Sergei Michailovich Trufanov, also known as Hieromonk Iliodor, was born on October 19, 1880 in a small village near the Don River. Despite crushing poverty, which claimed several of his siblings, Trufanov was able to attend several years of school and then entered the local seminary. He went on to attend and graduate the St. Petersburg Theological Academy in 1905. Shortly after, he gave several sermons that attacked a variety of people and organizations, including politicians, aristocrats, revolutionaries, Jews, nationalists, and more. Soon after he apparently blackmailed Rasputin. He later apologized for his slander of Jewish people, then renounced the Russian Orthodox Church, and ultimately was defrocked.After being banned from several monasteries, he fled to what is currently Norway. He continued to plot against Rasputin, starred as himself in a silent film, The Fall of the Romanovs in 1917, and then returned to Russia in 1918. A few years later, he moved to New York City and lived a relatively quiet life with his family while working as a janitor until his death on January 28, 1952. This story focuses on his earlier life, a time when one critic deemed him, "extravagantly psychopathic."

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Excerpt from The Mad Monk of Russia, Iliodor: Life, Memoirs, and Confessions of Sergei Michailovich Trufanoff (Iliodor); Illustrated With Photographs Is it necessary for me to convince you, my esteemed American readers, that what I have to tell deserves your attention? Let the facts speak for themselves - the facts which I shall narrate to you exactly as they have occurred during the course of my life. These facts are as uncommon as your gigantic sky scrapers, the towers of which, it seems, are about to reach the sky and the stars. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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