W&N acquires 'extraordinary' Rasputin biography from Antony Beevor
Weidenfeld & Nicolson (W&N) has acquired a new biography of Rasputin from author Antony Beevor.
W&N publishing director Ed Lake acquired UK & Commonwealth (excluding Canada) rights to Rasputin and the Dowager Empress’s Dream from Michael Dean at Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd. Viking Books US senior editor, Terezia Cicel, acquired US rights for PRH US from Robin Straus at the Robin Straus Agency.
Rasputin and the Dowager Empress’s Dream will be published in hardback in the UK by W&N in March 2026.
In the book, Beevor "pierces the fog of fantasy" around Rasputin that has only grown denser over time. The publisher said "the result is an unparalleled portrait of one of history’s most dubious masterminds".
The synopsis reads: "When Russia’s Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she ’lived under the pressure of the prophecy’. Rasputin had no official position. A barely literate moujik from Siberia, he had no forces at his command. He was a devoted monarchist, not a revolutionary. And yet, through his uncanny seduction of the imperial household, he contributed more than any other individual to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world. ’This man was unique,’ observed one writer. ’Like a character out of a novel, he lived in legend, he died in legend, and his memory is cloaked in legend."
Beevor is also author of Russia (W&N, 2022), The Battle for Spain (W&N, 2007) and The Second World War (W&N, 2012).
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Beevor said: "My fascination with Rasputin dates back a long way. How on earth could a barely literate peasant from Siberia have had such a devastating effect on the course of history? The Tsarist officer corps was so demoralised by the exaggerated accounts of political and financial corruption, to say nothing of the stories of Rasputin’s debauchery with the Empress and even her daughters, that when the February Revolution broke out in 1917, hardly a sword was raised in the Tsar’s defence. It is an intriguingly different angle on the so-called great man theory of history.
"The myths and the lies which swirled around him were the fake news of their day. Rasputin himself was partly responsible for them through boasting, yet the consequences reveal the phenomenon, all too often overlooked by historians, that rumour and conspiracy theories can produce even more powerful effects than reality. Stories of corruption and Dionysian orgies in high places proved far more devastating than anyone imagined at the time. The most destructive of all in such a rigidly patriarchal society was the false rumour that the Tsar had become cuckold to a Siberian peasant."
Lake said: "In his ability to weave high politics, military calculation and the experiences of the multitude into narratives of mesmerising power, Antony Beevor is without equal. We’re used to seeing him marshal his forces across epic canvases. The tinderbox setting of the Imperial household and the strange case of Grigori Rasputin, who seems to belong half to Russian folk tales and half to the realist novel, display his gifts for psychology at close quarters. Part political thriller, part Gothic mystery, Rasputin and the Dowager Empress’s Dream shines a different light on the Russian Revolution."
French rights have sold to Calmann Levy, Italian rights to Rizzoli, Danish rights to Lindhardt og Ringhof, Finnish rights to WSOY, Norwegian rights to Cappelen Damm, Swedish rights to Historiska Media, and Romanian rights to Grup Media Litera.
