The last one of this round of my Russian history era... I only wish I'd known how chunky it was before I'd ordered it from the library! While Grigory Rasputin is a fascinating historical character, I can safely say this was the wrong book for me. It's clearly very well researched and impressively detailed, but it's certainly more of a scholarly tome than something for a more general audience. I have a working knowledge of this era (yay A Level history!), but I just couldn't keep up. 

My main impression is that this is not a biography per say. Rasputin is at the heart of the book, ans it follows his life from birth to death, yes, but more often than not the author is viewing Rasputin through the lens of other peoples' reactions to him, be it direct or indirect. It came across to me that you learned far more about his rivals and enemies' motivations for disliking him or wanting to remove him than you ever did about the man himself. The trouble is, where that's a long list of people, all of whom have fairly long Russian names that I wasn't always familiar with, it's very easy to lose track and lose interest. It's definitely a good and different way of approaching a biography, but it does make it a much harder read. For example, there are a few people who run parallel to Rasputin and appear throughout, to whom it seems like this book could also serve as biography - Iliodor is one such person, but despite just having finished the book, I can remember his name and that's about it. There is lots of information in there about this guy, but I almost immediately lost the thread of who he was and how he relates to Rasputin. I think friend-turned-enemy?!

There were some things I picked up on that made me think though! The book quotes a number of letters written by Tsarina Alexandra, which are imploring Tsar Nicholas to take Rasputin's advice on everything from troop movements to ministerial appointments. By doing so, it absolutely reinforces the historical narrative that Alix leaned on 'the mad monk' heavily and almost worshipped him. However, it also gives nuance to the argument that Nicholas was weak-willed and ruled by his wife (who was ruled by Rasputin). The books successfully illustrates that, on the majority of occasions, Nicholas either ignored or rejected the proffered advice, and Rasputin would then change his stance accordingly. There is no denying that Nicholas made some poor choices, but this books makes a good case for not laying all of those mistakes at Rasputin's door. 

The book does try to act as something of a 'myth-buster', working through various episodes to try and get to the truth of the matter. The issue I had here is that, a lot of the time, it felt like the discussions surrounding the event often overshadowed the event itself - even with the big one, his unaliving, it doesn't feel like that much time or effort is actually dedicated to the event. Instead, it's all about the investigation afterwards and the theories surrounding the mysteries of that night. And unfortunately a lot of the events he chooses to examine were essentially misreported or made up at the time, so more often than not the conclusion of the author is 'sorry, another falsehood'. Which, while factual and appreciated, does tend to detract from the engagement level!

I will say I do like that this book has very short chapters, meaning you can take the information in in very easy bite-sized chunks, and there are plenty of good stopping off points. 

Overall, I don't think I absorbed any more than about 10% of this book. If you are a university student or academic studying this period, I suspect you will find this a fascinating read. But for Joe public, it's probably just a bit far out of reach. I probably should have DNFed by about page 200, but I was committed!