This man has changed all that.
He is an illiterate peasant, of average height, skinny, and with unusually long arms. He has a large, irregular nose; rich, sensuous lips; and an unkempt, shaggy beard. His hair, which is combed across his forehead, is long and parted down the middle. He wears tattered clothes and never washes. His skin bears the marks of hardship, of years of harsh exposure to hot sun and cold winds, no doubt a result of many years of wandering the land. Since his arrival over two months ago, he kept to himself and spent most of his time in silent prayer and introspection. I had not given him much notice until the day he looked at me, and I saw his eyes.
They are impossible to ignore.
Peering out from under thick brows, they are gray-blue and unsettlingly hypnotic. They are bursting with life, at first gentle and kind, rich with dreaminess and contemplation. And yet, in an instant, they can turn fierce and angry. His speech is strange, too, almost incoherent, lulling, somehow primordial. It is clear that he has no education, and he speaks in breathless torrents of simple words. And yet, when he does, the effect of his impassioned words, combined with the intense gaze emanating from his deep-set eyes, is nothing short of mesmeric.
Over the last few weeks, we have spent many hours talking.
He told me he was born in Pokrovskoye, a small Siberian village on the banks of the Tura River, in January of 1869, thirty years ago. It was the day of Saint Grigory, after whom he had been named. For that is his name. Grigory Efimovich Rasputin.
His father drove mule carts and worked on the barges by the river. When he couldn’t find work, he farmed the little land he owned, and fished. Grigory worked with him and still lived in the home of his parents with his wife and his two children. He tells me she is pregnant with a third.
There is a great hunger in this young peasant. He tells me he wasted a large part of his life, engaging in fistfights and drunken debauchery. He confesses to having a wild streak to him, an animalistic craving for violence and for women. I must admit that despite his crude ways, there is something inexplicably magnetic about him. I imagine that women must find him beguiling and irresistible. He tells me that back in Pokrovskoye, he had been caught several times with wenches and had suffered numerous beatings because of it. This does not surprise me.
“This peasant life is meaningless,” he told me early on. “Backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk, only relieved by drunkenness and the release through the flesh of a woman. That is not the existence I seek.”
Eventually, he candidly told me how he had resorted to crime to fund his debauchery. He stole fences, horses, and cartloads of fur. He was caught, and he was beaten. His peers mocked and taunted him, calling him “Grishka the Fool.” Strangely, he told me how he took pleasure in the beatings and the abasement. More than once, he referred to this “joy of abasement.” And somewhere in this mad, wasted life, he discovered what had been missing in his life.
He started seeking God.
The search did not start well. The priest in his village, also uneducated by the sounds of it, failed to provide him with the spiritual guidance he was looking for. Dissatisfied with not finding the answers he’d been seeking, frustrated that his contemplation was not bringing him closer to God, he resorted even more to drink and to women. The beatings resumed. He decided to leave and search elsewhere. So began his life as a wanderer in search of enlightenment.
He has been wandering the land for many, many years.
He journeyed to the Tyumen and Tobolsk cloisters, the monasteries closest to his village. He didn’t find the answers he was looking for there, so he ventured on. He visited more monasteries, farther afield. More churches, more villages, meeting countless people, praying with them. He had trouble with insomnia and spent many nights without sleep. And in his ceaseless wanderings along the meandering Tura River, he found inspiration in the glorious nature around him and began to have mystical visions.
“I woke up one night to see the mother of God before me,” he told me. “She was weeping. She said she was weeping for the sins of mankind, and asked me to go forth and cleanse the people of their sins.”
Inspired by this vision, he returned to his village and started holding prayer sessions, but those around him didn’t trust him. They knew him as a libidinous drunk and laughed at him.
“Everyone watches he who seeks salvation as though he were some kind of robber,” he told me, an unsettling rancor festering in his eyes. “All are too quick to mock him. But that is the suffering one must endure. It is part of the journey.”
So he left again. He told me it was then that he stopped smoking and drinking, stopped eating meat and sweets. He walked thousands of miles, from the Siberian hinterland to Kiev and Petersburg and back, with no more than a knapsack over his shoulder. He stayed in churches and monasteries or with peasants who admired his devotion and offered him shelter and alms. He spent time getting to know, and understand, many dozens of people. And his journeying had eventually brought him here, to this monastery, where he hoped to find salvation and healing from his inner torment through the relics of Saint Simeon.
I had been here myself for months, following the same quest. I was here to be saved, only I still hadn’t found the salvation I was yearning for. I was still unable to let go of the notion that had been embedded into me from my earliest days: that God was to be found in the wonders of science. The science that had already caused me so much torment.
The more we spoke, the more this man bewildered me.
How could a man change like that? How could he go from a self-confessed thief and serial fornicator and become a sincere strannik-a pilgrim? For he is a sincere believer, of that I am certain. He tells me he dreams of God. He speaks of searching to understand the mysteries of life, of hoping to get closer to God. Of hoping to be saved.
As do I.
For unfathomable reasons, I found myself sharing my secrets with the man, despite the fact that I had sworn to myself that no one would ever know what I had discovered. And yet, here I was, telling this mysterious wanderer everything. I could not resist his will or the comforting inner strength that radiated out of his eyes. And when I was finished, I felt a great sense of relief knowing that someone else shared my burden.
My tale brought satisfaction to Rasputin as well, but in a very different way.
It lit a great fire inside him. I could see it in his stare, which rose even more in its unbearable intensity. Once I was finished, he remained quiet for an uncomfortably long moment, just studying me in silence.
“It is all very clear to me now, Misha,” he finally said.
“What is?” I asked.
“Us, here, you and me. There is a reason we are here.” He reached out and cupped my hands in his. “God is that reason, Misha. God wanted us to meet. That’s why He brought us both here. Do you understand? What other possible reason could there be for us to be sitting here, together. We are here because of His great plan.”
“What plan?” I asked, stupefied, my mind entranced by his commanding gaze.
“His plan to save the Russian people. That is His plan for me. And that is why He has sent you here, to meet me. Because you, Misha, are going to help me achieve it.”