She wrote three memoirs about her father, dealing with Tsar Nicholas II and Tsaritsa Alexandra Feodorovna, the attack by Khionia Guseva, and his 1916 murder.

In her three memoirs, the veracity of which have been questioned,[1][2] she painted an almost saintly picture of her father, insisting that most of the negative stories were based on slander and the misinterpretation of facts by his enemies.

Matryona (or Maria) Rasputin was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye, Tobolsk Governorate, on 26 March 1898, and baptized the next day.

In September 1910[3] she went to Kazan (perhaps the Mariinsky women's gymnasium) and then came to St. Petersburg, where her first name was changed to Maria to better fit with her social aspirations.

[4] Rasputin had brought Maria and her younger sister Varvara (Barbara) to live with him in the capital with the hope of turning them into "little ladies.

[24] Boris Soloviev, a graduate of a school of mysticism, quickly emerged as Rasputin's successor after the murder.

[26] Maria also attended the meetings, but later wrote in her diary that she could not understand why her father kept telling her to "love Boris" when the group spoke to him at the séances.

In his own diary, he wrote that his wife was not even useful for sexual relations, because there were so many women who had bodies he found more attractive than hers.

Boris also found young women willing to masquerade as one of the grand duchesses for the benefit of the families he had defrauded.

After Tatyana (1920–2009) was born they left by ship for Ceylon, Suez, Trieste and Prague, where the couple opened a Russian restaurant, but business was slow.

They settled in Montmartre, Paris, where Boris worked in a soap factory, as night porter, car-washer and for the Waterman Pen Company; they lived at Avenue Jean Jaurès.

In 1929, she worked at Busch Circus, where she had to dance to "the tragedy of my father's life and death, and be brought face-to-face on the stage with actors who were impersonating him and his murderers.

Every time I have to confront my father on the stage a pang of poignant memory shoots through my heart, and I could break down and weep.

"[45] She was mauled by a bear in May 1935[46] but stayed with the circus until it reached Miami, Florida, where she quit before it ceased operations.

[48] Maria was ordered to leave the country within 90 days, but then, in March 1940, she married Gregory Bernadsky, a childhood friend and former White Russian Army officer, in Miami.

In 1947 her younger daughter Maria married in Paris to Gideon Walrave Boissevain (1897–1985), minister plenipotentiary in Greece, Chile, Israel, then Dutch ambassador to Cuba.

[50] She began work as a riveter, either in Miami or in a San Pedro, Los Angeles, California shipyard during World War II.

[36] At one point, she said she recognized Anna Anderson as Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia, a claim she would later recant.

Her home was in Silver Lake, an area of east-central Los Angeles with a large Russian-American community.