The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

On the freezing night of 16 December 1916 — 29 December by the Western calendar — Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was lured to the Moika Palace in Petrograd, the home of Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest young man in Russia. Within a few hours he was dead, and his body was pushed through a hole in the ice of the Malaya Nevka river. The peasant mystic who had held extraordinary sway over the Empress Alexandra, whose apparent power to calm the haemophilia of the heir to the throne had made him indispensable and detested in equal measure, was gone. But the manner of his going, as it came down to us, reads less like a murder than like the killing of a monster in a folk tale. He was poisoned and would not die. He was shot and would not die. He was shot again, beaten, bound, and drowned — and even then, the story goes, the water finished what the poison and the bullets could not. The near-immortality of Rasputin is one of the twentieth century’s most vivid legends. It is also, in most of its particulars, a fiction — and we can name the man who wrote it.

The Man in the Iron Mask: A Prisoner, a Legend, and a Velvet Cloth

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 08:00:00 +0000

On the morning of 19 November 1703, a prisoner died in the Bastille. The register recorded him under the name Marchioly, gave his age vaguely, and noted that he had been buried the following day in the parish of Saint-Paul. The gravediggers were paid, the cell was emptied, and the furniture he had used was reportedly burned. He had been a prisoner of the French crown for more than three decades, moved from fortress to fortress under the same jailer, and in all that time almost no one had learned his name or seen his face uncovered. From that scrap of official secrecy grew one of the most durable legends in Europe: a man whose face was locked inside a mask of iron so that no living soul could recognise the king he might have unseated. The truth is quieter, sadder, and in its own way more interesting than the iron.

Legend on vo.rs

The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River

The Man in the Iron Mask: A Prisoner, a Legend, and a Velvet Cloth