Who was Grigori Rasputin?
But one of the things I remember from my Russian History class in college is that Rasputin was quite the ladies man. No joke. He got women like crazy. How? It wasn’t just his powerful position or good connections. The man had a large knob on his…wellllll….wee-wee, shall we say? And it made him VERY popular with the ladies. So much so, in fact, that after his killers finally succeeded in assassinating him, they castrated him (according to legend anyway). Oh, and his greatest magical power was that of charisma (and I believe in magical powers, but this man just had charisma up the wa-hoo). He just knew how to influence people to do his bidding, including the Czar’s wife. Quite the charmer, isn’t he? Well, you said you wanted to know EVERYTHING about him, so I thought I should add all that on top of what other posters are no doubt going to share from Wikipedia.
Was he a holy man? Or was he the devil? There have been many books and films about Grigori Rasputin and his close relationship with Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarita Alexandra during the last days of the Romanov dynasty in Russia, but this novel is unique because it looks at Rasputin from the viewpoint of someone who perhaps knew him best – his own daughter. This novel opens as Maria Rasputin is being questioned by a tribunal about her father’s mysterious death. She then relays the events in the week preceding his murder in December 1916. Through the book Maria recounts the many people who sought out her father as a holy man, asking him for healings or to intervene on their behalf in some matter. She tells of her father being summoned to the palace by Tsarita Alexandra because he alone was able to heal her son from his bouts with hemophilia. She also relays how surprised she was to learn that her father was so widely known and hated that his life was in danger. The common people are starvin
