The myth of the masters revived: the occult lives of Nikolai and Elena Roerich

The myth of the masters revived: the occult lives of Nikolai and Elena Roerich, by Alexandre Andreyev, Eurasian Studies Library, Leiden and Boston MA, Brill, 2014, xxix + 502 pp., $179.00 (hbk), ISBN 978-9-004-27042-8Pity the scholar researching the lives of Nikolai Roerich and his wife, Elena. Even allowing for the impossibility of gaining perfect knowledge of any historical subject, Roerich - a fin de siecle painter of pivotal importance, but also an occultist who spent much of the 1920s and 1930s engaged in political schemes that verged on espionage - remains one of the most baffling individuals in modern Russian history. His wife, whose role in motivating his endeavours has been long underestimated, is no less enigmatic.Alexandre Andreyev, a noted expert on the history of Buddhism in Russia, has done much in his latest book to pull back the veil that still shrouds the Roerichs' intentions and actions. The Myth of the Masters Revived makes a signal contribution and exemplifies the newest historiographic tum in Roerich studies. In recent years, an expanding cohort of scholars, both Russian and non-Russian, have striven to assess Roerich without falling victim to the hagiographie tendencies so common among his admirers, but also without giving into the temptation - particularly strong among his detractors from the late 1970s onward - to dismiss him more than is warranted.With a judicious moderation often lacking among those writing about Roerich, Andreyev relates the fuller account of Roerich's years in emigration that has emerged over the last two decades, thanks to post-Soviet archival revelations and the appearance of other useful sources in the 1990s and 2000s. Famously, Roerich, after emigrating from Soviet Russia, staged two expeditions to Asia - one to Turkestan, the Altai, Mongolia, and Tibet in 1925-1928 (with an unpublicized side-trip to Moscow), and a second to Manchuria in 1934-1935 - ostensibly to study the cultures of Asia in the first case, and to search for drought-resistant grasses on behalf of the US Department of Agriculture in the second. In reality, both ventures were steps in a covert, occult-inspired aspiration that the Roerichs referred to as the "Great Plan": an attempt to create a pan-Buddhist state encompassing as much of Central Asia as possible. Not only did this audacious ambition guide the Roerichs' every action after 1920, but the family believed in all earnest that it had been communicated to them by unseen spiritual masters during seances presided over by Nicholas and especially Elena.During the earliest 1920s, the first iteration of the Great Plan was anti-Soviet, but by the time of their first expedition, the Roerichs had decided that their best course of action was to co-operate with the USSR. This pro-Soviet impulse faded by 1928, giving way to a second rightward shift, lasting through the mid-1930s and based on seeking support from White Russian emigres and Japanese forces on the Asian mainland. With the scandalous collapse of Roerich's second expedition - conducted with the blessing of Agriculture Secretary and future vice-president Henry Wallace (a Roerich disciple during the late 1920s and early 1930s) - the family found itself stranded in India, where Roerich remained until his death, hoping once again, but in vain, to reconcile with the Soviet Union. …