Cultural Clones

In 2001, the Dutch television  production company Endemol threatened to bring suit against the Russian television station TV6 over the latter’s program Behind the Glass, a copy of Endemol’s popular international reality show Big Brother, and demanded that TV6 pay license fees.

TV6 responded that Behind the Glass was its own original work, that it had been inspired by the producer’s reading of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s utopian novel We 12 years prior. In the novel, workers live in glass houses, so that nothing is shrouded from view. In the end, the dispute fizzled when TV6 was taken off the air.

Interestingly, what shocked Muscovites most about Behind the Glass was less the plagiarism than that the lascivious hijinks were set in the Hotel Rossiya, just across Red Square from the Kremlin. Thousands of Russians lined up to parade past a one-way mirror and get a live, five-minute view of life in the apartment. Novaya Gazeta called the show both the most popular and the worst TV event of November 2001.

The adaptation of western subject matter and ideas has a long history in Russia, not only in popular culture but also among the literary classics. Pushkin, for example, accused both Gogol and Knyazhnin of plagiarism, the former by jokingly complaining to his friend that the “Clever Uke” had stolen his best plots, referring to [Gogol’s] Inspector General and Dead Souls, and the latter by praising him in Eugene Onegin
(Ch. 1):

Fonvizin shone, freedom’s defender,

And Knyazhnin, the famous imitator.

However, Pushkin himself was not above reproach, even giving himself away in a letter to his wife: “In the morning I sat in my study, reading [the Brothers] Grimm.” The fruit of the Russian poet’s admiration for the German storytellers were his The Bridegroom and The Fisherman and the Fish. Pushkin’s Sleeping Princess and the Seven Bogatyrs is also reminiscent of the Grimms Snow White, and he took the plot of
The Golden Cockerel from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (specifically, from the Legend of the Arabian Astrologer). He peered into Byron for Don Juan, into Plutarch for Egyptian Nights, and into Boccaccio for Feast in the Time of Plague. Of course, Pushkin’s work turned out better. But see for yourself. Here is an excerpt from Snow White: 1

Mirror, mirror on the wall,

Who in this land is fairest of all?

To this the mirror answered:

“You, my queen, are fairest of all.”

But one day it answered:

“You, my queen, are fair; it is true,

But Snow White is a thousand times fairer than you.”

Here is Pushkin’s version:

Tell me, pretty looking-glass,

Nothing but the truth I ask:

Who in all the world is fairest

And has beauty of the rarest?

And the looking-glass replied:

“You, it cannot be denied.

You in all the world are fairest

And your beauty is the rarest.”2

Russian writers obtained inspiration not only from the West, but from each other. Ivan Goncharov’s widely known letter to Ivan Turgenev, dated March 3, 1860, contains the following lines: “As a person, I value one of your high-minded traits: the genial and indulgent self-interested attention with which you listen to other people’s writing.” The lines were a clear accusation of plagiarism.

The background story is as follows: Goncharov read a small part of his novel, The Breach, to Turgenev and related its plot. Later, when Turgenev’s A Nest of Gentlefolk appeared, Goncharov noticed a striking resemblance between the two novels. The same thing happened with the appearance of Turgenev’s On the Eve. The two writers were able to resolve their dispute civilly. The literary experts Druzhinin, Dudyshkin, and Annenkov concluded that, “The works of Turgenev and Goncharov, which arose from the very same Russian soil, should be expected to have several similar characteristics and bear some similarity to one another in some of their thoughts and expressions, which absolves and excuses both sides.”

The fabulist Ivan Krylov mercilessly pilfered his tales from the French author La Fontaine. And the latter, in his turn, swiped them from Aesop. Take, for example, Krylov’s fable The Dragonfly and the Ant. La Fontaine had entitled his work The Cicada and the Ant. On its way from Aesop to La Fontaine the common European grasshopper (sauterelle in French) was replaced by another loud, singing insect highly characteristic of the Mediterranean: the cicada (la cigale in French), for better rhyme and meter. For similar reasons, Krylov changed the grasshopper cum cigale into a dragonfly. The word “cicada” only appeared in Russian after the Crimean War of 1854-56. But Krylov was writing his tale in 1808, when no one in Russia had yet heard the word “cicada.” Short extracts from the two versions are inset above.

the history of the most famous plagiarists in children’s literature begins in Soviet Russia, in the 1920s and 1930s. Everything from the past, from Russian folk tales to the tales of E.T.A. Hoffman and Pushkin, was being expunged from libraries, and practically from [people’s] memories. But the pull of magic and the fantastic turned out to be stronger than educators’ attempts to turn every child into a hero in the national fairy tale.

Book publishers realized this, and thus brought out works by such children’s authors as Samuil Marshak, Daniil Kharms, Boris Zhitkov, and Yevgeny Shvarts. Still, there were no lengthy works with magical adventures. What was already flourishing in the West as its own genre had barely been noticed in Russia. Yet foreign winds did occasionally sweep across the border.

Children’s author and poet Korney Chukovsky translated Hugh Lofting’s The Adventures of Dr. Doolittle and published it under his own name. Lofting’s tale of a doctor who knew the language of animals was written in 1922 and had immediately become a bestseller. Chukovsky changed the name of both the doctor and the villain, giving them the Russian names Aybolit and Barmaley, and providing them with some new adventures.

The children’s author Boris Zakhoder was more honest. He called his Winnie the Pooh (“Vinny-Pukh”) a “retelling,” although his publisher paid him as a translator and left his name off the book’s cover. Zakhoder later wrote, “Sometimes I was very sorry I hadn’t done things the proper Soviet way and called myself the author.”

Zakhoder also later translated and retold Mary Poppins (by P. L. Travers) and Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll). “There is only one way to translate that permits the translation of the untranslatable,” Zakhoder wrote, “and that is to write it from scratch, just as if the author would have written it, had he written in the target language – in this case, Russian.”

Long before the Second World War, the charming young Natalya Sats, future founder of the famous Moscow Children’s Theater, was walking through the dappled alleyways of an elite settlement of dachas when she encountered Aleksey Tolstoy. Seizing the moment, she asked him to write a story that would be suitable for staging in a children’s theater. He obligingly complied. Soon Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino appeared in print, a truly exemplary children’s book. And a direct clone of Pinnochio.

Count Tolstoy was an educated man, knew several foreign languages, had lived abroad for many years, and was very familiar with the original Pinocchio story about a wooden toy, which had appeared in a book by Carlo Collodi entitled The Adventures of Pinnochio.

Yet the children who dwelt in the Land of the Soviets needed a fairy tale with ideological support. And he wrote one, changing the names of the hero, removing several characters and thinking up several new ones to take their place.

In the preface to a later book on Buratino, Tolstoy claims that “he had read the book as a child but forgotten it… Since the book had been lost, I told it again in a different way, thinking up adventures that were never in the book at all.”

Ironically, it seems that the free-borrowing Tolstoy forgot that the main lesson of Pinnochio was that lying is wrong. Further, in Collodi’s original version, the wooden toy, devoid of feeling at first, becomes human after experiencing suffering and disappointments. The retold tale provides a strictly defined ideological tint, introducing proletarian dolls who actively battle against those who would propel them into a “bright future.”

Alexander Volkov followed the Count’s example. Inspired by L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, he created The Wizard of Emerald City, Seven Underground Kings, and others.

cloned western fantasies still arrive here in thinly veiled guises. What was Dmitry Yemets thinking when he cloned Harry Potter to create his wizard Tanya Grotter – that they would meet and become friends? They did in fact meet, but it was in an Amsterdam courtroom, when British author J. K. Rowling asserted her plagiarism claim. True enough, the claim was not against Yemets but against the publisher, Byblos, who, had set April 2003, as the  release date for the first 7,000 copies of a Dutch translation of Tanya Grotter and the Magic Contrabass.

As a basis for the suit, the plaintiffs submitted a comparative analysis of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Yemets’s Tanya Grotter and the Magic Contrabass. Oleg Kling, the professor from Moscow State University’s Faculty of Literary Theory who prepared the analysis, said he believed that Yemets intentionally used the phonetic similarities in the heroes’ names, as well as virtual translations or rhymes of several Potter-novel names into Russian. The publishers, it was alleged, “jumped on the bandwagon” of the ultra-popular Harry Potter, benefitting from the multimillion dollar investment that Time Warner made in promoting Rowling’s books.

Rowling’s attorneys alleged that Yemet’s book was a clear case of plagiarism. They pointed to similarities between all the main characters, the only difference being that Grotter was a girl, and that she had a mole on her nose instead of a lightning-bolt scar on her forehead. After her parents were killed by the witch Chuma del Tort (“Plague-of-Cake”; Harry’s parents were killed by Voldemort), Tanya spent a joyless childhood with the Durnev family  (vs. the Dursleys in Harry Potter).

While the court’s decision did not include the word “plagiarism” (only the words “plot development”), Byblos was barred from publishing its Dutch translation of the book, and was ordered to “cease and desist from “any infringement of Rowling’s copyright.” Needless to say, even though Dutch children will not read of Tanya the wizard, Yemets has written 13 books about her that have been published in Russia.

the situation in broadcast media is no better
than with books. Russian television programs are filled with clones of western series and programs. Several were developed under license and in cooperation with the original creators, but several are plagiarized. On Field of Wonders, prizes are handed out by the wry actor Leonid Yakubovich instead of Pat Sajak and Vanna White. Who Wants to Be a Millionaire has made the parodist Maxim Galkin famous, and the whiny nanny played by Fran Drescher has been replaced by the simple Ukrainian woman Anastasiya Zsavorotnyuk in My Wonderful Nanny.

Colorful and distinctive programs have been replaced by shrill talk shows, a format whose origins are definitely not Russian. Is this worship of the West? Are people too lazy to create something original? Perhaps the answer is more simple and pragmatic.

Nine years after the release of Behind the Glass, an entire lobby appeared criticizing the harmful effects of such programming. Yevgeny Balashov and Viktor Volkov, members of the Moscow Municipal Duma, picketed the building of the Russian Ministry of Mass Media, demanding that it revoke TNT’s broadcasting license and cancel the program House 2, which took the concept behind Big Brother and made it more provocative, if not pornographic. “It turns our young people into moral freaks,” Volkov said. “What the show’s organizers are doing has a legal name: the commercialized sexual exploitation of people.” It should be noted that the Russian licensed version of Big Brother was a flop and ran for only one season, while House and House 2, also built around the concept of “housemates,” are in the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest-running reality show.

Without a doubt, adapting Western ideas to the Russian milieu requires delicate workmanship. My Wonderful Nanny would not have been as popular as it was for seven seasons if it had not been transposed from Manhattan to Rublyovka, home to Russia’s high officials and prominent businesspeople.

“Before we make our choice of any particular non-Russian format, we take into account the mental similarity of Russia and the country of the license holder,” says Tatyana Dmitrakova, a producer with WMEDIA, which has produced the news program Vzglyad (Viewpoint), the previously mentioned Field of Wonders, and other shows such as Dancing With the Stars, How to Become a Millionaire, Become a Star, Artist Laureate, and The Weakest Link. For example, the British projects Pop Star and Pop Idol never had a following in Russia, despite the unexpected furor created by Dancing With the Stars, with its ballroom dancing format.

“Think about the program Field of Wonders” Dmitrakova said. “On the American Wheel of Fortune, guessing the words was important, but in the Russian version, the most important feature became the interaction between the host and the Russian people and the presence of prizes in the studio, especially if you consider when Field of Dreams began: against a background of empty shelves and unemployment [right after the collapse of the Soviet Union]. At the time, it was a whole phenomenon.”

Originally on Field of Wonders, players themselves often brought prizes for the host, Vladimir Listyev. But when Leonid Yakubovich, with his earthy common-man humor, replaced Listyev, the show became a national phenomenon. Interestingly, the name of the program comes from that earlier clone: Buratino. Alisa the Fox and Basilio the Cat tell Buratino about the “Field of Wonders in the Land of Fools,” in order to fool him into thinking that, if someone buries gold coins in the Field of Wonders, a tree will grow out of them with coins for leaves. From which one cannot but wonder if the program’s producers were actually mocking those who came to the show in search of refrigerators and automobiles.

The quantity of clones among Russian television programs is partially explained by economics, Dmitrakova said. “Creating a pilot for a sizable Russian project will cost you a pile of money, whereas a license is simply convenient.”

According to Dmitrakova, our cultural particularities are revealed by our choice of hosts. “Elsewhere, program hosts for similar programs are stolid and bland. They’re neither fish nor foul, but something in between.” The host on an American program shouldn’t be attractive enough to appeal to women or to arouse the jealousy of male viewers, but should be more like someone you could see as a son-in-law,” Dmitrakkova said. “Whereas, we like them bold and brash!” And preferably young: Regis Philbin would not play well in Russia. RL

The Grasshopper and the Ant

La Fontaine 

A grasshopper gay

Sang the summer away,

And found herself poor

By the winter’s first roar.

Not a morsel she had!

So a begging she went,

To her neighbor the ant

For the loan of some wheat,

Which would serve her to eat,

Till the season came round.

“On an animal’s faith,

Double weight in the pound

Ere the harvest be bound.”

The ant is a friend

(And here she might mend)

Little given to lend.

“How spent you the summer?”

Quoth she, looking shame

At the borrowing dame.

“Night and day to each comer

I sang, if you please.”

“You sang! I’m at least;

For ‘tis plain at a glance,

Now, ma’am, you must dance.”

The Dragonfly and the Ant

Ivan Krylov 

The dragonfly gay,

Sang the summer away,

In the wink of an eye,

Winter was nigh.

The fields fell to sleep,

Under snow and frost deep,

No more was each leaf

A sunny home, however brief.

Along with winter’s cold

Came hunger and grief.

She sang no longer

No song inspires hunger

Weighed down with care

To her friend she dared.

“Help me, dear neighbor

Grant me this one favor

Rest for the night, 

Warm Food and light!”

“How strange my dear,

Did you work in the sun?” asked the ant.

“Who had the heart?

Our songs were our art.

And quibbling all day

Chased all thought of work away!

I sang the whole summer through.”

“Well my dear, you must dance too!”