It is said that writers can somehow predict future events. This was demonstrated, for example, by Edgar Poe, who described a case of cannibalism on a lifeboat after a shipwreck. Moreover, he not only accurately described how all this happened, but even guessed the name of the cabin boy, who was killed by hungry sailors just a few minutes before his salvation.
However, such mystical insights or creative foresight are inherent not only to the masters of the pen, but also to the masters of the brush, that is, artists. Here, for example, what an amazing case from his criminal practice was described by the head of the criminal investigation department of the Russian Empire Arkady Koshko, who after the 1917 revolution immigrated to France, and there, in 1929, published his memoirs.
This incident took place in St. Petersburg at the end of the nineteenth century. In the attic of one of the houses on Vasilyevsky Island, the corpse of a fourteen-year-old girl was once found, who was raped and then strangled by the villain. The capital literally seethed with such news, at that time it was a crime unheard of in its cruelty and godlessness, today you will not surprise anyone like that, which does not honor our generation in terms of morality and spirituality.
The police knocked down in search of the criminal, but time passed, and the killer remained at large. The shock in society from this atrocity was so great that one St. Petersburg artist painted a picture of what happened, which depicted a half-dark attic, a murdered child and a hunchback villain running away from the scene. Moreover, on the canvas, the criminal half-turns before slipping through the attic door, and reveals his ugly face with a red beard, small evil eyes and a huge voluptuous mouth.
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The artist's creative foresight nearly killed him
The artist's painting won a prize and was exhibited in the city art gallery, where people flocked in a crowd just to see this canvas. And then one day in the crowd near this picture, a sharp cry suddenly sounded, and one of the spectators collapsed to the floor. It turned out to be a hunchback man. But, God, those present were stunned, the hunchback from the picture and this hunchbacked visitor to the gallery were in one person …
When the hunchback regained consciousness, he asked to call the police and later admitted that he had committed a crime in the attic, he abused the unfortunate girl, and then strangled her. Since then, her image and her death rattle have relentlessly pursued the villain, but who could see him in the attic at that moment, could not understand the stunned criminal?
Captain Chulitsky, who was in charge of the detective police in St. Petersburg, did not believe in any miracles, and therefore immediately suspected the artist, at least, of concealing the crime, if not more - of complicity. However, the artist had a solid alibi: at the time of the crime he was in Italy, that is, he could not participate and even see the criminal in any way.
But the secret was easily clarified. Shocked by what had happened, the artist decided to paint a picture of this terrible atrocity, which is why he even went to the crime scene several times and made sketches of the attic with the dead girl. It remained to find an image of a vile and disgusting murderer. For some reason, the artist seemed to be a freak, like Quasimodo. Once, quite by accident, the brush master went into a tavern and saw there a hunchback, outwardly corresponding to the image that arose in his head. Having learned from the innkeeper that he was a regular visitor to the establishment, the artist caught a hunchback in him several times, and in five evenings he copied the image of a murderer from him. He could not even imagine that in fact he was drawing the killer …
The villain was sentenced to twenty years of hard labor, while, as Arkady Koshko wrote in his memoirs, in Russia they were executed extremely rarely, except for especially grave crimes of the state. But what is remarkable, adds the author of the memoirs, how accidental was the artist's visit to the tavern? What kind of providence made him go there, and at the very moment when the killer was there? Moreover, he fully responded to the image that the artist intuitively had already caught in his imagination. These are the incomprehensible secrets of creativity and being …
