Maria Rasputin

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Maria Rasputin in conversation with a Spanish journalist (1930)

Maria Rasputina , b. Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina ( Russian Матрёна Григорьевна Распутина * March 15 . Jul / 27. March  1898 greg. In Pokrovskoe ; † 27. September 1977 in Los Angeles ) was the daughter of the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin and his wife Praskovya Fyodorovna Dubrowina.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, she wrote various books about her father's life in connection with Tsar Nicholas II , his wife Alexandra and their murder.

Childhood and youth

Rasputin with his children Matrjona (Maria), Varwara and Dimitri

Matryona Grigoryevna Rasputina was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye, Tobolsk Governorate (now Tyumen Oblast ), but came to Saint Petersburg as a teenager , where her name was changed from Matrjona to Maria to better adapt to the social environment. Rasputin had brought Maria and her younger sister Varvara (Varya) to St. Petersburg in October 1913 so that they could live with him and attend the Steblin-Kamenskoi private school, where they were to be raised to be "little ladies". As a result of Rasputin's acquaintance with the tsarist family, his entire family was also guests in Tsarskoye Selo . She left a vivid description of Mary's first meeting with the Tsar's family: “We drove to Tsarskoye Selo in a court equipage; I still remember that I was shivering as if in a fever when I entered Mrs. Vyrubova's house. The tsarina was not yet there, and we sat down on a soft sofa for the time being; the living room was comfortably furnished, there were floors with innumerable trinkets everywhere, and prints and photographs hung on the walls. Suddenly the doorbell rang, and soon afterwards the rustling of women's clothes could be heard. Bertschik, Mrs. Vyrubova's favorite lakai, opened the door and the tsarina entered, followed by her daughters. She greeted us with a kind smile, and we kissed her hand in awe. Then she sat down and asked us to do the same […] “ There were numerous conversations between the Muschik's daughters and the Tsar's daughters as well as their parents, and a friendly relationship developed between the two families, which in the following years developed Repeated encounters.

In 1913 or 1914, the author Vera Zhukovskaya described the then 16-year-old Matrjona and her sister Varvara, 13 years old, as girls with pale, broad faces on whom the irrepressible Siberian strength was expressed. As Zhukovskaya remembers, Matryona had a broad, white face with a blunt chin and a low forehead over large blue eyes. "She kept shaking her head to remove the long simple fringes from her eyes [...] With a predatory movement, she ran the tip of her tongue over her wide, blood-red lips. The well-built bodies of the two sisters barely seemed to fit into their cashmere coats and they smelled of sweat. ” When the fine ladies of society visited their father in his modest apartment, they kissed the tall girl and called her by her nickname,“ Mara "And" Marotschka ". Zhukovskaya: “Here Mara came into the room; she wore a dark red dress and a splendid silk belt of the same color, and her curls were carefully twisted. Everyone stretched out their hands in greeting: 'Mara, Marotschka, good afternoon!' Then Matryona Rasputin took the place of honor next to old Golovina. ” Zhukovskaya found it very strange that Rasputin's daughters received so much attention from the princesses and countesses.

Maria later told her grandchildren that her father had always been very generous to her, especially when she needed him. Rasputin told her that she should never leave the house with empty pockets, but always have money with her to give to the poor. In June 1916, Rasputin went on a pilgrimage to the Verkhoturye Monastery with his daughters Matrjona and Varvara and his followers Anna Wyrubowa , Munja Golowina and Lili Dehn to venerate the relics of St. Simeon. While Rasputin was housed in a monastery cell, the women in the monastery inn endured the dirt and countless bedbugs. From here they visited the hermit monk Makarij in his hermitage and the Rasputin admirer Olga Lochtina, who lived in an annex near Makarij. After paying homage to the saint's relics in the monastery, Matryona went to Pokrovskoye with her sister and father. Little did they know then that it would be their final farewell to the monastery.

Rasputin's death

Rasputin's daughters lived with him in his St. Petersburg apartment until December 16. On this day he was invited by Felix Jussupow to a celebration in his house. Rasputin liked to call Yusupov "the little one". On the morning of December 17, 1916, the maid Katya Ivanovna had a premonition of Rasputin's death. At five in the morning, the time she usually got up, she rushed into Matryona's room, rattled her on her sleep and called out to her: Maria Grigoryevna, get up, I'm afraid! Grigory Efimovich did not come back! But Maria, who had heard these words halfway in a dream, was annoyed by Katja's fear and grumbled at her that he had gone to "the little one", Felix Jussupow. Maria fell asleep again, but at seven o'clock she was woken up again by Katja, because the police were at the door. Without suggesting what it was about, they asked about the circumstances of the previous evening and then left again. Now Maria was worried too and called Munja Golowina; but this reassured her that Rasputin had spent the night with Yusupov. Later, when Rasputin was dragged dead from the river, Maria identified the overboots he was wearing as his. On December 18, Matryona, her sister Varvara, the two maids, Rasputin's niece and Maria Golowina were interrogated. On the same day, the murderer Felix Yusupov was interrogated by investigator Makarov. From the conversations and their comparisons it emerged that Yusupov could have been convicted on that day by the statements of Rasputin's relatives; but the minister did not dare to convict a relative of the tsar through testimony of a cook and the daughters of Rasputin.

On December 21, 1916, the day of Rasputin's burial, which took place in Tsarskoye Selo Park, Mary placed an image of a saint on her dead father's chest before his remains were lowered into the earth.

On April 14, 1918, when the tsar and tsarina were taken to Yekaterinburg for their final exile , the tsarist and peasant families met for the last time. Alexandra looked out of the window of the train at the village of Pokrovskoye and saw the members of Rasputin's family staring in amazement from the windows of his house at the passing royal family.

Life after the revolution

During the First World War , Maria was briefly in a relationship with a Georgian officer named Papchadze. Thanks to Rasputin, he was spared the lot of having to go to the war front. During this time he did his military service in the reserve battalion in St. Petersburg.

After Rasputin's murder, Rasputin's supporters persuaded her to marry Boris Soloviev. He was the son of Nikolai Soloviev, the treasurer of the Holy Synod and an admirer of her father. After Rasputin's death, Soloviev soon succeeded him. Soloviev, who had studied the art of hypnosis extensively , held sessions in which Rasputin's followers attempted to contact the dead through prayers and séances . A year after Rasputin's death, in 1918, Maria wrote that she felt the presence of Rasputin's spirit: “For the first time I feel the presence of my dear father, who has been dead for more than a year. We can no longer hear his words from his own mouth, but we clearly feel that he is around us. ”She also testified that she saw him several times in dreams and that Olga Lochtina had similar stories of him: she told her that she had been in St. Petersburg on Gorokhovaya, where she had visited her father's court, and there she felt Rasputin's spirit within her.

Maria also took part in these meetings, but later wrote in her diary that she could not understand why her father had always advised her in the seances to “always love Boris” . According to her own admission, she did not love Boris at all. And Soloviev's enthusiasm for Maria had meanwhile subsided. In his diary he wrote that he didn't even want to sleep with this woman anymore because there were so many other women whose bodies he found more attractive than theirs. Nonetheless, she married Soloviev on October 5, 1917. They then returned to Siberia and lived in Rasputin's house in Pokrovskoye for a few weeks. Soloviev later stole the jewels of the Tsarist couple to help her escape from Russia, but then he kept the treasures to himself. After the Bolsheviks seized power, Soloviev joined the officers who had come to Yekaterinburg to plan the Romanovs' escape. During the First World War, he lost all the money that the jewels had brought him. There are also various accounts of people who impersonated Romanovs who had escaped after the revolution. Soloviev betrayed prominent Russian families by asking them for money to enable the Romanovs to escape to China. Many young women fell for him, in which they agreed to disguise themselves as one of the princesses with fraudulent intent, for the apparent good of poor families.

Escape into exile

Soloviev and Maria first fled to Bucharest , where Maria hired herself out as a dancer in the cabaret. They later emigrated to Paris , where Soloviev worked in a car factory and died of tuberculosis in 1926 . Maria initially found work as a governess and was able to look after her two young daughters. Later, Maria also worked as a circus artist and lion tamer at the Ringling Brothers Circus . After Yusupov published his hypocritical memoirs describing the murder of Rasputin, Maria sued him and Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich of Russia in a Paris court for $ 800,000 in damages. In the lawsuit, she charged both men with murder, adding that every decent citizen was indignant at the cruelty of Rasputin's murder. But Maria's complaint was dismissed. The French court ruled that the jurisdiction for this political murder lay in Russia.

Maria's further life

Around 1926, Maria's first book, The Truth About Rasputin, was published by Alt-Russland in Hamburg. It was followed in French by Le roman de la vie , translated into German by M. Uebelhoer: The novel of my life , published in 1930 by Union, Stuttgart. In 1934 the book My father followed in English , published by Cassell & Co. in London. Numerous translations and revisions of her memoirs were to follow in the following decades, including the German edition Mein Vater Rasputin (Verlag Engelhorn, Stuttgart 1968) and Rasputin in English . The man behind the myth (Arrow, London 1977). Maria was also the co-author of a cookbook in which she recommended the recipe for her father's favorite dish - cod soup - and a recipe for fish heads in jelly.

When Maria was touring with her circus in Peru, Indiana , she was attacked by a bear, but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami . There she left it and worked as a riveter in a shipyard for warships during the Second World War . From 1937 she resided permanently in the United States and became a US citizen in 1945. In 1940 she married a man named Gregory Bernadsky until 1955, when Maria worked in the factories of the Department of Defense before age reasons forced them to give up this job. After that, she was employed in hospitals, teaching Russian and babysitting babies for friends.

In 1968, Maria claimed that Betty Ford appeared to her in a dream and smiled at her. On the occasion, she also said that she would recognize Anna Anderson as Anastasia . A friend called her "little mother" because Maria liked to rummage in handbags, regardless of whether strangers were there in a pub, or rummaged through suitcases in hotel rooms, regardless of whether the reporter who interviewed her had provided her with a chair, however comfortable . She also owned two lap dogs, one of which she named Jussu and the other Pow, out of contempt for Felix Yusupov.

During the last few years of her life, she lived near the Hollywood Freeway in Los Angeles , California , where she received social assistance. Maria Rasputin was buried in Angelus Rosedale Cemetery.

progeny

One of Maria's two daughters married the Dutch ambassador to Greece and later became friends with Yusupov's daughter Irina Yusupova in the 1950s. Maria told her four granddaughters that her famous great-grandfather was a "simple man with a big heart and great spiritual strength, who loved Russia, God and the Tsar" . This was reported by her granddaughter Laurence Huot-Solowjew, the daughter of Maria's daughter Tatiana in 2005. Maria's descendants now live near Paris . A fiction biography of Maria's life was published in 2006 under the title Rasputin's Daughter , written by Robert Alexander.

literature

Web links

Commons : Maria Rasputin  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Alexander: Rasputin's Daughter , Baltimore, MD 2006, ISBN 978-0-14-303865-8 , pp. 297-298
  2. ^ Edward Radsinski, The Secret Files Rasputin , Munich 2000, ISBN 3-8135-0173-6 , p. 215
  3. ↑ Fülöp-Miller, René: The holy devil. The truth about Rasputin , Leipzig 1994, ISBN 3-376-05011-2 ; Pp. 185-186
  4. ↑ Fülöp-Miller, p. 186
  5. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 216
  6. ↑ Fülöp-Miller p. 302
  7. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 229.
  8. ↑ a b Stolyarova, Galina: "Rasputin's Notoriety Dismays Relative" . In: "The St. Petersburg Times (St. Petersburg, Russia)" . 2005. Archived from the original on September 1, 2012. Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 18, 2007. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.sptimes.ru
  9. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 414.
  10. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 415.
  11. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 464
  12. ↑ Fülöp-Miller p. 426
  13. ↑ Fülöp-Miller pp. 426-427
  14. ↑ Fülöp-Miller p. 427
  15. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 466
  16. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 468
  17. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 471
  18. ↑ Fülöp-Miller p. 435
  19. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 507
  20. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 396
  21. ^ Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra , New York, NY 1967, ISBN 0-440-16358-7 , p. 487
  22. ↑ Fülöp-Miller p. 259
  23. ↑ a b Massie, p. 487
  24. ^ Radsinski, Edvard , The Last Tsar , New York, NY 1992, ISBN 0-385-42371-3 , p. 230
  25. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , pp. 493–494
  26. ↑ Occleshaw, Michael, The Romanov Conspiracies: The Romanovs and the House of Windsor , Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 1993, ISBN 1-85592-518-4 , p 47
  27. ↑ a b c d Barry, Rey: "Child Rasputin" . In: "The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Virginia, USA)" . 1968. Retrieved May 20, 2011.
  28. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 494
  29. ↑ a b Massie, p. 526
  30. ^ King, Greg, The Man Who Killed Rasputin , Secaucus, NJ 1995, ISBN 0-8065-1971-1 , p. 232
  31. ^ King, p. 233
  32. ↑ Alexander, pp. 297-298
  33. ↑ Time magazine: "US news briefs" . In:Time magazine , March 4, 1940. Retrieved May 20, 2011. 
  34. ↑ Wallechinsky, David, and Wallace, Irving: "People's Almanac Series . " In: "Famous Family History Grigori Rasputin Children" . 1975-1981. Retrieved May 20, 2011.
  35. ^ King, p. 277
  36. ↑ Robert Alexander
  37. ↑ Radsinski, The Rasputin Secret Files , p. 513
  38. ↑ Robert Alexander
personal data
SURNAME Rasputin, Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rasputina, Maria; Rasputina, Matrjona Grigoryevna (maiden name); Распутина, Матрёна Григорьевна (Russian)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian author, daughter of the mystic Grigory Rasputin
DATE OF BIRTH March 27, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Pokrovskoye , Tobolsk Governorate, Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH September 27, 1977
Place of death los Angeles