Volume 29, Number 9 · May 27, 1982
The Black Sheep of Pokrovskoe
By Edward Crankshaw
The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin
by Alex de Jonge
Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 368 pp., $17.95
Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov is writing about that familiar figure of the old Russia, the starets, or holy man: 'A starets takes your soul, your will, into his soul and will. In choosing a starets you renounce your own will and surrender it to him in perfect submission, absolute self-abnegation.' This was evidently a good thing: it was an exercise in self-conquest, sustained by the hope of attaining through a life of total obedience that 'perfect freedom that is freedom from self.' Dostoevsky insists that the institution of the starets in imperial Russia came from the East, 'the practice of a thousand years.'
Review, 2731 words
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