spring or autumn period when Russian roads became impassable from the mud) or from rasputia (a crossing of two or more roads) merely attest to their poor knowledge of the rules of Russian name derivation.
‘The name “Rasputin” comes from the common noun rasputa — an immoral, good-for-nothing person (neputyovyi)’ (V. A. Novikov, A Dictionary of Russian Last Names) .
A ‘rasputa’ is a dissolute (besputnyi) , good-for-nothing (neputyovyi) , debauched (rasputnyi) person. Sometimes the word served as a first name. In the days of Ivan the Terrible, there lived on the White Sea a peasant named Vasily Kiriyanov who gave his sons the names ‘Rasputa’ and ‘Besputa’ (Yu. Fedosyuk, Russian Last Names) . Neither student of Russian last names mentions any rasputitsa . It is in fact the first derivation, rasputa , that accounts for the tsar’s attempt to change Rasputin’s last name, one so dubious for a holy man.
Rasputin grew into a skinny, unattractive youth. Yet even then his eyes possessed a strange hypnotic charm. And there was in him a certain tender dreaminess that astonished his crude peers and appealed to the young women. He was, according to the testimony of his fellow villagers, caught with wenches more than once and beaten for it.
As I was assembling Rasputin’s biography bit by bit, I found in a 1912issue of the New Times an article by a well-known journalist M. Menshikov about a conversation he had had with Rasputin. And in it was a truly poetical story told by the ‘elder’ about his boyhood: ‘At the age of fifteen in my village, when the sunshine burned brightly and the birds sang heavenly songs… I would dream of God. My soul yearned for what was far away. I dreamed [of God] many times … and wept without knowing why or where my tears came from … In that way my youth passed. In a kind of contemplation, a kind of sleep. And then, after life had touched me, I ran to a corner and secretly prayed.’ The journalist had been so entranced by his conversation that in the diary of the hostess of a celebrated Petersburg salon, the general’s wife Bogdanovich, I found this entry: ‘26 February 1912. Menshikov dined with us…He said he had seen Rasputin … that he was a believer, sincere, and so on.’
It was with the same poetic language that Rasputin related the main mystery of his transformation in his ‘Life’.
The Joy Of Suffering
Among the papers of the Extraordinary Commission is the testimony of Rasputin’s fellow villagers about his sinful youth. ‘His father would send him for grain and hay to Tyumen, about eighty versts away, and he would come back on foot, walking the whole eighty versts without money, beaten and drunk, and sometimes even without the horses.’ Starting in his youth, there lived in that unprepossessing young peasant a dangerous force that found its way out in merrymaking, fist fights, and drunkenness. That great animal force weighed on him like a heavy burden.
‘I was dissatisfied,’ Rasputin told Menshikov. ‘There was much I found no answer to, and I turned to drink.’ Drunkenness was the norm for peasants. His father had drunk, as the witnesses interrogated by the Extraordinary Commission testified, although he later took himself in hand. (He even acquired a little income and owned a plot of land. In the winter he found work as a carter and in the summer, like all the peasants of Pokrovskoe, he fished and worked the land and earned money as a stevedore on steamboats and barges.)
But Rasputin was constantly drunk. And now that tender dreaminess for which his peers contemptuously called him Grishka the Fool alternated ever more frequently with fits of violent debauchery and vicious fist fights. So that another fellow villager described to the Extraordinary Commission a violent and insolent Grishka with a wild nature who ‘got into fights not merely with outsiders but with his own father’.
‘But all the same, I thought in my heart about …how people