That doctrine has been set forth by his admirer Sinitsyn: ‘Christ was crucified, Iliodor states, but it was not he who was resurrected but the eternal truth that he preached and that Iliodor now preaches.’ And Iliodor ‘will create a new religion and, thanks to that religion, the whole life of people will be changed’. And so that it would be clear that he was the founder of a new religion and therefore a new Christ, Iliodor began to wear a white robe like that worn by Jesus. And ‘he blessed those who came to visit him as Jesus did, by laying his hand on the head of the one he was blessing … And he openly called himself the “King of Galilee”.’ And so in ‘New Galilee’ with its new ‘King of Galilee’, another Khlyst ‘ark’ was formed. Iliodor no longer dissimulated. He proved to be quite simply a Khlyst. And that secret Khlyst affiliation of his (which proved a very unpleasant surprise for Hermogen and Feofan) apparently also explains why Rasputin formed such a close friendship with and had such a remarkable trust in the ill-fated monk.
A Khlyst Encounter In Tsarskoe Selo
Even more interesting is the testimony of the famous poet and sectarian Nikolai Klyuev.
‘They called me a Rasputin,’ Klyuev wrote in an 1918 poem. Klyuev’s destiny began, as he himself said, when ‘an elder who had come from Afon’ (a Khlyst sect had been crushed at the Afon Monastery) said that ‘I myself … ought to become a Christ.’ And the elder introduced Klyuev to the ‘brethren’. And Klyuev’s wandering began. ‘The Dove-brethren [as the Skoptsy were called] … brought me virtually to the ends of Russia to the province of Samara. I lived there for two years as King David in a large Golden Ark of white dove-Christs, and then with various people of secret identity, I walked all over Russia.’ They became so enamoured of the Khlyst poet Klyuev in Petersburg that he was called to Tsarskoe Selo. He was brought to the tsarina at the Alexander Palace, where, as he recalled, ‘on a wooden stage covered with velvet brocade in a cold hall of the Tsarskoe Selo palace I stood before a row of golden chairs dressed in crude peasant boots, an alumnus of the barn and an emissary of the bear.’ And then he had a conversation with Rasputin.
‘We had not seen each other for seventeen years, and now God had brought us to press our lips together … We kissed … as if we had only parted the day before … and a conversation took place … I tried to speak to Rasputin in the secret language of the soul about the birth of Christ in man … He answered irrelevantly and finally admitted that he had become a strict follower of Orthodoxy… Upon leaving, I did not kiss Rasputin again but bowed to him in monastery style.’
Most likely Rasputin, the friend of the tsars, simply did not want to and could not acknowledge his former acquaintance. Especially since his own teaching, although created ‘on the basis of orthodox Khlyst doctrine’, had moved a good distance beyond it, as Prugavin correctly observed. Rasputin had created his own personal teaching.
An Imperceptible Halo
‘An Orthodoxy of the people’, a present-day priest has described Rasputin’s teaching to me. A naive Orthodoxy of the people that began with great holiness and ended in great sin.
But first a few words about the Khlyst Resurrection of Christ in man. For that resurrection to take place, it is necessary to suppress the flesh and sin. That is, in order to achieve a transformation of the soul, one must first mortify the Old Testament Adam in oneself — the man of sin. And to do that, it is necessary to reject everything worldly: honour and glory, love of oneself, even shame. And to care about one thing alone: God’s will. Only then will everything worldly in you pass away and the voice of God be heard. This in fact is the mystical Khlyst Resurrection, when in you there is no longer ‘yours’ but only the mind and thought of God. And then the Holy Spirit will come to dwell in you, and your mysterious transformation into a new Christ will occur. But that path to ‘God in oneself’ is long and painful.
From Zhukovskaya’s memoirs: ‘Munya gave an especially good account of how Grigory Efimovich mortified his flesh…how in the heat of the day he stood for hours in a swamp, placing himself at the mercy of mosquitoes and midges. Now he can permit himself anything: the one who has subdued his own flesh need fear no temptation!’
And after his wanderings, when he sensed the ability in himself to heal and even to prophesy, he came to believe that God was in him.
There is an echo of this in the File in Filippov’s testimony about Rasputin’s diet. It turns out that it was not merely a diet but also a path to the ‘divine in oneself’. ‘Rasputin did not merely avoid eating meat … He ate fish, as Christ and the apostles had done. And by apostolic rule, he ate with his hands…breaking his bread and never slicing it … Moreover, he found that meat blackens man, whereas fish lightens him. Therefore, both from the apostles and from those people who eat fish there always emanate beams of light like a halo, albeit an imperceptible one.’
He saw himself as having just such an ‘imperceptible halo’, and so did his devotees.
His Mission
But at the same time, Rasputin apparently suffered bitterly. His ferocious temperament would not allow him to defeat lechery completely, to forget about woman’s flesh. And it was evidently then that he began to reflect: if, despite all his great spiritual feats, the hunger for the flesh still remained, then it was probably there for a reason, and some purpose was hidden in it. For he had not experienced the torment of the flesh without reflection. It had been a kind of sign. And gradually he came to realize that it was his mission. He who had achieved great perfection was obliged to heal others as well of the torments of the flesh, of the Old Testament Adam within. And above all to heal them — women, those weak divine creatures, those vessels of sin in whose very nature was concealed the devil-pleasing thirst for lechery. Of course, as we shall see, he could heal men, as well. But to undertake his mission, he had to continue his discipline and become truly impassive. As impassive as the saints. Thus did he begin to create his doctrine.
The Naked Rasputin
It was indeed in Rasputin’s relations with women that the naive, rather frightening mysticism of the doctrine discovered by the ignorant peasant was hidden. As is clear from the File, those relations greatly worried his friend and publisher Filippov. And that apparently is why Filippov tried to talk to Rasputin about them. But Rasputin was evasive. For Filippov, an ordinary man living in the external world, could not understand him. ‘He would even … quickly and facetiously attempt to change the subject whenever someone started in on a more or less ribald theme.’ Nevertheless, Filippov was once quite startled by his supposedly modest friend.
Once when he was staying with me, Rasputin, unbeknownst to me, went into the kitchen where at the time my maid, a very pretty Ukrainian, was working. Re-emerging, he said, ‘What a little stinker you’ve got there!’
‘How’s that?’ I asked.
‘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 suc
cess, 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 exercis
e. 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 Rasputin File Page 32