John Lescroart - Rasputins Revenge

RASPUTINS REVENGE

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First New American Library Printing, November 2003
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Copyright John T. Lescroart, 1987
All rights reserved

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Set in Bembo and Trajan
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To Maurice E. Les Lescroart,
father extraordinaire,
192086

It is hard to know whether
war or peace makes the greater
changes in our vocabularies,
both of the tongue and of the spirit.

M.F.K. F ISHER

How to Cook a Wolf

(revised edition)

P REFACE

Someone once defined a Russian novel as a book in which people with unpronounceable names do nothing for 362 pages, at which point someones aunt dies.

I trust the present work will not fall into that category, although Russian names do present certain difficulties which the reader can overcome by keeping the following in mind:

the suffix vich means son of. Thus, the czarevich is the son of the czar. Likewise, the suffix ovna means daughter of.

almost all names have a formal and a diminutive form, often characterized by the suffix sha or shka. Thus, Rasputins first name is Gregory or Grishka, the Empress is Matushka, or little mother, and so on.

The titles czar and emperor are both correct and interchangeable, as are czarina and empress.

In 1918, Russia discontinued use of the old Julian calendar and began using our own Gregorian one. Because the events in this book took place in 1916 and 1917 and the documents are often dated, I have retained the Julian dates, which are thirteen days behind our own. This is especially important in regard to Rasputin. It is often asserted that his death on New Years Day, 1917, cursed the year to tragedy. If it did, the lesson escaped most Russians, since to them he did not die on January 1, 1917, but on the night of December 16, 1916.

Rasputin had several nicknamesthe starets, Grishka, the black monk, tyemniy, or the dark one, and many more. Interestingly, the name Rasputin itself is a nickname for the man born Gregori Efimovichit means dissolute or depraved.

I used many sources in researching this novel, but three works stand out: