Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia 9781501757280

Citation preview

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

MODERN Occultism . ---tn -

--

LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

JULIA

MANNHERZ

NIU PRESS DeKalb, IL

© 2012 by Northern Illinois University Press Published by the Northern Illinois University Press, DeKalb, Illinois 60115

All Rights Reserved Design by Shaun Allshouse

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mannherz, Julia. Modem occultism in late imperial Russia I Julia Mannherz. pages; em Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87580-462-0 (clothbound) -ISBN (invalid) 978-1-60909-064-7 (e-book) I. Occultism-Russia-History-19th century. 2. Occultism-Russia-History-20th century. 3. Spiritualism-Russia-History-19th century. 4. SpiritualismRussia-History-20th century. I. Title. BF1434.R8M36 2012 130.947'09034--dc23 2012010094

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

vn

3

1-The Laboratory in the Salon Spiritualism Comes to Russia 21 2-0ccult Science and the Russian Public 48

3-The Occult Metropolis Putting the Hidden to Practical Use 79 4-Servants, Priests, and Haunted Houses 111 5-Popular Occultism and the Orthodox Church 140 6-The Occult at Court Mariia Puare and the Fate of Occultism during the Great War 163

Conclusion 189

Notes

195

Selected Bibliography Index

269

249

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have helped me write this book. Financial support was provided by the Cambridge European Trust, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, the University of Gottingen, and in Oxford by the History Faculty, Oriel College, and the Fell Fund. I am grateful to all of them. I also wish to thank the staffs of the libraries and archives where I conducted my research: the university libraries of Cambridge, Gottingen, Munster, and Oxford, the Rossiiskaia natsional'naia biblioteka, the Rossiiskaia gosudarstvennaia biblioteka, the Biblioteka akademii nauk, the Gosudarstvennaia publichnaia istoricheskaia biblioteka, the Sanktpeterburgskaia gosudarstvennaia teatral'naia biblioteka, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, the British Library, the library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University College London), the Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv, the Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, the Natsional'nyi arkhiv respubliki Tatarstana, the Muzei tsirkovogo iskusstva, the Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga, the Tsentral'nyi istoricheskii arkhiv Moskvy, the Muzei Bakhrushina, and the Institut russkoi literatury. I am most grateful to friends and colleagues without whose help I would never have written this book. Hubertus Jahn and Susan Morrissey helped me formulate the project at the very beginning, and Hubertus saw it through the stages of a doctoral thesis. Natascha Astrina was always happy to help with the difficult features of the Russian language, and without her, Tatjana Balzer, and Elizaveta Liphardt, research trips to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan would not have worked out so well. Aleksandr and Ol'ga Astriny always had an open door for me in Moscow, Zoia Balandina was my host in St. Petersburg, and together with Kiril Bitner and Elizaveta Liphardt, Zoia tracked down texts about hypnosis, while Guzel' Ibneeva, Lialia Khasanshina, and Elena Vishlenkova helped me find primary texts in Kazan. Tetyana Bogdan, Nikolai Bogomolov, Sandra Dahlke, Vera Dubina, James von Geldem, Boris Kolonitskii, Polly McMichael, and Karen Petrone have also helped me with sources or suggestions.

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Irina Khmel'nitskaia has done more for me than could ever be expected of a friend, providing me with a place to stay in Moscow, helping with archives, libraries, red tape, and together with Dmitrii Provodin, enabling me to conduct "on-site research." In Gottingen, Manfred Hildermeier was always ready to help, and in Oxford my colleagues at the History Faculty and Oriel College have made me feel most welcome and have supported me in every possible way. Numerous friends and colleagues have commented on drafts of chapters or the whole manuscript at various stages of its development, and I would like to thank Clare Ashdowne, Dominik Collet, Bruno Currie, Simon Dixon, Murray Frame, Ian Forrest, Michael Hagemeister, Jana Howlett, Hubertus Jahn, Emese Lafferton, Carlos Martins, David Moon, Alex Oberlander, Will Pooley, Bernice Rosenthal, Steve Smith, Nick Stargardt, and Christine Worobec for their invaluable suggestions. At Northern Illinois University Press, Amy Farranto and Susan Bean have been extremely helpful editors in every possible way, and I am also grateful to Marlyn Miller for her thorough copy editing. Tilman Bauer has supported me in every possible way throughout the many years I have been working on the occult in Russia; for his love and companionship I am more than thankful. This book is dedicated to him.

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

Introduction

I

n the early 1890s, the symbolist poet Valerii Iakovlevich Briusov discovered his enthusiasm for the occult, and by the early months of 1893, he was regularly attending spiritualist seances. Several times a week, he joined a circle of acquaintances who gathered in darkened rooms to experience uncanny, supernatural occurrences. 1 These assemblies were so important to Briusov that he noted them in his diary, recorded them in a black notebook with the inscription "Spiritualist Seances," and mentioned them in letters. 2 Judging by these accounts, seances not only provided Briusov with playful entertainment and a chance to engage in mischievousness and in amorous adventures, but they also engendered philosophical and artistic contemplation about reality and were a source of creative inspiration. So deep was Briusov's emotional, artistic, and intellectual investment in spiritualism that, bedridden in 1895, he longingly begged his friend Aleksandr Lang (Miropol'skii) to visit and to entertain him: "bring the planchette with you; we'll write and hold a seance."3 Eventually, Briusov's seance experiences provided the basis for a novella and influenced his poetry and his self-perception as an artist. Briusov, of course, was an outstanding poet, but his enthusiasm for spiritualism was far from exceptional. Ideas about mystical and supernatural powers played a prominent role in the cultural imagination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian society. While Briusov was walking the night streets of Moscow to join his fellow seance participants, many of his contemporaries were engaged in similar activities. No statistics are available that could shed light on the absolute numbers of those who, alongside Briusov, were drawn to occult rituals during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. 4 Those who recorded occult activities in

4

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

their letters, diaries, notebooks, or memoirs were predominantly highly educated men, but a significant corpus of sources indicates that many more contemporaries shared these interests. The widespread fascination with the occult was mirrored in, among others, the sphere of publishing. Between 1881 and the end of the empire, over 30 periodicals devoted to the invisible world appeared in Russia, but the occult was also a prominent topic in mainstream publishing. 5 Cheap pamphlets extolled occult techniques and standard newspapers frequently reported supernatural occurrences. In February 1893, at the time when Briusov was attending seances in Moscow, the popular St. Petersburg daily Peterburgskaia gazeta (St. Petersburg Gazette) ran a series of articles on spiritualists in the northern capital entitled "Peterburgskie spirity."6 Over the course of two weeks, the broadsheet informed its readers about some of the capital's most famous occultists, about ghostly apparitions, reincarnation, spirit guidance in fiction writing, hypnosis, spirit photography, the importance of religion for all these phenomena, and the close relation between occult phenomena and the sciences. The series began with an interview ofViktor Ivanovich Pribytkov, and it is indicative of the allure of spiritualism that Pribytkov, "the 'official' St. Petersburg spiritualist, editor and publisher of the [spiritualist] journal Rebus," needed little introduction. He and his journal were well known to the newspaper's readers. 7 By the beginning of the new century, Briusov was moving confidently in the circles Peterburgskaia gazeta described. He made the acquaintance ofPribytkov in 1900, contributed articles to Rebus, and presented the journal's editor with "a small book of my poetry that has just come out." Briusov hoped that Pribytkov might find "in the last section, where I speak openly about my cherished beliefs [... ], poems [whose themes] are not entirely unfamiliar to you." 8 Before entrusting his letters to Pribytkov to the post, Briusov carefully composed draft versions, which underlines the importance he attributed to this correspondence. 9 Three years later, and more than a decade after he first took an interest in seances, Briusov had gained such high regard among Russia's leading spiritualists that he offered the gravesite obituary of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Aksakov, the man who had done more than anyone else to propagate spiritualism in Russia. 10 Briusov's interest in the occult and his friendship with authors, editors, and protagonists of publications dealing with the supernatural illustrates several themes that are at the center of this study. The significance of the occult in the private lives of contemporaries and its role in mass culture are the subjects of this book. The history of late imperial occult thought and practice are traced

INTRODUCTION 5

from their origins in private salons to the public debates of the 1870s and the subsequent proliferation of the occult within tum-of-the-century mass culture. Briusov himself knew of these different approaches to the supernatural world firsthand. His acquaintance with Pribytkov and Aksakov brought him into contact with representatives of an older generation of Russian spiritualists, who prominently propagated their beliefs in the growing sphere of publishing in the 1870s and 1880s, and who confidently insisted that the occult was scientifically explicable. Briusov himself, however, moved away from this rational approach and cherished the irrational sensations that occult rituals offered. He experimented with various techniques aside from spiritualist seances, and his increasing versatility was representative of a diversification of occult practices around the tum of the century.

Popular Occultism in the Russian Empire In late imperial Russia, occultism was made up of a cluster of theories, beliefs, and practices that included spiritualist seances; quasi-scientific theories concerning mathematics, x-rays, and light waves; hypnosis; meditation exercises; theosophical discussion groups; telepathy; clairvoyance; dietary regimes; prayers; gymnastic programs; and investigations into supernatural occurrences such as haunted houses. In most contemporary texts, the occult was used as a word with positive connotations whose meaning combined rational understanding with the discovery of higher emotional truth. As one encyclopedia described it, the occult was part of "the double striving of the human soul to believe and to apprehend." 11 Although highly diverse and disparate, these practices formed a unity not only because contemporaries labeled them as "occult" but also because they shared a number of prime concerns. One of these was the common objective of all occultists to interact with and to study a hidden and greater dimension of reality. 12 In the second half of the nineteenth century, this desire to experience and explain a concealed aspect of the world that many considered to be painfully unexplored was prominently engendered by the fashionable practice of spiritualism. During seances, that is, gatherings of men and women in darkened rooms that aimed to establish contact with the spirits of the departed, spiritualists received enigmatic messages delivered through knocks or in awkward handwriting; they observed sparks of light; they saw how invisible forces moved furniture, played instruments, or left imprints of immaterial

6

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

hands and feet on soft surfaces. All of these phenomena raised challenging questions about the ability of current knowledge to comprehend invisible forces and about the relationship of the here and now to another world. As shown in the first chapter of this book, spiritualism became a prominent practice in post-reform Russia that developed out of noble salon culture and combined entertainment with science. It allowed contemporaries to explore their relationship to death at a time when religious convictions concerning immortality were being challenged by scientific notions, and it moreover enabled participants to appreciate their own intense sense of being alive. Spiritualist gatherings also provided practitioners with the opportunity to fashion themselves as independently minded investigators of unexplored aspects of nature, or as unconventional artists. In the second chapter, two areas of knowledge are examined that, according to occultists, shed light on the workings of a hidden reality: mathematics and physiological ideas regarding hypnosis. The analysis of a ferocious public debate that erupted in 1878 over the claim that non-Euclidean geometry and higher dimensional mathematics explained the workings of seance phenomena begins the chapter. The chapter ends with a description of how this intellectually relatively exclusive debate metamorphosed into a mass discussion about occult science, which in the 1880s and 1890s centered around the practice of hypnosis. Historians and sociologists have frequently argued that occultism emerged as a reaction to the rise of science and materialism, and that occultism and rationality represent binary opposites. 13 In fact, occultists' relationship with science was complex and highly ambivalent. Occultists operated with scientific notions and hoped that their theories would be welcomed by representatives of established academe. Thus, numerous occult texts stressed the rational qualities of occultism by describing the study of the hidden realm as an innovative scientific discipline in its own right. Journals such as Vestnik okku 'ltnykh nauk (Herald of Occult Sciences) and Mag: Zhurnal okkul'tnykh nauk (The Magician: Journal for Occult Sciences) equated the occult with the exact sciences in their titles. Other pamphlets advanced "professors of secret sciences" or referred to doctoral theses in the area, while Pribytkov asserted in Rebus that occultism was devoted to "the teaching of nature's mysteries." 14 Occultists were not entirely unsuccessful in their endeavors to claim scientificity for their convictions. Spiritualists could point toward a number of esteemed scientists who ardently defended the veracity of seance phenomena. These included, among others, the chemist and fellow of the Royal Society Sir

INTRODUCTION 7

William Crookes, the German astrophysicist Karl Friedrich Zollner, the chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov, and the zoologist Nikolai Petrovich Vagner. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, physiologists became increasingly interested in hypnosis, a technique in which occultists claimed expertise. That established scientists would conduct research into such a "mysterious" topic was hailed by occultists as a sign that their concerns were finally entering the academic mainstream. While a lot of energy was spent in the attempt to situate the occult within the realm of science, occultists could also be extremely critical of scientific notions, which they argued failed to address the most significant areas of human existence: the ultimate meaning of life and death. Despite their criticism, however, occultists felt painfully offended by the majority of scientists who rejected their conclusions. Because of occultists' claims to explain nature fully, the fervent support by some scientists, and the hostile reaction it received from a majority of outspoken scholars, occult science became a hotly debated topic in the culturally influential thick journals, and it generated significant interest within popular culture. Consequently, debates about occult science in the public sphere turned into broader discussions about the veracity of scientific truth and its relationship to the relativity and ambiguity of modem life. Occultism, then, combined the disparate: belief about life after death, and science, entertainment and individual self-fashioning, as well as highly intellectual debates and popular culture. Indeed, one of the defining features of occult theory and practice was its versatility and eclecticism. 15 Occultists were trying to understand seance phenomena with the help of geometry, and they attempted to grasp the workings of hypnosis by evoking electricity or neurology, but they simultaneously borrowed from renaissance alchemy, Jewish Kabbalah, Buddhist mysticism, Christian theology, and Kantian philosophy. This borrowing of diverse ideas, which frequently contradicted each other, resulted in notions that on the one hand attempted to unify all human knowledge, but that on the other hand often lacked intellectual rigor and coherence. The nature of occult forces was a case in point. From the spiritualist perspective, these resided mostly outside of those who observed them, that is, occult phenomena were thought to be caused by the spirits of the dead. Yet champions of spiritualism also suggested that seance phenomena might be caused by powers that resided deep inside the psyche of the living who attended seances. 16 Toward the tum of the century, the border between external and internal forces became increasingly blurred and notions about these powers ever more vague. Sometimes, contemporaries

8

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

experienced the lack of precision in occult thinking as problematic. In 1892, Rebus published an article entitled "The Meaning of Terms Used in Spiritualism," which was intended to introduce greater semantic rigor. 17 The project, however, was ill-fated from the start, for the text was based on a German document that did not take Russian usage into consideration. Theoretical inconsistency and ideological overlap could be found across the spectrum of occult theory and practice and made a clear distinction between schools of occult thought almost impossible. How-to manuals, for example, combined instructions about spiritualist seances with fortune-telling, hypnosis with clairvoyance, meditation with the interpretation of dreams, or folklore with the fourth dimension, or they discussed the obstructive quality of corsets before turning to Indian fakirs. 18 The eclecticism of occultism is discussed in chapter three, as is the move of occult forces from the outside into the human psyche, a development that facilitated a widening of the occult sphere to include ever more varied forms of practices and beliefs. Popular occultism was eclectic and defied rigorous systematization. While this may be seen as an intellectual weakness, it was also one of its greatest strengths, in that it assured that occultism could be experienced as all embracing. After all, the object of occult study was that which, although real, was "impenetrable to the normal human senses," including the rational mind. 19 Occult thought, then, could not conform to standards of cold academic reasoning were it to do justice to its object of investigation. Around the turn of the century, most occultists abandoned attempts to approach the occult with scientific theories and instead relished supernatural experiences precisely because they defied reason but stressed emotion. Occultists described how supernatural experience led them from the mechanics of everyday life "into the realm of the heart and of sentiment."20 This journey conferred upon them highly personal visions of sublime wisdom, majestic love, and supreme power. As one disciple put it: "these sensations allow us to feel revelatory meaning."21 Rather than agreeing upon a set of abstract ideas and practices, diverse forms of occult penetration of higher wisdom shared an emotional, and sometimes also a bodily, experience of awe and insight. Two techniques that stressed such experience are the focus of chapter three: gaining hypnotic power over others, and the so-called occult-mental prayer. The first allowed practitioners to gain influence over themselves and others, while the second brought about a sense of belonging within a larger community of like-minded brethren. Both exercises offered an entryway into hidden reality and a technique that enabled practitioners to employ the mighty powers that lingered in this realm.

INTRODUCTION 9

One further trait that was shared by diverse occult ideas and practices was "a common ideology of seekership,"22 that is, a painstaking search for a deeper truth that would bestow meaning on all aspects of everyday experience and transcend quotidian triviality by integrating all forms ofknowledge. One of the consequences of occult seekership was the ever-widening scope of occult concerns, which in early twentieth-century Russia were advertised very openly. 23 Cheap pamphlets and journals taught readers "how to summon a ghost," "how to develop clairvoyance," and how to obtain "spiritual prowess." 24 At first sight, mass publications dealing with the occult appear to be a contradiction in terms. The occult, which translates from the Latin as that which is deliberately hidden, cannot, it would appear, be trumpeted by cheap instruction manuals. Yet the modem popular occultism that this study deals with was highly visible. The vibrant print culture of the late tsarist empire meant that the occult conception of the universe, allegedly revealed only to the initiate, was proclaimed in journals and in the pages of cheap pamphlets, and advertised in newspaper listings. The occult truth that these organs revealed was not openly self-evident; it had to be searched for and found, but it was neither concealed nor beyond reach. It was veiled, but accessible for each individual who looked for it, and cheap instruction manuals promised to teach readers how to go about this quest. The occult insights that these publications revealed, then, were not mysteries in the sense of being inaccessible but, in the words of Jacques Derrida, "in the sense that a secret provides a valuable insight."25 Seekership could be individual and directed toward emotional insight; it could also manifest itself around attempts to study and to explain mysterious phenomena. In late imperial Russia, haunted houses provided opportunities for such analysis; and their boisterous character brought together convinced occultists and contemporaries who did not necessarily share beliefs in supernatural interference. These unquiet homes, which were visited by curious onlookers and inspected by the police, the clergy, and journalists, are the subject of chapter four. Reports about them featured prominently in newspapers, pamphlets, and journals, thereby confronting ordinary readers with phenomena that seemed to pertain to a different reality. The logic and narrative of accounts about haunted houses resembled dreams, and their meaning defied straightforward interpretation. By combining different notions and possible explanations, none of which, however, was presented as preeminent, debates about haunted houses continued the occult tradition of uniting the disparate in the public sphere. They also significantly expressed an attitude that accepted and even relished ambiguity, merging Orthodoxy with medicine, folklore with

10

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

social thought, and bringing together the rural village in which these events took place with the urban mass culture that reported them. Discussions about haunted houses illustrate the location of occultism in the cultural landscape of late imperial Russia. Occult ideas and practices were focused around specialized journals or instruction manuals devoted to the topic. But the occult was also prominent in the mainstream press, where it was debated by the country's most prominent cultural, scientific, and artistic figures. In mainstream publishing, however, supernatural occurrences remained a contentious topic. Some newspaper articles implied that spiritualist explanations were plausible, but frequently writers remained ambiguous or expressed ridicule and skeptical or even scathing assessments. The occult was thus never quite accepted and retained an illicit fiavor. 26 The focus of chapter five turns toward those who observed the occult from the outside by analyzing the reactions of Russian Orthodox theologians. It shows that theologians, like occultists, were challenged by the ascent of science as the most authoritative form to explain nature and man. Orthodox authors, like their occultist compatriots, wrestled with individualism, immortality, and the meaning of miracles. But despite these shared concerns, Orthodox thinkers were restrained by Christian teaching, and their responses to these questions stayed within the boundaries of theological tradition. Orthodox writers in tum criticized occultists for abandoning basic Christian tenets. For example, occultism allegedly did not lead believers to strive toward personal salvation and moreover lacked the redeeming figure of Christ. Occultists were indeed not much concerned with a deity or a personal relationship with God. Instead, as discussed above, they freely incorporated various religious and philosophical traditions. Notwithstanding the affinities to both science and belief, the occult was rejected by the official church as heretical and lambasted by prominent scientists as irrational. The occult, then, was also defined by its position in society. In late imperial Russia it may have been at the cultural center, but it also lay on the religious, scientific, and social peripheries. Theologians and occultists differed not only in their ideas, restrained in the case of the first and rather imaginative in the case of the latter, but in their ties to social institutions. While Orthodox writers were associated with and bound by the traditions of the Church, the intellectual freedom of occultists was not obstructed by any institutional organization. In contrast to established churches, occultists did not create set organizations, a ministry, or even a community of fellow occultists that was clearly defined. As a consequence, occult identities were hard to grasp. Establishing who was a spiritualist, a hypnotist,

INTRODUCTION 11

or even an occultist was tricky. When it came to the occult community, the driving stimulus of seekership acted as a centrifugal force. In their search for an individual experience of hidden meaning, men and women in the late tsarist empire shopped around; very few of them were faithfully wedded to only one of the numerous teachings and practices available but moved from one to the next. Pribytkov and Aksakov, for example, remained vocal advocates of spiritualism over several decades, but they also dabbled in hypnosis. Briusov's interest in spiritualism likewise continued over many decades, but the poet also tried yoga and followed meditation exercises. 27 Others later reminisced about interests that combined spiritualism with yoga, telepathy, and the training of hypnotic powers. 28 Moreover, while engaging in such heterodox practices, occultists also commonly asserted their Russian Orthodox identities. 29 And while Pribytkov, Aksakov, and Butlerov stayed faithful to occult convictions broadly defined over decades, other contemporaries moved in and out of occult practice. Despite its failure to congeal into a clearly defined intellectual, religious, or social movement, occultism in late imperial Russia formed an entity, for it conformed to what sociologist Colin Campbell has described a "cultic milieu," that is, a loose amalgamation of practitioners who are united by diverse, transient, and loosely structured practices, and by the subscription to periodicals and shared reading, all of which revolve around fluctuating belief systems. Such a cultic milieu has undefined boundaries, only a rudimentary organization, and no sacraments. It is accessible, tolerant of various strands of thought within the broader sphere of the occult (and beyond), and it makes few demands on its members. 30 Despite these characteristics, the cultic milieu is a single entity, not only because individual practitioners take part in its various manifestations and thus hold it together, but also because a common consciousness of deviance, a need to justify their views, and a sense of mutual sympathy and support unite followers. 31 Its loose links set popular occultism, which is the object of this study, apart from other movements that are exclusive, emphasize hierarchies, and conduct their meetings in secrecy. Whereas societies such as Freemasons, Martinists, the Golden Dawn, sectarian groups and, to a lesser degree, theosophical groupings were tightly structured, clearly circumscribed, expounded fixed belief systems, and possessed stable institutions, the popular occult lacked this organizing principle. The teachings and writings of such exclusive occult groups may become part of the sphere of popular occultism when they transcend the restrictions of their institutional boundaries through publications or open lee-

12

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

tures, but their secret meetings and well-guarded hierarchies keep them from full engagement in popular culture. The public visibility of spiritualism in turn explains why it plays such a prominent role in this study: its central practice, the seance, was straightforward enough to be conducted by everyone who wanted to give it a try, and the ideas that stood behind it were easily comprehensible intellectually and accessible practically through the popular press. Spiritualism moreover lacked a central organizing institution; instead it was anarchic, with practitioners meeting at privately arranged gatherings. They identified with each other through shared interests and readings and common convictions. Popular occultism more generally, then, was an unorganized "frame of mind" with seekership at its center. 32

Occultism in the Modern World In the eyes of many commentators the success of occultism in post-reform Russia was shocking because belief in a different, hidden reality that was inaccessible to the rational mind was at odds with Enlightenment ideals about modem man, his independence from supernatural forces, and the powerful knowledge he used with increasing success to subjugate nature. The modem rational persona of the nineteenth century, as embodied by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev's fictional character Evgenii Bazarov, believed in neither supernatural powers nor in the value of emotion. 33 Bazarov and real-life men like him confirmed Max Weber's influential assessment that modernity was a world free of mysterious powers, a world that was thoroughly "disenchanted."34 What made oc-. cultism a sensitive topic and assured its notoriety, then, was its flourishing in a period when, in the minds of many, it should not have been around. Indeed, some sociologists define occultism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon that was in various ways closely implicated with secularization, either as a reaction against it, 35 or as the revival of an older esoteric tradition in a period of spiritual disenchantment. 36 Whereas these approaches stress the difference between occultism and the modem-a difference that in the latter understanding is based on dependence-in this work, their similarity is emphasized. Until relatively recently, most historians have followed Weber's assessment and equated modernity with rationalism and a rejection of mysterious powers.37 In the last two decades, however, historians of religion have shown that faith and individual experiences of the supernatural remained highly important throughout the nineteenth century; indeed they have argued for a religious re-

INTRODUCTION 13

vival in the period. 38 Scholars of heterodox beliefs in turn have equally noted the relevance of such convictions in the modem age and the way in which they engaged with and were motivated by contemporary concerns. 39 Such observations necessitate a reassessment of the modem. Whereas traditional definitions of modernity have painted a static picture of industrialized economies, administrative rationalization, political participation, cognitive realism, and belief in progress, recent studies have emphasized cultural modernism, focusing on self-reflexivity, the fleeting, the contingent, the irrational, and the contradictory, which pervaded both popular and high culture as modernity's defining features. 40 Like some nineteenth-century poets, these scholars have defined the experience of the modem as tied up with an acute sense that seemingly stable certainties-social structures, economic customs, religious traditions, moral values, political establishments-were changing or even disintegrating, that life had become transient and unpredictable. The experience of flux was rife in late imperial Russia: students of the period have painted the picture of a society in which developments of change, disintegration, and realignment were all pervasive. They have pointed to political reform, industrialization, and urbanization, and to the upheavals that followed in their wake: mass migration; unstable social and cultural boundaries between classes, ethnicities, and genders; the broadening of the public sphere; the emergence of a mass culture that amplified competing ideologies of autocracy versus revolution, enthusiasm for technological progress versus religious faith, fears about science gone bad, and nostalgia for a preindustrial past; traditional patriarchy versus feminism; Russian chauvinism versus tolerance and calls for national autonomy. 41 As these examples show, the experience of modernity was not only one of flux but also characterized by the sensation that opposites coexist and contemporaries have to encounter the "simultaneity of the un-simultaneous."42 The modem experience thus describes the sensation of encountering the end of the old and the promise of new empowering times, while the lingering and nostalgic endurance of the past within this modernity also warns of a future that could be threatening. 43 Nothing epitomized the ambiguity of the present-the simultaneity of transience, disappearance, and tenacity, and the coexistence of opposites-and the elusive promise of an unrealized future better than the occult and visions of ethereal spirits. In occultism, the past, present, and future collapsed. Occult thinking combined intellectual traditions harking back to pre-Enlightenment thought with state-of-the-art scientific theories and promised future insights that would revolutionize human understanding of the world and of the human

14

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

self. 44 Jacques Derrida has read spirit appearances themselves as moments of heightened temporal ambivalence, since the presence of a person who is no more but whose eternal self points toward the future fuses the chronologically disparate. 45 Moreover, supernatural phenomena are-as is modem life-transient and ever changing, and their development defies prediction and control. Spirits appear and disappear, or sometimes even fail to appear despite great efforts of the living to summon them. Yet while the living have an image of the character of ghosts in their minds, these beings are ultimately ungraspable, they lack corporality. That makes the supernatural a particularly suitable illustration of the modem, which, in the words of the decadent French poet Charles Baudelaire, was defined by "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable."46 In this book, then, the occult is analyzed as a way of thinking, feeling, and describing the world that was enmeshed with and representative of the experience of European modernity.

Occultism and Historiography The importance of occultism in the lives of individuals and in late nineteenth-century Russian publishing notwithstanding, the fascination with the supernatural evident among contemporaries has either been ignored or actively written out of history. Briusov provides a particularly striking example in this regard. 47 In his diary, as in his letters to his friend Lang, thoughts about art, philosophy, and literature were inextricably entangled with spiritualist experiences and sexual adventures. Indeed, the first entry set the tone by describing a seance meeting. 48 Throughout the first notebook, Briusov described in great detail his spiritualist activities and his infatuation with Elena Maslova, during both social functions and spiritualist gatherings, and he made clear that decadence, spiritualism, and passion were the important components of his artistic program. One diary entry reads: "[I must] Find a lodestar in the mist. And I see them: decadence and spiritualism. Yes! Whatever one may say, whether they are false, or ridiculous, they are moving ahead, developing and the future will be theirs. [... ]And if Elena Andreevna will be my aide, we'll conquer the world."49 The published Soviet versions of his diaries erased spiritualism from this plan of action. "Decadence and spiritualism" became simply "decadence," and Briusov's affair with Elena was turned into a fleeting flirtation at his nameday party. 5° It was not only later Soviet portrayals of the poet's life that re-

INTRODUCTION 15

moved spiritualism; the English edition of his diaries was even more severe in cutting any reference to the invisible worldY Biographies of other well-known and respected contemporaries who shared Briusov's spiritualist views were treated in a similar manner. For example, General Aleksei Brusilov, a Russian First World War hero and a prominent commander in the Red Army after the revolution, believed in the reality of communications with the beyond. Although this belief is reflected in the original1929 version ofhis memoirs, it disappeared from later Soviet editions and had earlier been removed from the English and French translations. 52 When the spiritualist convictions of esteemed cultural or historical figures were not denied outright, they nevertheless remained awkward for later writers. In the case of the chemist Butlerov, for example, biographies and encyclopedia entries laconically mentioned his interest in spiritualism but insisted incorrectly that "luckily, Butlerov drew a strict dividing line between his adherence to mediumism and his academic, pedagogical, and social activities."53 This embarrassment on the part of scholars for their subjects' beliefs remains widespread to this day. When the topic could no longer be avoided, the biographers of the actress and singer Mariia Puare asserted in a recent study that their heroine never really believed in occult manifestations, regarded them as sinful, and only engaged in them in order to please her husband-a man who incidentally turns out to be a villain shortly thereafter. 54 The tendency to ignore occult convictions has not been restricted to studies of Russian culture. Biographers, historians, and literary critics have also downplayed the role of the occult in the lives and intellectual developments of influential figures within British, French, and German culture. 55 While the occult interests of historical figures, whose achievements contributed to the order and values of the present, proved difficult to acknowledge, the otherworldly infatuation of those whose projects failed or were condemned by prosperity have been more easily recognized. In the Russian case, disappointed monarchists and liberals blamed the political blunders of the hapless Nicholas II on his penchant for the occult. Bolsheviks pointed out the mystical interests of unworldly aristocrats and decadent bourgeois. 56 Simultaneously, critics ofthe revolution explained its tumultuous events as the product of mystical infatuation and Masonic conspiracies, or they found the causes of the Stalinist terror in esoteric fatalism. 57 The description of the occult as a pastime of the bad guys has been an international phenomenon, just like its marginalization in relation to history's heroes. In the case of France and Germany, for example, occult mind-sets have readily been associated with the enemies of

16

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

the republic or diagnosed as significant influences in the fonnation of national socialist ideas. 58 This approach to the occult might have to do with the fierce condemnation that it has received since the Enlightenment for epistemological reasons. In many texts since then, occult thinking has been ridiculed. Friedrich Engels penned an acerbic critique in the 1880s, and in the twentieth century Theodor Adorno wrote that "the penchant for the occult is a symptom of the degeneration of consciousness."59 The occultist, according to this argument, is someone who has willfully rejected the insights of reason and turned his back on the advance of knowledge. This intellectual tradition has been influential among historians, many of whom have ridiculed occultists. 60 Occultism, then, has largely been reserved for inept rulers, idle capitalists, sinister machinators, or simply the deluded. In recent years, this equation of the occult with negative qualities has been challenged as cultural historians and literary critics have begun to analyze its prominence and its creative impulse in tum-of-the-century culture. 61 A number of specialists of Russian culture have focused on the artistic inspiration that the occult offered poets, writers, painters, theater directors, and philosophers. 62 Because this literature has focused on well-known cultural figures, it has described occultism as the exclusive interest of an artistic minority that stood apart from the rest of society. Another strand in historical research has focused on the peasantry, on its belief in nature spirits, the role of magic in rural healing practices, and on traditional divination. 63 Taken together, these studies have implied that the interest in a supernatural world that differed from official Orthodoxy was an interest that was determined by class, as being restricted either to the social and intellectual elite or, in its folkloric version, to uneducated villagers (narod). In its analysis of the role of the occult at a meeting point between elite and mass culture, this book is a departure from previous research. Through an investigation of the occult and its role in mainstream culture, where it combined rural experience and urban notions with capitalist market mechanisms, this book moves beyond previous research, which has insisted on a deep "rift between charlatanism, cheap vogues, 'bazaar occultism' and serious occultism" on the one hand, and folkloric magic on the other. 64 The view that serious occultism was a pastime of the educated elites was first voiced in the nineteenth century by its detractors. 65 While I do not wish to deny the occult interests of exposed cultural figures or members of the aristocracy, the aim of the present study is to focus on the wider cultural context in which their activities operated. Therefore an analysis of the appeal of the supernatural among

INTRODUCTION 17

contemporaries who were not members of educated and eloquent circles is presented. The views of those who did not reach for pen and paper to record their encounters with the supernatural world are, however, difficult to establish and can often only be gauged implicitly. In order to access this tangled sphere of the occult, which reached into both high and popular culture, both published and archival sources are used. The former consist of instruction manuals as well as newspaper reports, journal articles, and fictional literature dealing with supernatural phenomena. This material, which was aimed at a mass market, also includes advertisements, films, photographs, and illustrations that show the supernatural in action. The literary qualities of these texts are often unimpressive or worse, yet their market success underlines their cultural significance. The contradictory messages of instruction manuals, newspaper accounts, and seance reports were, I argue, infinitely more influential than the more exclusive circles that have thus far been studied. Insights gained from these documents are dovetailed with unpublished sources that illustrate individual and more intimate motives. The second category of documents includes police and church reports as well as private letters, diaries, and unpublished seance protocols. Because occult activities were part of participants' private lives and contemporaries arranged such gatherings informally with their acquaintances, providing a comprehensive analysis of who engaged in occult activities and where they did so is impossible. Where they survived, notes about seance arrangements are dispersed around numerous archival holdings, but the occult is not indexed in archival finding aids. At the same time, the plans that contemporaries shared orally of course left no traces in the archives whatsoever. Enough material exists, however, to combine an analysis of mass-produced texts with personal material, which allows us to probe the popular appeal of occultism and the relationship between the more general allure of the supernatural and its subjective meanings at an individual level. The prominence of spirit apparitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century raises questions about their elusive identity. Historians, sociologists, and literary critics-echoing the debate of occultists about the exterior versus interior existence of such beings-have claimed that during the Reformation, the "real" phantoms of medieval culture ceased to haunt Europeans physically and instead became internalized. The gradual relocation of these ephemeral beings into the mind, so the argument goes, was accelerated during the Enlightenment and was complete by the late eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, then, ghosts had allegedly turned into figments of the

18

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

imagination or had become metaphors in literature; in either case, they ceased to have a reality outside of the mind. 66 The idea that supernatural phenomena only occurred within the minds of those who experienced them was closely linked to the emergence of psychology as an academic discipline, that is, to attempts at disentangling and defining the rational and irrational workings of the mind. 67 In the views of early psychoanalysts, many of whom were deeply interested in the occult, supernatural experiences were outward manifestations of innermost desires. 68 C. G. Jung, for example, who studied seance occurrences for his doctoral thesis, argued that spirit manifestations during spiritualist gatherings were independently acting subconscious personalities of one participant being projected onto everyday reality. These experiences, Jung insisted, had significance that went beyond the individual mind because communal attempts to get into contact with the supernatural world created occasions in which "we have a spontaneous attempt of the unconscious to become conscious in a collective form." 69 On the other side of the explanatory spectrum, some folklorists and historians have claimed that interactions with ghosts, demons, or vampires are descriptions of natural phenomena that have been filtered through cultural assumptions, which in tum added supernatural powers to the narrative. Among scholars who subscribe to this view, those who have proposed the most naturalist explanations have argued that interactions with invisible creatures are either caused by hallucinations brought about by illness or accidental intoxication, or that ghost stories are explanations advanced by sober minds for natural phenomena whose precise physical workings these witnesses do not understand and can thus not describe accurately. 70 A more complex argument proposed by David Hufford suggests that a specific kind of nighttime vision is "empirically grounded" in the somatic experience of sleep paralysis, but whose later description is melded with cultural explanations. For Hufford, this experience is common to sleepers all over the globe, it is not a sign of illness, and the description of it is not based on a misunderstanding of physiological processes. 71 While I personally have never seen or otherwise experienced the presence of a spirit, my aim here is to take those who claimed they did seriously. I am not interested in what actually happened when men and women interacted with the invisible world: in late imperial Russia, contemporaries failed to agree on whether what was going on during seances, meditation exercises, or in haunted houses was caused by spirits of the departed, by barely understood laws of nature, by the nervous system, or by fraud, and it would be both presumptuous and dishonest for a historian writing a century later to claim that she could

INTRODUCTION 19

settle the question. What is more, I do not think that it would be interesting if I were to establish the unshakeable physical, psychological, or supernatural causes of these phenomena. Thus, I am not interested in the events as such, but in the people who experienced them. The focus of this analysis, therefore, is how contemporaries approached such sensations and how they explained what was going on. As I analyze their examination of occult phenomena, I propose historical interpretations of my own. In doing so, I do at times draw on the ideas of psychoanalysts and psychologists. In particular, I have found Freud's ideas about the construction of multilayered and ambiguous meaning through occult experiences inspiring. 72

Private Occultism and the Autocratic State The imperial criminal code defined religious dissent as a political act, and historians have largely followed the tsarist government in this assessment by investigating heterodox forms of belief and practice from a perspective that pitted secular or religious authority against ordinary people. 73 Analyses of unorthodox forms of religiosity have focused on distinct sectarian groups or intelligentsia circles whose organization as exclusive communities and whose self-perception furthered the impression of a conflictual relationship with the state. 74 Together with other historical research, this literature has underlined social conflict and fragmentation, and has affirmed the preeminence of the politicaJ.75 More recently, civil society has received significant scholarly attention. 76 Historians have discovered spheres of autonomous private initiative, but they have again analyzed these activities in relation to the autocratic government, interpreting them as either adversarial or collaborative. While in this work it is assumed that an independent public sphere existed, it is focused on the ways in which contemporaries animated and experienced "private Russia." The essentially political reading of individual enterprise, both religious and otherwise, has influenced the ways in which historians have approached spiritual search within Russia's past. Relatively few studies have been devoted to the private and non-adversarial meaning of belief. 77 This study is built upon the small amount of work that has been done on this topic, but also on research that has analyzed the quotidian sphere of consumption and its symbolic meaning. 78 The occult is uniquely suited to offer an entryway into the private, nonpolitical concerns of contemporaries, which for the majority, we must assume, far outweighed their interest in governance. Magical texts rarely mention

20

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

politics, and the authorities on their part only rarely took an interest in mystical gatherings. For the historian, this is a mixed blessing: on the one hand, these circumstances significantly restrict the quantity of sources available for a study of the occult, since only a small number of records on mainstream occultism can be found in police files. On the other hand, however, this situation forces us to think about a concern that was very close to the hearts of numerous contemporaries in ways that move beyond the traditional focus on internal conflict and the adversarial relationship between society and state. The traditional focus in the historiography is ultimately influenced by a teleological approach to late imperial Russian history that views the period in the light of the revolution. While no historian can be oblivious to the events of 1917, this study, by shifting the focus back to the tsarist period itself, nonetheless is an attempt to restore subjective and cultural complexity to a society that, despite its fascination with clairvoyance, did not live purely in relation to a future date. In that lost, late imperial present, multifarious developments were initiated and almost anything was possible. The largely positive attitude toward the occult and its apolitical character changed with the experience of the First World War. The focus of the last chapter is a description of how the supernatural first became patriotic, before everything occult came to be seen as an expression of elite irresponsibility and decadence. In the summer of 1914, spirits retreated from the public sphere to give way to patriotic saints of the Orthodox church. One and a half years into the conflict and after painful Russian losses, however, these nationalist expressions lost their appeal. In a scandalous court case from 1916, Count Aleksei Orlov-Davydov, one of the wealthiest aristocrats of the empire, a member of the Duma and close friend of prominent politicians, claimed that he had been duped by his second wife, the actress Mariia Puare, and her dabbling in occultism. His case illustrates how, on the eve of the revolution, occult activities had become associated with the rich and famous, the aristocracy, and tsarist politicians, and with shameful decadence and elite corruption. This new wartime assessment has had a long and influential legacy, as the twentieth-century editors who felt the need to eradicate the occult from the diaries and lives of Valerii Briusov and others illustrate.

The Laborator y in the Salon Spiritualism Comes to Russia

T

he origins of the widespread late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fascination with the transcendental in the Russian empire go back about half a century to the 1850s, when spiritualism made its first appearance in Russia. 1 Initially, spiritualists constituted a small and exclusive group of highly educated and socially privileged people. By the end of the century, their constituency had widened significantly, and this development changed the character of spiritualist practice and thought. The history of spiritualism in Russia from its inception to the early stages of its popular success, and the importance of scientific thought and aristocratic forms of sociability to its development, lies at the center of this chapter. Spiritualism came to Russia from the United States via Western Europe. 2 The beginnings of modem spiritualism can be dated quite precisely to March 31, 1848, when two teenage girls, Kate and Margaret Fox, heard knocks in their house in Hydesville, in upstate New York, which they claimed came from the other world. They soon established communications with the alleged spirit, and newspapers quickly spread the news about their success to other parts of the United States.3 Numerous contemporaries emulated their example and began to communicate with the dead, and the ritual of the spiritualist seance emerged. These were gatherings at which participants assembled in darkened rooms and, aided by the nervous sensitivity of a medium, awaited supernatural occurrences. Even the periodic discovery of deception did not halt the spread of these activities. 4 American spiritualism soon spread to Europe, and Britain eventually became home to one influential strain of spiritualism in the Old

22

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

World. British mediums developed famous reputations, the island's spiritualists were famed for their scientific study of seance phenomena, and many continental Europeans, including Russians, were proud to be accepted into the membership of celebrated British associations devoted to the topic. 5 A second, more mystical strand of spiritualism developed in France under the leadership of Allan Kardec, whose ideas elaborated theories about reincarnation in addition to spirit communication. 6 Both the British and the French style of spiritualism found supporters in Russia. In Russia, spiritualism became a topic of salon conversations in the 1850s. The lawyer Anatolii Fedorovich Koni recalled in his memoirs how, along with the game of lotto, "the gullible pursuit of prophetic tables" became "a popular pastime" at this time. "Many passionately took up these things, putting a miniature purpose-built table with a little hole for a pencil on a sheet of paper and placing on it the hands of those through whom the spirits liked to communicate in writing 'the secrets of eternity and the grave. "'7 Later, Russian adepts precisely dated the emergence of spiritualism in Russia to the winter season of 1852. "Tables, hats, and saucers turned everywhere and talks about rappings at night began to make their rounds." 8 Russian spiritualism received a boost in 1858, when Daniel Dunglas Home (pronounced "Hume") visited the empire. 9 Home was arguably the most famous medium of all time. He was born in Scotland but grew up in New England, where he discovered his mediumistic abilities. He never had another profession apart from his spiritualist career, and he was the only medium never to have been exposed as a fraud. In 1858, Home travelled to Rome where he met his future wife, the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra Kroll, a goddaughter of the tsar. In the same year, on the occasion of his marriage to Aleksandra, Home visited his wife's homeland for the first time, and the couple stayed in Russia for almost a year. Home held numerous seances, which were attended by exquisite and select members of the high aristocracy, including Alexander II himself. Yet, despite the extended time Home spent in Russia, his visit did not have major consequences for the spread of spiritualism in the tsarist empire. His audience, it seems, was too exclusive to tum seances into truly popular pursuits. Spiritualists later bemoaned that seances "were not treated with the necessary seriousness" in the 1850s and "served almost exclusively as fashionable and marvelous salon entertainment." 10 Indeed, the infatuation with spiritualism in the 1850s did not leave a lasting trace and produced few manuscripts or published documents. Spirit messages from beyond the grave were as ephemeral as their alleged authors; the fashion appeared briefly and at intervals, before

THE LABORATORY in THE SALON

23

J\.XP AUOBJ1UHiM.

nonynRpHbiK oqepK'b Mnp3KTMqecKie COBtT&I HaqMH310U{MM .

MOOHBA.

1907 r.

Figure 1: Depiction of a planchette, a device used during seances to record messages from the beyond. Khrapovitskii, A. Magneticheskoe pis 'mo. Moscow, 1907.

24

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

disappearing almost immediately. 11 Articles in Russian ecclesiastical journals published in the 1860s support this assessment by describing spiritualist seances purely as Western idiosyncrasies. 12 According to V. Snegirev, writing in 1871, only a few Russian aristocrats had thus far become acquainted with spiritualism on their "travels through Western Europe and, for want of anything better to do, had brought all sorts of marvels home." 13 Snegirev might well have been hinting at Home's visits and his friendship with Russian aristocrats, since the medium was invited to visit the empire again in 1865, when he gave further sittings for the emperor. Snegirev concluded his musings with the expectation that "without any doubt, [spiritualism] will, in one way or another, sooner or later, spread to the masses.'* Within a few years, his prediction was to become true. In February 1871, Home accepted a further invitation to come to Russia. In St. Petersburg, his seances were attended by a number of Russian scholars, among them Aleksandr Nikolaevich Aksakov and the chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov. Home was also introduced to Butlerov's sister-in-law, Iuliia Glumelina, and almost immediately became engaged to her (Aleksandra had died of consumption in 1862). This union strengthened the link between the famous medium, the empire's intelligentsia, and Russian society more generally. Eventually, Home's reputation in Russia grew so legendary that it became impossible to regard him as anything other than "the Russian medium Home," or "russkii medium Jum.'' 15 Home, and the spiritualist phenomena he elicited, found enthusiastic supporters in Aksakov and Butlerov. Aksakov was to become Russia's most active, vigorous, and famous spiritualist. 16 Aleksandr Nikolaevich was a member of the prominent Aksakov family, a nephew of the writer Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov, and a cousin of the Slavophiles Ivan and Konstantin. He had been educated at the imperiallycee, where at a young age he had developed an interest in philosophy and religion and had studied, among others, Swedenborg's writingsY In 1852, Aksakov took part in Andrei Mel'nikov-Pecherskii's expedition to Old Believer communities in Nizhnii Novgorod guberniya before joining the state service in 1868. Aksakov later wrote that he had been interested in questions relating to spiritualism since 1855, but his first personal experience of seances did not occur before 1870. 18 After this experience, he immediately became convinced of the authenticity of spiritualist phenomena and spent the remainder of his life and funds publicizing spiritualist tenets. In response to Home's 1871 visit to St. Petersburg, Aksakov published a brochure, Spiritualizm i nauka (Spiritual-

THE LABORATORY in THE SALON 25

ism and Science), in which he discussed the medium's feats. 19 The title is significant, for Aksakov saw himself as the champion of a new science that would investigate the world beyond the grave and eventually revolutionize scientific and religious knowledge. 20 Unlike his friend Butlerov, however, Aksakov had not had any formal scientific education or training. For two years, the young Aksakov had attended lectures in anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and physics as a private student at Moscow University, but he failed to obtain a university degree in any of those subjects (indeed, in any subject at all), a fact upon which his pompous autobiographical sketches of the 1890s remain uncharacteristically quiet. 21 Nevertheless, Aksakov described his informal Moscow education as vital, for it provided him with the necessary knowledge so as "not to be impressed by scientists" when they disagreed with his spiritualist convictions. 22 Aksakov's activities to promote spiritualism mimicked academic conventions. During seances, Aleksandr Nikolaevich wrote detailed minutes, which he archived and could retrieve years later. 23 He also occasionally employed exact instruments, such as thermometers and barometers, to register the influence of the weather on seance phenomena. 24 In the 1890s, and possibly also earlier, Aksakov copied the practice of university professors and hired a graduate student as his research assistant. 25 His academic aspirations were mirrored, moreover, in his publishing enterprises. In 1874, Aksakov founded and privately financed the Leipzig journal Psychische Studien; like academic periodicals, it was published in regular installments and offered reports of recent supernatural occurrences, accounts of seance experiments, and theoretical discussions about the topic. Aksakov also immediately brought out a German translation of his Spiritualizm i nauka. Like the journal, his magnum opus, Animismus und Spiritismus, was also initially published in Leipzig before appearing in Russian, French, and Italian. 26 Aksakov himself claimed that the aim of these German publications was to "bring spiritualism to the attention of [Germany's] scholars" and thereby to contribute to its rational investigation and eventual acceptance by the scientific community. 27 The choice of location and language is significant. By concentrating his efforts on the nation with the most eminent scientific reputation in tsarist Russia and by publishing in the lingua franca of nineteenth-century learning, Aksakov underscored his academic aspirations. Moreover, the internationalism of his activities, including his publications, his correspondence with like-minded western European contemporaries, and his travels abroad, replicated the cosmopolitanism of the scholarly community. 28 Aksakov did not neglect Russia and vigorously propagated spiritualism there too, mercilessly sending his writings to prominent acquaintances,

26

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

including public cultural figures such as the historian, lawyer, and sociologist Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin, the writer Nikolai Semenovich Leskov, the philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov'ev, and the artist Mikhail Osipovich Mikeshin. 29 In return for these presents, Aksakov expected public support for spiritualism. Among the recipients of Spiritizm i nauka was the historian and journalist Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin. In the late 1820s, Pogodin had been the editor of Moskovskii vestnik (The Moscow Herald), and in this position he had provided the Wisdom-Lovers, a group of Russian idealists for whom "nature was a living, spiritual whole," with a forum for their ideas. 30 Pogodin remained interested in metaphysics and spirituality and in February 1872 attended two seances with Home at which Aksakov was also presentY Pogodin's interests left Aksakov expecting a favorable reception for his work, but Pogodin offered no response to the gift, and Aksakov, fearing that his book might be lying in a forgotten comer somewhere, felt compelled to write to him. In his letter, Aksakov expressed the hope that his apprehension about the text's location was "mistaken, but ifl'm not, then I feel obliged to remind you at least once about this reading, particularly now in the summer, when, I assume, you have more leisure time to occupy yourself with subjects evidently unfamiliar (postoronnyi) to you." 32 Whether Pogodin was impressed by this forceful demand remains unclear. A year later, however, the historian published disrespectful remarks about the two Home seances in his spiritual autobiography, stating that spiritualist seances were merely "childish pranks."33 This description deeply disappointed Aksakov. Nevertheless, when in 1874 Aksakov heard about plans to print a second edition of Pogodin's book, he dispatched a lengthy note and some further publications to Pogodin, anticipating revisions of the relevant sections. 34 In his pushy attempts to convert acquaintances to the spiritualist cause, Aksakov presented himself as a scientist and spiritualism as an intellectual discipline that analyzed a discrete set of natural phenomena. "A man of science"-an epithet that he awarded himself-"sees in these phenomena something that points toward something new within nature and that demands further investigation. " 35 All contemporaries who refused to accept this assessment, he implied, strayed from the path of objective knowledge. "Spiritualism," Aksakov went on, "does not regard these phenomena as supernatural, but strives to establish those conditions under which they occur, those laws that govern them and that define these phenomena as natural. [Spiritualism] thus enlarges the field of psychology and brings the wondrous and the mysterious within the field of exact and positive knowledge." 36

THE LABORATORY in THE SALON 27

Aksakov's self-fashioning as a scientist received its greatest boost through the heartfelt support for spiritualism offered by two eminent professors, the chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov and the zoologist Nikolai Petrovich Vagner. Butlerov is regarded as one of the founders of Russian chemistry. 37 He was also known for his activism in promoting women's education and as an authoritative figure in Russian apiculture. The son of a nobleman from Kazan province, Butlerov graduated from the local university and held a teaching position at Kazan until 1868, when he moved to St. Petersburg. By that time, he had won for himself a serious scientific reputation. In 1861, Butlerov had published his concept of chemical structure, predicting and demonstrating the existence of isomers; in 1866, he synthesized isobutane, and two years later he discovered that unsaturated organic compounds contain multiple bonds. When Butlerov first encountered spiritualism, he was highly skeptical. 38 It was only after his move to St. Petersburg and his growing friendship with Aksakov, his wife's relative, that his skepticism was turned (with Home's help) into enthusiastic support. Butlerov was so enthralled by Home's seances that he and Aksakov tried to set up the first scientific commission in Russia to investigate spiritualist phenomena. 39 Although the plan came to nothing, Butlerov's support promulgated spiritualism to a wider audience. An article published by Nikolai Petrovich Vagner in 1875 saw Butlerov's name become irrevocably linked to spiritualism. Butlerov and Vagner had known each other since their days at the University of Kazan. Like Butlerov, Vagner engaged in a range of scientific, social, and artistic activities. 40 Between 1876 and 1878 Vagner edited the journal Svet (Light) and helped lift the poet Semen Iakovlevich Nadson to prominence. Vagner was also known for his own literary works, most notably his Skazki Kota Murlyki (Tales of Cat-Purr). Besides this, like Butlerov, Vagner was arenowned scientist. In 1861, he discovered pedogenesis in some insects, a work that was met with great skepticism after its publication in 1862, but for which he was ultimately awarded the prestigious Demidov Medal of the Academy of Sciences. Like Butlerov, he also moved to the capital in the 1870s, where he accepted a chair at the university. In 1881, he founded a zoological research station at the Solovetskii monastery, an institution that has since moved to the Kola Peninsula, but that still exists today as an institute of the Russian Academy of Science. The news that Butlerov had been carried away by mediumism came as a great surprise to Vagner in 1871. Butlerov persuaded Vagner to attend some seances with Home, and although Vagner was impressed by the knocks to the

28

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

table and its movement, he remained unconvinced by such phenomena until 1874, when Camille Bn!dif, a French porcelain trader with mediumistic powers, visited St. Petersburg. 41 Aksakov, Butlerov, and Vagner were among those . present at his seances, and this time, the checks that were carried out and the sensational phenomena that occurred (including the materialization of a hand, an accordion hovering and playing in the air, and other inexplicable events) convinced the zoologist. 42 Vagner did not keep his new conviction to himself, but publicized his conversion in a lengthy letter to the editors of Vestnik Evropy (The Messenger of Europe) in the April 1875 issue. 43 Aksakov immediately hailed this entry of spiritualism into the realm of mainstream publishing as a great success in Psychische Studien. 44 Indeed, this article became fateful for Russian spiritualism. Vagner had mentioned Butlerov as another scientist convinced by the reality of mediumistic phenomena in his Vestnik Evropy article and thus drew the chemist into the debate. After vitriolic attacks, Butlerov also felt compelled to publish an article on the subject in another thick journal and to defend his spiritualist convictions. 45 Butlerov and Vagner, like Aksakov, described seance phenomena in scientific language and emphasized their social standing as eminent scholars. All three men, moreover, constantly referred to the academic titles of other spiritualists, such as the mathematician Mikhail Vasil' evich Ostrogradskii (who had died in 1861 ), the German astrophysicist Karl Friedrich Zollner, or the British chemist, fellow of the Royal Society, and outspoken spiritualist William Crookes. 46 By contrast, the academic titles of anti-spiritualists were occasionally conveniently ignored. 47 Vagner also recalled his famous zoological discovery of pedogenesis and reminded his audience that in the early 1860s very few people had found his spectacular research results convincing. By recalling this incident, Vagner implied that his new and highly debated convictions about spiritualism would likewise one day be proven correct. 48 It was precisely this claim to scientificity that angered opponents of spiritualism and contributed to the vitriol of what was to follow. The most tangible consequence of the spiritualists' claim to scientificity was what came to be known as "the Mendeleev Commission."49 The chemist Dmitrii Ivanovich Mendeleev, a colleague of both Butlerov and Vagner at St. Petersburg University, was deeply worried by spiritualist claims to scientificity, buttressed as they were by Butlerov's and Vagner's open endorsement. At Mendeleev's initiative, a commission was set up to investigate spiritualist phenomena under the auspices of the Physical Society. Aksakov, Butlerov, and Vagner agreed to

THE LABORATORY in THE SALON 29

assist the commission as expert witnesses. Aksakov promised to find mediums for the commission to investigate and immediately published announcements in the international spiritualist press, offering potential mediumistic candidates the chance to prove their abilities in St. Petersburg (expenses paid). Spiritualists in New York were working on a short list of applicants, andAksakov sailed to Britain to investigate European contenders. 50 The Mendeleev Commission turned into a traumatic experience for spiritualists and anti-spiritualists alike. By the spring of 1876, the two camps fell out spectacularly. Both groups entered the common investigation with the sincere expectation that their respective convictions would be confirmed by the Physical Society. Spiritualists hoped for an officially sanctioned pronouncement that an independent force was at work during seances, while Mendeleev and his committee members expected the fraudulent character of spiritualism to become apparent. As a consequence, the two groups failed to engage seriously with the views of the other side. Spiritualists brushed away concerns about the fraudulent activities of the Petty brothers, the mediums Aksakov had initially brought to Russia, choosing instead to call their mediumistic activities "weak." Mendeleev, on the other hand, gave a public lecture decrying the fraudulent nature of spiritualism on December 15, 1875, long before the commission was supposed to reach a conclusion; he also repeatedly violated the terms of the commission's proceedings. Further disputes arose over who had the right to take notes and what was to be mentioned in the minutes, which instrUments were to be used to investigate levitating tables, and who was supposed to search Mary Marshall, the second medium Aksakov invited to St. PetersburgY Another major dispute concerned the schedule the commission was to follow after the delay in procuring mediums meant it was unable to meet as agreed for 40 seances by May 1876. At the beginning of March 1876, these numerous conflicts brought the collaborative project to a breaking point, and Aksakov, Butlerov, and Vagner withdrew their cooperation.SZ What followed was a public relations campaign that became extremely hostile and painful for both sides. The spiritualists and their opponents alike tried to communicate their interpretation of the events to the public. Mendeleev had considerable talent for public relations, and he informed his audience about the fraudulent character of spiritualism in lectures (the proceeds of which were sententiously given to charity), newspaper publications, and in his book Materialy dlia suzhdeniia spiritizma (Materials for a Judgment of Spiritualism). 53 Aksakov, Butlerov, and Vagner also published their version of the events in the Russian periodical

30

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

press and in Psychische Studien. 54 In 1883, Aksakov brought out a book about the commission entitled Razoblachenie (Exposure). 55 In these spiritualist publications, Mendeleev was portrayed as a manipulative tyrant, cantankerous, disruptive, and most importantly, prejudiced against spiritualism from the start. Later, Aksakov even claimed that Mendeleev was suffering from hallucinations that made him hear and see only what he wanted to perceive. 56 Spiritualists also frequently reminded their readers of an open letter signed by some 130 respected Petersburgers and published in Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti (The Saint Petersburg News)-and, of course, reprinted in Psychische Studien-that described the commission's demise after eight seances as disgraceful, and demanded that its work be resumed. 57 For spiritualists, the history of the Mendeleev Commission became the vital component in a selfpropagated and endlessly repeated story of harassment and hostility. The most significant legacy of the events of 1875 and 1876, however, was that they forced spiritualism out into the public domain. As the vehement anti-spiritualist Bykov put it in 1914, "serious advertising for this movement was made in 1874 [sic] by the fervent opponent of spiritualism, Professor D. I. Mendeleev."58 Mendeleev's endeavor to halt what he perceived to be a new form of superstition, particularly worrying because of its claim to scientificity, failed pitifully as the fame and appeal of spiritualism grew and widened. Seances, spirit communications, and materializations became common topics in daily conversations and were treated in literary works, such as Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1875-1877), in which a medium is modeled on Home, in his Plody prosveshcheniia (The Fruits of Enlightenment) (1890), in Dostoevskii's Dnevnik pisatelia (Writer's Diary) (1873-1881), in Brat'ia Karamazovy (Brothers Karamazov) (1879), and in Turgenev's novellaKlara Milich (1883). 59 These texts, along with a further debate about spiritualism in 1878-1879, ensured that the topic was not easily forgotten. 60 In 1881, Russian spiritualists further underlined their prominence in the public realm by finally founding their own Russian-language journal Rebus. The journal's editor was Viktor Ivanovich Pribytkov, but Aksakov's influence behind it was considerable, and the journal's offices were located in the latter's house on 6 Nevskii Prospekt. Relatively little is known about Pribytkov, who had been educated at the Naval Academy and had served as an officer in Russia's navy prior to taking up editorial responsibilities for Rebus. 61 He became interested in mediumism in 1874, shortly after his wedding, when his wife Elizaveta Dmitrievna revealed her mediumistic abilities. 62 Pribytkov was probably related to Varvara

THE LABORATORY in THE SALON 31

Bhl XO.llHT'b

2 •

-

~

1 • &0 ••

-

•

ll'l:lltCT.••.a1 tAfllUIITC.I&.»IIIl" . . hMt.IIMS "

'

10 •

JIOjlllllt!K.A ffl'IUIIUJA£1'1'11:

a.

•

rl)pt'J,.'CIUW'I~ UI'IJIUtt•iul)n: ll'h ltln·rolJ• ['C»U~ttiM (l,uu•· )h•pr...IHlM, lltNeCII'I 1.1poUf'_lf"J1o, J,.• •VI ~ff)..

NW A"'o

oU1o11UeMIII

UO

Q~llt',1-LIU1Ur".&111o

eu•~, "a~o~l•~::~~_,:~SI~Au~lu . )~eli,·c:u (.\ n.llllc••il IIJ'iO- • au 'ltl'MJ•r,..'L, on. 0 AO 8 ...... ...

on .,Dcx0 4ou'b ••o n 31lnut.O ·HaaunqaoTcR

~em.;;· _ • ...

. ••

c!onoaoH JJ.nR

B;J.Illln

oroue~'b

un

Mll:~i

Jla

lrllllll 110 Bll;tUO 3Blllill .

IS~Zl»~x'b. ~

'S&e.

on

•

ptsn,

na ycrPoAc-rao " co.aep~a.Hie

ft

"':"'lt...._

-~"'"""w"" .....-.J!.p-

TQ.1MCO J XMLI.lU(SI'(".JI II UO;r.etftRIITL GoJM!CTOB)' taiUIIUO'IK)' - II tiJ)If tl'Wll1t 11p1164}"TJ')' OTII)'i:TUTh- Tfti:OUC) TIIXOXOUL1r:01 1ftl~

l'ml:)"

IIOTKOlf'l.!

I

'IYPHJI}\A.

llo!MIO.ut• 'l- Tat'iolf•J

IJ:n. po.n

TaVate[II)'J•II. IOeJWem•f\ft TllU'IUIOifiM 1\apm•w~llli ao(H'I(I()n-,

D1. nn111el11. .la.tr.ttcJI'lo rp.•u,t. ~ n.n., uo;cuHl

ro.ao-.n't•nll.

lin •o•-.M••

•r•n,

Ilo rpuatf II)' A'Io..... h'1o ero nnun.,

Tun. ...

Df>..l'to ....lltM•1

Jkcoun., A -.ee em a.xO'IO'Mo. ..

Figure 2: Rebus in 1884 suggesting light-hearted entertainment.

I

32

MODERN OCCULTISM in LATE IMPERIAL RUSSIA

Ivanovna Pribytkova (possibly his sister), a writer and a spiritualist. 63 Numerous family seances convinced Pribytkov of the reality of spirit activities, and it became his goal to propagate his convictions. Pribytkov's editorial work contributed substantially to the spread of spiritualism in Russia and earned him the respect of fellow spiritualists. According to Ilya Vinitsky, Aksakov had requested the right to print the first Russian spiritualist journal in 1876 but was refused permission. 64 Five years later, Pribytkov submitted a similar petition. Aware that previous "endeavors to found a spiritualist journal in Russia had not met with success," Pribytkov's request to the censors "touched only slightly upon spiritualism." As he later reminisced, "I restricted myself to the most humble program: rebuses, charades, riddles, novels, tales, stories, and light literary style. 65 The strategy succeeded and Pribytkov was allowed to bring out a "weekly literary publication under the title of Rebus."66 The first issue of Rebus was published in October 1881, and its layout suggested a family games journal. In numerous subsequent requests to the censors, Pribytkov slowly carved out more space for the topic that really interested him, and early in 1883 he was granted permission to publish "surveys of new discoveries and of research of the natural world."67 Obviously, science was not to be understood here in Mendeleev's sense. Gradually, the picture riddles vanished, no prizes were awarded for their solution, the layout became more serious and mysterious, and the subtitle "man is the closest but most difficult of all rebuses" was added. Rebus published accounts of supernatural occurrences, philosophical essays, reports about scientific discoveries that its editors regarded relevant to spiritualism, and light literature. Most essays were written by spiritualists, but many reports were copied from newspapers or other journals. In many cases, foreign publications were translated and reprinted. Unfortunately, no circulation numbers have survived. Rebus was a relatively expensive publication. An annual subscription cost two rubles in 1881; a single issue could be bought at 10 kopecks. By 1890 this had risen to four rubles per annum and 15 kopecks per issue. The price suggests that most of its subscribers belonged to the more affluent strata of society. Nevertheless, Rebus became well known all over the empire and was the prime propagator of spiritualism after 1881. It ultimately proved to be the longestlived and most well-known occult journal of the tsarist period. 68 The early character of Rebus as a popular entertainment magazine has been described by Maria Carlson as a camouflage, a ruse intended to fool the censors.69 Yet the character Pribytkov chose for the journal in his dealings with

THE LABORATORY in THE SALON 33

N9 1354.

28-ro

C8HT111ip11

1908

N9 29.

r0.11a

nol.nMCHAN u-.Ha

Jla 12 xtt•••n· 6 p. • n • • 8 :t .lllfl('.. pt~t

••

1 , ISO,

Co.lepmaltie: ~l"~)-~!''ur;~~~~1~~...n~J:~~~,)~Ko.~..~-·:·~:~:;.~:"::.a,i";:~~O,e•d,~,';;,,_.;!;,.r;,.~T~!~

no.a $oTOrjoa•J•1• .:.l''ll."'' -7) HOBbfA KuHrH-8. SpiOCotn...-cuurauull \ wr!.:n.t, Ct>JHJo#'l,»..,1.lyxnx1o. ,Jt?*'"lllllt'·· -9) OGDR&nettlft.

TOlllt. •

KOK1o HI. t'111~" ofot'l(IJtH'.1bC"Tll1. l'tll:f'fHIIt>lllhlllf'U>tUI·

un, Pf:.l11KTH)I1\ ll