Boris de Zirkoff on Madame Blavatsky's Background and Early Life

Boris de Zirkoff · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 25 pages

A definitive edition of the Collected Writings, Boris de Zirkoff argues, calls for a survey of the years before Helena Petrovna Blavatsky embarked on her literary career — and this essay, which opens the first volume, is that survey. What distinguishes it from most biographical sketches of her is its honesty about its own limits. The source material for the early period, de Zirkoff writes, is fragmentary and uncertain; her own statements are often contradictory and therefore unreliable, and the accounts of friends and relatives are frequently just as confused, with the notable exception of her sister Vera Petrovna de Zhelihovsky, who kept a diary and was a particularly careful writer.

Much of the uncertainty, he observes, could have been at least partly resolved during the lifetimes of the people who were there, but was allowed to stand unchallenged until it was too late — the witnesses gone, and documents known once to have existed destroyed. The best any modern writer can do is present a fragmentary account with obvious lacunae, or a set of possible alternatives supported by references to early sources, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. De Zirkoff adds that this is not a situation unique to Blavatsky: the lives of genuine occultists are for the most part little known and their movements uncertain, and no biographer would fare better with the Count de Saint-Germain, Cagliostro, Apollonius of Tyana, Śamkarāchārya, Simon Magus, Zoroaster or Pythagoras.

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