>Considering the general cultural background, it is not unnatural that Helena Andreyevna, daughter of the Fadeyevs, and mother of H.P.B., should herself have been a very remarkable woman. She was born Jan. 11/23, 1814, near the village of Rzhishchevo, in the Province of Kiev, where the estate of the Dolgorukovs was located. Nurtured in an atmosphere of culture and scholarship, she became a noted novelist, her first work, called The Ideal, being published when she was 23. Her marriage, in 1830, at the early age of 16, to a man almost twice her age, Col. Peter Alexeyevich von Hahn,7 was an unhappy one, owing to incompatibility and the inability on her part to fit into the narrow groove of her husband’s military life. Her delicate sensitivity and high ideals made it impossible for her to enjoy the society of people whose ideas and sentiments remained on a very commonplace level. In her novels, she pictured the wretched position of women, their lack of opportunity and education, and voiced the question of their ultimate emancipation. She was the first woman in Russia to do so in literature. Her unhappiness must have contributed to the undermining of her health, and she died from tuberculosis when only 28 years of age