Blavatsky’s English translation of Dostoevsky’s parable, published in The Theosophist
What the Work Is
“Grand Inquisitor” is Helena Blavatsky’s English translation of the “Grand Inquisitor” passage from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov — specifically the text found in Book V, chapter five of that novel. Blavatsky, the Russian-born mystic and co-founder of the Theosophical Society, was at the time editor-in-chief of The Theosophist, and in November 1881 she began publishing her translation of the passage in that magazine. The translation was accompanied by a short commentary of her own, which introduced the text to her readers.
What the Book Is About
The translated passage presents what Blavatsky described as a “satire” on modern theology in general and on the Roman Catholic Church in particular. As she summarised it for her readers, the “Grand Inquisitor” imagines the Second Coming of Christ taking place in Spain during the era of the Inquisition. Christ is immediately arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. Within Dostoevsky’s novel, this legend — which Blavatsky called a “poem” — is composed and narrated by the character Ivan Karamazov, described in her commentary as a materialist and an atheist, who tells it to his younger brother Alyosha, characterised there as an immature Christian mystic.
Key Ideas and Themes
Blavatsky’s introductory commentary framed the passage for a readership that might not know Dostoevsky’s work. She explained that “the great Russian novelist” had died a few months earlier, making the “celebrated” novel The Brothers Karamazov his last work. Her presentation thus served both as translation and as introduction, positioning the Russian novelist for an English-speaking Theosophical audience and reading the Grand Inquisitor scene as a critique of institutional religion — above all of the Roman Catholic Church — and of modern theology more broadly.
The translation belongs to a wider pattern in Blavatsky’s editorial work: her magazine carried translations and commentary on Russian literature alongside Theosophical material, and she took an active interest in identifying writers whose work she regarded as consonant with Theosophical thought. Her commentary on the “Grand Inquisitor” is an early instance of that project, appearing years before she would explicitly classify Dostoevsky as a “theosophical writer.”
Significance and Influence
The publication of the translation in The Theosophist in November 1881 holds a particular significance for scholars of esotericism. Brendan French, a researcher in the field, has argued that it is “highly significant” that exactly eight years after publishing her translation of the “Grand Inquisitor,” Blavatsky declared Dostoevsky to be “a theosophical writer.” That declaration came in her article “The Tidal Wave,” which addressed the approach of a new era in both society and literature. There she wrote that what the European world needed was “a dozen writers such as Dostoyevsky, the Russian author,” describing such writers as “fearless apostles of the living Word of Truth, moral healers of the pustulous sores of our century,” and adding that to write novels with a moral sense deep enough to stir society “requires a literary talent and a born Theosophist as was Dostoyevsky.”
The translation is thus notable less as a standalone literary work than as a document of Blavatsky’s editorial programme and of the early Theosophical movement’s engagement with Russian literature — an engagement that would later extend to her publication of Tolstoy’s fairy tale “How A Devil’s Imp Redeemed His Loaf, or The First Distiller” in November 1889, and to the appearance of Raphael von Koeber’s article on Tolstoy in her magazine Lucifer in September 1890.
The source material also records that Blavatsky’s engagement with Russian literature extended to Leo Tolstoy. When Tolstoy was compiling The Thoughts of Wise People for Every Day, he drew on Theosophischer Wegweiser, a magazine of the Theosophical Society of Germany. From its 1902 and 1903 issues he extracted eight aphorisms of the Indian sage Ramakrishna, eight passages from Blavatsky’s The Voice of the Silence, and one from the fellow Theosophist Franz Hartmann, translating them into Russian. Tolstoy’s library held the English edition of The Voice of the Silence, which had been presented to him by its author.
Blavatsky’s November 1889 publication of Tolstoy’s fairy tale “How A Devil’s Imp Redeemed His Loaf, or The First Distiller” was accompanied by a small preface about the features of translation from Russian. In it she called Tolstoy “the greatest novelist and mystic of Russia of to-day,” observing that all his best works had already been translated but that the attentive Russian reader would not find in any of these translations the “popular national spirit” that permeates all original stories and fairy tales. She noted that despite being full of “popular mysticism,” and some of them “charming,” they are the most difficult to translate into a foreign language. She concluded: “No foreign translator, however able, unless born and bred in Russia and acquainted with Russian peasant life, will be able to do them justice, or even to convey to the reader their full meaning, owing to their absolutely national idiomatic language.”
In September 1890, Blavatsky published philosopher Raphael von Koeber’s article “Leo Tolstoi and his Unecclesiastical Christianity” in Lucifer. Von Koeber briefly described the merits of Tolstoy as a great master of artistic language, but the main focus of the article was Tolstoy’s search for answers to religious and philosophical questions. The author concluded that Tolstoy’s “philosophy of life” is identical in its foundation to that of Theosophy.
The source material further records that the Theosophist Charles Johnston, president of the New York branch of the Irish Literary Society, travelled to Russia and met with Tolstoy. In March 1899 Johnston published “How Count Tolstoy Writes?” in the American magazine The Arena. In November 1904, Rudolf Steiner gave a lecture in Berlin entitled “Theosophy and Tolstoy,” where he discussed the novels War and Peace, Anna Karenina, the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the philosophical book On Life (1886–87).
