New light on Inayat Khan’s time in Moscow

New light is shed on Inayat Khan’s year in Moscow (1913-14) by Oleg Yarosh, in “Universal Sufism and the Cultic Milieu in Russia at Turn of the xx Century,” Mondi 1, no. 1 (2019), pp. 101-20. Yarosh, who is head of Oriental Philosophy at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, uses not only Inayat Khan’s memoirs but also Russian sources that other researchers have not used.

Inayat Khan’s most important Russian host, it seems, was Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866-1949, pictured), a celebrated poet who had spent much of his life abroad and whose salon was one of the most fashionable in Moscow. He was a follower of Anna Mintslova (1865-1910), a Russian disciple of Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), and was also interested in Sufism, which few Russians then were—Sufism was too closely associated with Russia’s Muslims, who were not highly regarded by the elite, says Yarosh. Notes on Sufism are to be found in Ivanov’s archive, and he wrote poems referring to Rumi and Hafez. One of his last poems, written in exile after the Russian Revolution, was “Певец у Суфитов” (Sufi Singer), which hails both Rumi and Hafez, who are linked to the “witness” of Plato.

Ivanov’s understanding of Sufism, then, seems to have something in common with the literary Western Sufism of Goethe and of the later nineteenth century, not especially with that of Inayat Khan. But even if Ivanov did not learn his Sufism from Inayat Khan, a pre-existing interest in Sufism may have been what led him to introduce Inayat Khan into Russian society, and it was evidently through him that Inayat Khan met other celebrities such as the composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), a friend of Ivanov—celebrities who, one gathers from Yarosh, may not have been quite as taken by Inayat Khan as his memoirs suggest.

Before he met Ivanov, Inayat Khan’s point of arrival in Moscow was a fashionable night-club called “Maxim,” run by an unusual African-American entrepreneur, Frederick Bruce Thomas (1872-1928: see Vladimir Alexandrov, The Black Russian, 2013). A Russian Theosophist, Eugenia Spasskaya, noted in her memoirs that when other Theosophists heard of “a Hindu, Inayat Khan” in this “tavern hell,” they tried to “buy out the naïve teacher,” but that Inayat Khan preferred to stay at Maxim for a while.