Plagiarism or ignorance of history? New novel by Guzel Yakhina "Echelon to Samarkand". Scandal at the release of the book. Are copyrights or intellectual property rights infringed?
In 2018, the first novel, My Children, was released. It tells the story of a German from Russia who works as a school teacher. The time of the novel is the period of the Civil War, collectivization, the famine of the 1930s. The new novel by the writer was initially announced as the most anticipated book of the year. The work "Echelon to Samarkand" again touches on the period of the first years of the existence of Soviet power.
However, before the book was released, a scandal broke out involving plagiarism and distortion of historical data.
Samara local historian Grigory Tsidenkov, who has been studying the history of famine in the Volga region for a very long time, wrote in LiveJournal that the action of the novel takes place in 1923, and this is roughly how to write about the evacuation from besieged Leningrad in 1945.
It should be noted that the starving people were evacuated in 1921-22, and in 1923 everyone was already being returned.
The historian also admitted that he did not read the novel in full, but he has no doubt that Yakhina took the material from his blog. This is indicated by certain details that Guzel could not find out from anywhere else.
Guzel herself stated that the essence of the claims was not clear to her. In an interview with Novaya Gazeta, Yakhina says that there is a lot of truth in the novel Echelon to Samarkand. She learned this truth from archival documents. A list of the main primary sources, such as: memoirs, letters, diaries, are given at the end of the book. “There is nothing surprising in the fact that other archival documents published by other authors tell about the same events and situations,” the writer says in an interview.
I don’t see plagiarism, the maximum use of the author’s research, without attribution, commented the writer Mikhail Loginov. “I recently plunged into the topic and, not yet reading the arguments of the local historian, I thought that the novel was about how children from the Volga region were taken to Turkestan in 1923. This is the evacuation from Leningrad in 1944. He found the same metaphor only in 1945. And this surprised me unpleasantly. To take on such a complex topic, so not knowing its basic constants. Briefly: The famine in the Volga region ceased by the autumn of 1922.
All of the above begs the question. Isn't this a distortion of historical facts?
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