The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin [Paperback]

Alex De Jonge (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 8 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub (June 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0881844845
• ISBN-13: 978-0881844849
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 4.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,690,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The best way to form your own oppinion on the"mad monk", May 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Times of Grigorii Rasputin (Hardcover)

"Contradictions, what of them, for you they are contradictions, but I am me, Grigorii Rasputin, and that's what matters: look at me, see what I have become!"(De Jonge 124). This one statement made by Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin is the window to his soul. Every part of his complex personality is exposed in it, but it takes the 350 page book by Alex De Jonge to realize it. "The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin" is an in depth and well researched biography not only on "the mad monk" but also on all of the lives that he touched. Through this book one can successfully throw away the many Russian rumors that have become Rasputins's legacy to formulate a better objective view of what is closer to the truth. De Jonge is not forceful with his own opinion; he is more like a tour guide who presents all the information and then allows the "tourist" to believe what he likes.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars ... the specter is still living..., April 18, 2007

By 

Mr Bassil A MARDELLI "Antoun" (Riad El-SOLH , Beirut Lebanon) - See all my reviews

Don't you see how strange the shadow and specter of Rasputin is still living, at least in our imaginations, up to now.!!

The tragedy of the Russian Tsarina, looking for someone with the power to heal her ailing son and successor to the Russian throne was indeed the predominant factor that raised the `terrible monk' from the throes of the slums to the magnificence of the Russian palace.

Alexandra was not fooling with Rasputin, as widely and wrongly spread. She knew the monk was an artful loquacious, indolent, pleasure loving and more difficult to make him work, but she didn't suspect he was a sheer liar.

Initially, Rasputin set himself to please the royal court by being obsequious and entertaining reciting funny stories and acts of buffoonery.

Greater only than his aversion to the `commoners' of the Russian society- of whom he was one - was his aversion to Jewish communities that mainly represented the reforming tendencies in Russia and had been the real power behind the 1905 unrests, which followed the Russo-Japanese wars.

Tsar Nicola II, whose optimism the Tsarina shared, was extravagantly feted as much for Rasputin's magnificent presence at his court and of his influence.

Totally immersed and absorbed by the illness of their son, the royal couple did not really appreciate the degree of contempt felt by the other princes of `royal blood' combined with sense of inferiority vis-à-vis the newcomer

This forgave Rasputin his caustic manner and his tendency to bad temper and impolite language and his easy faculty for making enemies had flourished during the last couple of years before 1917 revolution.

Rasputin was an inveterate mystic faith healer who never found it temperamentally difficult to anticipate trouble. If his face was sagging with worry, this transpired his senses of doom and gloom. The cult of arrogance practiced by Rasputin affected no one painfully than Alexandra. She trusted his intelligence and treated him as conscientious and hard-working `member of the family'. Any comments to the contrary made by others she described as rude, tactless, disputatious and given to sneering ill-manners.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Admirable historian, March 16, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Times of Grigorii Rasputin (Hardcover)

This was the first book of de Jonge's I read. I was so amazed by his method of doing history that I read the book twice. Since then I've read every book of his I could find and, happily, his historiography is consistent in all his writing. What I admire about his method is his balance and his ability to show the various facets of a complex subject without engaging in polemic and yet making his view of the issue quite clear. It is his personalist mode of historiography that I admire. The conclusion I drew from Rasputin is that he seems to have had some sort of inexplicable power, but for the most part he was a typical Russian peasant from Siberia whose strange religious practices were not that much different from the Oneida community of 19th century New York. Neither a saint nor a sinner, but a shrewd, cunning, uneducated peasant who really did know the peasant mind about Russia and took advantage of the opportunities before him. That seems to me to be the best explanation of a difficult figure of history.