Madame Blavatsky Enlightens the Sceptics of Her Motherland

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 8 pages

An unfinished manuscript in Russian, in her own handwriting, held in the Adyar archives under the title Teosoficheskoye Obshchestvo — a nineteenth-century tale. Her sister Vera de Zhelihovsky recorded that Blavatsky was writing it shortly before her final illness and that only part of the introduction was ever completed. Boris de Zirkoff, who assembled the text, calls it a masterpiece of Russian prose, full of sparkling wit and vivid imagery.

Its publication history is unusually tangled and the note explains it: an English translation by the Hungarian theosophist Zoltan de Algya-Pap appeared in The Theosophist in September 1961; the original Russian was printed the following year by the Boston journal Alba, edited by Nicholas and Dagmara von Reincke, with facsimiles of two manuscript pages reproduced here. The English text used is de Algya-Pap's, revised against the Russian. Her own opening states the purpose plainly: that so much nonsense is written and spoken, especially in Russia, about the Society she planned and founded in New York on 17 November 1875, that she has decided to enlighten her compatriots — whether they believe her being, she adds, another matter. It is dedicated to the sceptics of the motherland.

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