Interesting facts about British writers and poets. Eccentricities of famous writers

Runaway Agatha Christie and Spiritualist Conan Doyle

Have you ever considered that two of England's greatest deductive minds lived and worked at the same time? Moreover, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an active participant in the search operation during the disappearance of Agatha Christie. In 1926, the writer's husband asked her for a divorce, as he was already in love with another. This was a huge blow to the creator of the mustachioed Poirot. And she disappeared. Rumor has it that Christie wanted to commit suicide and fabricate evidence against her unfaithful husband.

And among the volunteers of the whole country who helped find the literary diva, Sir Conan Doyle himself turned out to be. True, all his help consisted in the fact that he took Agatha's glove to a well-known medium. You will not believe it, but the man who invented the most pragmatic and atheistic character of all time was an ardent supporter and propagandist of spiritualism, he simply believed in all otherworldly forces. Fortunately, or unfortunately, the medium did not help the search operation in any way, and the writer was found 10 days later in a small spa hotel outside the city, where she calmly registered under the name of a negligent homemaker and drank cocktails for 10 days. By the way, no one knows when, how and why Agatha Christie ended up in that hotel. The writer herself claims that she had short-term amnesia. But we are girls, we guess ...

Lord Byron or Casanova?

Byron's love affairs are legendary. Biographers unequivocally add to his biography the fact that once in one year of Venice, Byron had the good fortune of "communication" with more than 250 ladies. And this despite the fact that the poet definitely limped and was extremely prone to fullness. Besides, the pride of all England had quite strange collection. He collected strands of hair from the most intimate places their mistresses. Curls, and at that time they probably were, were lovingly kept in envelopes, where the poet himself drew names with his own hand: “Countess Guiccioli”, “Caroline Lam” ... In the 80s, to the great regret of literary critics, the collection was lost and its trace has not been found to this day since.

But the most common gossip revolves around George Byron's love for youngsters and animals. If the first is exactly what you thought, then the second is platonic love. In the personal mini-pet of the poet, one could meet crocodiles, badgers, horses, monkeys and many different living creatures. And the great English romantic poet was furious at the sight of an ordinary salt shaker with salt. Rumor has it that there have never been such at magnificent festivities with the lord. The secret of such fierce aggression towards the salt shaker remained unsolved.

Dad Hem and his cats

Everyone has heard about the cat owner, alcoholic and suicide Hemingway. He really suffered from a severe form of paranoia, did endure a number of sophisticated psychiatric techniques, and towards the end of his life he stopped writing. And when Hemingway died, American intelligence services confirmed what great writer kept repeating all his life - he was really being followed.

But there is another side of the coin. The ideal of a man, a life fighter and a womanizer, American dad Hem loved Cuban mojitos, beautiful journalists and honesty in everything. One day sipping a friendly cocktail another giant American Literature, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, complained to Hemingway that his wife Zelda considered him " manhood» is relatively small. To which the writer took him to the toilet, arranged a control check, and then reassured poor Fitzgerald that everything was in order. He already knew.

But as for cats, Hemingway's favorite pet was Snowball, which has a small defect - six toes on soft paws. Now you can meet the descendants of Snowball, who continue to pay tribute to the genius of literature, and live in Uncle Ham's house-museum in Florida.

Charlie and the Wax Factory

As a child, the future pride of England, Charles Dickens had a hard time. The writer's father ended up in a debtor's prison, and little Charlie had to go to work, unfortunately, not at a chocolate, but at an upcoming wax factory, where young talent I had to stick labels on jars of wax all day long. No football with slingshots, no halabud on a tree. That is why the images of unfortunate orphans came out of Dickens so realistic.

In general, one can write and write about the oddities of Charles John Dickens. The most famous of them says that the writer could not sit down at the table or go to bed with his head not to the north. Their brilliant works Charlie wrote in that direction.

Legends say that Dickens was addicted to hypnosis and mesmerism (telepathic communication between people and animals), and even voluntarily fell into a trance. During such a state, the writer fiddled with his hats, which, after seizures, wore out very soon. Later, I even had to abandon hats altogether. Well, among other things, the favorite entertainment of the English prose writer was going to the morgue. Especially in those sections where unidentified bodies were exposed. Wonderful pastime, I must say!

Antosha Chekhonte

A domestic example of a difficult childhood of a writer is Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, beloved by everyone, whose father kept a tailor's shop and forced his youths to work in it. At the same time, little Anton managed to study and sing in church choir, but he did not find his childhood.

Another extremely interesting fact about the great satirist: Chekhov kept more than 50 original pseudonyms in his arsenal: Champagne, Brother of my brother, Man without a spleen, Arkhip Indeikin, and of course, Antosha Chekhonte is only part of Chekhov's boundless fantasy.

But Stanislavsky in his memoirs describes such a story. Once, while Anton Pavlovich was visiting him, a friend came to see him. During the conversation, Chekhov was silent and only stared intently at the newcomer. When the guest left, the master of the short genre said: “Listen, he is a suicide,” to which Stanislavsky only laughed, because he had never met a more joyful, happy and optimistic person than this friend. Imagine the director's astonishment when a few years later the "cheerful" guest was poisoned.
Yet contemporaries describe Chekhov as the good man on the ground. WITH light hand Anton Pavlovich Chekhov Russia has become richer in schools, hospitals and shelters for those who have nowhere to go.

coffee instead of sex

Somehow, a thief got into the apartment of a young, not yet very successful writer. When he started rummaging through drawers in the only chest of drawers in the apartment, he heard loud laughter behind him. Honore de Balzac, that was the name of the novice writer, loudly remarked that it is unlikely that a thief will be able to find money where he has not been able to find it himself for a long time.

The author's contemporaries argue that sharp feeling humor helped Balzac survive in sorrows and poverty. Humor and coffee. The famous Frenchman could drink about 50 cups of extremely strong coffee a day. Someone even calculated that during the writing of " human comedy» Balzac drank 15,000 cups of aromatic liquor. And this is without the beans that the coffee lover liked to chew when it was not possible to brew his favorite drink.

And Honore de Balzac believed that sex is tantamount to one good romance. The male seed, in his competent opinion, is nothing but particles of brain tissue. After a night of love, he even somehow bitterly admitted to one of his girlfriend that he had probably lost a brilliant work.

From comet to comet

Another lover of pseudonyms, Mark Twain, came up with more than a dozen of them. And the very "mark twain" meant "by the mark twain", that is, the safe immersion of the ship in two fathoms. In his youth, the creator of Tom Sawyer worked for a long time on a sea vessel somewhere in the waters of the Mississippi.

Few people know that Samuel Clemens, the real name of the writer, was born two weeks after Halley's comet swept over the Earth. And in 1909, Twain wrote: "I was born with Halle, and I will leave with her." On April 20, the comet circled the planet again, and the next day the genius was gone.

Probably, it was this fact that Mark Twain predicted such an unreal life, full of secrets. One of the prose writer's best friends was the enigmatic Nikola Tesla. Together with him, Twain participated in the development of mysterious inventions and even patented several, including an album with adhesive pages for photos and an original self-adjusting suspenders.

And the world-famous American hated children (despite our favorites - Tom and Huck), but adored cats and tobacco. He started smoking when he was only 8 years old last day smoked 30 cigars a day in his life. Moreover, Twain chose the cheapest and most fetid varieties.

Among other things, Mark Twain was one of the most famous American Freemasons. Little is known about his activities in the lodge. His initiation took place in 1861 in the small town of St. career ladder».

Looking for the green stick

Well last Hero of our article, a writer whose image has become legendary for the whole mother of Russia. The life of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy has been studied by us from school up and down. But do you know what influenced the writer's ideas about universal peace, love and harmony? As a child, little Levushka's brother told a story many times about a magic green wand that can be found on the outskirts of that same Yasnaya Polyana and with its help make the world a much better place. It was this tale that influenced the whole later life and worldview of the great novelist and teacher.

But in youth future star Russian literature suffered from a common illness gambling. One card game with a neighbor, the landowner Gorokhov, Tolstoy lost the house in which he grew up, and all on the same Yasnaya Polyana. Gorokhov, without thinking twice, dismantled the building brick by brick and moved it to his estate.

The strangeness of Tolstoy does not end there. In my first wedding night, Lev Nikolaevich forced 18-year-old Sophia Bers to re-read his entire diary, especially devoting moments love affairs. Tolstoy wanted to be honest with the woman he took as his wife, and told her about all his mistresses, including adventures with countless peasant women. Rumor has it that what should happen between husband and wife did not happen that night.

Russian poets and writers came up with many new words: substance, thermometer (Lomonosov), industry (Karamzin), bungling (Saltykov-Shchedrin), obscure (Dostoevsky), mediocrity (Severyanin), exhausted (Khlebnikov).

Korney Chukovsky's real name was Nikolai Vasilyevich Korneichukov.

Voltaire ridiculed Duke Rohan for his arrogance. The duke ordered his servants to beat Voltaire, which was done. Voltaire challenged the duke to a duel, but the duke refused, as Voltaire was not a nobleman.

Starting to work on a new work, Balzac locked himself in a room for one or two months and tightly closed the shutters so that light would not penetrate through them. He wrote by candlelight, dressed in a bathrobe, for 18 hours a day.

Mark Twain was born in 1835 when Halley's comet flew close to Earth. He predicted that he would die during her next appearance. And so it happened in 1910.

Alexandre Dumas once participated in a duel where the participants drew lots, and the loser had to shoot himself. The lot went to Dumas, who retired to the next room. A shot rang out, and then Dumas returned to the participants with the words: "I shot, but missed."

Writer Charles Dickens always slept with his head to the north. He also sat facing north when writing his great works.

French writer Guy de Maupassant was one of those who annoyed the Eiffel Tower. However, he dined daily at her restaurant, explaining that this was the only place in Paris where the tower was not visible.

Beaumarchais, after presenting his play The Marriage of Figaro, was arrested and imprisoned. Louis XVI, playing cards, wrote an arrest warrant on the seven of spades.

Jules Verne spent many hours a day studying scientific literature, writing out the facts of interest to him on special cards. The scientific community could envy the card index compiled by him: there were more than 20 thousand cards in it.

Hans Christian Andersen was angry when he was called a children's storyteller and said that he wrote fairy tales for both children and adults. For the same reason, he ordered that there should not be a single child on his monument, where the storyteller was originally supposed to be surrounded by children.

In 1925 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to Bernard Shaw, who called this event "a token of gratitude for the relief he brought to the world by not publishing anything this year."

The American writer Emily Dickenson (1830-1886) wrote over 900 poems in her lifetime, only four of which were published during her lifetime.

Some biographies of Erich Maria Remarque indicate that his real name- Kramer (Remarque vice versa). In fact, this is an invention of the Nazis, who, after his emigration from Germany, also spread the rumor that Remarque is the descendants of French Jews.

LN Tolstoy was anathematized. Once a year, anathema was solemnly proclaimed in all churches to three persons: Mazepa, Grishka Otrepyev and Tolstoy.

The Belarusian poet Adam Mitskevich was also a science fiction writer. In Future Story, he wrote about acoustic devices that can be used to listen to concerts from the city while sitting by the fireplace, as well as mechanisms that allow the inhabitants of the Earth to maintain contact with creatures inhabiting other planets.

Jules Verne never visited Russia, but, nevertheless, in Russia (in whole or in part) the action of 9 of his novels unfolds.

American extravagant writer Timothy Dexter wrote a book in 1802 with very peculiar language and lack of any punctuation. In response to reader outrage, in the second edition of the book, he added a special page with punctuation marks, asking readers to arrange them in the text to their liking.

Lord Byron had four domestic geese that followed him everywhere, even at social gatherings. Despite his overweight and rather strong clubfoot, Byron was considered one of the most energetic and attractive people of his time.

Alexandre Dumas, when writing his works, used the services of many assistants - the so-called "literary blacks." Among them, the most famous is Auguste Maquet, who invented the plot of The Count of Monte Cristo and made a significant contribution to The Three Musketeers.

The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, was (in 1703) sentenced to prison for a satirical article. He spent days tied to pillory on the square. Passers-by were obliged to spit on him. Defoe was then forty-two.

Creator famous novel"The Gadfly" Ethel Lilian Voynich was a composer and considered her musical works even more significant than literary ones.

famous Soviet writer and public figure Konstantin Simonov burred, that is, he did not pronounce the letters "r" and "l". It happened in childhood, when, while playing, he accidentally cut his tongue with a razor, and it became difficult for him to pronounce his name: Cyril. In 1934 he took the pseudonym Konstantin.

Expression " balzac age” arose after the release of Balzac’s novel “The Thirty-Year-Old Woman” and is permissible in relation to women not older than 40 years.

Ilf and Petrov are very original way avoided thought-stamps - they discarded ideas that came to mind at once to both.

One of the most prolific writers of all times and peoples was the Spaniard Lope de Vega. In addition to The Dog in the Manger, he wrote another thousand eight hundred plays, all of them in verse. He did not work on any play for more than three days. At the same time, his work was well paid, so Lope de Vega was practically a multimillionaire, which is extremely rare among writers.

The famous fabulist Aesop was so poor that he sold himself into slavery to pay off his debts. At that moment he was thirty years old.

Robinson Crusoe has a sequel. In it, Robinson again suffers a shipwreck and is forced to travel to Europe through all of Russia. For eight months he waits out the winter in Tobolsk. The novel has not been published in Russia since 1935.

From American writers Most of all, the works of Edgar Allan Poe were filmed - 114 times.

Once, at an official reception, Khrushchev called the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn Ivan Denisovich.

Chekhov sat down to write, dressed in full dress. Kuprin, on the contrary, loved to work completely naked.

The Spanish playwright Antonio Silva was burned at the stake on October 19, 1739. On the same day, his play "The Death of Phaeton" was shown in the theater.

Writer Ernest Vincent Wright has a novel called Gadsby with over 50,000 words. There is not a single letter E (the most common letter in the English language) in the entire novel.

Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem wrote a collection of short stories "Absolute Void". All stories are united by the fact that they are reviews of non-existent books written by fictitious authors.

Brian Aldiss, an acquaintance of Agatha Christie, once spoke about her methods - “she finished writing the book before last chapter, then chose the most unlikely of the suspects and, returning to the beginning, reworked some points to set him up.

Lewis Carroll liked to communicate and be friends with little girls, but was not a pedophile, as many of his biographers claim. Often his girlfriends underestimated their age, or he himself called adult ladies girls. The reason was that the morality of that era in England strictly condemned communication with a young woman in private, and girls under 14 were considered asexual, and friendship with them was completely innocent.

When the writer Arkady Averchenko during the First World War brought a story to one of the editorial military theme, the censor deleted from it the phrase: "The sky was blue." It turns out that according to these words, enemy spies could have guessed that the matter took place in the south.

The real name of the satirist writer Grigory Gorin was Offshtein. When asked about the reason for choosing a pseudonym, Gorin replied that it was an abbreviation: "Grisha Ofshtein decided to change his nationality."

If you're a reader of Stephen King's novels, you'll notice that most of his stories take place in Maine. Paradoxically, this state has the lowest crime rate in the United States.

James Barry created the image of Peter Pan - the boy who will never grow up - for a reason. This hero became a dedication to the author's elder brother, who died the day before he turned 14 and remained forever young in his mother's memory.

Initially, on the grave of Gogol in the monastery cemetery lay a stone, nicknamed Golgotha ​​because of its similarity with Mount Jerusalem. When they decided to destroy the cemetery, when reburial in another place, they decided to install a bust of Gogol on the grave. And the same stone was subsequently placed on the grave of Bulgakov by his wife. In this regard, Bulgakov's phrase is noteworthy, which he repeatedly addressed to Gogol during his lifetime: "Teacher, cover me with your overcoat."

After the outbreak of World War II, Marina Tsvetaeva was evacuated to the city of Yelabuga, in Tatarstan. Boris Pasternak helped her pack. He brought a rope to tie up the suitcase, and, assuring her of its strength, he joked: "The rope will withstand everything, even hang yourself." Subsequently, he was told that it was on her that Tsvetaeva hanged herself in Yelabuga.

Daria Dontsova, whose father was Soviet writer Arkady Vasiliev, grew up surrounded by creative intelligentsia. Once at school, she was asked to write an essay on the topic: “What was Valentin Petrovich Kataev thinking about when he wrote the story“ The Lone Sail Is Whitening? ”And Dontsova asked Kataev himself to help her. As a result, Daria received a deuce, and the literature teacher wrote in her notebook: “Kataev didn’t think about it at all!”

The image of Russia on the scale of world literature is inconceivable without these names. And on the shelves of any more or less decent book lover, the books of these Russian writers are proudly displayed in front of everyone.

But what do we know about our favorite writers, whose books are considered must-read at any conscious age. Modern man it’s not enough to read the author’s book, please give him another book about the author.

In continuation of the article about two great Russian classics — L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky, I post one more no less interesting selection interesting facts about Russian writers:

A. S. Pushkin

- I smoked a lot.

He shocked the ladies of Yekaterinoslav with translucent pantaloons without underwear.

He was the father of four legitimate children and at least one illegitimate child.

Was sure he would die white man or a white horse.

He himself chose the place for his grave.

I studied poorly at the Lyceum.

He ordered mass for the repose of the soul of the servant of God George, that is, Byron.

Gave a skull to a friend Delvig.

He lost a lot at cards, but he always found the means to cover his gambling debt.

Dantes was a relative of Pushkin. At the time of the duel, he was married to sister Pushkin's wife - Ekaterina Goncharova.

Before his death, Pushkin asked for forgiveness for violating the tsar's ban on duels: "... I am waiting for the tsar's word in order to die peacefully ...".

M. Yu. Lermontov

- He was short, broad-shouldered, stocky, big-headed and limped like Lord Byron.

Most of all in the world he loved his grandmother, and she loved him.

Participated in a duel with a Frenchman who provided pistols for Pushkin's duel with Dantes.

He considered himself a descendant of the Scot Lermont.

He took the bride away from a friend, and then he wrote an anonymous slander on himself in order to get rid of the annoying girl.

He showed courage in battles in the Caucasus.

Studied the Azerbaijani language.

He was keenly interested in various kinds of predictions, divination and symbols.

He was caustic, impudent, merciless to the weaknesses of others, vindictive and arrogant.

In his short 26-year life, Lermontov participated in three duels, four more were avoided, thanks to the common sense of those around him.

For fun, he loved to upset upcoming marriages, pretending to be in love with someone else's bride, and showered her with flowers, poems and other signs of attention. Sometimes he threatened, promising to commit suicide if his "love" married another. And then he admitted to the draw ...

He managed to lose in all games and competitions, only the fall of the Frenchman Barant in a decisive attack could save the wounded Lermontov in the first duel. During the return from the Caucasian exile, the poet decided to tell fortunes and threw a fifty-kopeck piece - where should he go: to the service or is it worth taking a walk, stopping by for a while in Pyatigorsk. And the way to Pyatigorsk fell out for him. There (July 15, 1841), near Mount Mashuk, he was killed in a duel by a retired cavalryman Martynov, who, as it turns out, was an amateur shooter. It turned out that before this duel, he only fired a pistol three times ...

A. P. Chekhov

- He worked in his father's shop.

He brought a tame mongoose named Bastard from the island of Ceylon.

In the gymnasium, for the sake of outrageousness, he wore trousers of a defiant color under his uniform.

As a child, he dressed as a beggar, put on make-up and received alms from his own uncle.

He gave the policeman a salty watermelon wrapped in paper, saying that it was a bomb.

Received a fee for furniture from the editorial office of the magazine "Alarm Clock".

He studied tailoring at the county school. At the request of his dapper brother Nikolai, he sewed gray gymnasium trousers, so tight that they were called pasta.

He sang church hymns at home. As for the voice, Anton Pavlovich spoke in a loud bass.

An army of female fans followed him everywhere. When Chekhov moved to Yalta in 1898, many of his admirers followed him to the Crimea. As the newspapers wrote, the ladies literally rushed along the embankments after the writer, just to see their idol more often, “studied his costume, gait, and tried to attract his attention with something.” For such devotion, the local gossip columns aptly dubbed the girls "Antonovka".

One of the three most filmed authors in the world. Over 287 screen adaptations.

At first glance, he saw a suicide in a stranger.

Chekhov had about fifty pseudonyms. Well, one of them is definitely known to you since your school days - Antosha Chekhonte, of course. There were also: Schiller Shakespeare Goethe, Champagne, Brother of my brother; Nut #6; Nut #9; Rook; A person without a spleen; Akaki Tarantulov, Someone, Arkhip Indeikin

Chekhov's grandfather was a serf, and the writer himself refused hereditary nobility. Yegor Mikhailovich Chekhov was able to redeem himself and his family to freedom. Subsequently, his famous grandson never forgot about his origin. At the same time, in 1899, when Emperor Nicholas II, by his decree, awarded the writer the title hereditary nobleman and the Order of St. Stanislav of the third degree, Anton Pavlovich simply ... did not accept this privilege. The highest decree remained without attention and consequences - as well as the title of honorary academician Russian Academy Sciences, which Chekhov also considered useless for himself.

To be continued…

According to the journal

Poets and writers for some - crazy geniuses, for others - do not represent anything special, but only bother in schools with their poems, stories and biographies. But some do not even realize how many personalities are interesting outside of their work. What about the most unusual and unknown interesting facts about writers and poets?

A.S. Pushkin is “our everything”, I hope everyone remembers this. The line “let's drink from grief is instantly recalled; where is the mug? - these words are partly true, though the most favorite drink was sweet lemonade!

In the process of creating a work, the writer was reinforced not with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, but with a glass of lemonade, especially the poet loved him at night.

Surprisingly, before the duel with Dantes, Pushkin went into the confectionery and drank a glass of fragrant lemonade with great pleasure.

Eccentricities of Gogol

Oh, how many myths go around the author of the famous "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka". Contemporaries confirmed some oddities of the writer. Gogol slept sitting, loved needlework (sewed scarves and vests), wrote all his brilliant works only while standing!

For example, as a child, I loved to roll up bread balls, for which I usually got slapped. And Gogol calmed his nerves by rolling balls all his life! Nikolai Berg, recalling the writer, said that Gogol constantly walked from corner to corner or wrote, at the same time rolling up balls of bread (namely, wheat). And the writer tossed rolled balls into kvass to his friends!

Chekhov's Amazing Habits

But Chekhov, calming his nerves, did not roll balls, but crushed rubble with a hammer into dust, which then went to sprinkle garden paths. The writer could spend hours, without being distracted, breaking rubble!

Deep psychologist Dostoevsky

By the way, the characters of all the characters in Dostoevsky's works were copied from real people. Dostoevsky constantly made new acquaintances, started a conversation even with random passers-by.

Contemporaries note that when the writer was immersed in writing, he was so carried away that he forgot to eat. He walked around the room all day, saying sentences aloud. One day while writing famous novel Dostoevsky wandered from corner to corner and talked to himself about Raskolnikov's attitude towards the old pawnbroker and his motives. The footman was frightened when he accidentally overheard the conversation and decided that Dostoevsky was going to kill someone.

Religious philosopher Leo Tolstoy

Here you can make a huge list of the eccentricities and oddities of the author of "Anna Karenina", "War and Peace" and much, much more.

Firstly, as an 82-year-old man, he ran away from his wonderful wife, who could spend hours copying his works into a clean copy. And all because of the discrepancy of views, which were discovered only in the 48th year of marriage.

Secondly, Leo Tolstoy was a vegetarian. Thirdly, the writer lost the family estate in cards. Fourth, Leo Tolstoy denied everything wealth, constantly communicated with the peasants and appreciated physical work. The writer himself said that if he didn’t work at least a little in the yard a day, he would be very irritable. He also loved needlework, especially sewing boots for relatives, friends and even unfamiliar people.

Vladimir Nabokov and his butterflies

Entomology is a huge passion for Nabokov, he could run around the neighborhood for hours in search of beautiful butterflies.

One of the most funny pictures Nabokov with a net. But anyway main love for Nabokov, there remained the craft of writing. The author's principle of writing texts is interesting. The works were written on 3 by 5 inch cards, from which the book was then created. The cards had to have pointed ends, straight lines and gum.

Mystical letters of Evgeny Petrov (Kataev)

The main hobby of the co-author satirical works"Twelve Chairs", "Golden Calf", etc. I used to collect stamps, but it's not that simple either. Petrov sent letters to invented addresses to cities that did not exist on the world map. First he chose real country, and then fantasized about what city it lacks, who would live there, etc. You ask: why did he do it?

After long travels around the world, the letter came back, crowned with numerous stamps marked "Address not found." But once Petrov received an answer from New Zealand, everything coincided: the address, the name and even the situation described by the domestic writer. Petrov wrote in a letter that he condoled on the death of a certain Uncle Pete, asked how his wife and daughter were doing. The addressee replied that he misses Petrov, recalls the days spent with him in New Zealand, his wife and daughter also send their regards and hope to see you soon. One would think that someone was joking, but the interlocutor attached a photo in which he was depicted big man hugging Petrov!

The poor satirist got so excited that he ended up in the hospital with pneumonia. He had absolutely no idea who the person in the photograph was and had never been to New Zealand! This story was put into the plot of the film "The Envelope" in 2012.

• For the fact that Mayakovsky wrote his poems with a colleague's ladder, the poets accused him of fraud, because at that time payment for poems was made based on the number of lines. Because of this arrangement, Mayakovsky's poems were paid 2-3 times more.
• Oddly enough, but the Cuban Julian del Casal, who was the author of endlessly pessimistic poems, died of laughter. At a friendly dinner, from a joke told by one of the guests, he began to have an attack of uncontrollable laughter. Unfortunately, this caused an aortic dissection, bleeding, and death.
• Russian writers and poets invented many words that have taken root in circulation: Lomonosov invented substance, Karamzin - industry, Saltykov-Shchedrin - bungling, Dostoevsky - to fade away, Severyanin - mediocrity, Khlebnikov - a pilot and exhausted.
• In China, under Emperor Qianlong, poets who wrote sad poems were executed.
• The poet of the East invented female name Svetlana, he first used it in the novel "Svetlana and Mstislav". This name gained popularity after the publication in 1813 of Zhukovsky's ballad "Svetlana".

• Pushkin owns at least 70 epigraphs, Gogol and Turgenev - more than 20.
• Sometimes Pushkin wrote poems to order, for example, poems in honor of the Prince of Orange or the ode "On the Return of the Sovereign Emperor from Paris."
• In Ecuador there is a statue of the local poet José Olmedo. However, not everyone knows that due to the meager budget, the Ecuadorian government decided to purchase a second-hand sculpture of the poet Byron.
• Four geese lived in Lord Byron's homestead, and they were very fond of accompanying him on walks. They even went with him to social gatherings.
• Byron is one of the attractive and energetic people of that time, this was not prevented by a strong clubfoot and overweight.
• The 18th century Russian poet and diplomat Khariton Makentin wrote under the pseudonym Antioch Cantemir, which was an anagram of his name.
• There are no living descendants of William Shakespeare left on Earth.
• Shakespeare came up with several different ways pronouncing one's own name.
• The line from Shakespeare's Hamlet "Everything is rotten in the Danish kingdom" has been translated in different ways. Somewhere it sounded like "I foresee the disasters of the fatherland", or "To know that something evil happened here."