Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [54]
So, there were no “ladies of high society”! But what was there?
Grigory Rasputin was born in the village of Pokrovskoe, in Siberia, the son of the peasant Efim Novykh. His father was a terrible drunkard who suddenly saw the light, stopped drinking, and saved up a sufficiency. Then his wife died and his muzhik despair kicked in again: he began drinking and lost all his money. His son Grigory was well known at this time for his own dissolute life. As Rasputin he went to Tobolsk, worked as a waiter in a hotel, there married the servant Praskovye, and she bore him three children: a son and two daughters.
Grigory himself described this dissipated beginning to his life poetically and tenderly: “When I was fifteen in my village in the summertime and the sun warmed me and the birds sang their heavenly songs I dreamed of God.… My soul yearned for the distance.… Dreaming many times I wept and did not know myself where these tears had come from or why.… So my youth passed. In a kind of contemplation, a kind of dream. And later, when life brushed me, touched me, I ran into a corner and prayed secretly. I was not content and could not find the answer to many things; I was sad. I began drinking.”
What sweet speech. The gift of seduction.
Until the age of thirty he smoked and fornicated and even worse—he stole. But just as he was about to turn thirty, it happened: a novice monk met him on the road and their conversation set the errant soul on the correct path. The mysterious life of the holy man Grigory began with that moment. During the threshing, when the servants laughed at his holiness, he thrust his shovel into a heap of grain and set out for holy places. He walked for more than a year, came home, dug out a cave under his cattle shed, and prayed there for two weeks. Then he went off again to wander, praying at holy places. He was in Kiev, like Venerable Serafim, and then in the Sarov wilderness itself, then on pilgrimage in Moscow, and on through Russia’s endless towns and villages.
He returned home after long wanderings, and as he was praying in church, in front of the people, he beat his brow on the floor in his zeal. From that time he was given to prophecy and healing.
Vera Leonidovna:
“This was a fantastic man. When the fashionable restaurant Vienna opened, I was taken there by Artsybashev, the author of the play Jealousy. What a success I was in that play! Also with us was an incredible man well known throughout Petersburg, Manusevich-Manuilov. There were rumors that he was an agent of every possible intelligence service at one and the same time. It was he who made the suggestion: ‘Let’s go see Rasputin.’ It was right next door to the Vienna, on Gorokhovskaya Street. Artsybashev refused, but I’m a daredevil. Rasputin was sitting in the dining room between two girls, his daughters. His eyes bore into me—I have a physical memory of the sensation. The table was laden with flowers and across sat the young, pale blond Munia—Maria Golovina, the empress’s lady-in-waiting. People kept calling and stopping in constantly. Women came by. Maria kept running to open the door, as diligent as a servant, and then he said to her: ‘Write.’ And he began to speak. It was all about meekness, about the soul. I tried to remember it and later, when I got home, I even wrote it down, but it wasn’t the same thing. Everyone’s eyes had ignited. There was an ineffable flow of love. It was intoxicating.”
I was reminded of this story in the archive. The empress’s dark blue notebook. On the inside cover