Agardi Metrovich

Agardi Metrovich was an Italian opera singer and an early friend of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. His name is thought to be the nom de guerre of one of the carbonari [Italian revolutionaries] who supported Giuseppi Mazzini.

Madame Blavatsky wrote of him to her colleague A. P. Sinnett on April 13, 1886. She was expressing indignation about salacious rumors being spread that year by Alexis Coulomb and his lawyer about her relationship with Metrovich.

Now this address:

“Mme. Metrovitch otherwise

Mad. Blavatsky.”

is a written libel and a bullying bit of chantage, blackmail or whatever you call it. People with a mouth and a tongue cannot be stopped from saying that every man whoever approached me, from Meyendorff down to Olcott, was my LOVER... But I do believe that when a lawyer or lawyers on the authority of Mme. Coulomb’s infernal gossip writes such an insult implying not only prostitution but bigamy and aliases — it is a defamation...

Now listen to the story. Agardi Metrovitch was my most faithful devoted friend ever since 1850. With the help of Ct Kisseleff I had saved him from the gallows in Austria. He was a Mazzinist, had insulted the Pope, was exiled from Rome in 1863 -- he came with his wife to Tiflis, my relatives knew him well and when his wife died a friend of mine too — he came to Odessa in 1870. There my aunt, miserable beyond words, as she told me, at not knowing what had become of me begged of him to go to Cairo as he had business in Alexandria and to try and bring me home. He did so. There some Maltese instructed by the Roman Catholic monks prepared to lay a trap for him and to kill him. I was warned by Illarion, then bodily in Egypt — and made Agardi Metrovitch come direct to me and never leave the house for ten days. He was a brave and daring man and could not bear it, so he went to Alexandria quand meme and I went after him with my monkeys, doing as Illarion told me, who said he saw death for him and that he had to die on April 19th (I think). All this mystery and precaution made Mme. C. open her eyes and ears and she began gossiping and bothering me to tell her whether it was true — what people said — that I was secretly married to him, she not daring I suppose to say that people believed him most charitably worse than a husband. I sent her to grass, and told her that people might say and believe whatever they liked as I didn’t care. This is the germ of all the later gossip.

Helena Blavatsky's relative, Count Sergei Witte, wrote in his memoirs that "Mitrovitch" claimed her to be his wife or mistress, and that when they traveled together from Odessa to Cairo, their ship sunk and the singer was drowned while saving Blavatsky. However, the Witte memoirs are inaccurate in many details, and can be considered more colorful than authoritative.<ref>Sergei Witte, The Memoirs of Count Witte. Translated from Russian and edited by Abraham Yarmolinsky (Garden City, N.Y. and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1921 [Forgotten Books, 2013: http://www.ForgottenBooks.org], 5-9.

Additional resources

• Georgiades, Erica. "H. P. Blavatsky and the Wreck of the S. S. Eunomia" in Wordpress blog. July 28, 2014.
• Georgiades, Erica. "H.P. Blavatsky and the Wreck of the S.S. Eunomia." Theosophical History 17.1 (January, 2014), 13-34. This is a thorough examination of the possibility that H. P. Blavatsky and Agardi Metrovich were on shipboard when the Eunomia exploded.
• Georgiades, Erica. "Who Was Agardi Metrovich?" International History Conference, 2019. See Day 1 program. October 12, 2019.
• Witte, Count Sergei. The Memoirs of Count Witte. Translated from Russian and edited by Abraham Yarmolinsky (Garden City, N.Y. and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Co. 1921 [Forgotten Books, 2013: http://www.ForgottenBooks.org], 5-9.