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| ISBN-13: | 9780835608367 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Quest Books |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2003 |
| Series: | Letters of H.P. Blavatsky , #1 |
| Pages: | 656 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x 2.01(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Background Essay A
HPB's Early Life
[The following account is based primarily on the biographical sketch of HPB's early life by Boris de Zirkoff, "Helena Petrovna Blavatsky: General Outline of Her Life Prior to Her Public Work," in Collected Writings 1:xxv–lii, supplemented by other sources, such as A. P. Sinnett's Incidents.]
Much of H. P. Blavatsky's early life is poorly documented, and reports of it are sometimes contradictory (with different reports even by Blavatsky herself). The following sketch presents some of the surest or at least likely facts about her life before the first known letter, and subsequent essays give background for other letters. These essays are not a biography of HPB (as Blavatsky preferred to be called by those who knew her), but supplementary material to help explain her correspondence.
Birth and Ancestry
Ekaterinoslav (since 1926 called Dnepropetrovsk) is a town on the bank of the Dnieper River toward the southeast of the Ukraine, which was formerly part of the Russian Empire. Shortly after its founding in 1783, Ekaterinoslav became a provincial center, where trade was carried on by people from the surrounding region. There, probably in the early morning hours of August 12 (which was July 31 by the Julian calendar then used in Russia) in the year 1831, a baby girl was born to Helena Andreyevna and Artillery Captain Peter Alexeyevich von Hahn.
A cholera epidemic was sweeping the land, and the baby girl was premature, so she was baptized immediately and given her mother's Christian name, Helena. (A Russian has as a second name a patronymic, that is, a name based on the father's first name, so the baby was Helena Perrovna, "daughter of Peter.") The ceremony of her baptism was a small disaster. Throughout the lengthy Russian Orthodox ritual, participants stood with candles in their hands. One of them in the very front of all the assembled relatives, the infant's aunt but herself only a little child, grew weary and slumped down on the floor. The godparents were in the process, on behalf of the infant Helena, of renouncing the devil and all his works. At that point the little girl on the floor, toying with the lighted candle she was holding, accidentally set fire to the long flowing robes of the officiating priest. The result was a great blaze that severely burned him and several others who tried to put out the fire. People said it was a sign that the infant Helena's life would be full of trials and troubles.
Helena's father, Peter Alexeyevich von Hahn (1798–1873) was the son of Lieutenant General Alexis Gustavovich von Hahn and Countess Elizabeth Maksimovna von Pröbsen. The family was from Mecklenburg, a branch of the Counts Hahn von Rottenstern-Hahn, who a century or so earlier had emigrated to Russia, where their last name was Russianized as "Gan." Vera de Zhelihovsky, HPB's sister, says that Helena inherited her curly hair and her vivaciousness from her paternal grandmother. Helena was her parents' first child, and at the time of her birth, her father was in Poland, fighting in the Russo-Polish War of 1830–1.
Helena's mother was Helena Andreyevna (1814–42), the oldest daughter of Andrey Mihailovich de Fadeyev and Helena Pavlovna.
Helena's maternal grandfather was a civil officer of some distinction, at various times a Privy Councillor, Civil Governor of the Province of Saratov, Director of the Department of State Lands in the Caucasus, and a member of the Council of the Viceroy of the Caucasus. Helena's maternal grandmother was the daughter of Prince Paul Vassilyevich Dolgorukov and Henrietta Adolfovna de Bandré-du-Plessis, of French descent. Because the maternal grandmother, Helena Pavlovna, had been born as Princess Dolgorukova, her parents objected to her marriage with a commoner. She was an accomplished woman, with proficiency in botany, history, archeology, and numismatics. She corresponded with scientists from various countries of Europe, including Alexander von Humboldt. Lady Hester Lucy Stanhope called Helena Pavlovna "an outstanding woman-scientist, who would have been famous in Europe, but who is completely underestimated due to her misfortune of being born on the shores of the Volga river, where there was none to recognize her scientific value."
The de Fadeyevs had several other daughters who survived infancy, in addition to HPB's mother. They included Nadyezhda Andreyevna (1828-1919), HPB's aunt who was only three years older than she, who never married, and who was to be for some years a member of the Council of the Theosophical Society; and Katherine Andreyevna, who married Yuliy F. de Witte and one of whose sons was Count Serguey Yulyevich de Witte, Russian Minister of Finance (1892–1903) and first constitutional Prime Minister of the Russian Empire (1905–6), who sought to Westernize Russia.
HPB's mother, Helena Andreyevna, was also an accomplished woman. She became a published novelist at the age of twenty-three. When just sixteen, she married Peter Alexeyevich, who was nearly twice her age. Her marriage exemplified the truth of the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Helena Andreyevna's cultured background did not fit the tenor of military camps. Her novels depicted the plight of women in nineteenth-century Russia and were early examples of feminist protest. She died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight, when her first child, Helena Petrovna (HPB) was eleven. She had borne three other children as well: a son, Alexander, who died in infancy; a daughter, Vera, four years younger than HPB and a frequent correspondent of hers; and another son, Leonid, born two years before his mother's death.
From childhood to Wifehood
During her first ten years, Helena Petrovna moved repeatedly, partly because, like all military men, her father had frequent changes of post and partly because her mother's health led her to travel to various places in search of cures or relief from the rigors of military life. In 1834, her grandfather, Andrey Mihailovich de Fadeyev, was appointed to a post in Odessa, on the shore of the Black Sea. His daughter, recovering from the birth and infant death of a son, Alexander, brought young Helena to live with her grandparents. The next year, Helena's sister, Vera, was born in Odessa.
The following years saw Helena traveling with her mother in the Ukraine, to St. Petersburg, and to Astrakhan, a city and province at the delta of the Volga River into the Caspian Sea. In 1836, Helena's grandfather was appointed Trustee for the nomadic Kalmuck tribes in Astrakhan. Her mother took Helena and Vera to live there for about a year. Then Helena's mother, with the two girls, resumed her travels — to a spa in the Caucasus; to Poltava, where Antonya Christianovna Kühlwein joined them as the girls' governess; and to Odessa, for more mineral water treatments. In 1839, a Yorkshire English governess, Augusta Sophia Jeffers, joined the family. Late that year, they moved to Saratov on the Volga River, where Helena's grandfather had been appointed as governor of the province. Helena's brother Leonid was born there in 1840.
In 1841, Helena went with her mother, sister, and brother to join their father in the Ukraine, moving again the following year back to Odessa. In July 1842, Helena's mother died, and her children returned to Saratov to live with their grandparents for about three years. But Helena continued her travels, visiting the Ural Mountains, which divide European Russia from Siberia, and beyond.
In 1846, Helena, Vera, and Leonid moved with their aunt Katherine de Witte and her family to a house in the country, but at the end of the year they returned to Saratov. The following year they journeyed to Tiflis (now called Tbilisi) in Russian Georgia, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, where their grandparents had settled. The journey, an arduous one by boat and horse carriage, took nearly two months. The years 1847–8 saw further travels around Tiflis.
During the winter of 1848–9 Helena was engaged to Nikifor Vassilyevich Blavatsky. There are several explanations of how and why the engagement came about, but the most widely cited and perhaps most probable is that given by her aunt, Nadyezhda Fadeyev (Incidents 54):
She cared not whether she should get married or not. She had been simply defied one day by her governess to find any man who would be her husband, in view of her temper and disposition. The governess, to emphasize the taunt, said that even the old man she had found so ugly, and had laughed at so much, calling him "a plumeless raven"— that even he would decline her for a wife! That was enough: three days after she made him propose, and then, frightened at what she had done, sought to escape from her joking acceptance of his offer. But it was too late.
Nikifor Blavatsky had held various civil posts in the Russian provincial governments in the Ukraine and Georgia (in the Caucasus) and was to be appointed vice governor of a newly organized Province of Yerivan (Yerevan) in Armenia, near the eastern border of Turkey. He was an undistinguished but competent civil servant.
In the following spring 1849, Helena seems to have run away from home, perhaps in an effort to avoid her approaching marriage. In July 1849, however, Helena married Nikifor and went with him to a resort near Yerevan in Armenia. She again tried unsuccessfully to run away during this trip. The Blavatskys stayed at the resort, however, until late August, when they were briefly visited by her family, after which they all went to Yerevan.
In October 1849, HPB left her husband to return to Tiflis, where her grandparents were. They sent her to St. Petersburg to join her father, who had remarried and was to meet his daughter at the Black Sea port of Odessa. With two servants, she traveled overland from Tiflis to Poti, a port in Caucasian Georgia on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, where she was to take passage to Odessa. However, either accidentally or purposefully, HPB missed the ship she was supposed to take to Odessa and instead got passage on an English vessel, the SS Commodore. On it she sailed northwestward on the Black Sea to the city of Kerch at the eastern tip of the Crimea. Helena sent her servants ashore to arrange for her arrival in Kerch the next morning, but instead of debarking herself, she remained on board when the ship sailed that night for the city of Taganrog, on the north shore of the Sea of Azov, and then back across the Black Sea to Constantinople. Thus at the age of eighteen, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky began her long wanderings around the world.
Early Travels
From Constantinople, HPB may have traveled during 1849–50 in Greece, eastern Europe, Asia Minor, and Egypt, meeting Paulos Metamon, a Coptic occultist in Cairo. During 1850–51, she was in western Europe, particularly Paris and London, where she met a family friend, Princess Bagration-Muhransky. During her London stay, she lived variously in a flat on Cecil Street, in a hotel called Mivart's (now Claridge's), and in another hotel between the City and the Strand.
According to Countess Constance Wachtmeister, HPB said that she first met Master Morya face to face in Hyde Park, London. She identified the time to A. P. Sinnett as "the year of the first Nepal Embassy," which was 1850. Both the date and place, however, are problematical. HPB wrote in her Sketchbook that she met her teacher at Ramsgate on her twentieth birthday (August 12, 1851), but also told Constance Wachtmeister that "Ramsgate" was a blind. HPB also told the Countess that her father was in London at the time and she consulted him about the Master's offer for her to cooperate "in a work which he was about to undertake."
It is, according to Boris de Zirkoff (CW 1:xxxix, citing Sinnett, Incidents 62–6), "fairly certain or at least probable" that HPB traveled to Canada in fall 1851 and stayed at Quebec, going from there to New Orleans to study the practice of voodoo. But being warned in a vision of the dangers of voodooism, she continued through Texas to Mexico. During 1852, she seems to have traveled through Central and South America to visit the ancient ruins there. She also went to the West Indies, where she arranged with "a certain Englishman" she had met in Germany two years before and a Hindu chela she had met in Honduras to sail by way of the Cape of Good Hope to Ceylon and Bombay.
HPB made an unsuccessful attempt by herself to enter Tibet through Nepal. She traveled around north India, as far east as Dinajpur (in what is now Bangladesh). In a letter of December 5, 1881, to Prince Dondukov-Korsakov, she says she "stayed there nearly two years, traveling about and receiving money each month — from whom I have no idea." Thereafter, HPB seems to have traveled back to England by way of Java and Singapore. In From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan (272), HPB says of her Master, "Long ago, very long ago, more than twenty-seven years, I met him in the house of a stranger in England, where he had come in the company of a dethroned native prince." The latter was presumably young Prince Dhuleep Singh of Lahore, who sailed from India on April 19, 1854, and arrived at Southampton on June 18, 1854.
Later in 1854, HPB again traveled to America, landing in New York and passing through Chicago on her way across the Rockies to San Francisco with a caravan of emigrants, probably in a covered wagon (Sinnett, Incidents 66–7). Her precise whereabouts thereafter are unknown, but she probably stayed in the Western Hemisphere until fall 1855. At that time, she left for Calcutta, India, by way of Japan.
In India, HPB traveled widely, at Lahore meeting a German ex-Lutheran minister named Kühlwein, an acquaintance of her father's and perhaps a relative of her old governess, who was accompanied by his two brothers. The four laid plans to enter Tibet. They traveled through Ladakh in eastern Kashmir to Leh, one of the highest permanently inhabited towns in the world, in the company of a Tartar Shaman on his way home to Siberia. HPB may at this time have crossed the border into Tibet with the aid of the Shaman, who also helped her out of a difficult situation by mentally summoning the help of native horsemen. Her adventures on this occasion are described, with some artistic license, in Isis Unveiled (2:598–602, 626–8). She may also have traveled in Burma, Thailand, and Assam at this time, leaving India by summer 1857.
Return Home
By early 1858, HPB was apparently back in Europe, traveling through France and Germany and then returning to Russia in fall 1858, for her first visit home in nine years. The approximate time of her return to Russia is fixed by a letter from her husband, Nikifor Blavatsky to HPB's aunt and confidant, Nadyezhda de Fadeyev (the Russian original of which is in the Archives of the Theosophical Society, Adyar, and has been translated in the Theosophist 80 [Aug. 1959]: 295–6). The letter, which is dated from Erevan, November 13, 1858, reads in part:
Until now I knew nothing of H. P.'s [Helena Petrovna's] return to Russia. To tell you the truth, this ceased to interest me long ago. Time smooths out everything, even every memory. You may assure H. P. on my word of honor that I will never pursue her. I wish ardently that our marriage be annulled, and that she may marry again. It is possible that I too may marry again, from calculation or inclination, feeling myself not yet unsuited to family life. So make every effort, by uniting your forces, and let her also do her best to annul the marriage. I did my best, but Exarch Isidor [the bishop who headed the Orthodox Church in Caucasian Georgia] refused to do it. Therefore I do not intend to start a new lawsuit any more, or even to obtain the divorce by applying to the Emperor [five illegible words] because I consider it entirely useless after having received your letter. I beg you instantly to endeavor to end the matter, to the satisfaction of both of you. Whether she finishes or reopens the subject, in any case, I repeat, I shall not attempt to pursue her or make inquiries in order to find out where she is living. You know that a man loses less, in public opinion, than a woman, in whatever circumstances he may happen to be. In whatever manner I might behave morally, I would be justified sooner than a woman.
In this way I have been living since the time of my misfortune [his marriage to HPB]. And in consequence of it I have been working on my character in order that I may become unaffected by anything. Very often I even laugh at the stupidities which I committed, and I comfort myself by realizing that not only I but other people too make the same mistakes in this strange world.
One can become accustomed to anything. So I have got used to a joyless life in Erivan. Whatsoever may happen I shall remain unaffected. My plan is to retire entirely from active service. I would then go to my estate, in that hidden corner which nobody knows of, and live there surrounded by the delights of a lonely life.
Your always devoted, N. Blavatsky
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Letters of H. P. Blavatsky Volume 1 1861-1879"
by .
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Table of Contents
Preface,
Editorial Principles,
History of the Project,
Acknowledgments,
Letters,
Before 1875,
Background Essay A: HPB's Early Life,
1 between 1861 and 1864: To her relatives,
2 1865: To her relatives,
Background Essay B: The Lost Years,
3 early 1872: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
4 ca. January 1872: To The Medium,
5 ca. March or early April 1872: To her relatives,
6 ca. late April 1872: To her relatives,
7 December 26, 1872: To the Director of the Third Department,
Background Essay C: Early Days in New York,
8 October 28, 1874: To A. N. Aksakoff,
9 ca. Oct. 31 and Nov. 6, 1874: To H. S. Olcott,
10 ca. November 12, 1874: To H. S. Olcott,
11 November 14, 1874: To A. N. Aksakoff,
12 December 13, 1874: To A. N. Aksakoff,
13 1874: To her relatives,
1875,
Background Essay D: HPB's Leg Injury,
14 January 30, 1875: To F.J. Lippitt,
Background Essay E: The Katie King Affair,
15 February 9, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
16 early February 1875: To H. P. Corson?,
17 February 11, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
18 February 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
19 ca. February 1875: To??,
20 ca. February 13, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
Background Essay F: The John King Portrait,
21 February 16, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
22 ca. February 22, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
23 ca. February 23, 1875: To L. Andrews,
24 March 6, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
25 March 7, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
26 mid March 1875: To L. Andrews,
27 March 15, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
28 late March 1875: To H. S. Olcott,
29 late March 1875: To H. S. Olcott?,
30 March 20, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
31 ca. March 24, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
32 ca. March 24, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
33 March 24, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
34 March 30, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
Background Essay G: HPB's Marriage in Philadelphia,
35 April 3, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
36 early to mid April 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
37 April 12, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
38 April 14, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
39 April 20, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
40 mid April to early May 1875: To H. P. Corson,
Background Essay H: HPB's Lawsuit in America,
41 April 28, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
42 May 20, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
43 May 21, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
44 May 21, 1875: To H. S. Olcott,
45 May 24, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
46 June 9, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
47 June 10, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
48 June 19, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
49 June 30, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
50 June 1875: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
51 June 1875: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
52 July 6, 1875: To F. J. Lippitt,
53 July 18, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
54 September 10, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
55 September 20, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
56 latter half of 1875: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
57 October 13 — 16, 1875: To H. P. Corson,
58 late 1875 or thereafter: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
59 November 16, 1875: To S. Moses,
60 December 1, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
61 December 6, 1875: To A. N. Aksakoff,
62 late 1875 or early 1876: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
63 late 1875 or early 1876: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
Background Essay I: The Founding of the Theosophical Society and,
Controversy over the Inaugural Address,
1876,
64 January 8, 1876: To H. P. Corson,
Background Essay J: Further Controversy over the Inaugural Address,
65 February 1876: To C. C. Massey,
66 ca. February 1876: To A. N. Aksakoff,
67 March 12, 1876: To C. R. Corson,
68 March 22, 1876: To H. P. Corson,
69 spring or summer 1876: To A. N. Aksakoff,
70 July 1876: To A. N. Aksakoff,
71 August 1876: To A. Wilder,
72 October 5, 1876: To A. N. Aksakoff,
73 October or November 1876: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
74 November 1876: To C. C. Massey,
75 ca. December 6, 1876: To A. Wilder,
76 late 1876: To A. N. Aksakoff,
1877,
77 February 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
78 early February 1877: To the Editor of the Banner of Light,
79 March 1, 1877: To N. de Fadeyev,
80 ca. March 1, 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
81 ca. May or June 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
82 June 8, 1877: To N. de Fadeyev,
83 June 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
84 June 1877: To her relatives,
85 June 15, 1877: To A. N. Aksakoff,
86 ca. June 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
87 ca. June 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
88 July 19, 1877: To N. de Fadeyev,
89 ca. July 1877: To E. Hardinge Britten,
Background Essay K: The Writing and Publication of "Isis Unveiled",
90 October 2, 1877: To A. N. Aksakoff,
91 October 10, 1877: To W. H. Burr,
92 October 28 — 29, 1877: To N. de Fadeyev,
93 November 6, 1877: To N. de Zhelihovsky,
94 November 6, 1877: To A. N. Aksakoff,
95 November 7, 1877: To A. R. Wallace,
96 November 16, 1877: To M. D. Evans,
97 November 19, 1877: To W. H. Burr,
98 late 1877: To her relatives,
99 November 20, 1877: To T. Madhava Rao,
100 December 11, 1877: To N. de Fadeyev,
101 December 12, 1877: To P. C. Mittra,
102 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
103 late 1877: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
104 late 1877: To her relatives,
105 late 1877 or early 1878: To her relatives,
1878,
106 late January 1878: To her relatives,
107 January 26, 1878: To J. C. Bundy,
Background Essay L: The Arya Samaj and Hurrychund Chintamon,
108 February 9, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
109 ca. March 1878: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
110 April10, 1878: To P. C. Mittra,
111 April 25, 1878: To N. de Zhelihovsky,
112 April 1878: To H. Chintamon?,
Background Essay M: Thomas Alva Edison,
113 April 30, 1878: To T. A. Edison,
114 ca. May 1878: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
115 May 4, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
116 May 9, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
117 May 21, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
118 May 22, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
119 May 30, 1878: To S. Krishnavarma,
120 May 30, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
121 July 3, 1878: To N. de Fadeyev,
122 July 8, 1878: To N. de Fadeyev,
123 July 30, 1878: To C. H. van der Linden?,
124 August 7, 1878: To S. Krishnavarma,
125 August 21, 1878: To H. Chintamon,
126 August 28, 1878: To C. R. Corson,
127 August 28, 1878: To A. N. Aksakoff,
128 October 13, 1878: To the editor of the New York Sun,
129 October 25, 1878: To E. P. Mitchell,
130 November 28, 1878: To Mrs. C. Daniels,
131 November 29, 1878: To J. D. Buck,
132 December 10, 1878: To F. E. Burr,
133 December 14, 1878: To T. A. Edison,
134 December 16, 1878: To F. E. Burr,
1879,
135 January 1, 1879: To A. Sturge,
Background Essay N: English Reactions to HPB,
136 January 14, 1879: To V. de Zhelihovsky,
Bibliography,
Glossary-Index,