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black 1/2 cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective brodart book jacket cover. fine cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. bookplate with no name on front flyleaf, otherwise contents free of markings. dustwrapper in near fine cond. 1cm tear spine bottom, tiny teaar to front bottom corner, not price clipped. nice vintage copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, no names, inking, underlining or remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (nap). photo illustrated title pg. 368p. glossy b&w photo illustrations. endnotes. bibliography. index. biography. russian history. religion. true crime. conspiracy theory ~ Few historical figures have been as shrouded in myth and speculation as Grigorii Rasputin. At the height of his fame, he was thought to be no less than a demonic figure, possessed of supernatural powers, a dissolute agent of the forces of evil with an iron~clad, perhaps sexual, hold on the throne of Imperial Russia. His disciples swooned in his presence; his enemies plotted murder. Alex de Jonge, author of Fire and Water, the critically acclaimed biography of Peter the Great, has spent years researching the man behind the myth, and in Rasputin has written the colorful, definitive portrait of a man even more fascinating than his legend. Rasputin is the story of an illiterate Siberian peasant who penetrated the very highest circles of the Romanov dynasty, a starets (holy man) whose pilgrimages and struggles of conscience warred with sexual rapacity and a predilection for drink, a monk whose fame as a faith healer and visionary was eclipsed by scandalous orgies and notorious palace intrigue until his very name became a synonym for vice and corruption. Here are the people in his life: his jealous (or admiring) fellow holy men, the political ministers who curried his favor, the female disciples who gave him sex to save their souls, and the Tsarina Alexandra, whose child he saved and whose heart he never lost, even as scandal succeeded scandal. And here is the turbulent Imperial Russia of which he was so dramatic a part, an explosive mixture of religious fervor, political brutality, sexual promiscuity, and social decadence. Alex de Jonge shows us the remote, muddy Siberian villages, the ancient monasteries that formed the chain link of Orthodoxy, and the St. Petersburg of the Romanovs, whirling across its ballrooms, heedless of impending catastrophe. From his humble beginnings to the bloody murder that marked his end, Rasputin was never less than a figure of controversy and mystery. Was he an ambitious fraud, a man divinely inspired, or a simple peasant thrust by circumstances into a position he never fully understood? Alex de Jonge has written a masterful biography of a personality as dramatic, contradictory, and enigmatic as Russia itself.
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