The Rasputin File (42 page)

‘Why, she spit in my face!’

It turned out Rasputin had dragged her into a room and started fondling her, and she had slapped him.

Yet at the same time Filippov witnessed the adoration by the aristocratic beauties of that peasant who had been rejected by a maidservant. He saw how Lokhtina, who had broken her life for his sake, sought his caresses. And again Filippov tried to find an explanation for it and discuss it. And again Rasputin avoided all explanation.

Then Filippov apparently embarked on an investigation of his own. He frequently went to bathhouses with Rasputin. And there he carefully examined the naked Rasputin. ‘I had an opportunity to observe the physical peculiarities of his body, since we bathed together at the bathhouse on Cossack Lane. Externally Rasputin was exceptionally clean: he often changed his linen, went to the baths, and never smelled bad.’ But in the bathhouses of the rich where they bathed, Rasputin remained a peasant who trusted no one. ‘He did not when he bathed check in the small neck cross given to him by the empress but stuffed it in the toe of his boot with a sock.’

But clearly the main thing that interested Filippov was Rasputin’s naked body. He sought the reason there for Rasputin’s success, the secret of the sexual legend of which all Petersburg was gossiping. But he found nothing supernatural.

‘His body was exceptionally firm, not flabby, and ruddy and well proportioned, without the paunch and flaccid muscles usual at that age… and without the darkening of the pigment of the sexual organs, which at a certain age have a dark or brown hue.’ Those were the only ‘physical peculiarities’ that he remarked. Nothing unusual, no enormous sexual organ of the sort already created or soon afterwards to be created by legend. A neat, clean peasant with a young-looking body, and that is all.

And it was apparently then that the disappointed Filippov resorted to interrogating any ladies who could help in his researches about his friend. He informed the investigator of the Extraordinary Commission, who evidently was also quite exercised about it all, of the surprising results of his interrogation of Rasputin’s women. ‘According to the comments of Ptashinskaya, who told Annenkova (Anchits) about it, as well as of the other women who made personal statements to me about it, Rasputin did not seem very interested in physical relations.’

And so the ladies did not experience any supernatural amorous ecstasies. But there was still a part of Rasputin’s life in that ‘holy period’ that apparently was hidden from Sazonov and Filippov. Rasputin’s friend Filippov would have been quite astonished to learn that his strange humble friend had all that time been engaging in mad pursuit of streetwalkers. That there had been endless encounters with prostitutes, forays with them into apartments and bathhouses, all of it recorded by the amazed police agents. True, there was in those reports one basis for caution. There was no testimony from the ladies of the pavement whom Rasputin had visited. It was apparently for that reason that the Extraordinary Commission decided to trace Rasputin’s prostitutes. Retained in the File are the names of those they tried to summon for interrogation before the Commission. In vain.
They had all slipped away in the gathering chaos. But the question remains: had the agents not in fact tried to interrogate Rasputin’s prostitutes before the revolution? Or had their testimony merely perished in the destruction of the documents on Rasputin about which I have already written and will still write? Most likely, they were destroyed. But rarely is everything destroyed. And one deposition did survive! And a very valuable one.

One of the agents had written ‘how it turned out on clarification that after approaching the first prostitute, Rasputin bought her two bottles of beer, but did not drink himself … asked her to undress, looked at her body, and left’. That testimony stunned me. Because I had once heard something like it before, many years before. I had heard it but had not understood.

The Prostitute ‘Peach’

At the beginning of the 1970s I travelled quite often to the Lenfilm studios in Leningrad. They were making the film
A Day of Sunshine and Rain
, for which I had written the screenplay. At the time they were shooting a scene involving a non-speaking part, that of a ‘Petersburg old woman’, as the type was called — a relic of the tsarist empire. They brought in several old Leningrad woman for screen tests. And one of them was ugly, the witch Baba Yaga incarnate. In reply to a nasty remark by the director in that regard, the assistant who had recruited the old women said with dignity, ‘You don’t like her? Well, Grishka Rasputin liked her a lot in his day.’ Even so, she did not get the part. But I, as any young writer should have been, was burning to talk to her. I recall tracking her down in the studio cloakroom and inviting her to the studio commissary. She ate the entire meal in silence, I recollect. And only when she had finished did she begin to speak. ‘If it’s about Grishka, I’m sick and tired of talking about it … There wasn’t anything between us. After all, Grishka was impotent.’ I remember my delight!

So began our conversation, of which an entry in my journal remains.

She said that it happened in 1914 before the war. She had been turned out of her house — she tediously related the plot, similar to that of the story of Katyusha Maslova in Tolstoy’s
Resurrection
, about how she had entered service as a maid in a house on Ligovsky Avenue, how she had been seduced by the master’s son, and how she had ended up on the streets of Petersburg. She was seventeen at the time. Once she was picked by a peasant in a tight-fitting coat. He immediately promised her such good money that she began
to wonder where a peasant would get such a sum — maybe he had killed somebody. But as if reading her thoughts, he said to her, ‘Little fool! Don’t you know who I am? I’m Grigory Efimovich Rasputin.’ He took her to the same cheap hotel where they all took her and ordered her to undress. He sat down across from her. And sat and watched in silence. His face suddenly turned very, very pale, as if all the blood had left it. She even got scared. Then he gave her the money and left. On his way out he said, ‘Your kidneys are bad.’ He took her to the same hotel another time. And even lay down with her but did not touch her. And she was a ‘real peach’. Which is what everybody called her. She saw him again, but he picked others. She was glad, since she was afraid of him — it was as if he was crazy — she was afraid he would stab her. Such things had happened. He said something else to her that first time, but she was not paying attention, since ‘it was cold in the room — it was winter — and I was sitting naked and all hunched up.’ In 1940 she had a kidney removed.

A Solution To The Riddle of Rasputin?

And Filippov recalls in the File a remarkable conversation he had with Rasputin.

I … heard Rasputin’s explanation of his attitude toward women: he found little spirituality and ‘glow’ in them … At the same time, one must always ‘become more refined’, and even in his relations with women he did not so much use them physically as feel refined feelings from proximity to women, and that, Rasputin added, ‘is something womenfolk do not understand … The saints would undress harlots, and look at them, and become more refined in their feelings, but would not allow any intimacy …’ And Rasputin himself believed that by refining one’s nerves and experiencing the highest Platonic states, one could raise one’s body into the air in spite of its weight … And he explained Christ’s ascension and walking on water as examples of that ability of the soul, and said that Christ himself had not avoided Martha and Mary but was their desired guest.

This is an almost verbatim repetition of what the police agent wrote, that Rasputin had ‘asked her to undress, looked at her body, and left’. And of what the old prostitute ‘Peach’ related. And so, to refine one’s nerves was to master one’s flesh, and to delight in mastery of the flesh, of the Old Testament Adam. And from that delight came the ability to walk on water and to raise oneself into the air. The ability to ‘be Christ’.

But what about those he slept with? The endless ‘little ladies’?

His enemy the monk Iliodor, in testimony based on Rasputin’s own words, speaks of ‘refining’, as well, although in a diametrically opposed way.

A strong will gave him the possibility of abruptly turning away from the life of the rake to feats of fasting and prayer. First by those feats, and then by extreme sexual debauchery, he refined his flesh and took his nerves to the highest degree of oscillation … In general, this may be achieved by feats, sexual depravity, or, finally, as the result of any debilitating disease, of consumption, for example. In all these instances, people are very nervous, impressionable, feel deeply, and can penetrate the soul of another, read the thoughts of strangers, and even predict the future.

There is a difference here, and a similarity. Both here and there Rasputin is a peculiar kind of vampire. There, he drank the mysterious energy of victory over the sin concealed in the female body. And here, that energy is engendered in accepting sin from the female body. These are not two different stages, as Iliodor thought. They are the two paths that Rasputin discovered. And along which he travelled simultaneously.

The Struggle With The Devil

In the beginning Rasputin had achieved his goal and become impassive. And when he told Iliodor that he had spend a night without passion with two young women, he was telling the truth. It was an exercise. To temper himself, Rasputin went around Petersburg setting himself exercises in impassivity like the ancient saints: he picked up prostitutes and looked at the naked bodies of ‘harlots’. But, apparently, it often happened that he felt something quite different in himself, that unhappy ‘saint’. And thus, as the agent wrote, upon leaving the prostitutes, ‘the Russian, while walking alone, talks to himself and waves his arms and slaps himself on the body, thereby attracting the attention of passers-by.’

Let us not forget that for Rasputin the devil was real And if the devil appeared to Dostoevsky’s character in a state of delirium, then for Rasputin the devil walked with him stride for stride. And it was his argument with the devil after his visits to the prostitutes that the agent had observed.

The ‘Saint’ Draws The Spirit Of Darkness Unto Himself

But alongside Rasputin’s exercises with harlots were the real ‘little ladies’, his ‘fools’ — Lokhtina, Berladskaya, Manshtedt, the Baroness Kusova, and so on. They were supposed to come to his aid whenever the wicked devil ceased to obey. And instead of impassivity, he would feel a lust that took away his strength and did not allow pure thoughts to exist.

It was evidently at this time that it occurred to Rasputin to perfect a certain experience of the great elders that he had heard about in the monasteries. An expert on monastic life, the mystic Sergei Nilus, has written of the ‘visible devil’, who appeared in the dreams of the elders Abbot Manuil and Abbot Feodosy. Neither Manuil nor Feodosy thought of ridding themselves of the uncanny. Rather, they found a place for the demon within their ‘egos’, so that there took place in them both a clash between demonism and the spirit of Christ dwelling in their souls, and a victory over demonism.

The peasant decided to proceed in the same way. He resolved to take unto himself the devil of female lechery that so tempted him. And to deal it the final blow in his own body. The devil residing in the ‘little ladies’ would now belong to him. And he was already summoning his devotees to come to him, as to a physician, to rid themselves of the lechery living within them. And as evidence in the Tobolsk archive makes clear, in 1913 a priest named Yurievsky, attempting to resume the investigation of the Theological Consistory into the matter of Rasputin’s
Khlyst
affiliation, described from the words of witnesses ‘the magical rites that Father Grigory performed in his bathhouse with his followers…First he would pray, after which the phrase “demon of lechery, get thee hence” would be repeated three times. And then Rasputin would perform the sexual act with the woman. The power of copulation was such that the woman no longer felt her usual state of lustfulness. She felt as if all lewdness had left her.’

No, it was not the power of copulation here; it was the power of the terrible faith of his devotees that this semi-literate hypnotist-sectarian, who devoutly believed in his destiny and who had infected them with that belief, was a saint. It was the ecstasy of union with a ‘saint’ that was the source of their happy disembodiment. As in the
Khlyst
‘arks’ (which Rasputin had previously experienced) where they piously believed that it was through group sinning’ that they would rid themselves of the demon of lechery. (Yurievsky presented the results of his investigation to Bishop Alexis of Tobolsk, Molchanov’s father, and the bishop naturally threw it in the fire and ordered the priest to drop the matter.) And Beletsky, the chief of the
Department of Police, testified before the Extraordinary Commission that Rasputin ‘explained to his neophytes in my presence that it was by absorbing into his own membrane the sins he was struggling against … by absorbing filth and vice into himself, that a person achieved the transformation of his soul washed clean by his sins’. Or, more accurately, washed clean not by his sins but by the constant repenting of sin. For repentance involved great torment and suffering and prayer. And it seemed to him that he had through his own prayer obtained forgiveness, and that his soul had again been made pure. These were the depths into which the unhappy semi-literate mystic had resolved to plunge. And they were what his wife had in mind when, after catching him with a ‘little lady’ in one of his regular ‘exorcisms of the demon’, she said, ‘Each must bear his cross, and that is his.’ And they were the reason that he would say to Zhukovskaya, ‘Without sin there is no life, because there is no repentance, and if there is no repentance, there is no joy.’

That ‘holy eroticism’ gradually developed his sensuousness to its full extent. Now he could sense sin in a woman at once. And then she was given no quarter — he went after her. As he had Filippov’s pretty servant. And as he had Zhukovskaya. And the more sinful her thoughts, the more she stimulated him ‘to take sin into himself, to rid himself of the demon’. His desire as a measure of her impurity. That was what he had been talking to Berladskaya about after he slept with her. And in giving herself to him, Berladskaya, as she wrote, believed ‘that he was a saint, and that he was now busying himself so loathsomely only for my benefit and purification, and so I felt terribly sorry for him, and there arose a feeling of gratitude’. And he believed it too.