He is known as Yevgeny Petrov - co-author of Ilya Ilf, the creator of all favorite novels about the cute cheater Ostap Bender and brother of another, no less famous writer - Valentin Kataev. Eugene Petrov lived a short life, but full of strange coincidences and mysterious coincidences, many of which are still not fully explained.
A SERIES OF DRAMATIC EVENTS.
According to his brother's memoirs, Yevgeniya constantly pursued dramatic events that almost cost him his life. Here is the shortlist of "feats" of the writer-satirist. Back in his school years, together with his friends, he went on a sea voyage from Odessa to Ochakov. The means of transportation was an old scowl. Teenagers were caught in the strongest storm and miraculously escaped. Later in the school's laboratory, the boy was poisoned by hydrogen sulfide vapor, and he was hardly pumped out in the fresh air. When Eugene was in Italy, he was knocked down by a cyclist in Milan, but even here the lucky one got away with scratches. During the Finnish War, the house where the writer was then hit by a shell, and near Moscow, Eugene fell under heavy mortar fire from the German army. But every time the beloved of fate remained alive and well, until, finally, he was caught by the same death in 1942, to which he, as if underhandedly, was preparing a providence. "I firmly know that I must die soon, that I can't avoid it," writes Petrov in his diary long before 1942.
AN ORIGINAL HOBBY.
In 1923, the talented young man moved from Odessa to Moscow and actively engaged in journalism, cooperating with several newspapers and magazines. At the same time, he had an unusual passion: he collected envelopes with stamps of postal departments in different countries. He got the exhibits in his collection in a very original way. In order to receive an envelope bearing the postmark of a particular country, Yevgeny wrote a letter there, indicating the surname and address he had invented. After a while, the envelope was returned - all in multi-colored seals, with the mark "address, does not exist". During the whole time, Petrov had accumulated more than one dozen such letters.
But here is what an amazing story happened to a collector shortly before the Second World War.
In the spring of 1939, Eugene sent a letter to an imaginary address in New Zealand as usual. The writer invented the city of Heidberdville, named the street Reitbic, gave the house number seven, and the name of the recipient indicated this - Merrill Ojin Weasley. Petrov enclosed an envelope of fun for a letter in English (which he knew perfectly): "Dear Merrill! Please accept my sincere condolences on the death of Uncle Pete. I'm sorry I didn't write for a long time. I guess Ingrid has no problem. Kiss my daughter for me. I think she's a grown-up, huh? Always yours, Eugene.
He sent the letter as a registered and urgent - in order to quickly get it back.
"YOUR MERRILL"...
But it took months, and the letter never came back. Thinking that it was lost somewhere, Eugene had already started to forget about his own message, when suddenly at the end of the summer of the same year he received an envelope from New Zealand. But it wasn't his letter at all, but the answer of a certain... Merrill Ojina Weasley! On the envelope, Petrov read the address of the sender, written in an unfamiliar handwriting - the same address that he had once invented himself!
"Dear Eugene! - The joker read with surprise. - Thank you for your sympathy. I'm sorry that I was late with the answer. Unexpected death of dear Uncle Pete confused all our plans. Ingrid and I always remember the days when you were here. Gloria's already big and going to second grade. She still plays with the bear you gave her. Don't forget to write to us. Your Merrill.
The envelope also contained a picture of a middle-aged, dense, middle-aged man in the arms of a... Eugene Petrov.
Looking at the date on the back of the photo - "October 9, 1938". - the writer was covered in cold then: that's the day he was taken by ambulance to the hospital. Then he earned a severe form of pneumonia and a few days between life and death. Everyone was preparing for the worst...
To understand this story, Eugene wrote a letter to New Zealand again, where he had never been before, but never received an answer. And then the Second World War began, and everybody did not have time for mysticism.
From the very beginning of the hostilities, Yevgeny Petrov seconded to one of the newspapers as a war correspondent, began to fly to the front. Familiars noted that he had become uncommunicative, rarely smiled, stopped joking and often did not even hear the questions asked. And the reason, apparently, was not so much our retreat as the writer's inner state. It seemed as if he knew that he did not have long to live.
In 1942, the plane on which Evgeny Petrov was flying to the front was shot down by a German fighter jet. Few people were rescued, and one of the authors of "Twelve Chairs" was among the dead. He was not even 40 years old then.
MYSTICAL DOUBLE.
This is in the biography of the creator of the immortal image of Ostap Bender could have dotted the picture, if Eugene Petrov hadn't received that second - long-awaited - message from New Zealand after his death. It was brought to the writer's widow and translated into Russian. In the letter the same Merrill Waisley expressed fears for the life of Eugene: "I was very afraid when you, being here, bathed in the lake. The water in it was very cold, but you only joked, saying that you were destined not to drown, but to crash on a plane. So please be careful, fly as little as possible.
How can you explain everything that happened? Except that Eugene was in a feverish delirium, and someone instead visited the family of the mentioned Weasley. But why is this "someone" indistinguishable from Eugene? And why are there so many coincidences here? The official science to all these questions and hardly will answer. On the other hand, an alternative system of knowledge, eniology, can explain the situation to some extent.
During a fever with high fever, a person often has a splitting of physical and thin body. This cleavage can become irreversible and lead to death. Yevgeny Kataev's thin body has, for some unexplained reason, gone beyond the physical and moved to New Zealand, where it materialized again and appeared before the Weasley family. Something similar, as many know, happened to Empresses Anna Ioanovna and Catherine II before their death. However, the so-called astral ghosts, or Doppelgangers, are ethereal spirits. And the double of Eugene Petrov physically, as follows from the letters of Merrill Waisley, is not different from the original ...
Perhaps everything really was, and this story will someday be finally clarified.