Last modified on Tuesday August 03, 2004 at 8:23 PM EDT
I do not remember when our first meeting took place. It must have been in the late twenties or the very early thirties. In the universe of Russian Paris, some peoples' paths never crossed, while others constantly ran into each other, depending on the dimensions and character of their existence. Helen and I met very often since our paths crisscrossed daily or nightly.
I was introduced to her, I believe, at the house of Youri Shirinsky-Slikhmatov, the editor and pillar of the Russian quarterly Affirmations. The very name speaks for itself; already in the twenties we were not satisfied with a flat summary negation of the Bolsheviks and sought an affirmative way out of the European crisis. Berdyaev, of course, contributed to Affirmations; his thesis of "the primacy of the spirit" could have been the password for the entire magazine and for all the emigre factions which came in contact with it.
Later, other such reviews appeared, the most significant amongst them New City, initiated by Ilya Fondaminsky, George Fedotov and Fedor Stepun.
And then there were the meetings at Mother Maria Skobtsov's hospitality house, inspired by the same, yet slightly differing principles. Helen and I bumped into each other everywhere, at such gatherings, in the most varied surroundings. Only amongst emigres (or after an earthquake) can one find such a mixture of people, from different social strata, inspired and united by the same spiritual leanings.
Prince Youri Shirinsky-Shikhmatov was the son of one of the Tsar's last Ministers of Religion, a man who as a Senator used to say that to the right of him there was only the wall. Prince Youri, the son of this archconservative dignitary, was married to the widow of Boris Savinkov, the revolutionary terrorist who staged the assassination of Plehve, of the Grand-Duke Sergei and of many others.
Mother Maria was a Russian-Orthodox nun, not locked up in a convent, but deeply involved in her soup line, hospitality house, and writings; as a young girl she wrote poetry and participated in the activities of the Social Revolutionaries. At Fondaminsky's (another Social Revolutionary) one could always meet Kerensky, the head of the shortlived Russian democratic state which ended in October 1917. (Shirinsky-Shikhmatov, Mother Maria and Ilya Fondaminsky, all three perished in German concentration camps).
Helen was at home in all these places, with all these people, and it was against this background that I came to know her.
She and Kerensky were great friends. She helped him with his French and English lecture tours, though he was the man who, directly or indirectly, had fired her father (or accepted his resignation).
I mention these details in order to demonstrate how fantastic our life in Paris was, during the pre-war years, how concentrated and intense our quest for a new and just society, and how free we felt in our choices. Hardly anyone of my generation, if asked about his religious affiliation, would answer: Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant. The usual answer one could expect was: "I would like to be a Christian."
Basically, without ever emphasizing it, we were an ecumenical crowd with strong social involvements. Helen Iswolsky's THIRD HOUR was a logical continuation of the same—under new circumstances.
From the beginning I was struck by a peculiar and very attractive trait of hers: raised in utmost luxury as the daughter of the Tsar's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Helen could and liked to work. She provided for herself and her mother with odd journalistic writings, collaborating in the French counterparts of our "spiritual" magazines, such as Esprit (Emmanuel Mounier) and Temps Présent (Stanislas Fumet).
To make a living she had to accept various jobs. Thus she was the first to translate a couple of my short stories for a French weekly, a magazine which, for some obscure reason, was supported by the famous (or infamous) Stavisky. After the Stavisky case blew up, Helen and I had a good laugh over the fact that part, a very small part, of the money he had stolen had gone into our pockets.
Of course, I was not the only one whom she translated. There were others, with great names: Berdyaev and Remizov into French; Mounier into Russian; Kerensky's speeches into English; and so on. A three-way hotline! Bringing together Mounier and Berdyaev, Maritain and Fedotov or Kerensky, that was her great mission at that time.
The fact that she had converted to Catholicism was an absolutely private matter (which was never discussed). No Russian religious movement discriminated against her and I can say from my own observations that she felt very much at home in the Russian Church. Not for nothing did she choose the Eastern Rite within the Catholic Church, the rite which follows the Russian Orthodox liturgy.
Such was our life till the great exodus began. We all left Paris weeks, days, even hours before the Huns' raid (and some returned there to perish). Helen settled temporarily in Pau, I was in Montpellier where I received a couple of letters from her. She got her American visa long before me. When I arrived in the United States in June 1942 1 heard that she had found shelter at the Tolstoy Farm, where her mother, by now very sick, could be taken care of.
In 1944 we met again at the home of Mme. Manziarly in New York. Irma Manziarly was born in St. Petersburg of German Protestant parents, had married a French-Italian, lived after the Revolution in France and the Himalayas, knew several gurus and also Gandhi. She followed certain esoteric teachings and dedicated the last years of her life to spiritual matters. The meeting at her place, to which I had been invited, was to discuss a new magazine which was to be ecumenical in the fullest sense of the word. The name of the future magazine had already been chosen: THE THIRD HOUR. What was missing was adequate material.
The other two members of the initial group were the composer Arthur Lourie, a Catholic convert, and Kazem-Bek, a man with a most complicated curriculum. His Moslem ancestors served the Romanovs and eventually joined the Russian Orthodox church. In the emigration he was the chief of a political party which saw Russia's future in "The Tsar plus the Soviets". The party was called Mlado-Rossy ("The Young Russians"). It was a highly patriotic group consisting mainly of young noblemen. When the Germans took over Europe, Kazem-Bek released his followers from their loyalty oath and emigrated to America. (The Mlado-Rossy, just as the Communists and Jews, resisted the Germans during the occupation). Kazem-Bek, after a few years, joined the Moscow Patriarchal Church and, leaving behind his wife, his children, and an old water-spaniel, went to Soviet Russia where he married again.
I diverge on these character sketches to show that such a motley crowd had to be ecumenical par excellence, without bias, without hypocrisy and cheap preferences for any "familiar" church. This was the value of the THIRD HOUR: true ecumenism without any undercurrents of favoritism. Anything that was part of Christian spirituality found its way into it—or rather was given room in THE THIRD HOUR. We were perhaps the first here to publish articles on Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Mother Maria, Teilhard de Chardin, Mounier, and Fedorov. Theologians like Berdyaev, Maritain, and Karl Barth participated in the magazine.
At the first meeting at Manziarlys I spoke about Nikolai Fedorov and proposed to write a piece about him for the first issue. This seemed to suit everyone.
Issue No. I appeared in 1946—it was actually three issues, in Russian. French, and English. We were trying to find our audience which turned out to be American. Since those early beginnings I have helped Helen carry on with the THIRD HOUR, the more so that the other founders soon died or defected. There were altogether nine issues of the magazine.
But the greater achievement lay perhaps in our meetings at which we argued matters in a rather Russian way, violently and up to the very end (if not of the problem then, at least, of the night). Somehow quite inobtrusively and quickly, our meetings grew into large gatherings, so large that they had to be moved from Helen's quarters to more spacious establishments. Americans, friends from England, France, and Germany joined us. Red wine was served and became the trademark of the THIRD HOUR discussions.
In those early days and over the years many came and went: Auden, de Rougemont, Ursula Niebuhr, Anne Fremantle, Kerensky, Eileen Egan, Marguerite Tjader, Dorothy Day; outstanding priests from France and Belgium, Africa, and India, they all were contributers and speakers. The burden of seeking out these people, of organizing our debates, of keeping the channels of communication open, rested mainly on Helen. It is true, she always had help, but without her we would not have carried on. So, gradually and rightly, it became Helen Iswolsky's THIRD HOUR. She often despaired and, as she was growing older and feebler, regularly threatened to close shop, but she never really meant it (only death could part her from the THIRD HOUR).
Gradually, too, the movement changed from the acute intellectual activity of its beginnings. It petered out, became more conventional—an institution. Perhaps at some point it had fulfilled its historic mission, and other groups of which we were not even aware took the fight onto another level. But the spirit of friendship, of ecumenism was present to the last. Only when some starry-eyed youngster would praise our meetings, then, as if talking about a faded beauty, we would say: "you should have been here 15–20 years ago!"
Helen too changed, trying above all to avoid sharp confrontations, be it in theology or politics. Age took its due. And her position was difficult: as Iswolsky's daughter she always felt that Russia's Kremlin historic borders had to be defended and that, somehow, the Kremlin and the Patriarchal Church were doing the job now. This, for scientious emigre, must have created a lot of contradictions.
She adored Soloviev; his partaking of Catholic communion, I believe, shone for her as an eternal example and signpost. But even in her lectures on him she would towards the end, fall into textbook banalities.
Life at the Catholic Worker Farm was a good period for her; the transfer to new quarters seemed a mistake. She was alone, though sporadically some people came to live with her. But it did not work out. She was not an easy companion at times.
And yet, aging, probably very sick, she continued to work, her mind as clear and sharp as ever, her mental energies undepleted. Last August she sent me a magnificent paper on V.S. Yanovsky which she had written at the request of the editor of Queens Slavic Papers, some thirty pages, possibly the last literary task she undertook on this earth. We were not always in accord: Tolstoy versus Dostoevsky was our constant battle ground. But there was a deep abiding mutual respect, based on the knowledge that during 45 years neither of us had ever betrayed that "primacy of the Spirit" that had brought us together.
There were very few left of the first "wave" of emigres who never went bowing to the rue de Grenelle (where the Soviet Embassy is located) never helped Germans or Japanese "save" Russia (there were such amongst us) and never collaborated with any variety of espionage organization of any country whatsoever.
I saw her last, two weeks before her accident. It was obvious that she was gravely ill, so ill that there was no sense to speak about it. Then I called her several times at the hospital; she asked me to postpone my visit until after New Year: then we would decide everything about the coming issue. I told her not to worry, whatever happened we'd see the issue through. We both knew that it would be the last one.
She died on the eve of Christmas, Sister Olga, O.S.B. Oblate (1896–1975).