Obituary to Mikhail Nikiforovich Katkov

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 6 pages

Six pages, and the most personal writing in this batch. Mikhail Katkov, editor of the Moscow Herald and the Russian Messenger, had died, and this is her letter of tribute, sent from London in August 1887. She had written for both papers for seven years and, she says, had never had anything but kindness and gentle condescension for her ungrammatical Letters from India — a debt she says she will never forget.

The tone is unguarded from the first line. She has no idea whose hands the letter will fall into, only that whoever reads it will be Russian, and that any true Russian will understand it was written not for propriety's sake but under the weight of sincere grief. For four days, she writes, she has been in a daze. The judgement that follows is political as well as personal: that he is no Russian and no patriot who fails to see this death as an irreparable loss, that no other such sentinel of the country's interests now lives, and that this is why the Berlin and Austrian press rejoice — there being no one left, in her phrase, to crush their lying brains under his heel. Skobelev and Aksakov are named in the same breath as others recently lost.

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