Grigory Rasputin has long occupied a peculiar corner of the historical imagination. In popular culture he appears as a kind of pantomime villain: a hypnotic monk with burning eyes, drunkenly ...

In “Rasputin,” the biographer Antony Beevor delves into the mysterious life of the last czarina’s mystic adviser. By Sophie Pinkham Sophie Pinkham is the author of “The Oak and the Larch: A Forest ...