Many famous figures of literature and art in their lives have encountered mystical phenomena.
So, if you flip through the pages of Pushkin's life, it turns out that superstitions played a significant role in it and largely determined its very course.
One of such cases was described by Vladimir Dal, who knew the great poet quite closely. It happened in 1825. During this period, Pushkin lived in a Pskov village and he was forbidden to leave it. Suddenly, strange rumors began to reach him about the death of the emperor, then about the abdication of the crown prince. To find out how true these conversations are, Pushkin decides to secretly leave the village, calculating the time so as to arrive in St. Petersburg late in the evening, and then return a day later.
Already at the very exit from the village, the coachman noticed some kind of omen, clearly not to the liking. And when they drove away from the village, Pushkin himself also began to repent of this undertaking. But, in order not to seem faint-hearted, he decided to continue this journey.
And suddenly the coachman, with a desperate exclamation, pointed to the hare, which ran across the road ahead of the carriage. And Pushkin with great pleasure yields to convincing requests of the coachman, saying that, in addition, he forgot something very important and necessary at home. The journey had to be interrupted.
What if the poet neglected the omen and went to Petersburg? Most likely, he, as expected, would have arrived in the capital on the evening of December 13 and, probably, would have stayed with his lyceum friend Ryleev. This means that the poet would have fallen into the thick of the mutiny on the night of December 13-14. Undoubtedly, later it would have been difficult for Pushkin to abandon the too natural accusation that he had not intentionally come to Petersburg to take part in the Decembrist speech.
But an even more surprising and at the same time tragic prediction was heard by the poet in 1817 from the lips of the then famous Petersburg fortuneteller Alexandra Filippovna Kirchhoff, thanks to her name and patronymic among young rakes known as Alexander the Great. She really had enormous popularity in fashionable Petersburg. It is curious that after the death of Pushkin, young Lermontov also visited her as a client, to whom the sorcerer also very accurately indicated the year of death.
So one day in 1817, Pushkin met with one of his friends. After walking along Nevsky Prospekt, a friend suggested that the poet go to the famous fortune-teller who knew how to predict fate along the lines of the hand.
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“You,” she said to Pushkin, “these days you will meet with your old acquaintance, who will offer you a good job; then, soon, you will receive unexpected money through the letter; and thirdly, I must tell you that you will end your life with an unnatural death. And a blond young man will kill you because of a woman …"
Glancing then at the palm of the captain, the "sorceress" announced with horror that the officer would also die a violent death, but would die much earlier than his friend, perhaps even the other day.
The young people came out confused. And the next day Pushkin learned that in the morning in the barracks his captain had been stabbed to death with a bayonet by an angry soldier. And although the fulfilled prediction affected the poet's friend, the superstitious Pushkin was also quite alarmed.
And soon the predictions about the poet himself began to come true. Two weeks later, on Nevsky Prospekt, the poet really met his old friend, who had previously served in Warsaw under the Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich, and had recently been transferred to St. Petersburg. A friend offered and advised to take his place, assuring that the Tsarevich also wanted this.
And a few days after meeting with an acquaintance, the poet received a letter by mail with money: this money was sent to him by a lyceum friend who had once lost it at cards to Pushkin.
The third, most terrible, prediction came true twenty years later. When three times a white Dantes - white-haired, wearing a white uniform of a cavalry guard and a white cockade - mortally wounded the poet, everyone who knew about the prediction became terrified of how accurately it was fulfilled.
And, as if anticipating his death from a blond man, Pushkin almost always tried to avoid conflicts with fair-haired people …
And this mystical secret, which connected the knot of Auguste Renoir and Aline Charigot, was told to the world by their son, the famous film director Jean Renoir.
Thirty years before Auguste Renoir met the young dressmaker Aline Charigot, he began to paint her portraits. On a porcelain vase painted by the artist in his youth, Venus de Milo is an exact copy of Aline. On porcelain plates, he depicted the profile of Marie Antoinette - and this is the same Aline with her short nose. The owner of the workshop demanded that Renoir "lengthen" the queen's nose, otherwise the buyers of the plates would not recognize their favorite. But the artist categorically refused to do this.
Moreover, he painted portraits of his children many times long before they were born! He drew different children, and many years later the parents of the "real" kids said: "Isn't it, the spitting image of Renoir?"
Auguste Renoir created his own worlds, populating them with women, children and men born of his creative imagination. Years passed, and they suddenly met in his earthly life.
This is exactly what happened with Sharigo, whom the artist once met in his life …
A strange, if not mystical, incident happened in adolescence with the famous Soviet science fiction writer Alexander Belyaev. Once, in the company of friends, he went to the river. Alexander's brother was also in this society.
At first, everyone swam near one shore. But then some of the guys decided to cross the boat to the opposite side of the river. Alexander went with them. His brother refused to cross.
Sitting on the sand, Alexander unexpectedly lifted a piece of clay lying nearby and began to sculpt a human head. To his amazement, the features of his brother's face were clearly visible on the clay figurine. Amazed Alexander, without thinking twice, threw the stucco into the river. As it turned out later, his brother drowned at the same moment.
Of course, a skeptic would call the incident a coincidence. Only will he answer the question: why exactly at that moment Belyaev's fingers, acting mechanically, sculpted his brother's face? And why, when the clay mask fell into the water, did the brother drown after it? Aren't there too many tragic coincidences for one case?..
The writer Yevgeny Petrovich Kataev, who was published under the literary pseudonym Petrov, collected envelopes from letters, which he himself sent to a randomly selected country. At the same time, the writer invented the city, street, house number and even the name of the addressee. Naturally, after some time the letter returned back to Petrov, however, in an envelope decorated with a foreign stamp "The addressee is incorrect."
In April 1939, Evgeny Petrovich sent another letter to New Zealand at the address he invented: the city of Hydebirdville, 7 Reitbeach Street, Merrilla Weisley. In the envelope, he enclosed a letter with the following content: “Dear Merrill! Please accept our sincere condolences on the passing of Uncle Pete. Be strong, old man. Forgive me for not writing for a long time. Hope Ingrid is okay. Kiss my daughter for me. She's probably already quite big. Your Eugene."
Four months later, in August, a reply came with a photograph in an envelope and the sender's address: "New Zealand, Hydebirdville, 7 Reitbeach, Merrill Ogin Weisley." The letter read as follows: “Dear Eugene! Thanks for the condolences. Uncle Pete's ridiculous death unsettled us for six months. I hope you will forgive the delay in the letter. Ingrid and I often remember those two days that you were with us. Gloria is very big and will go to the 2nd grade in the fall. She still keeps the bear that you brought her from Russia."
Petrov never visited New Zealand, so he was incredibly surprised when he saw in the photograph a tall man who hugged … himself, Petrov. On the back of the photo was the inscription: "October 9, 1938". But just that day he was in the hospital unconscious. At the same time, the doctors did not hide from close relatives that the writer had almost no chances to stay alive.
To fully understand this unusual situation, the writer sent another letter to a well-known address in New Zealand. But Petrov did not wait for an answer: the Great Patriotic War began. Petrov was called to the front as a war correspondent for Pravda and the Information Bureau. In 1942, the plane on which he was traveling to the war zone disappeared.
And on the day of the disappearance of the plane, a message from Merrill Weisley came to the writer's Moscow address. He wrote: “I got scared when you started swimming in the lake. The water was very cold. But you said you were destined to crash on a plane, not drown. Please, be careful - fly as little as possible …"
Bernatsky Anatoly