Matryona Grigorievna is the only daughter of the legendary Russian healer and fortune teller Grigory Rasputin, who lived a long and full life. She remained with her father until the very end, identifying his body after his murder as an 18-year-old girl, and in exile she lived next door to the man who took her father's life.
Matryona faced many trials, but overcame them with dignity and passed on to her descendants priceless memories of her father.
Grigory Rasputin is a colorful and controversial figure, a friend of the Romanov royal family and, as a result, a prime target for all opponents of the monarchy. Empress Alexandra Feodorovna literally idolized him, because, as she was convinced, he was the only person capable of alleviating the suffering of her son, Crown Prince Alexei. Meanwhile, Grigory Rasputin had his own large family to take care of.
In 1887, he married the peasant Praskovya Dubrovina, with whom they had seven children. However, only three of them survived childhood - Dmitry, Matryona and Varvara. Grigory built a two-story house, the largest in the village of Pokrovskoye, especially for his family. Immediately after that, he set off on a journey.
Later, Matryona recalled that her mother was a good housewife, took care of the home and children, and endured with dignity "all the difficulties associated with both life with her father and separation." Praskovya worked hard all her life and was not particularly interested in the spiritual issues that occupied her husband's mind. She had heard rumors of a wandering healer, but she never imagined that this was her husband.
Rasputin rarely visited his native village. But when he did, he spent all his time with his beloved children. Matryona told of a walk in the forest to the “father's tree“. During one of these visits, Grigory shocked his family with the news that he planned to move permanently to St. Petersburg. Praskovya Fyodorovna accepted the news with her characteristic humility. She released her husband and continued to live and manage the household in Pokrovskoye. Her eldest son, Dmitry, decided to stay with his elderly mother. But the young girls, Matryona and Varvara, went with their father.
Most likely, Grigory himself insisted on this. He felt responsible for the lives of his daughters and wanted to protect them. And he had quite objective reasons for concern: once, in Siberia, Matryona was attacked by the stepfather of a friend, who tried to rape her. Fortunately, Rasputin was nearby and fought off the rapist. Grigory suffered a concussion from an axe blow to the head, but his daughter survived. Since then, he had been consumed by worry about Matryona and Varvara. As soon as he could, he brought them to live with him in St. Petersburg.
Matryona says that her first train journey in her life filled her with indescribable delight. She was only 10 years old, traveling with her father in a separate carriage, and they were served dishes she had never tasted before. St. Petersburg seemed like a magical world to a girl from an ordinary peasant family. Luxurious interiors, theater visits, and expensive gifts from her father’s admirers – It took Matryona a long time to get used to all this.
On the one hand, Grigory dreamed of raising his daughters as real “young ladies“: he hired the best teachers for them, kept them away from the kitchen and gradually introduced them to his circle of acquaintances. On the other hand, he protected them with all his might, never wanting to let them out of his paternal wing. Matryona recalled that he allowed her to go to the theater only with an adult companion, required her to be home before 10:00 p.m., and forbade her to communicate with his admirers.
“However, like any other girl, I found many ways to get around the restrictions“, Matryona admitted in her memoirs. “Most often we would walk along Nevsky Prospekt with Marusya Sazonova (the daughter of a civil servant and Rasputin's friend) and pretend to look in shop windows. Of course, we would use them as mirrors to see the young men walking behind us. Innocent flirtation. Neither Marusya nor I could have imagined that we would meet young men on the street.
Not all of my father's acquaintances, however, were favorable to Matryona and Varvara. They did not express open disapproval, but behind their backs they whispered that Rasputin's daughters were too plump and careless for ladies of society. “People around me never let me forget my peasant origin,“ Matryona would say.
Shortly before Rasputin and his daughters' next visit to Pokrovskoye, the telephone in their home rang. The man on the other side wanted to speak to Matryona, and as soon as she answered, he began to declare his love for her, saying that he had seen her on the street. She was a little taken aback, but the stranger was insistent and convinced her to continue the conversation. They began to call each other almost daily. “The young man was generous with flattery and I almost fell in love with him, but I had to tell him that I could not meet him because in a few days I was leaving for Siberia with my father. The calls stopped immediately“, she wrote.
On the way, a man suddenly sat down next to her and introduced himself as Davidson, a newspaper reporter. “I recognized the voice on the phone immediately. I did not particularly like the young man's face, but I was flattered that he had followed me. It was all so romantic. I didn’t tell my father anything. I still regret it to this day. My stupidity led to tragedy. Later it turned out that Davidson was one of the participants in the assassination attempt on my father. As soon as we arrived in Pokrovskoye, he immediately went to Khionya Guseva to finalize the preparations for the crime,” Matryona recalls.
It was on the pier that Guseva stabbed Rasputin in the stomach. But he survived. The conspirators didn’t know this, so they sent Davidson back to Matryona, who supposedly wanted to write an article about the assassination attempt for the local newspaper. And then Matryona found out everything. She was horrified when she realized that she had helped the people who wanted to kill her father get information about her family. “I am the reason for this misfortune! I brought the murderer to my father!“, she complained.
Then events began to develop dramatically. Rasputin survived, but continued to suffer greatly from the consequences of his injury. Moreover, he was practically excommunicated from the royal court, because his views on the war differed from those of Nicholas II.
The elderly healer began to drink heavily. His daughters, who were extremely attached to their father, took care of him. Later, Matryona admitted that a few days before Rasputin's murder, she felt a strange change in him. Grigory fell into a deep depression and "wandered around the apartment, burdened by the weight of his premonitions". He spoke little.
One evening he wrote a long letter, sealed it, and told Matryona: “Do not open it until I die“. Three days before the fateful day, he made a deposit in the name of his daughters. On December 16, 1916, Rasputin voluntarily got into a car sent by the conspirator Felix Yusupov, despite the protests of his friends and family, and drove to his death.
A few days later, the old man's body, bearing numerous signs of violent death, was found in the ice near the Petrovsky Bridge. Matryona was called to identify him. The terrifying image was forever etched in her memory: “I remember opening my mouth to scream, but nothing came out,“ Matryona wrote. “Through the fog I heard the official question of the investigator Protopopov: “Do you know the identity of the deceased?“ I stared at Protopopov for a few moments, struggling to understand the words.“ After the formalities were completed, Matryona's legs gave out. She barely remembered how she got home.
But the horrors did not end there. The money that Rasputin left to his daughters disappeared from the bank, and Matryona herself was summoned for questioning. The soldiers treated her roughly, trying to find out only one thing: whether her deceased father had had an intimate relationship with Alexandra Feodorovna, who they now called “the former Tsarina“.
“It was too much. My nerves were stretched like strings. "I burst into hysterical laughter," she recalls. When the soldiers realized that they would get nothing from her, they released her. Then Matryona realized that she desperately wanted to leave St. Petersburg - nothing connected her to the city where she had experienced so many nightmares. She took her sister and returned to Siberia. Shortly before the revolution, Matryona married officer Boris Solovyov, a participant in the attempt to free Nicholas II during his Siberian exile and a follower of Rasputin. It was not a marriage built on love, but rather a union of two like-minded people who needed support in difficult times. Soon they had two daughters, named after the Grand Duchesses Tatyana and Maria. But even before the birth of their second daughter, their family emigrated to Europe.
The decision to leave her homeland was not easy for Matryona. But in the end, it was this decision that saved her life: her brother and sister, who remained in Russia, died - her sister from typhus, and her brother and his family, considered "harmful elements", were deported to the north, where the entire family died of dysentery.
Matryona, her husband and their children tried to settle in Paris. Boris even opened his own restaurant, but unsuccessfully: only poor Russian emigrants came to him, buying food "on credit". In 1924, Matryona's husband fell ill with tuberculosis and died quickly. Thus, Rasputin's daughter was left alone, penniless and with two small children to raise. She did not shy away from any job, working as a governess in wealthy families in order to somehow improve her situation.
Meanwhile, Matryona learned that Felix Yusupov, one of her father's murderers, was living in Paris. And unlike the widowed woman, he has settled down well in exile: together with his wife he founded the fashion house “IRFE“, which is especially loved by Parisians.
But Matryona does not dream of revenge. She, like many of her compatriots-emigrants, tries to forget all her past feuds and learns to live in the new circumstances. However, in 1928, Felix does something that deeply hurts Matryona. Still enjoying his impunity for the crime he committed, he publishes a book in which, reveling in the details, he tells how he and his friends sent Grigory Rasputin to the afterlife. The work was published in large circulation and brought Yusupov a very good income.
Matryona gathers all her courage and goes to court. She declared her intention to clear her father's name and sue his killer for compensation. Naturally, the case caused great excitement among the Parisian public. But to Matryona's surprise, most of her fellow émigrés sided with Yusupov. Moreover, the court refused to help her, declaring Rasputin's murder a political assassination committed in another country and therefore outside French jurisdiction. After that, Matryona and Felix parted ways forever. Rumors spread that she had quietly "taken revenge" by naming her dog after him.
Matryona still needed money to support her children. She remembered her youthful ballet lessons in St. Petersburg and found work as a dancer in a local cabaret. One day, a British circus entrepreneur stopped by and admired her talent. He offered her a job in his circus, but asked her to prove that she was not afraid of anything. “If you enter the lion’s cage, I will hire you,” he told her. Matrena, crossing herself, entered.
The entrepreneur even came up with a special act for Matryona, taking advantage of the audience’s interest in her famous father. The circus was constantly sold out, as everyone wanted to see the daughter of a healer-fortune teller tame wild animals with just her “Rasputinian” gaze. On the posters for her performance, Matryona posed with a lion bowing its head towards her.
“Maria Rasputin, daughter of the mad monk, famous for her exploits in Russia,” the caption read. Soon Matryona went on tour, visiting almost every country in Europe and America. Her circus career was rapidly progressing.
But then fate intervened. One day, while on tour in Peru, Matryona was attacked by a polar bear. The bear tamer received serious injuries and spent a long time in the hospital. Then reporters revealed that the bear skin on which Rasputin was killed in 1916 was also white. Perhaps this tragedy was a warning from above for his daughter? In any case, Matryona decided not to tempt fate any longer. After a long recovery, she abandoned her career as a bear tamer and took up a more ordinary job.
She worked as a riveter in an American shipyard, and after World War II she worked in defense plants until she received an old-age pension. In the following years, Matryona Grigorievna worked part-time as a nanny and nurse, gave private Russian lessons, and also wrote a book about her father.
However, for unknown reasons, she never published the results of her work during her lifetime. It was only in 1999 that they fell into the hands of a Russian publisher and finally saw the light of day. The book “Rasputin. Why?“ contains the daughter's unique memories of her legendary father - from her childhood in the village of Pokrovskoye to Rasputin's murder in St. Petersburg - as well as somewhat unexpected, but always logical interpretations of all his actions. According to the publisher, the work offers a sincere explanation for those who hold Grigori Rasputin responsible for almost all the misfortunes that have befallen Russia.
Matryona Grigorievna Rasputina died in 1977, a year before her 80th birthday. Her descendants live in the West, but one of Grigory Rasputin's great-granddaughters, Laurence Yo-Soloviev, often visits Russia. She admits that she does not possess supernatural powers, but she is sincerely interested in Orthodoxy, her roots, and feels a special connection with the Russian people.
Source: marieclaire.ru