Boris de Zirkoff — theosophist, editor and writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Boris Mikhailovich de Zirkoff was born on 7 March (22 February, Old Style) 1902 in St Petersburg, in the Russian Empire. His mother, Lydia Dmitriyevna von Hahn, was a niece of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the founder of modern Theosophy, which made him her grandnephew (one biographer calls him her great-grandnephew). A frail child, he was tutored at home and mastered several languages; he never attended school. He knew little of his great-aunt until he was about sixteen, when he first saw her book The Secret Doctrine at the home of a Russian consul, and its study became the beginning of his lifelong dedication to Theosophy.
In 1917 he and his family left Russia. In Europe he met Katherine Tingley, then head of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, during her tour of the continent, and she invited him to the society's headquarters at Point Loma, near San Diego in California. He joined the Point Loma society in January 1924, and that December, at twenty-two, he began what became his life's work: compiling the scattered writings of Blavatsky. Around 1930, as part of the effort of Tingley's successor Gottfried de Purucker to bring the Theosophical organisations together, a uniform edition of her writings became an inter-organisational venture.
In 1942 he moved to Los Angeles, where, working independently and with the support of the writer Manly P. Hall and an HPB Writings Fund, he reconstructed volumes that had been lost and brought out volumes 5 and 6 of the Collected Writings in 1950 and 1954. From 1956 the Theosophical Society (Adyar) became the sole publisher and distributor of the series. With a small volunteer staff he also founded and edited the journal Theosophia, from the early 1940s until his death, lectured, and contributed to Theosophical journals around the world.
By his death in the United States on 4 March 1981, aged seventy-eight, he had seen into print the first twelve volumes of Blavatsky's Collected Writings, together with new editions of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. A collection of his talks and writings, The Dream That Never Dies, was published in 1983.
"Left Russia with his family in 1917; settled at the Theosophical headquarters at Point Loma, California, in 1924 and in Los Angeles in 1942."
Migration storyTracing the roots — St Petersburg (Russia)
Born in St Petersburg in 1902 to Lydia Dmitriyevna von Hahn, a niece of Helena Blavatsky, he was educated at home and left Russia with his family in 1917.
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St Petersburg (Russia). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.