Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (8 page)

The first of these incidents happened before the family portraits in the reception hall of the governor’s mansion. One particular painting, hung far up near the ceiling and covered by a curtain, intrigued Helena, but when she asked to see it, she was refused. Waiting until the room was empty, she dragged a table over to the wall, set a smaller table on it, then placed a chair atop both. Mounting this unstable platform, she leaned one hand against the dusty wall and jerked aside the curtain with the other. The movement threw her off balance and as she began to fall, she felt herself losing consciousness.

When she awakened she found herself lying on the floor, unhurt. The tables and chair were back in their usual places, and the curtain again covered the portrait. Had she not left a hand print on the dusty wall, she might have thought she had dreamed the whole incident. To Helena, this was evidence of the intervention of supernatural agencies, capable of coming to her aid during times of crisis.

A similar kind of rescue occurred during the summer that she turned fourteen. A horse that she was riding in her usual reckless style suddenly bolted, and she fell with her foot entangled in the stirrup. Under normal circumstances, she might easily have been killed. But there was what she described as “a strange sustaining power”
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around her that seemed to hold her up in defiance of gravity, and the horse was mysteriously brought under control.

Both of these episodes happened at times when Helena Petrovna was engaged in some activity for which she could have expected a scolding. Obviously, such fine distinctions between good and bad behavior were not important to her invisible guardian.

Even after living with her grandparents for three years she never gave up on Peter von Hahn. In 1886, looking back on that summer of 1845, when she became fourteen, she wrote that “father brought me to London to take a few lessons of music.”

Took a few later also—from old Moscheles. Lived with [von Hahn] somewhere near Pimlico... Went to Bath with him, remained a whole week, heard nothing but bell-ringing in the churches all day. Wanted to go on horseback astride in my Cossack way; he would not let me and I made a row I remember and got sick with a fit of hysterics. He blessed his stars when we went home; travelled two or three months through France, Germany and Russia. In Russia our own carriage and horses making twenty-five miles a day.
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There was, however, another version of the reunion with her father.
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That summer, according to Vera’s diary, von Hahn visited his children for the first time since his wife’s death. They were shocked to find they had difficulty recognizing him because he had aged so considerably. According to Helena’s account of the events, Peter immediately whisked her away, leaving Vera and Leonid behind, even though in reality a journey from Saratov to London would have meant a major sacrifice of von Hahn’s time and money. Helena boasted that he thought enough of her musical ability to arrange for lessons with Ignaz Moscheles, the renowned conductor, composer and teacher of Mendelssohn. Actually, her studying with Moscheles that summer would not have been impossible, since he had in fact returned from Germany in March, 1845, to conduct the London Philharmonic.

Despite that, Helena’s lessons fall into the same fantasy category as her later boast to Henry Olcott that, while in London, she played a charity concert with Clara Schumann and Arabella Goddard, performing a Schumann piece for three pianos.
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The only note of realism in her London story is that von Hahn would not tolerate her maverick behavior and “blessed his stars” when he could return her to the Fadeyevs.

The most significant experience of Peter von Hahn’s visit that summer was observing Helena’s mediumship and making the acquaintance of Tekla Lebendorff. His reaction was far more negative than the Fadeyevs’ but for different reasons. Unlike them, he was not a pious man who objected on religious grounds; rather, he considered the idea of spirits an affront to his reason.
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What he could not shrug off was the fact that Helena was not only writing in German, but also in a handwriting quite unlike her own. Subsequent to the events, he asked one of his brothers, a government official, to compile a dossier on Tekla Lebendorff. In the course of a business trip to Revel, the brother was able to establish that there certainly had been a Madame Lebendorff who, owing to her son’s dissolute behavior, had left the city and gone to live with relatives in Norway, where she died. The statistics Helena’s uncle uncovered about the woman—her age, number of children and so forth— corroborated all of his niece’s statements.

When my uncle returned to St. Petersburg he desired to ascertain, as the last and crucial test, whether a petition, such as I had written, had ever been sent to the Emperor. Owing to his friendship with influential people in the Ministere de l’lnterieur, he obtained access to the Archives; and there, as he had the correct date of the petition, and even the number under which it had been filed, he soon found it and comparing it with my version sent up to him by my aunt, he found the two to be
facsimiles,
even to a remark in pencil written by the late Emperor on the margin, which I had reproduced as exactly as any engraver or photographer could have done.
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However, crucial as this test may have seemed to Helena, the skeptical Peter von Hahn was still not completely satisfied.

For all three von Hahn children, seeing their father again was anticlimactic. He looked older than his forty-seven years and no longer cut such a dashing figure. His abortive marriage had left him weary and unsettled, and, unknown to the children, he was considering remarriage. After an uneasy month among the strangers who were his children, he departed.

In January of 1846, the viceroy of the Caucasus, Prince Mihail Vorontzov, appointed Helena’s grandfather Director of State Lands in Trans-Caucasia. As Imperial Russia continued to expand its frontiers, the Caucasus became the scene of a long, drawn-out war of conquest. After fifteen years of campaigning, the mountains still held unsubdued Daghestan guerrillas and Circassian tribesmen. Proper administration of newly acquired lands exceeded the capabilities of the Russian government and, while Fadeyev’s promotion was prestigious and reflected his rising importance in the civil service, the job would bring its share of frustrations. Since his new assignment did not take effect immediately, the family remained in Saratov for the winter and spent the summer, as usual, at the country villa.

In mid-August, Andrey, Princess Helena, and Nadyezhda moved to Tiflis, in Georgia, but the von Hahn children did not accompany them. Instead they were left with their aunt and uncle Katherine and Yuli Witte and the couple’s two young sons, Andrey and Alexander. The Wittes had taken a summer house on the other side of the Volga, near the village of Pokrrovskoye, and did not return to Saratov until December.

Leaving Helena behind was not the wisest step the Princess could have taken, since Katherine, though well meaning, had absolutely no sympathy with her niece and no interest in psychic phenomena. It quickly became evident that she would have to contend with sleepwalking, Tekla Lebendorff, and other weird happenings which took place with alarming regularity.

One of the governesses then with the family had a habit of keeping fruit in her bureau until it rotted, a quirk that disgusted Katherine. The woman became seriously ill and once she was confined to bed, the first thing Katherine did was to order the bureau cleaned out and the fruit thrown away. She did not anticipate that the sick woman, on the point of death, might ask for one of her “nice ripe apples.” In a quandary, Katherine went to the servants’ quarters to send someone out for a rotten apple. While there, she received news that the woman had just died. Katherine rushed upstairs, trailed by Helena Petrovna and the servants, and as they passed the open door of the governess’s room, they saw her eating an apple. That is, at least, what Helena claimed. Presumably she did see such a sight and described it so vividly that Katherine “shrieked with horror.” Recounting this incident in 1884, H.P.B. said that the vision “disappeared at once, and we rushed into the bedroom. There she lay on the bed, and the nurse was with her, having never left her one minute for the last hour. It was her last thought made objective.”

Then she added, as if fearing that nobody would believe her: “A perfectly true story, one witnessed by myself.”
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Thanks to Andrey Fadeyev’s connections, Yuli Witte was able to get a bureaucratic job in Tiflis as director of the Department of State Property. At the beginning of May, 1847, as soon as the snow had melted, the Wittes took the von Hahn children and Antonya Kuhlwein to join the Fadeyevs. With no railroads or paved roads, the journey to Tiflis was a rather complicated venture. Leaving Saratov, they cruised down the Volga on the SS
St. Nicholas,
stopping for two days at Astrakhan. There they took passage aboard the SS
Teheran,
and followed the coastline of the Caspian Sea as far as Baku, which they reached on May 21. The next day they started out in carriages for Shemaha, where the Fadeyevs and Nadyezhda had come to meet them, and where they stayed for about a month. Then, at a leisurely pace they headed northwest to Tiflis, crossing the Shemaha pass and the Kura River, which they forded at Minguichaur, stopping for a day at Elizabethpol.

The magical vistas of the Caucasus—its mountain peaks snowcapped year-round while lemon trees bloomed in the subtropical river valleys—inspired great literature from Pushkin, Tolstoy and Lermontov. It is puzzling that Helena, who had a passion for travel, recorded nothing about this first long trip of her life. If it were not for Vera’s diary, we would have known nothing of their itinerary.

At the end of June, eight weeks after leaving Saratov, the traveling party reached Tiflis, a city set in the mountain valley of the Kura River. Having come under Russian control only forty-five years earlier, Tiflis had an unusual ambience. The Russian sector, where the Fadeyevs lived, looked perfectly European: stately avenues, rows of modern houses, cafes, milliners, even a bookseller. A few blocks away, however, the scene gave way to a rich spectacle of Asiatic bazaars, caravansaries and streets full of open shops where smithies and shoemakers carried on their crafts in view of the passers-by. Although one saw plenty of Russian military uniforms and French frock coats, the town overflowed with dark-skinned Persians in loose flowing dresses, fierce-eyed Kurds, horse-peddling Circassians, and beautiful Georgian women in long veils and high-heeled slippers.
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Tiflis, like Astrakhan, contained diverse nationalities and Asiatic Russia infected Helena Petrovna with an incurable passion for exotic peoples. European Russia, with its fussy decorum and manners imitative of the French, held so little charm for her that she would later abandon it without noticeable qualms.

The family had not been at their new home a month before they embarked on one of those summer processions that aristocratic Russians were so fond of. First they went to Borzhom, a resort on the estate of Grand Duke Mihail Nikolayevich, and then to the hot baths of Abbas-Tuman, stopping to take the curative waters. Life during the summer social season was easy and informal, and the prominence of the Fadeyevs assured their welcome at picnics, horseback-riding excursions for the children, suppers and balls for the adults. At the end of August, they returned to Tiflis and settled down at the Sum-batov mansion.

IV

The Plumeless Raven

During that first winter at Tiflis, Helena led a life which, even if not to her liking, could not be described as uneventful. Around this time she received a shock that rocked her self-confidence and forced her to rethink her belief in the supernatural. The officer who had first introduced Helena to Tekla Lebendorff at her father’s military camp when she was five, came to Tiflis and called on the Fadeyevs. In the intervening years, Helena had lost all memory of the connection between D—-and his Aunt Tekla, and she remembered him only as a warm man who had shown her kindness. When D—-invited the von Hahn children to visit him at his military quarters, they accepted enthusiastically and were sent off by the Princess in the company of a governess. Entering his room, the first thing that Helena noticed was the miniature of Tekla sitting on a table. Overcome by the sight, she screamed, “It is, it is the spirit. It is Mrs. Tekla Lebendorff.”

D—-was, to say the least, astonished. “Of course it’s my old aunt,” he replied, expressing surprise that she remembered the portrait, not to mention his aunt’s name. When Helena began to explain that his dead aunt and sometimes her son who had committed suicide were in the habit of visiting her at night, she was interrupted by an outburst of laughter. His aunt was not dead, D—-assured her; she was living in Norway and, in fact, he had just received a letter from her. As for the unfortunate son, it was true that he had once attempted suicide, but he had recovered and now was employed in a Berlin bank.

When these startling revelations were conveyed to the Fadeyevs, H.P.B. recalled, “Never were people more taken back than were my venerable aunts.” For if it was not Tekla who had dictated petitions to the Czar and rhapsodized over angels and archangels, who was it? Exasperated by the whole business, her family concluded that it was the Devil. And it was insinuated that Lelinka had somehow tricked them.

Innocent of deception, Helena also apparently rejected the devil theory. But she was helpless to come up with anything remotely approaching a satisfactory explanation. It would be many years before she would be able to account for the writing, describing it as “the work of my mind,” and calling the facts relayed by Tekla “the objective reproduction of what my own mind read and saw in the astral light.”
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At the time, however, her sense of chagrin and confusion must have been acute. Only one thing was certain: the writing career of Tekla Lebendorff was finished.