Femme fatale, or femme fatale - what kind of subspecies is this, does it exist in nature or is it something else, like a cine-literary hoax? Or even a caricature: they say, a demonic woman is the one who "wears a black velvet cassock, a chain on her forehead, a stiletto behind the collar, a rosary on her elbow and a portrait of Oscar Wilde on her left garter."
Of course, you can laugh as much as you like, but in history, the femme fatale and outstanding adventurers have met more than once. Moreover, by no means all of them had vivid natural data, which, however, did not prevent them from seducing men of all ranks and literally driving them crazy.
Sonka the Goldhand
Only a lazy one has not heard of this virtuoso thief. No matter how loud epithets she was awarded: both the queen of the underworld, and the star of world crime. They say that thieves still revere Sonya, bring coins and fresh flowers to her grave, simultaneously asking her for a better life. In the southern sea city, in the second homeland of the unusual heroine, they even conduct a separate excursion called "Criminal Odessa", where they tell, among other things, about the adventures of this lively young lady from Moldavanka.
In 2007 Viktor Merezhko shot a series about Sonya and, despite his assurances that the picture does not claim to be authentic, the image of the legendary thief is drawn quite nicely. This woman died more than a century ago, but talk about her does not subside, the "grandmother of domestic crime" does not lose her ratings and inspires a variety of creative personalities.
It is incredible, but true: the criminal talent has its admirers not only in the thieves' world. Despite all this hype and fame, paradoxically, Sonya Zolotaya Ruchka remains a very mysterious person: there are catastrophically few reliable facts from her biography, everything else is rumors, speculation and myths. Did Sonya serve hard labor where she is buried - there are no specific answers to these questions.
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Sophia Bluestein, aka Sheindlya-Sura Leibova Solomoniak, was born in the town of Powonzki, Warsaw district. Sonechka's crime was literally in her blood, because her family was also distinguished by more than an adventurous character. Relatives Solomoniak did not do anything: buying stolen goods and smuggling. In general, all that is customary for people of such a warehouse to write poetry and hide dried roses in a scented girl's diary.
Sonya, as befits a Jewish young lady, got married at the age of 18 and a year later gave her husband Isaac Rosenbad a daughter named Sura-Rivka. On this, however, the decent part of the biography of the legendary thief ends. 5 months after the birth of her daughter, Sonya collected Isaac's money, made her husband a pen and set off to conquer northern Palmyra.
Why is this windy thief and adventurer still talked about to this day? And the whole point is that Sonya the Golden Hand had other talents, besides the criminal: she is a child of the slums, she perfectly knew secular etiquette, easily mastered French and German, played the piano well. Well, just a girl from high society, even the aristocrats had no doubt that they were a baroness, a viscountess or a countess.
Marlene Dietrich as Sophia Bluestein in Desire, 1936.
Of course, all these talents came in handy for Sonya in her unrighteous deeds. There is no doubt that she would have made a wonderful actress, but fate decreed otherwise. Jewelry stores, where real performances took place, became her imaginary stage.
Richly dressed Sonechka - decency itself did not arouse any suspicion: well, a lady chooses a ring with a diamond for herself and what's wrong with that? Shop employees, on the contrary, even fawned at the "important guest", trying in every possible way to please her, to show the entire range of goods. At this moment, Sonya's faithful pages were connected, distracting the attention of sellers, and the Golden Handle was already hiding stones under her long nails, and at lightning speed she was replacing larger ornaments with fakes.
She also had one more favorite trick, called "Guten Morgen": Sonia, dressed with a pinch, entered the hotel rooms early in the morning, and while the guests were in Morpheus's arms, the Golden Hand would rob them like sticky.
She acted silently because she always wore felt shoes. If one of the guests woke up, our heroine raised her eyebrows, blushed picturesquely and apologized: she made a mistake, they say, with the door. Or, smiling radiantly, she sat down on the edge of the bed. Natural charm and charm at that time did not fail the Golden Pen even once.
If you believe the few testimonies, then Sonya was not a beauty - 153 cm in height, a pockmarked face, but the Golden Hand was full of lovers. Their number was not influenced by her two subsequent marriages - with the old Jew Shelom Shkolnik and with the cardboard sharper Bluestein, to whom she gave birth to two daughters. Sonya parted with her spouses by the method already worked out at Rosenbad - she grabbed her husband's money and was like that.
The Golden Hand operated in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and abroad. As soon as the case began to smell fried, Sonechka immediately changed her place of deployment, looking for more and more criminal spaces. Once she was nevertheless caught, but the cheerful Golden Hand set her spell on: either she tells a funny story, or she starts reading poems in different languages. The overseer could not resist and helped the virtuoso thief to escape.
She was caught in Leipzig, they wanted to hand her over to the Russian embassy, but it was not at all happy with such a “gift”. However, even there, abroad, Sonechka managed to charm her guards and again evade criminal responsibility.
But the wheel of fortune at a certain moment turned in the other direction. They say that the Golden Hand was ruined by a young gigolo Volodya Kochubchik, who constantly demanded more and more money from his mistress. Dangerous enterprises this time brought Sonya to a very real trial. But the Golden Hand could no longer give up her criminal inclinations. She repeatedly escaped from exile and, they say, seduced another warden.
Sinking the Golden Handle into shackles, 1881.
However, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, who visited Sakhalin, where Sonya was serving a sentence, doubted this: “She walks around her cell from corner to corner, and it seems that she is constantly sniffing the air like a mouse in a mousetrap, and her expression is mouse … Looking at her, it is hard to believe that until recently she was so beautiful that she charmed her jailers."
Many shared this point of view, because a wave of crimes similar to two drops of water swept across Europe, and again it was worse than la femme, and the thief allegedly even called herself Sophia. Whether it is true or not, nobody knows.
Almost nothing is known about the last years of the life and death of the popular thief. Some say that she died of a cold in Sakhalin, others that she lived incognito in Odessa, and others are sure that she lived in Moscow with her daughters, actresses of the Maly Theater.
It is only known that Sonya's grave is located at the Vagankovsky cemetery, but who actually rests there, again, is unclear. Sophia Bluestein, aka the Golden Hand, left a huge number of questions and, apparently, this inspires art workers to search for answers about her life and fate.
Olga von Stein
Olga von Stein is a great combinatorial woman, a first-class extortionist, the successor of Sonya the Golden Hand. They say that the very crimes that shook Europe while Sonya was in hard labor are attributed to this very Petersburg adventurer who copied the criminal handwriting of the famous thief.
She was a friend of the mayor Viktor Wilhelmovich von Wal and Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev, the chief adviser to Alexander III and Nicholas II. Von Stein robbed both ordinary citizens (unlike, by the way, from the Golden Hand) and the rich.
The Faberge jewelry company, the Eliseevs' trading house, the furniture factory “Melzer and Co” - whoever did not suffer from the greedy Olga Grigorievna. One of the St. Petersburg fashion houses lost 17 thousand rubles because of von Stein's passion for new dresses and hats.
Olga Zeldovna (later Grigorievna) Segalovich was born in 1869 in Strelna in the family of a jeweler. And everything would be fine (the profession is bread!), But the non-noble origin actually put an end to her successful marriage.
Segalovich lost herself until she was 25 years old: then the aged professor-harper Tsabel took her in marriage, but the beautiful wife was not going to wither away in his dull society, especially since young and wealthy admirers circled side by side like bees around a hive. And Olenka somehow immediately got a taste and got used to living in a big way. Poor Zabel hoped that his wife would change her mind, but in the end he gave up and after 7 years of marriage filed for divorce.
Olga Grigorievna's everything went like clockwork. Without thinking twice, she married the state councilor von Stein, the owner of a huge house on Liteiny, where representatives of the St. Petersburg elite began to visit: mayors, senators, chief prosecutors.
Von Stein finally began to live as she wanted: social events, expensive costumes, the attention of wealthy citizens. But it's not for nothing that they say that money corrupts. Olga Zeldovna, like that old woman from the tale of the fisherman and the fish - she was already not enough.
Von Stein, like her senior "colleague" in the criminal shop, Sonya Zolotaya Ruchka, could powder the brain of anyone. The men were thrilled, melted like candy in warm palms, lost their minds, and Olenka pulled her graceful hands to their wallets.
She turned over not only money and jewelry, but also Rubens' paintings and, as they say, even stole cars. Von Stein organized charitable balls and lotteries in favor of charitable institutions, of course, without sacrificing a penny to them. She fooled honest workers: when applying for a job, they had to pay a cash deposit in order to prove their decency. Of course, the entire amount went to the whim of the insidious von Stein.
The most egregious case was the story of the venerable old man Pyotr Devyatov, who went into debt to get a job as a caretaker of an infirmary. But Olga Grigorievna shamelessly took 4 thousand rubles into her hands and was adamant, despite all the requests of the retired sergeant major.
The old man could not stand such humiliation and a month later died from a blow in the arms of his own daughter. Just after that, the law enforcement agencies decided to take on the impudent General von Stein, but that was not the case, because she had many defenders and influential patrons.
The prestigious lawyer von Stein, Jacob Parchment, organized her escape abroad with an artistic disguise in a man's suit. Olga Grigorievna ended up in New York, where she continued to live in grand style, settling in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. But the exemplary family man and brilliant lawyer Parchment was deprived of the right to engage in professional activities and eventually committed suicide. However, Stein did not get away with it, the Russian police did not doze and still managed to extradite her to her homeland.
In 1907, Olga Grigorievna, who was too presumptuous, was again tried, but the sentence was surprisingly mild. Von Stein went into exile - the city of Ostrov, Pskov region, where she gave concerts for as much as 50 rubles. In 1914, von Stein returned to St. Petersburg, became Baroness Osten-Sacken and continued her criminal activities, for which she was again convicted.
Olga Stein's case in the district court. "Petersburg leaf", 1907.
The government changed, but Olga Grigorievna remained the same: this time she was engaged in the illegal transfer of citizens who did not agree with the Bolsheviks abroad. The "Baroness" took away all their money and family jewels, promised to arrange "everything as soon as possible" and was like that.
But the jokes are bad with the Soviet government: Osten-Sacken ended up under a tribunal and, it seemed, would sit in prison until her second coming, but the term was reduced to 5, and then to 3 years, which she did not serve.
Believe it or not, the 60-year-old adventurer fell in love with the head of the colony, Krotov, who was twice her age. Together they fled to Moscow, where they opened another fake office. But the metropolitan threat police eventually figured out the criminal lovers. At the time of his arrest, Krotov was mortally wounded, and Olga Grigorievna received her fifth term.
Caricature from the "Petersburg newspaper", 1908.
Probably, von Stein, even at the age of 80, could masterly deceive and then seduce the warden. By the way, there were rumors that she did not serve the fifth term again and allegedly saw Olga Grigorievna, alive, healthy, cheerful, at the Hay Market, where she was dashingly selling crispy sauerkraut.
Surprisingly, this swindler and adventurer, at any power, managed to get out of the water dry. Olga von Stein-Osten-Sacken died in besieged Leningrad, but her peculiar fame is still striking in scale.
Maria Tarnovskaya
Perhaps the most dangerous, insidious, cynical and bloodthirsty of all these criminal ladies is Maria Tarnovskaya, an aristocrat, daughter of Count O'Rourke, who was related to the Stuart kings. She always walked over the head and was pathologically cruel to her lovers: her 22-year-old admirer Vladimir Shtahl committed suicide at the Kiev Anatomical Theater after a night with the fatal beauty.
Someone may reasonably note: you never know what could have come to a person's head, especially since the time was appropriate - men fight in duels, ladies faint.
But here everything was much more sophisticated: Maria Nikolaevna set a condition for young Stahl - right after a night with her, he had to commit suicide, having previously insured his life for 50 thousand rubles in her favor. Vladimir swore this at the grave of Tarnovskaya's mother and kept his promise.
But this was far from the only nightmare episode. Maria in general was a kind of succubus, strangling men, which only she did not get up: she extinguished cigarettes on the hands of lovers, and forced them to tattoo their name, and pushed their foreheads against their previous lovers.
Tarnovskaya's smocks were clearly not aristocratic, but rather criminal. But in general, this demonic woman without exaggeration represented the decadent spirit of the era and even inspired artists.
"The King of Russian Poets" Igor Severyanin dedicated a sonnet to her, in which Tarnovskaya appears in a multi-layered image of "doves, cats, snakes and romance." Symbolist Valeriy Bryusov wrote the story "The Last Pages from a Woman's Diary", the heroine of which is in many ways reminiscent of a Kiev aristocrat.
Italian writer Anna Vivanti wrote the novel Circe about this Kiev fury. It is curious that it is referred to as one of the earliest feminist novels, that is, Tarnovskaya is such a black angel of revenge, punishing men for their sins. The plot of "Circe", by the way, formed the basis of the silent film.
Plays were staged about her life. Unheard of popularity for a bloodthirsty adventurer. But what can I say, Luchino Visconti himself wanted to make a film about her, however, the idea was not destined to come true, but what an interest in personality. This, however, is not so surprising, because Tarnovskaya managed to "inherit" not only in her fatherland, but also in Venice.
At first, she squandered money (80 thousand) from her lover Donat Prilukov, a once talented lawyer and an exemplary family man, but as soon as the funds ran out, Maria Nikolaevna came up with a new criminal plan. A wealthy widower, Count Komarovsky, who, of course, could not resist Tarnovskaya's spell, came into her field of vision.
However, there were no indifferent to her, as eyewitnesses described Tarnovskaya: "Unusually tall, thin, elegantly dressed, with noble features and sparkling life, incredibly lively eyes, always laughing, flirtatious, resourceful and talkative even in difficult times."
To his misfortune, Count Komarovsky introduced Maria Nikolaevna to his friend, the provincial secretary Nikolai Naumov, who became another link in the criminal chain. Tarnovskaya forced a 23-year-old boy to become the murderer of his older friend, 500 thousand rubles were at stake.
The Karabiner accompanies M. Tarnovskaya to court. Venice.
Maria Nikolaevna, as always, hoped to get out of the water dry, but that was not the case: the unfortunate killer told the police the true motives of the crime. Tarnovskaya, Prilukov and the Swiss Eliza Perier, who was privy to the essence of the case, ended up in the dock. Justice has triumphed.
There was a jury trial, more like a theatrical performance. Maria Nikolaevna once again tried to portray herself as a victim, here are her words: “Am I, in fact, an adventurer, criminal, murderer, as they portray me? If I am not a competitor for the prize for virtue, then everyone will at least make sure that I am a sick weak woman, and not a shrew and demonic nature."
But the jury was deaf to Tarnovskaya's complaints, she was sentenced to 8 years of correctional labor in the salt fields. Not much is known about the further fate of the insidious adventurer: they say that a millionaire fell in love with her and took her to America. However, whether this is true or not is, as always, unclear, because the matter concerns the adventurer.
Used materials from the article by Valeria Mukhoedova from the site softmixer.com