are saved,’ Rasputin recounts in his ‘Life’. And it was evidently the truth. The pointless life of his fellow villagers — peasant labour from dawn till dusk interrupted only by drunkenness — was that life?
But what was life? He didn’t know. And the violent drunkenness continued. There wasn’t enough money for debauchery. And then he got into some dangerous business. His fellow villager E. Kartavtsev testified before the Extraordinary Commission:
I caught Grigory stealing my haystack fence. He had chopped it up and stacked it on his cart and was about to drive away with it. But I caught him and was going to make him take what he’d stolen to the regional administrative office. He wanted to run and came near to hitting me with his axe, but I hit him with a stake so hard the blood started flowing from his nose and mouth …At first I thought I’d killed him, but then he started to stir … I set out with him to the regional office. He didn’t want to go. But I hit him several times in the face with my fist, after which he himself walked to the regional office… After that beating he turned kind of strange and stupid.
‘I hit him with a stake, the blood flowed’ — it was all so ordinary. Savage, bloody fist fights were a common affair in Siberia. Rasputin’s build was anything but powerful, but even so, he was, as we shall subsequently have occasion to see more than once, a person of unusual physical strength. So the beating he took from the by no means young Kartavtsev probably made little impression on him. It was no accident that, as Kartavtsev says, he immediately took up his thieving again: ‘Soon after the theft of the stakes from me, a pair of horses was stolen from the common pasture. I myself was guarding the horses and saw Rasputin and his comrades ride up to them. But I didn’t give it any meaning. Several hours later I discovered the horses were missing.’
His plucky companions rode off to the city to sell the horses. But, according to Kartavtsev, Rasputin for some reason let the horses go and returned home.
No, something did happen to Rasputin in the course of that beating. The simple Kartavtsev’s explanation that Rasputin ‘turned kind of strange and stupid’ is inadequate here. No, he could not have understood Rasputin’s dark, complicated nature. When, during the beating, the blow of the stake had seemed in danger of killing him and the blood had started running down his face, Rasputin evidently experienced something. The beaten youth sensed a strange joy in his soul that he would later call ‘the joy of abasement’, ‘the joy of suffering and abuse’. ‘Abuse is a joy to the soul,’ hewould explain several years later to the writer Zhukovskaya. That is why Grishka went so unresistingly to take his punishment at the regional office. And why after the second theft he did not go to town to sell the horses. Maybe it was his moment of rebirth. And his fellow villagers apparently sensed a change in him. It can be no accident that when after the theft of the horses, ‘the matter was brought to court of banishing Rasputin and his comrades to eastern Siberia for their vicious behaviour’, his comrades were sent away at ‘the verdict of society’, but Rasputin was released.
It was time for him to marry, time to bring two more working hands into the household. His wife Praskovia (or Paraskeva) Fyodorovna was from the neighbouring village of Dubrovnoye. She was two years older than Rasputin. Wives in the villages were often chosen not for their youth or beauty but for their strength, so they could work hard in the fields and at home.
According to the 1897 census, although twenty-eight, Rasputin had not yet set up his own household and he continued to live with his father’s family. The family consisted of its head, Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin, fifty-five; his wife, Anna Vasilievna, also fifty-five; his son Grigory, twenty-eight, and Grigory’s wife, Praskovia Fyodorovna, thirty.
Meredith Clarke, Pia Milan