To my knowledge, there is not a single great disaster that has not been predicted, often in detail, and discussed in one or more works of literature. (Pierre Bayard) Pierre Bayard's new book "The Titanic will sink" is as fascinating and paradoxical as the previous bestsellers published in Russian: "The art of talking about books you haven't read", "The art of talking about countries in which you never happened" and "The Case of the Hound of the Baskervilles". This time Bayard suggests that literary works are capable of not only describing the present or narrating the past, but also predicting the future. The starting point for a convincing and beautiful hypothesis was a little-known fact: the American writer Morgan Robertson in his novel described the sinking of the Titanic 14 years before the disaster, which amazed contemporaries, and the resonance from which has not yet dried up. Bayard gives interesting literary examples confirming the prophetic gift of writers - even if they are not aware of its existence. Pierre Bayard (b. 1954) is a French publicist and philologist, author of almost two dozen books, specialist in literary shocking and psychoanalyst, professor at the University of Paris VIII.