Page 480 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

her which was difficult to imagine. I shall write about all of it later, showing step by
step everything we went through together. Now I would like to throw some light upon
those moments of Svetlana’s life before we met, almost twenty years ago, about which
she told me and about which she can not tell anyone anymore with her wonderful vivid
language of not only a gifted writer, but also a gifted Person in every respect.

When Svetlana was a teenager, she got meningitis in a very heavy form. The
headache was so severe that even morphine injections were unable to take the pain
away. After a while the doctors said that they could not prescribe morphine as an
analgesic anymore, otherwise she would become a drug addict and that she should face
the unbearable pain alone, without any help from medicine. Anyone else in her place
would have found the necessary stuff, by appealing to narcodealers, to seize that
infernal pain at least for the time of the narcotic oblivion. Svetlana declined that option.
Besides, she continued to work full-time, so that nobody even guessed that she had an
unbearable permanent headache.
Svetlana also told me that her father and she had been "crazy" bibliophiles. In
order to buy or exchange a book they were interested in, they were ready to go to the
ends of the Earth or give a months salary for it. And they did it, they went and they
paid! One day Svetlana went "book hunting" in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas, if I am
not mistaken, which ended in a very interesting meeting.

When she finally got the book she wanted, Svetlana sat down on a bench in a
shady alley, submerged in her thoughts, quite sorrowful ones (for which she had every
reason, but they were very personal and I shall not write about them). When she came
to herself, she saw a middle-aged man sitting beside and attentively looking at her. He
asked her what happened that such a wonderful face expressed such a deep sadness.
Svetlana desperately needed someone to somehow unburden her heart. A casual
sympathetic person was a gift of fate for her, but very quickly the conversation turned
to other subjects and they began to discuss the sense of life and other subjects which
had given her no rest since her childhood and pushed her to search for answers to her
questions in the wisdom of the East and other books which promised to open all the
secrets of being to a reader.
However, these books gave her nothing but disappointment! They only lured with
their promises of enlightenment, and then everything would come down to the idea that
only the "great consecrated" could get these revelations, which for the rest, they said,
were premature or even dangerous, both for them and for the surrounding people! What
a nice strategy! I would call it a Hodja Nasreddin strategy. (Hodja Nasreddin was a
th
satirical Sufi Turkish figure of the 13 century – E.L.) The strategy was the following:
when Hodja’s stubborn donkey did not want to move in the necessary direction, he
hung a carrot on a fishing-rod in front of the donkey’s nose and turned the rod where
he wanted to go and the stubborn donkey reached for such a close, juicy and sweet
carrot and carried his master wherever he pleased. Svetlana and her father, Vasiliy
Vasilievich, searched for books on occultism and eastern teachings hoping to find the
answers to their questions there. In vain they hoped for that. The books promised to do
so, but did not keep their promises. They gave unintelligible verbiage instead of clear
explanations.

Back to content

479