Rasputin, the Holy Devil

by René Fülöp-Miller. New York: The Viking Press. 8vo. xii+386 p.p. $5.00.

OH, those Russians! With their violence and their vehemence and their age-old, stolid, incurable indifference, and their veracity and their vodka! Oh, those Russians! With their strange aptitude for sex and sin and sanctity and the missionary spirit, shifting from one to the other with barbaric relish and incomprehensible ease! You read it all in their music, with its haunting, intoxicating dissonances, its broken, syncopated rhythms, so symptomatic of a syncopated soul. You read it in their literature, Turgenev and Tolstoi and Dostoevski and Tehekov, the literature of rapture and ecstasy and turbulent question and brutal tragedy and simulated, stimulated peace. You certainly read it fully in this epic story of Rasputin, the inspired peasant, drunk with vodka and holy fervor, who turned men’s and women’s hearts and the world upside down, and then went out, stabbed, on a winter night. It will be said that this is the old Russia, that the Russia of to-day is made over, transformed. But the Russia of to-day has its roots deep down in the Russia of Catherine and Peter and Ivan the Terrible and the hordes who wandered from Asia with Oriental greed and Oriental cruelty.

This story of Rasputin is perhaps all the more impressive from being somewhat incoherent and confused in the telling, since confusion and incoherence were the tissue of the man’s soul. A peasant’s son, born in a Siberian village, he grew up with animals and dreams and God, and all his life partook of all of them. An illiterate, enthusiastic monk, he wandered over all Russia, picking up queer human secrets, looking into eyes arid hearts, with an uncanny power of psychological penetration and an inexplicable depth of spiritual mastery. Women especially adored him, and he made profit of their adoration, legitimate and illegitimate, straying into strange divagations of theoretical religious debauchery.

Then he came to St. Petersburg, grafted his mystical domination on to the last, tottering, incompetent representatives of the Romanov dynasty, and for years, up into the Great War, made and unmade ministers, dictated policies, all the time dragging women through sexual corruption to God, spending his days in political intrigue and his nights in the maddest dancing and revelry, yet contriving, apparently without effort, to keep the reputation of a saint even with those who knew him to be a sinner.

Naturally the politicians hated him, and they intrigued against him, and devised all sorts of schemes to destroy him. For a long time he defied them and laughed at them, but in the end they got him, and his body was dragged out of the Neva, the last resting place of so many Russian sinners and saints.

When you finish, you rub your eyes and awake from a nightmare, realizing with relief that this is common-sense America, with its trolleys and automobiles and baseball leagues and elections and prohibitions. No drunken debauched prophets about here! Yet, perhaps with the influence still in your blood, you wonder whether, if you stripped off common sense, Dr. Cadman, and Eddie Guest, you might come down to the primitive elements, after all, just as in Russia. There is sex here, and jazz here, and vodka here, and religious fanaticism here, and under it all there is that basis of universal mystery which makes the secret of Russia, because it makes the secret of humanity, and deeper still there is the unsolved, perhaps insoluble, problem, which makes the strength and the weakness of all the Rasputins, and is caught up in the lilt of the old song;—

For God is the riddle of life.
And life is the riddle of God.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD