De Zirkoff Recalls His Formative Years in Russia

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 22 pages

Twenty-two pages, and *the only autobiography in this batch*. Where the other de Zirkoff files in this section are biographies he wrote of other people, this is his account of his own early life. The frontispiece is the lesser coat of arms of the Russian Empire.

The contents page divides it into five parts, each separately paginated so a reader can go straight to one: boyhood days; my last year in Russia; how I learned about theosophy; how I came to Point Loma; and a closing section headed simply From then on. The shape of the story is set by the Revolution — the family, headed by a Russian general and connected to Blavatsky through his mother, Lydia Dmitriyevna von Hahn, a second cousin of hers, fled in 1917 across Finland to Stockholm — and the memoir turns on what that displacement made of him. The theosophical sections explain the connection this whole section of the site depends on, since he became the compiler and editor of the fifteen-volume Collected Writings which nearly every file here cites. Point Loma, near San Diego, was the American headquarters of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, and the account of how a Russian émigré studying languages and classics in European universities ended up there is the human part of the story. A page of suggested reading from this series closes the file.

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