Madame Blavatsky: The Woman Behind the Myth (14 page)

Vera would later say that she had completely lost track of Helena and believed her dead.
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Possibly what she actually meant was that the Fadeyevs counted Helena as one who is dead, just as any respectable family at that time would have shied away from acknowledging their relationship with a notorious black sheep. Nobody, however, believed for a moment that Helena had died, not with the letters from Metrovitch, the unpleasant tales carried home by the Kiselevs and Bagrations, the newspaper clippings sent by Russian friends traveling abroad (or possibly by H.P.B. herself) about her musical activities. No, they did not think her dead, but on the other hand they never expected her to have the nerve to come back.

Sometime during the summer or early autumn of 1858, Helena parted from Metrovitch and traveled to Russian territory, but the city in which she temporarily halted is unknown. Apprehensive, unsure of what sort of welcome she might expect from her family, she turned to Nadyezhda for help in smoothing the way. In October, Nadyezhda wrote to Nikifor at Erivan, informing him of his wife’s return and asking him not to bother Helena. In a stoic, rather bitter response of November 13 (Old Style), he wrote that Helena “ceased to interest me long ago. Time smooths out everything, even every memory.”
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He had no intention of causing unpleasantness for his wife:

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 exerting your forces, and let her also do her best to annul the marriage. I did my best, but Exarch Isador 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.

Repeating that he would not contact Helena, or make inquiries as to her whereabouts, he went on to call his marriage “a misfortune” and for him it no doubt was. Now nearly fifty, he had no wife or family, and after his futile attempts to obtain a divorce, no longer even the hope of either.

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.
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Nadyezhda had less luck with the Fadeyevs. Andrey absolutely refused to have his granddaughter in Tiflis; in the end, Nadyezhda had to send Helena the address of her sister. In February, Vera’s thirty-one-year-old husband had died suddenly, leaving her utterly distraught over the loss of “he who loved me more than anyone on this earth.”
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She had a four-year-old son, Feodor, and an infant, Rostislav, who had been born posthumously. While her late husband had left her some property, temporarily Vera was living with her father-in-law at Pskov, in northwest Russia near the Baltic.

Writing to Vera, Helena announced that she planned to travel after the first of the year, but at the last minute, perhaps reluctant to spend the holidays alone, she moved up her schedule by several weeks and turned up at Pskov on Christmas Day.

III

Yuri

Aside from Christmas, the Yahontovs were celebrating the marriage of their daughter that evening. There was a stream of guests and even though the wedding banquet had begun, the doorbell continued to ring every few minutes. Just as the bridegroom’s best man rose, champagne glass in hand, to begin the ritual toasts, the bell was heard again. Something about the impatience of the last ring must have alerted Vera for, despite the many servants and to the astonishment of the guests, she jumped up from the table and rushed to open the door. “Overcome with joy,” Vera forgot the wedding and took Helena to her room. Almost immediately unusual happenings began to occur for, Vera recalled, “that very evening I was convinced that my sister had acquired strange powers.” (See Appendix A.) To be sure, she had always associated strangeness with Helena but now the happenings were so startling, so flamboyant, that they could not be easily dismissed. Awake or asleep, her sister “was constantly surrounded with mysterious movements, strange sounds.” Distinct little taps came from the furniture, windowpanes, floors and walls, and it did not take Vera long to discover that the knocks possessed an intelligence of their own. When asked a question, “they tapped three times for ‘yes,’ twice for ‘no.’”
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Successfully upstaging the bridal couple, Helena quickly became the center of attention with her rappings and poltergeist effects. Now, as later, H.P.B. would bolster temporary insecurities by overwhelming people with phenomena, an attention-getting device that usually worked well. On this occasion, however, it was not the Yahontovs that she wished to impress but Peter von Hahn, who was attending the wedding with her brother Leonid and half-sister Liza.

During the next few weeks the drawing room of Vera’s prominent in-laws was full of visitors, playing cards or singing around the piano, but most of the guests surrounded Helena Petrovna, who sat quietly in an armchair with her embroidery. Even in provincial Russia, people had heard about Spiritualism, and while there had been reports of mediums in St. Petersburg, none had penetrated so far as Pskov. Certainly nobody had ever actually heard the rappings of a so-called spirit, and for this reason Helena became an overnight sensation.

To Helena’s disappointment, her most enthusiastic detractors were her father and brother. Peter von Hahn, perhaps remembering Tekla Lebendorff, would have nothing to do with the rapping sessions, remarking that such nonsense was beneath the concern of serious people. Leonid, now eighteen, and a law student at the University of Dorpat, proclaimed himself a believer “in no one and nothing.” One evening, when Helena was describing how mediums could make light objects become so heavy they could not be lifted, Leonid hovered behind his sister’s chair. “And you mean to say that you can do it?” he demanded.

Helena’s answer was guarded. “I have done it occasionally, though I cannot always answer for its success.”

When the guests pressed her to try, she agreed, but warned that she promised nothing. A three-legged table was positioned in the center of the room. Helena fixed it with an intense stare and then, still staring, she motioned one of the young men present to remove it. Even though he seized it with both hands, the table could not be moved and finally he gave up.

Suspecting collusion, Leonid approached the table; he tugged, he kicked, he shook until the wood began to splinter. But the table refused to budge. “How strange,” was his only concession.

Finally, Helena asked him to try again. Leonid gave a tremendous pull, this time almost dislocating his arm because the table was light as a feather. Years later, H.P.B. explained the feat, saying that it could be produced by the exercise of her own will directing the magnetic currents, or by the aid of unseen beings from Tibet, but she did not specify which method she had used at Pskov. (It should be noted that similar phenomena have been performed by hypnotists who have good subjects.)

While Leonid had been grudgingly won over, Helena wanted badly to impress her father. Winning his respect was important to her but nothing seemed to work, not her thought-reading, not her Latin prescriptions for the treatment of various diseases, not even the excitement when Liza’s governess, Leontine, wanted to know what had happened to a young man who had jilted her, and she found the answer in a letter locked inside a trunk in her room. Von Hahn ignored all of it. Secretly, Helena could not blame him because she, too, had little respect for mediums. When anyone at the Yahontovs was indiscreet enough to call her one, she indignantly denied it, declaring that she was a mediator between mortals and beings they knew nothing about. “But I could never understand the difference,”
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confessed Vera, and neither could anyone else.

Meanwhile, Vera was in the midst of organizing her affairs and trying to adjust to widowhood. Her late husband, shortly before his death, had purchased a village of a hundred serfs at Rougodevo, in the Province of Pskov. The place had been bought sight unseen through an agent. There was, however, a sizable mansion on the property and Vera proposed to settle there with her sons, her father and half-sister Liza. Now, of course, Helena Petrovna was invited to join the menage. Before settling in their new home, they spent a few weeks in St. Petersburg where Peter von Hahn had business to look after.

Their first weeks in the capital, at the Hotel de Paris, were lived at a highly accelerated pace. In the mornings von Hahn was occupied with his business affairs; in the afternoons and evenings everyone made and received social calls. “There was,” Vera recalled, “no time for, or even mention of, phenomena,” which suggests that Helena had managed to restrain the rapping. This moratorium lasted, however, until the evening when two old friends of her father’s came to visit. Having heard about Spiritualism, they were anxious to see something and Helena obliged. The old gentlemen professed amazement at her powers and later they began to castigate von Hahn because, while the rapping and “mind-reading” had been going on, he had been engrossed in his game of patience. “Old women’s superstition,” he barked. Nonetheless, his friends convinced him to participate in an experiment. He must go into the next room, write a message on paper, and place it in his pocket. Then they would see whether Helena’s spirits could spell out the message.

In hopes of proving his friends wrong, von Hahn did as requested and then returned to his cards. “What shall you say, old friend,” asked one of his cronies, “if the word written by you is correctly repeated? Will you not feel compelled to believe in such a case?”

If that happened, von Hahn replied scathingly, “you may prepare to offer me as an inmate of a lunatic asylum.”

The raps produced only one word,
Zaitchik,
but that word, Vera reported, left her father trembling. Showing them the paper, he read, “What was the name of my favourite war-horse which I rode during my first Turkish Campaign?” and below, in parenthesis, he had written Zaitchik.
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As a consequence, von Hahn did a complete about-face and after that he “became passionately fond of experimenting with his daughter’s powers. Once he inquired of the date of a certain event in his family that had occurred several hundred years before. He received it. From that time he set himself and Madame Blavatsky the difficult task of restoring the family chronology.”
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The entire genealogical tree of the counts of Rotternstern and the Hahn-Hahn family had to be traced back to the first crusade, a task which occupied his attention until finally in the early summer they departed for Rougodevo, 132 miles from St. Petersburg.

The days when the gentry could buy a village with its inhabitants was quickly running out, but in the summer of 1859, Vera and her family were still able to live in feudal style. The imposing country house, surrounded by lakes and pine forests, offered a sweeping view of the countryside for 20 miles around. A suite of rooms on the ground floor was given to von Hahn, while the rest of them occupied the ten large rooms on the first floor, and the servants lived at the back. The second or third evening after their arrival, Vera and Helena were strolling through the flower gardens at the front of the house. Helena kept smiling furtively through the windows into some empty rooms and finally told Vera that she could see people inside: a long-haired German student in a velvet blouse, a fat old woman in a frilled cap, an old man with extraordinarily long nails that looked like claws.

Vera, unamused, began to shriek aloud about the Devil and when Helena said they were only lingering reflections of those who had once inhabited the rooms, she was not a bit comforted and worried about the spirits loitering in the children’s rooms. Helena suggested that she send for two old serfs and give them a description of the ghosts. As it turned out, the peasants knew exactly who was meant and assured their mistress that a German student from Gottingen and a fat housekeeper had once lived there. The man with the long nails was their former master, who had contracted a skin disease in Lithuania and could not cut his nails without bleeding to death.

That matter taken care of, the household settled down to normal, if any house in which H.P.B. lived could be termed normal. “All the persons living on the premises,” recalled Vera, “saw constantly, even in full noonday, vague human shadows walking about the rooms, appearing in the gardens, in the flower beds in front of the house, and near the old chapel.”
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More mysteriously, Mademoiselle Leontine discovered in her locked drawers letters containing family secrets known only to herself. Evidently Helena was having a busy time because hardly a day passed without some unexplained event: a locked piano hammering out a march, lamps suddenly extinguished as though a gale wind had blown through the house, objects ripping through the air, sofas and tables performing somersaults. Traditionally, these acoustical and kinetic effects have been attributed to a noisy, boisterous spirit called a poltergeist; today, however, they are termed Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis or RSPK by parapsychologists who theorize that in certain unstable persons, or places, intense reservoirs of energy dam up. When, or if, these reserves are released, energy is transmitted from the psychical to the physical plane.

It is difficult, as usual, to pin down Madame Blavatsky’s own views on these manifestations. According to Vera, Helena made a distinction between two kinds of invisible entities: brainless elementals, the shells of departed beings whom she mockingly referred to as spooks; and superhuman men with whom she was in constant communication and who visited her in their astral bodies. But whether she actually made this distinction at Rougodevo in 1859 is doubtful, since she evolved her theories gradually and in a piecemeal fashion. Moreover, H.P.B. translated Vera’s recollections of this period and she did not hesitate to correct and revise the material as she went along, claiming that Vera did not know what she was talking about.