The Rasputin File (43 page)

It was in fact about this that Lokhtina was speaking when she confirmed in the File some words of hers published by Iliodor: ‘For a saint, everything is holy. That Father Grigory was like everyone else, then? People make it a sin, but he by that self-same sin only sanctified you and brought down upon you the grace of God.’

‘For A Saint, Everything Is Holy’

Nevertheless, Rasputin suffered in that first ‘holy period’. He felt that lust had not been conquered, but that it had conquered him. Thus came into being the Rasputin condition that recalls Dostoevsky — continuous suffering from a consciousness of one’s own sinfulness, continuous appeals to God with prayer and repentance.

And thus was manifested Rasputin’s fearsome Russian talent for inner righteousness while enclosed in a membrane of continuous sin.

Where suffering from repentance transforms sin into Love.

Love was the chief thing for him. Love everywhere overflowing. The pagan Love of nature, of trees, grass, and rivers. Christian Love in the family. Only Love was holy. And therefore if a married woman loved her husband, she was for Rasputin untouchable. But whatever was not love was a lie. As Lili Dehn testifies in the File, ‘he … demanded purity in family relations.’ Once he ran into her and her father on the street, and deciding that her father was her lover, he made a huge scene, promising to tell my husband that I had been out walking with a man’. That is why for him the tsarina’s great love for the tsar was sacred.

But if a woman did not love her husband and remained in the marriage, she was sinful. Rasputin was against love’s being subordinated to the laws of marriage. It was for him something terrible that came from the official church. Everything that was not true love was to him criminal and subject to change. For him, Grand Duchess Elizaveta Fyodorovna’s remaining faithful to her homosexual husband was repellent. And like all the
Khlysty
, he considered it a duty to replace non-love in a marriage with a new spiritual and physical union, like one dove with another’. That is why upon learning that the tsar’s sister Olga was living in a marriage of non-love’ with a homosexual, he tried to embrace her, to infect her with love. He believed that the women whom he had rewarded with Love or had liberated from lechery would be linked to him for ever by invisible bonds.

You know,’ he explained to Zhukovskaya, there is this path from earth to heaven. If I love someone seriously, I keep it, that path, in my mind and know by it whether she is going off the track… Because I have removed all sins from her, she goes pure with me, but if she has gone off the track, then the sin is mine and not hers.’ And Filippov, in describing Rasputin’s ridiculous jealousy in regard to Laptinskaya and the rest, had not understood. Rasputin was not jealous. He bore a responsibility for them and was afraid that someone might corrupt them. For he sincerely believed that in sleeping with them, he had rid them of sin. And that without him, they would engage in sin. That is why, as Lili Dehn testified, he required of his admirers that they visit him almost daily’.

A Second Transformation

But was the experience of the holy zealots who had exhausted themselves with asceticism and fasting suitable for yesterday’s sinner? After all, the hillock of righteousness he had clambered up with such difficulty as a youth was so small. So the devil, once let into his soul, remained there. And
the terrifying experience of exorcising lechery turned into mere lechery. Ceaseless lechery that for him became a narcotic. Thus had his experiments ended. Such a transformation of the soul was called a ‘state of spiritual temptation’. And after a certain point, as we shall see, he would for that very reason come to hate
them
— the ‘little ladies’ who had given themselves to him. And who had thereby allowed the devil to become established in his soul. For it was no longer simply the satisfaction of lust, but that ‘refining of the nerves’ that gave him his mysterious dark strength.

And his salon gradually became an ordinary sect. At whose head stood a ruler, Rasputin. And by his side the consecrated Lokhtina. Who was not afraid to ‘spread the word’ to the whole world, calling Iliodor ‘Christ’ and Rasputin the ‘Lord of hosts’. But in order not to do them injury, she pretended to be a holy fool. With holy fools it was all just talk.

Yurodstvo
(holy folly) was Rasputin’s second secret. For in the concept of
yurodstvo
there was for Alix also an explanation of Our Friend’s peculiar actions. Familiarity with the concept also allowed the tsars to disregard the reports of his debauchery.

The Tsars And The Madmen

From the diary of KR: ‘They continue to receive the holy fool Grisha.’ The File, from the testimony of Andrei Zeyer, ‘who was in charge of assigning the royal family’s carriages’: ‘Rasputin visited the palace frequently, it seems to me … The first time I saw him was at church … Colonel Loman kissed him. When I asked him who he was, Loman evasively replied that he was a holy fool.’

Alix, of course, called Rasputin ‘elder’ merely as a matter of convention, emphasizing thereby that Our Friend had been chosen by divinity. Elders were individuals, usually monks in monasteries, who lived in isolated places and engaged in fasting and prayer. As someone well versed in mystical literature, the tsarina knew perfectly well that in addition to elders, there were in Russia other remarkable and truly ‘divine’ people. Those who had committed themselves to the feat of
yurodstvo
— the holy fools.

Holy fools are a Russian phenomenon. At the basis of the feat of
yurodstvo
lie the words of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians that ‘We are fools for Christ’s sake’ (4:10), ‘for the wisdom of this world is folly with God’ (3:19), and of the Evangelist Mark that ‘if any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (8:34). The
holy fools rejected in Christ’s name the life of ordinary people and agreed to simulate madness in order, as He had done, to endure suffering and revilement voluntarily. And thus to partake of His suffering, His persecution. ‘Sinners beat them, but the wise heeded their words,’ it was said of holy fools in the days of the kingdom of Muscovy.

And in contrast to sinners who are eager to call themselves holy, the holy fools were holy men who called themselves sinners. In order to endure constant abuse from the world. The Englishman Giles Fletcher, who visited Muscovy at the end of the sixteenth century, described those strange people. ‘They use to go stark naked, save a clout around their middle, with their haire hanging long, and wildely about their shoulders, and many of them with an iron coller, or chaine about their neckes, or middes, even in the very extremity of winter.’ Yet in Muscovy the voice of the holy fool was taken as the voice of God. When holy fools wished to eat, they could enter any shop and take whatever they liked, and the owner was glad. And the most beautiful cathedral in Moscow was erected next to the Kremlin and dedicated to the holy fool Basil the Blessed.

The cruel Muscovite tsars held in awe and feared the holy fools, whom they called ‘blessed’. Ivan the Terrible, one of the bloodiest Russian tsars, had accused the cities of Novgorod and Pskov of treachery. Novgorod was surrounded by the tsar’s troops, its inhabitants were burned at the stake, infants were tied to their mothers and thrown with them into the river Volkhov, and the tsar’s warriors went out in boats and with their pikes finished off those who swam to the surface. And then the tsar set off for Pskov in order to destroy its inhabitants. The bells were rung in Pskov and wives parted with their husbands. But when he entered the city, the first thing the omnipotent tsar did was to bow down before the holy fool Nikolai. It was Lent. The holy fool, who went about clad in heavy chains on his naked body, silently extended a piece of raw meat to the tsar in response to his greeting. ‘I am a Christian and do not eat meat during Lent,’ the tsar said. ‘You do worse, you devour human flesh, forgetting both the fast and God,’ the holy fool answered. And the omnipotent tsar meekly departed with his troops without harming Pskov. Such was the power of the holy fools. Their counterfeit madness concealed behind a mask of foolishness both simple holiness and wisdom. Their behaviour itself was a mockery of the conventions and vices of the world, of that which the world itself hid from view. The very nakedness of the holy fools was a stripping bare of a world that thought about adorning the body but that did not think about the soul. By their violation of social decorum the holy fools rent the veil covering man’s secret vices.

Lust was a cardinal sin. And the holy fools badgered women, thus making obvious what people preferred to conceal and make secret. Which is why the behaviour of the holy fools sometimes displayed the sexual dissoluteness that was so carefully concealed by society. Which is why they could copulate right on the street. As G. Shavelsky, the head chaplain of the imperial army and navy, wrote, ‘On the tsarina’s desk was the book
Sainted Holy Fools of the Russian Church
, with her marginal notes next to the passages where the sexual dissoluteness of the holy fools was discussed.’

So she had grasped Rasputin’s secret, or so she believed.

The holy fool renounced all blessings, and not just worldly ones but also those of the spirit — honours, glory, even the respect and affection of one’s neighbours. More than that, he challenged those blessings and enticements to battle, acting not in human fashion but in a distorted
(urodskii)
way (hence the etymology of ‘holy fool’:
yurodivyi
or
urodivyi)
.

Alix could have understood the secrets of the holy fools’ behaviour from the example of the ancient Byzantine holy fool Simeon, who bore the same name as the saint of Verkhoturye. And Feofan, too, initially sought in Simeon’s Life an explanation for Rasputin’s actions.

The holy fool Saint Simeon ‘intentionally went to bathhouses with women, for which he was abused and insulted’.

It is indeed in the ‘Life of the Holy Fool Simeon,’ published in
Monthly Readings
, that the tsarina could have found what to her would have seemed like a solution to the riddle of Rasputin’s numerous shocking and even horrifying actions.

‘People could not completely recognize his holiness, since he hid it from them,’ it is written in the Life of Simeon. ‘For
yurodstvo
is that feat whereby a person who is filled with true Christian wisdom reveals himself through his profound humility, through his mad external actions.’ Simeon, however, frequently revealed himself as sexually crazed. For example, ‘when the wife of an innkeeper was asleep by herself in her room and her husband was selling wine, Simeon came to her and started to remove his clothing, pretending that he wanted to lie with her. She started screaming, and the innkeeper came running, and his wife said to him, “He wants to rape me.” And the husband savagely beat the elder. But Simeon found happiness in enduring the abuse.’

And again:

There were two bathhouses in the town, one for men, and the other for women. Simeon went to the women’s bathhouse. They shouted at him, ‘Stop, holy fool, do not go in there, that is the women’s bathhouse.’ But Simeon said, ‘There is hot and cold water there, and there is hot and cold
water here; there is nothing else in particular, neither here nor there.’ With these words he entered the bathhouse naked and sat down among the women. They at once fell on him, beat him, and drove him out. Afterward the deacon asked the saint, ‘Father how did your flesh feel when, naked, you went in among naked women?’ The elder replied, ‘It is all the same, I was among them like a tree among trees, not sensing that I had a body … but all my thoughts were directed to God’s work.’ Being impassive, he went in to the women, and just as in ancient times the bush on Sinai remained unconsumed by the fire, so did he from being touched by women … And those who spread lies against him at once fell ill for it. And only he could heal them with his kiss.

And Alix saw that Bishop Feofan, who had dared to rise against Rasputin and had not understood his holiness, had also fallen ill. Reading the story of the holy fool Saint Simeon, it must have seemed to the tsarina that she was reading Our Friend’s own story. So that the tsars could have recalled the holy fools and Saint Simeon when they were told the horrors about Rasputin and the bathhouses and the prostitutes. And they would know until the day of their death: they had met a truly saintly holy fool as if resurrected from the days of the Muscovite kingdom of the first Romanovs. And who had called down upon himself, as befitted a holy fool in view of his meekness, the abuse and persecution of the unseeing. In that is the explanation of the sentence spoken by the tsar in reply to Stolypin’s charge that Rasputin was going to the bathhouses with women: ‘I know, and he preaches Holy Scripture there.’

The Sect

Was Vyrubova initiated into Rasputin’s
Khlyst
fellowship? Unlike Lokhtina, probably not. Vyrubova believed, as did the tsarina, that he was a holy fool. Or, more precisely, she tried to believe it but she never ceased to have her suspicions. And it is for that reason that Vyrubova continued all that time to be interested in
Khlyst
teachings. She was apparently looking for anything that might disprove what was being said in the papers — anything that would please the tsarina. It was for Vyrubova, in fact, that the future Bolshevik leader Bonch-Bruevich compiled his vindication of Rasputin.

Another strange text was found in the search of Vyrubova’s little house, one entitled ‘Secrets of the
Khlysty’
.

Vyrubova testifies in the File that ‘When the indications that Rasputin was a
Khlyst
appeared in the newspapers, I turned to an acquaintance of
mine, Gofshtetter, who wrote for the
New Times
, asking him to explain to me just what that was. And Gofshtetter then gave me the page presented to me during my interrogation by the Extraordinary Commission containing an explanation of the essence of the religious views of the
Khlysty
.’