Against Odds: Hopkins Finds Petrovka

Anthony Hopkins needed a copy of The Girl from Petrovka to prepare for a movie role, but none of the major London bookstores he tried had one. Then, while waiting for a train at Leicester Square Underground station, he spotted the exact novel sitting abandoned on a seat. Months earlier, author George Feifer had lost one very particular copy of that book somewhere else in London, and when the two men finally compared notes, an already improbable coincidence became almost impossible. We tell the full story in this episode and then play the Yap Yap Quiz with Comedian, Glen Tickle!

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There’s a particular kind of coincidence that seems to happen disproportionately often with books. Maybe that’s because books are physical objects that can survive for decades, changing hands over and over without anyone knowing everywhere they’ve been. A book can be purchased, given away, donated, lost, resold, forgotten on a train, inherited by somebody’s kid and eventually show up thousands of miles from where it started. Every once in a while, one of those books finds its way back to someone who knows exactly where it came from.

In 1929, American novelist Anne Parrish was in Paris with her husband, Charles Corliss, when she stopped to browse the secondhand books sold along the Seine. Parrish spotted an English-language children’s book called Jack Frost and Other Stories, a title she remembered from her childhood in Colorado Springs. She bought it for a franc, brought it back to her husband and told him that she’d owned and loved the same book as a little girl. 

Her husband opened the book and found an inscription inside. Written in a child’s handwriting was “Anne Parrish,” followed by her childhood address in Colorado Springs. Parrish hadn’t merely found another copy of a book she remembered from childhood in a used-book stall thousands of miles from home. She had found the physical copy that had belonged to her as a child. 

Stories like that end up in books about coincidence because our brains are terrible at knowing what to do with them. We understand that unusual things happen, but when a chain becomes specific enough, coincidence starts to feel like an inadequate word for it. British statistician David Hand eventually wrote an entire book about this problem called The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. And the story he chose to open that book involves another wandering book, another impossible reunion and an actor named Anthony Hopkins. 

The Anthony Hopkins in this story isn’t the Anthony Hopkins most people immediately picture today. There was no Hannibal Lecter yet, no The Remains of the Day, no Nixon, no Amistad, no Odin in the Marvel movies and no two Academy Awards. In the early 1970s, Hopkins was a respected Welsh actor whose career had grown out of British theater and who was beginning to establish himself more seriously in film.

Hopkins had graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1963 and joined Laurence Olivier’s National Theatre company a couple of years later. His first major international film role arrived in 1968 when he played Richard the Lionheart in The Lion in Winter, opposite Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. By the beginning of the 1970s, he had accumulated credits in movies including The Looking Glass War, When Eight Bells Toll and Young Winston, but the role that would permanently turn him into a household name was still almost twenty years away. 

Meanwhile, an American writer named George Feifer had spent years developing the background for a novel set in the Soviet Union. Feifer was born in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1934 and graduated from Harvard in 1956. He later studied Soviet law at Columbia University, received a master’s degree there in 1961 and learned Russian during his service in the U.S. Navy. 

Feifer’s first trip to Moscow came in 1959, when he worked as a guide at the American National Exhibition. This was the exhibition where Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously argued over capitalism and communism while standing near a model American kitchen, in what became known as the Kitchen Debate. Feifer was there working as a guide, answering questions from Soviet visitors about American life, including questions about American cars and race relations. 

He returned to the Soviet Union in 1961 as an exchange student at Moscow State University. Feifer attended classes and observed civil court cases, gathering material that became his first book, Justice in Moscow, published in 1964. He continued writing about Soviet life, concentrating not just on high-level Cold War politics but on the ordinary routines and contradictions of people living inside the system. 

Eventually Feifer turned some of those experiences into fiction. His first novel, The Girl from Petrovka, was published in Britain in 1971 and told the story of Joe, an American journalist in Moscow, and Oktyabrina Matveyeva, an unconventional young Soviet woman. The novel was semi-autobiographical, drawing on Feifer’s years in the Soviet Union and his familiarity with the peculiarities of daily Soviet life. 

Hollywood moved quickly. On September 1, 1971, Variety reported that director Robert Ellis Miller had purchased the movie rights to Feifer’s novel. By the following year, producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown had acquired the screenplay rights, Miller was set to direct, and the project was moving toward production. 

The eventual cast included Goldie Hawn as Oktyabrina and Hal Holbrook as the American journalist Joe. Anthony Hopkins was cast as Kostya, Joe’s Russian friend. Hopkins wasn’t the star of the movie, but according to Feifer’s later account, Hopkins was determined to read the novel before making it. 

So, in the summer of 1972, Hopkins went into London to buy The Girl from Petrovka.

And he couldn’t find it.

David Hand’s account says that none of the main London bookstores had a copy. There are later versions of this story that get more specific about exactly which stores Hopkins visited and how long he searched, but those details aren’t necessary because Hand’s documented version gives us everything we need. Hopkins wanted the book, tried the major bookstores in London and came up empty. 

Eventually, he headed home.

Hopkins entered the London Underground and found himself waiting for a train at Leicester Square station. While he was there, he noticed that someone had left a book lying on a seat. It appeared to have been discarded or forgotten by whoever had been there before him. 

Hopkins picked it up.

The book was The Girl from Petrovka.

This is the point where most coincidence stories would end. An actor needs a particular novel for an upcoming movie, searches the major bookstores of one of the largest cities in the world and fails to find it, then walks into an Underground station and discovers a copy sitting abandoned on a seat. David Hand uses that sequence alone as an example of the kind of event that makes us want to start calculating impossible odds. 

But Hopkins took the book home, and there was something unusual about this copy.

Someone had written in it.

The markings weren’t random notes from a reader. They were corrections, written throughout the book. Some of them involved changing British English into American English, including spellings like “labour” becoming “labor.” 

Hopkins had no reason to know who had made them.

At that point, he had never met George Feifer.

And George Feifer had absolutely no idea that Anthony Hopkins had his book.

Because months before Hopkins ever went looking for The Girl from Petrovka, George Feifer had lost a very specific copy of it.

In November 1971, according to David Hand’s reconstruction, George Feifer had lent a copy of The Girl from Petrovka to a friend. This wasn’t simply one of several identical copies sitting around Feifer’s house. Feifer had personally gone through this particular copy while preparing the book for its American publication, making editorial changes in it. 

Those changes made the book identifiable. Feifer had annotated it while converting details of the British edition for an American audience, including changes in spelling. Hand specifically mentions “labour” becoming “labor” as an example of the kinds of corrections Feifer had written into the book. 

Feifer lent that annotated copy to a friend.

And his friend lost it.

Hand places the loss in Bayswater, an area of west London. Feifer later recalled the same basic story himself, saying he had lent the proof copy to a friend and specifically asked him to be careful because Feifer had marked it extensively in red pencil. The book disappeared months before Hopkins was cast in the film. 

There is no documented chain showing exactly what happened to the book after it disappeared in Bayswater. We don’t know who found it, whether someone carried it somewhere else, whether it changed hands again or how it traveled from the place where Feifer’s friend lost it to Leicester Square Underground station. The part of the book’s journey between those two locations is simply missing.

By the summer of 1972, however, it was sitting on a seat in Leicester Square station at precisely the time Anthony Hopkins was there after failing to find another copy in London bookstores. Hopkins picked it up and kept it. Neither Hopkins nor Feifer yet knew that this had reconnected the lost book with the film being made from it. 

Meanwhile, the film itself was developing a complicated travel history of its own. Robert Ellis Miller and screenwriters Allan Scott and Chris Bryant went to Moscow while developing the adaptation. According to the American Film Institute’s production history, Soviet authorities prevented them from entering certain areas and confiscated some of their footage before they left the country. 

Miller decided he didn’t want to shoot the movie in the Soviet Union. The production made plans to film in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and principal photography was initially scheduled to begin there on September 29, 1973. Sets were built, preparations were underway and the movie was ready to go. 

Then the arrangement collapsed.

About two weeks before filming was scheduled to begin, the Yugoslavian company Inex Films canceled its contract with Universal Pictures. Miller publicly speculated that political pressure from Moscow was responsible, and he noted that Inex had previously requested script changes. Whatever caused it, the production suddenly needed another country to stand in for the Soviet Union. 

A Yugoslavian official named Oto Denes later disputed Miller’s suggestion that Moscow had directly pressured Inex. Denes did, however, acknowledge that Inex had been concerned Russia would be offended by the film. The cancellation delayed production for more than a month and eventually led to an international arbitration that awarded Universal $508,000 in damages. 

The replacement location was Vienna.

Production began there on November 5, 1973. After roughly a week of shooting in Vienna, the production returned to the United States, where additional filming took place in Southern California and on Universal sound stages. The finished movie would eventually use Vienna and various California locations to create a version of Moscow that the filmmakers had decided they couldn’t practically shoot in Moscow itself. 

At some point after Hopkins found the book, Hopkins and Feifer finally had the opportunity to meet.

Hopkins told Feifer what had happened.

He explained that he’d wanted to read The Girl from Petrovka after becoming involved with the movie. He had tried to buy the novel in London and couldn’t find it. Then, while waiting for an Underground train at Leicester Square, he had found a copy abandoned on a seat. 

Feifer listened to the story.

Then he told Hopkins about his missing copy.

Feifer explained that in November 1971 he had lent his uniquely annotated copy to a friend. That friend had lost the book in Bayswater. Feifer’s copy could be identified because it contained his handwritten corrections converting the British edition for American publication. 

They checked the annotations in Hopkins’s copy.

They matched.

The copy Anthony Hopkins had found sitting in Leicester Square Underground station was the same physical book George Feifer’s friend had lost months earlier in Bayswater. 

Feifer himself later told the story, and his version adds another detail. He remembered that London was dealing with IRA bomb threats at the time and that people were being warned not to touch unidentified packages. According to Feifer, the object Hopkins found on the station bench was wrapped, and Hopkins picked it up anyway. 

Inside was the book he’d spent the day trying to find.

Feifer also offered his own completely informal assessment of the odds. He described Hopkins finding The Girl from Petrovka after unsuccessfully searching London as perhaps a “one in a million” event. The fact that the copy turned out to be Feifer’s personally annotated proof made it, in Feifer’s words, closer to “one in a hundred million.” 

Those numbers weren’t statistical calculations, of course. They were Feifer’s way of describing how absurd the sequence seemed. Statistician David Hand eventually took the story much more seriously as a probability problem, using it to begin The Improbability Principle. 

Hand’s argument is that events like this seem impossible partly because we calculate their probability backward. After something remarkable happens, we focus on the precise sequence that produced that outcome. Feifer had to mark that particular book, lend it to that particular friend, have the friend lose it, have the book travel through London, have Hopkins need that title, have the bookstores fail him and have Hopkins arrive at the station where the book happened to be waiting.

But before any of that happened, there were enormous numbers of other possible coincidences that could have occurred instead. Millions of people lose objects, find objects, meet strangers, miss trains, change plans, walk into shops and encounter things they weren’t looking for. Hand’s larger argument is that given enough opportunities for unlikely things to happen, some incredibly unlikely things eventually will. 

The Hopkins story works especially well for Hand because the coincidence has multiple layers. Finding a copy of the novel after failing to buy one is the first. Finding the author’s missing annotated copy is the second. The eventual meeting between the actor holding the book and the author who could identify it closes the loop. 

The movie attached to all of this finally arrived in theaters in 1974. The Girl from Petrovka opened in Los Angeles on August 16 and in New York on August 22. Goldie Hawn played Oktyabrina, Hal Holbrook played Joe and Anthony Hopkins played Kostya, with Robert Ellis Miller directing from a screenplay credited to Allan Scott and Chris Bryant. 

The movie also had an impressive crew. Vilmos Zsigmond, who would later win an Academy Award for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was the cinematographer. Henry Mancini composed the music, and Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown produced the film. AFI lists its running time at approximately 104 to 105 minutes. 

The Girl from Petrovka did not become a defining film for any of its principal stars. Goldie Hawn already had an Academy Award by then, Hal Holbrook continued a long career across film, television and theater, and Hopkins moved on to other projects. The strange journey of the book ultimately became much more durable than the movie Hopkins needed it for.

Feifer kept writing as well. His career eventually included nonfiction books about Russia, the Battle of Okinawa and Commodore Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan. He died in Los Angeles in November 2019 at the age of 85, almost sixty years after his first experiences studying Soviet life had begun shaping the work that eventually produced The Girl from Petrovka. 

Hopkins’s career went in a very different direction. In 1991, almost twenty years after he went searching for Feifer’s novel, he appeared as Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. The following year he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, while the film also won Best Picture, Best Actress for Jodie Foster, Best Director for Jonathan Demme and Best Adapted Screenplay for Ted Tally. 

Hopkins would eventually win a second Best Actor Oscar for The Father, becoming one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. His filmography would include The Remains of the Day, Nixon, Amistad, The Two Popes and the Marvel Thor films. But none of those roles required him to wander through London looking for a novel that the author had accidentally arranged to leave for him months in advance. 

So that’s our story for this week and it’s a crazy one. Sometimes the universe just makes things collide in the craziest ways. And the Internet Says It’s True.

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