Letter out of Nowhere

Today I would like to talk about a very mysterious story that happened to one quite famous person, which is connected to New Zealand. I am talking about Kataev Evgeny Petrovich (more known under his pseudonym Evgeny Petrov). He was (and many people in Russia are still reading books he wrote) very famous book writer in Russia in thirties and forties of the twentieth century.

The strange hobby
It happened between 1939 and 1941. Evgeny Petrov had a very rare hobby: all of his life he collected envelops from his own letters. Let me explain. He wrote a letter to a distant foreign country, while he made-up the whole address except of the country name. Since the address was fake, the letter reached the destination country, but then, after a month or so came back to sender with different post office stamps on it, the main stamp being “wrong address”. Such stamped envelopes Petrov collected.

The Letter to nowhere
This time Petrov decided to disturb the postal offices of New Zealand. It was April of 1939. He made-up a town named “Hideberdville” and a street “Rathbeach”, house number seven and made the letter to Merrill Eugene Wellesley. In the letter he wrote:

Dear Merrill! Please accept my sincere condolences for death of uncle Pete. Be strong buddy. Forgive me for not writing for a while. I hope that Ingrid is fine. Kiss daughter for me, she must have grown much. Yours Evgeny.

Then he sealed the letter, on the backside of it wrote his own real address and send this letter.

The unexpected answer
About two months passed since Petrov sent the letter, but it didn’t come back so he decided that it was lost and forgot about it… But came August and something came back from New Zealand. But it wasn’t the letter Petrov sent! It was an answer! At first he thought that someone played with him in his own way, but when Petrov read the address of the sender he almost got a heart attack – it was “Hideberdville, Rathbeach st. 7 from Merrill Eugene Wellesley” And there was a real blue stamp of New Zealand’s post on the envelope. The text in that letter was as follows:

“Dear Evgeny! Thank you for your condolences. It took as half a year to overcome the ironic death of uncle Pete. I hope you can forgive me for delaying this answer. Ingrid and me often recall those two days that you were with us. Glorya is grown very much and this autumn will go to the second grade. She still keeps that teddy bear you brought her from Russia. Sincerely your friend.”

Petrov have never been to New Zealand, and he was even more amazed to see in the photograph that was in the envelope a stranger hugging him! On the back of this photograph a date was written – 9th October 1938. Petrov recalled that at the same date he was in hospital unconscious with severe pneumonia. At that time doctors fought for his life for a few days and already told his relatives that his chances to survive are very small.

The second letter which came too late
In order to understand and sort this out, Petrov wrote a second letter to the same address in New Zealand, but he didn’t live enough to receive an answer. On first of September a second world war began and from the first days of the war he became a military correspondent for two main Russian newspapers “Pravda” (the truth) and “Informburo” (bureau of information). His colleagues said that he changed since that letter. He became enclosed, thoughtful and even stopped joking at all. In 1942 the plane on which he flew to the front of the war got lost. Most likely it was shot down. At the same day Petrov’s wife received the news about the airplane, a letter from Merrill Wellesley came to his address in Moscow. It was translated to Petrov’s wife, in it Merrill was fond of the courage of Russian people and expressed concern for Evgeny’s life. He wrote:

“When you were with us, I got scared when you went to swim in the lake. The water was very cold. But you said that your destiny is to die in a plane crash and not by drowning. Please be careful and fly as little as you can… “

What a mystical story! To tell you the truth I found hard to believe it when I heard it myself. I even tried to find Hideberdville in New Zealand and didn’t find it… This story maybe isn’t real but Evgeny Petrov is a very real and famous person (in Russia), and it is a fact that he died in a plane crash.