Blavatsky Book Review: H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings, Russian Serials, 2025

Great day in the morning! The 150th anniversary of the founding the Theosophical Society gave us two long-awaited compilations of the writings of it's most prolific early writer. The complete compilation of her writings is nearing fruition, with more collected letters to appear, and perhaps another volume of miscellanies....

H.P. Blavatsky Collected Writings Russian Serials

140 pages of new English material, full of intriguing, fascinating, engaging writings from Russian periodicals... (sourced from her scrapbooks) + Durbar of Lahore + People of the Blue Mountains

The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai

 23 July 2025

 584 pages

ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 8170596467

ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-8170596462

 

From the 36-page introduction by Michael Gomes:  

'Two sets of articles written from New York in 1878 form the first part of this volume. “From Across the Sea, from Beyond the Ocean,” signed Helena Blavatsky, appeared from March to December 1878. The text was published in the Odessa newspaper Pravda, and No. 45, 23 February; No. 59, 12 March; No. 70, 25 March; No. 110, 16 May; No. 116, 23 May; No. 237, 24 October; No. 270, 3 December; No. 272, 6 December, 1878. The other, “A Voice from the Other World,” signed “Golos” (Voice), appeared in the Tiflisskiy Vestnik (Tiflis Messenger), No. 105, 13 May; No. 107, 16 May; No. 108, 17 May; No. 204, 13 September; No. 206, 16  September; No. 208, 19 September; No. 212, 23 September; and No. 216, 29 September, 1878.

 

The two series, “From Across the Sea, from Beyond the Ocean” and“A Voice from the Other World” that open the volume, make their first English appearance here. Newly Americanized citizen Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, like a true New Yorker, had an opinion about everything and conveyed it with flair to a Russian audience. Aside from the erudite author of Isis Unveiled, we see Mme. Blavatsky as an astute chronicler of American life. The glaring inequalities are there — crime, death, and disease and the heroic narratives that arise from it — all conveyed as part of the American experience of the 1870s.'

 

In short, the new material consists of fifteen articles written for Pravda and Tiflis Messenger newspapers dealing mainly with American social, political and religious life, with international affairs, and commentary on general news events, with some coverage of spiritualism and an article on Thomas Edison and the phonograph.  Below are some short passages to give a brief glimpse of her writing style:

 

"The probable usage of the above-mentioned capacities of the phonograph in various branches of commerce and scientific industry, as well as in family enjoyment, requires more or less delicate mechanical consideration, but the practical usefulness thereof is unlimited. For instance: the preparation of the manuscripts of literary productions; the dictation of documents and books; the difficult tasks of professors and teachers who repeat the same lecture or the same lesson to their pupils; the substitution of the voice of a living lecturer by the voice of the apparatus and of the skillful playing by artists on various instruments by the playing of the phonograph — a playing which may be repeated ad infinitum with an accuracy which may not be attained another time by the performer himself, and this after any number of years; family chronicles of ordinary as well as well-known people; accurate diaries orally dictated every evening before retiring; last wills and testaments; electrotype adaptations, as for instance books, musical boxes, children’s toys, clocks, signaling on railways and at sea; sermons delivered in the voice of the preacher without his presence; commercial advertising repeated every quarter of an hour by a special apparatus outside the offices or shops, or even in restaurants, etc.,etc. ' (pp. 60-61)

'Nothing in nature reminds us much of a woman as the ocean; its caprices and fantasies quickly come and go, and no one can predict their hour. The ocean receives its color from the sky, and its turbulence from the currents of air. Its very existence, with its constant flirtation with, and mirroring of, the elements, depends upon the latter; but in spite of that, just like a woman, it constantly and daringly calls them out to battle. If you throw yourself into it in a rough manner, or go too far out, it will treat you disdainfully and without pity — and like a woman will try to ruin you. But if, on the contrary, you treat it gently and cleverly, and trust yourself carefully and quietly to its treacherous waves, it will carry you along on its high crests, and will cradle you like a child upon the breast of its loving mother.…'  (pp. 125-27)

 

“Let me remind you that we are talking here of such great scholars as Jevons,5 Babbage,6 Balfour Stewart and Tait,7 who have fully demonstrated in The Unseen Universe that even the inception and evolution of the unspoken thought cannot take place without an expenditure of energy, which, acting on the invisible ether, must carry forever the waves or vibrations of its motion through space, from the very minute of contact.
“The energy of matter, carried from the region of the visible into the region of the invisible world, is transformed in the laboratory of the latter into something tangible and cognizable, although invisible to the ordinary eye. In other words, a regular bridge (such is the expression of the esteemed scholar, not mine) — upon which the thoughts of abstract and invisible beings, clothed in concrete form — the sense from the ethereal heights of ‘other worlds,’ and the thoughts of mortals ascend upwards…Do you understand?” (pp. 98-99)