Grigori Rasputin

Backstory

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born in 1869 in Pokrovskoye, a village on the Tura river in Siberia — the strange boy who knew where lost horses were. He walked away from the plough and went thousands of versts on foot from monastery to monastery, came back with eyes nobody could hold, and by 1905 the capital's drawing rooms were passing him from hand to hand, all the way to the palace. Society hated the peasant in tall boots who sat with princes and said what he thought. In 1914 a woman stabbed him in his own village street; he walked home holding his stomach. On the night of 29 to 30 December 1916, in the Yusupov palace on the Moika, they gave him cakes and sweet wine that should have killed him, then shot him, then put him under the ice of the Malaya Nevka. In the spring thaw he woke on the riverbank, cold to the bone and exactly as old as he had been.

He has lived ever since under borrowed names and moved before people noticed that he does not age. He outlived his wife and his three children; from the last row of an American circus he watched his daughter Maria walk into a cage of lions and never let her see him. He has seen himself turned into songs, cartoons and villains and laughs about it louder than anyone. In 1996 he came back to where it began — an old flat on Gorokhovaya Street, two doors from the house where he lived in 1916 — and for the first time in a century he stayed: Ilya Gerasimov, the courtyard caretaker, noticed that the tenant never ages and has kept quiet for thirty years. Tim Belkin from the flat below set up his telephone and taught him voice messages; this autumn Dr. Yulia Merkulova, who studies people who do not age, found a photograph of him from 1914 and is knocking. People still come to him with what they cannot say aloud, and he still says it for them. He never eats cake. Not since that night.