Blavatsky Defends The Key to Theosophy

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 16 pages

Sixteen pages from the Collected Writings volume XII, pages 334 to 349, published there under the title "Neo-Buddhism". The frontispiece is by Ilene Meyer. *This is her reply to a review, and it was very nearly lost*: a Russian manuscript in her handwriting was discovered years later in the Adyar archives, with notes appended by her sister, Vera de Zhelihovsky.

Those notes are reproduced at the front of the file and are worth reading before the essay itself. The first calls it Helena's last article, which her sister was unable to have published owing to the enmity of the Russian public to theosophy in general and of certain individuals to her personally, adding the hope that someday it may be found useful. A second, in the same hand, records that the article was written three years earlier and had not been published owing to circumstances for which the author was not responsible — and that in the meantime the author died in London in 1891. A third explains that when the Russian Review declined to print the reply, Blavatsky asked her sister to place it in some other Russian periodical, and that absences from home and family circumstances prevented it during her lifetime; the time has now come, she writes, for her sister to speak for herself, because the opinions of many Russian writers about her and about the Society are based precisely on the article she was answering. The reviewer was Vladimir Sergueyevich Solovyov, an outstanding Russian philosopher and writer, most of whose work has never been translated into English — and, as the file notes, the brother of Vsevolod Solovyov the novelist, who after a brief association with Blavatsky and the movement became a bitter enemy. The essay itself is her defence of The Key to Theosophy against his reading of it.

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