martyrs. Helena Petrovna found the lessons tedious and had to be kept under surveillance lest she slip out of the house to play with uncouth street boys. “All of our teachers,” Vera said, “had exhausted their patience with Helene, who would never conform to fixed hours for lessons but who, notwithstanding, astonished them by the brilliance of her abilities,”
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especially the ease with which she mastered foreign languages and played the piano.

In summer, everything changed. With the first hint of mild weather, the whole household would pile into wagons for the annual emigration to the governor’s country villa outside Saratov. This exodus included not only the Fadeyev family with upwards of a hundred serfs, but also the family of Princess Helena’s daughter Katherine, who had recently married an obscure agronomist named Yuli Witte. The Wittes were Dutch Lutherans from the Baltic Provinces but Princess Helena insisted that Yuli convert to Russian Orthodoxy as a condition for the marriage—a small price to pay for marrying the daughter of a Dolgorukov princess. Drawn into the Fadeyev family circle, Witte had no objection to making his home with his in-laws, especially now that Katherine was pregnant.

Helena’s Uncle Rostislav, too, was back home. His hot temper had led to the termination of his studies at the Artillery College, from which he was asked to leave after a year. College was followed by a short, unhappy career in the army and even though he had finally passed the examination to become an officer, he returned to Saratov where he promptly resigned his commission and devoted his time to studying science. Helena Petrovna had great respect for Rostislav, despite his unrelieved succession of failures, and she was apparently more receptive to his advice than to anyone else’s.

In the country, everyone rode cossack horses, explored an abandoned park full of crumbling kiosks and pagodas, and delighted in nocturnal expeditions into the forest to catch night butterflies for the Princess’s entomological collection. Helena’s greatest joy was stealing off to visit Baranig Bouyrak, an old man frequently covered from head to foot with bees and said to be a sorcerer. The villa itself could fire any child’s imagination. Resembling a medieval castle more than an eighteenth-century house, it was a rambling building full of subterranean galleries, turrets, abandoned passages and weird nooks and crannies that offered unparalleled hiding places. The former residence of the Pantchoolidzef family, governors of Saratov for several generations, it apparently came gratis with the position of governor. Along with the mansion also came a fourth tutor—Madame Henriette Peigneur, who had been governess for the Pantchoolidzef family for twenty-five years. In her youth, during the French revolution, she had been chosen a “Goddess of Liberty” and ridden in processions through the streets of Paris. Now, a bent old woman, she was given to reminiscing about her former glory as a beauty queen and did not demand very much work from her pupils. She was also a veritable anthology of hair-raising legends about the villa. Vera wrote:

Our heads were full of stories about the ghosts of martyred serfs seen promenading in chains during nocturnal hours; of the phantom of a young girl, tortured to death for refusing her love to an old master, which was seen floating in and out of the little iron-bound door of the subterranean passage at twilight; and other stories that left us children and girls in an agony of fear whenever we had to cross a dark room or passage.
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The exception, of course, was Lelinka who had no fear, but boundless curiosity to know more. The Princess finally gave permission to the children to explore the underground labyrinths, accompanied by no less than a half-dozen men servants carrying torches and lanterns. Finding more broken wine bottles than human bones, however, they quickly lost their fascination with the dungeons and went back to their usual games. To Helena, however, the subterranean corridors offered the perfect refuge from the governesses. In a corner, under a barred window, she built a kind of tower from old broken chairs and tables. She would stay in this snug spot for hours at a time reading books, including one of popular legends called
Solomon’s Wisdom.
Eventually her hiding place was discovered, and then Andrey Fadeyev periodically would have to send a deputation of servants, headed by a police officer, to drag H.P.B. upstairs.