Надежда Лохвицкая - Tolstoy, Rasputin, Others, and Me - The Best of Teffi

Everyone leapt up. They stood around him to watch. “Dearie”, the one who had gone to fetch the poems, turned pale. His eyes bulged. He squatted down on his haunches and began clapping his hands. “Whoop! Whoop! Whoop! Go! Go! Go!”

And no one was laughing. They watched as if in fear and—certainly—very, very seriously.

The spectacle was so weird, so wild, that it made you want to let out a howl and hurl yourself into the circle, to leap and whirl alongside him for as long as you had the strength.

The faces all around were looking ever paler, ever more intent. There was a charge in the air, as if everyone was expecting something… Any moment!

“How can anyone still doubt it?” said Rozanov from behind me. “He’s a Khlyst!”

Rasputin was now leaping about like a goat. Mouth hanging open, skin drawn tight over his cheekbones, locks of hair whipping across the sunken sockets of his eyes, he was dreadful to behold. His pink shirt was billowing out behind him like a balloon.

“Whoop! Whoop! Whoop!” went “Dearie”, continuing to clap.

All of a sudden Rasputin stopped. Just like that. And the music broke off, as if that is what the musicians had intended all along.

Rasputin collapsed into an armchair and looked all around. His eyes were no longer pricking people; they seemed vacant, bewildered.

“Dearie” hastily gave him a glass of wine. I went through into the drawing room and told Izmailov I wanted to leave.

“Sit down for a moment and get your breath back,” Izmailov replied.

The air was stifling. It was making my heart pound and my hands tremble.

“No,” said Izmailov. “It’s not hot in here. It’s just your nerves.”

“Please, don’t go,” begged Rozanov. “Now you can get him to invite you to one of his rituals. There’ll be no difficulty now!”

By now most of the guests had come through and were sitting around the edges of the room, as if in anticipation of some sort of performance. The beautiful woman came in, too, her husband holding her by the arm. She was walking with her head bowed; I thought she was weeping.

I stood up.

“Don’t go,” said Rozanov.

I shook my head and went out towards the hall. Out of the dining room came Rasputin. Blocking my path, he took my elbow.

“Wait a moment and let me tell you something. And mind you listen well. You see how many people there are all around us? A lot of people, right? A lot of people—and no one at all. Just me and you—and no one else. There isn’t anyone else standing here, just me and you. And I’m saying to you: come to me! I’m pining for you to come. I’m pining so badly I could throw myself down on the ground before you!”

His shoulder went into spasms and he let out a moan.

And it was all so ludicrous, both the way we were standing in the middle of the room together and the painfully serious way he was speaking…

I had to do something to lighten the atmosphere.

Rozanov came up to us. Pretending he was just passing by, he pricked up his ears. I started to laugh. Pointing at him, I said to Rasputin, “But he won’t let me.”

“Don’t you listen to that degenerate—you come along. And don’t bring him with you, we can do without him. Rasputin may only be a peasant, but don’t you turn up your nose at him. For them I love I build stone palaces. Haven’t you heard?”

“No,” I replied, “I haven’t.”

“You’re lying, my clever girl, you have heard. I can build stone palaces. You’ll see. I can do many things. But for the love of God, just come to me, the sooner the better. We’ll pray together. Why wait? You see, everyone wants to kill me. As soon as I step outside, I look all around me: where are they, where are their ugly mugs? Yes, they want to kill me. Well, so what! The fools don’t understand who I am. A sorcerer? Maybe I am. They burn sorcerers, so let them burn me. But there’s one thing they don’t understand: if they kill me, it will be the end of Russia. Remember, my clever girl: if they kill Rasputin, it will be the end of Russia. They’ll bury us together.”

He stood there in the middle of the room, thin and black—a gnarled tree, withered and scorched.

“And it will be the end of Russia… the end of Russia…”

With his trembling hand crooked upwards, he looked like Chaliapin singing the role of the miller in Dvořák’s Rusalka . At this moment he appeared dreadful and completely mad.

“Ah? Are you going? Well if you’re going, then go. But just you remember… Remember.”

As we made our way back from Filippov’s, Rozanov said that I really ought to go and visit Rasputin: if I refused an invitation coveted by so many, he would almost certainly find it suspicious.

“We’ll all go there together,” he assured me, “and we’ll leave together.”

I replied that there was something in the atmosphere around Rasputin I found deeply revolting. The grovelling, the collective hysteria—and at the same time the machinations of something dark, something very dark and beyond our knowledge. One could get sucked into this filthy mire—and never be able to climb out of it. It was revolting and joyless, and the revulsion I felt entirely negated any interest I might have in these people’s “weird mysteries”.

The pitiful, distressed face of the young woman who was being thrust so shamelessly by her lawyer husband at a drunken peasant—it was the stuff of nightmares, I was seeing it in my dreams. But he must have had many such women—women about whom he shouted, banging his fist on the table, that “they wouldn’t dare” and that they were “happy with everything”.

“It’s revolting,” I went on. “Truly horrifying! I’m frightened! And wasn’t it strange, later on, how insistent he was about my going to see him?”

“He’s not accustomed to rejection.”

“Well, my guess is that it’s all a lot simpler. I think it’s because of the Russian Word . He may make out that he doesn’t attach any significance to my work there, but you know as well as I do how afraid he is of the press and how he tries to ingratiate himself with it. Maybe he’s decided to lure me into becoming one of his myrrh-bearing women. [6] The Orthodox term for the women who, early in the morning of the third day, came to Christ’s tomb and found it empty. So that I’ll write whatever he wants me to write, at his dictation. After all, he does all of his politicking through women. Just think what a trump card he would have in his hands. I think he’s got it all figured out very well indeed. He’s cunning.”

Several days after this dinner I had a telephone call from a lady I knew. She reproached me for not coming to a party she had given the evening before and that I’d promised to attend.

I had completely forgotten about this party.

“Vyrubova was there,” said the lady. “She was waiting for you. She very much wants to meet you, and I had promised her you would be there. I’m terribly, terribly upset you couldn’t come.”

“Aha!” I thought. “Messages from the ‘other world’. What can she want of me?”

That she was a messenger from that “other world” I didn’t doubt for a moment. Two more days went by.

An old friend dropped in on me. She was very flustered.

“S——is going to have a big party. She’s called round a couple of times in person, but you weren’t at home. She came to see me earlier today and made me promise to take you with me.”

I was rather surprised by S——’s persistence, as I didn’t know her so very well. She wasn’t hoping to get me to give some kind of a reading, was she? That was the last thing I wanted. I expressed my misgivings.