Around 1885 lived a young Russian girl, Marie Bashkirtzeff. She wrote some prose and poetry and did some painting. She lived and died very young from TB on the French Riviera in Nice. Not particularly pretty, nor particularly striking, she had nevertheless a tremendous personality. In fact so striking that the city of Nice after her death created a Museum Bashkirtzeff where were kept her paintings, her writings and her personal things. The French author Francois Coppee said of Marie Bashkirtzeff: "Je l'ai vue une fois, je l'ai vue une heure, je ne l'oublirais jamais." (I saw her once, I saw her one hour—I shall forget her never.)
I think as far as personality is concerned, this applied likewise to Nelka. As I said before, I saw her for the first time when I was but seven years old. The impression I got then never left me throughout my life and only grew and developed with time and age.
We were married for 45 years and my love and devotion to her date back from that encounter at seven. In other words a span of 60 years—a lifetime. A lifetime during which everything was centered around this one person.
I think one can say that she had been both very happy and very unhappy in her life, at least this was the balance of her feelings during the first half of her life. During that period she experienced great happiness in her relationship with her mother and with other members of her family, in the devotion and loyalty she had to them. She also experienced happiness in her endeavors in her school work, in her interests in life and for life. The happiness she may have derived from the realization of things well done and accomplished.
But also there was great, overwhelming unhappiness and sorrow, because of the unusually hard way in which she accepted the loss of those who were close to her. Few probably felt such losses as acutely as she did and this caused pain and anguish. Then there also was unhappiness in the contradiction and the division of feelings, between two countries, two backgrounds, two ideologies, two attachments. This constant division brought with it many heartaches, many disappointments.
And then the second half of her life was the one she passed with me. I can only hope that I may have given her at least a measure of the happiness which she so much deserved. Again there were disappointments, frustrations and heartaches as there are in every life and existence. But gradually, with age she seemed to acquire a greater calm in her feelings, she seemed to mellow in her intensity, she seemed to find greater reconciliation within her own beliefs and thoughts and find a greater calm of the soul and a greater satisfaction in her beliefs than she had before that.
She always felt that the turning point in her life, as well as in mine, started from the time we were in Constantinople and when we saw a distant aunt of mine, Princess Gorchakoff.
She was a student of Theosophy and also seemed to have the calm and serenity which comes from the study of that philosophy. Undoubtedly she had a good deal of influence on Nelka and started us on a new way of thinking. Out of this encounter developed gradually all the changes of beliefs and attitudes which brought about such a fundamental and radical change in all the outlooks which Nelka had held hitherto and which she was now discarding.
I think I can say that towards the end she had acquired great moral calm, satisfaction and serenity. She was not perplexed or afraid of the uncertainties of one's beliefs, of the imminence of death or of the questions of the hereafter.
Doubt, uncertainty, perplexity and an unresolved search seemed to have been supplanted by a feeling of calm and confidence. A great thing for anyone to have and to be able to have the moral fortitude to face such a change and to accept it graciously.