by Elena F. Pisareva  (Wheaton: Quest Books, 2008, 113pp.)

The thirty years prior to the 1917 Russian Revolution were years filled with the discovery of Asian religious thought and practice including its more Westernized forms. In the 1870s, the Russian Tsarist empire started moving east to absorb what is today’s Central Asia. The Crimean War prevented Russia from moving toward the west, and British expansion in India made the Russians fearful of British control of Afghanistan and Central Asia. Russian troops started moving into Central Asia — the decisive battle of Tashkent was 1865. Along with troops, the Russian government sent scholars to study the way of life, and they started to write about Islam, the Sufi dervish movements, the Tibetan forms of Buddhism found in Mongolia and among other Central Asian peoples.

Along with government-sponsored scholars, there were independent individuals who went to Central Asia on a personal spiritual journey such as G.I. Gurdjieff. The reports of these finding created an interest in Asian thought among the educated elite.

At the same period, from the mid 1860s to the eve of the Revolution, wealthy Russians would spend the winter in Western Europe and sent their children to elite schools in Switzerland, Germany and France. Russian writers and painters participated in the intellectual and artistic life of Western Europe. There was a good deal of intellectual exchange, along with the discovery of American writers such as Walt Whitman. A good picture of the intellectual life on the eve of the Revolution is drawn in the first part of Gary Lachman’s In Search of P.D. Ouspensky (Quest Books, 2006, )

Into this confluence of ideas from east and west, the Russian branch of the Theosophical Society was born. Elena Pisareva, one of its early members, recounts in this book the early years from its legal founding in 1909 until November 1918 when the last annual meeting was held. By early 1919, the Communist Party prevented all non-Party organizations from operating. In 1921 Elena Pisareva fled on foot to Finland and then joined Anna Kamensky, who had been the chief motor of Russian theosophical activity, in Geneva.

Born in 1855, Elena Pisareva died in Geneva in 1944. She came from an aristocratic family and was educated in Germany and continued her contacts with German thought. Thus she came to know the writings of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). From 1902 to 1909, Steiner was the general secretary of the German branch of the Theosophical Society and wrote his key theosophical books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainments (1904), Theosophy (1904) and Occult Science: An Outline (1909).

A common interest in the writings of Rudolf Steiner brought Pisareva into contact with Anna Kamensky (1867-1952), an intellectual who wrote On the Hidden Meaning of Life and helped in the translation of spiritual books, notably from the French Edouard Schure’s Les grands initiés, which had a wide readership in Russia. Schure’s account of spiritual leadership from Krishna to Plato to Jesus highlighted the common themes of religious life, making the many currents of religious thought present in Russia at the time, not one of opposition but potential harmony.

Elena Pisareva married Nikolai Pisarev, an aristocratic social reformer with a large estate where he put into practice schools and health facilities for his farmers (former serfs). He also started Logos Publishing Company which ran from 1905 to 1917, publishing theosophical and other spiritual books. His estate became a chief meeting place for Russian theosophists — Anna Kamensky often spending the summer months there. The estate was in a spiritually-prone area being close to the church whose elder is depicted as Father Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

While the period was one of religious and spiritual exchanges, there was also a backlash from the Orthodox Church which feared any ideas that it could not control. In 1912, the Orthodox Church instigated a court trial against the Theosophical Society for “blasphemy, sacrilege and insulting the saints” — a political crime that threatened the foundation of church and state. However, the power of the Church was already weakened — swept away by the 1917 Revolution. By 1912, liberal freedom of speech ideas were taking hold, and the Theosophical Society was acquitted. As so often happens, efforts to limit freedom of thought brought publicity to the Society, and intellectuals, who did not know of it, then joined, in particular followers of Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy’s daughter-in-law Sofia became a member.

The Theosophical Society did not touch the working class but had an impact on the intellectual-artistic milieu. Alexandra Unkovsky, a well-known violinist, was an active member and often played at the meetings on the Pisarev estate. She, like Alexander Scriabine, also influenced by theosophical currents, tried to make a new form of music performance using both music and color. She composed a musical piece on the Bhagavad Gita, remarked at the time. She also helped in the creation of a theosophically-influenced Orpheus Circle for Music in St. Petersburg.

There was also, in the Steiner spirit, an interest in developing new educational forms. The Society helped in the creation of the Union for the Education of a Free Person.

With the Russian Revolution and the coming to power of the Communist Party which wanted a monopoly on ideology, education and arts, the above-ground theosophical movement came to an end in Russia. Those who could left the country, and others carried on out of sight. Elena Pisareva has written an interesting, personalized history of events in which she participated and of persons she knew.

For a fuller and more academic presentation of the period see: Maria Carlson No Religion Higher than Truth: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia 1875-1922 (Princeton University Press, 1993)
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal (Ed.) The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (1997)
Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal: A Revolution of the Spirit: Crisis in Value in Russia, 1890-1924 (1990) Both from Cornell University Press.