"Rasputin's Daughter": Rasputin from a daughter's viewpoint

"Rasputin's Daughter"
by Robert Alexander
Viking, 304 pp., $23.95

In his new novel, "Rasputin's Daughter," Robert Alexander employs the same model he used to such effect before: A first-person narrator bears witness to a specific event as Russia makes its cataclysmic transformation to Communism.

Alexander hit a bull's-eye with this formula in "The Kitchen Boy," which described the 1918 execution of Czar Nicholas and his family. But the latest book, built around the bearded mystic who ingratiated himself with the royal family, falls short of that earlier mark.

For one thing, it's tough to top a dramatic re-creation of what happened to the imperial family. Alexander was working with terrific material when he told the story of the czar and his family through the eyes of a fictional character who was based on a brief mention in the empress' diary.

In contrast, "Rasputin's Daughter" unravels the circumstances surrounding the death of a man who is far less sympathetic: the rough-hewn, wild-haired Siberian who could heal the czar's hemophiliac son but was also a lecherous manipulator.

The author chooses Rasputin's older daughter, Matryona Grigorevna Rasputin (Maria to us Western readers), to bear witness to this man who so gladly alternated between the spirit and the flesh. In the novel, she is a passionate young woman who loves and admires her father but gradually wakes up to his loathsome ways.

Maria serves as an entry point into a larger topic. Alexander wisely moves away from Rasputin's oft-discussed relationship with the royals and toward what his power represented during the death throes of their reign.

Radicals were fighting to bring down the government, while distraught nobles struggled to maintain it (and get Rasputin out of the picture).

Meanwhile, aristocrats and commoners alike responded by embracing the cross and Mother Russia. Rasputin embodied their soulful irrationality.

As Maria observes, "Everyone in Russia, it seemed, was desperate for a miracle, and many people were turning to Papa in search of it."

Unfortunately, this becomes wider ground than Alexander's formula or narrator can manage. The book is further marred by Maria's improbable love affair with the mysterious young man named Sasha.

In the end, the details of Rasputin's demise seem less significant than the people who fell under his spell. Their turn to the ineffable at a point of political crisis, so un-Western and contrary to the materialist impulses of the Bolsheviks, is the real mystery to be solved.

Ellen Emry Heltzel writes from Portland and has a column on the Internet at www.goodhousekeeping.com/bookbabes.