Art and its “providers”

Will the new ethics change the relationship between writers and information providers who claim co-authorship?

Everything was mixed up in the Oblonskys' house. Perhaps writing it like this, without quotes and attribution to the author, I will incur accusations of plagiarism. But even if so, you can’t say more precisely: everything is mixed up in our house of writers and readers.

Literally in recent weeks, two plagiarism scandals have erupted, making us recall previous cases that passed with much less noise, but now, in the light of new ones, they again seem significant.

Personally, the most interesting thing in all this seems to me is not who is right, who is to blame, but why all this is happening right now. But the outline of events must be briefly recalled.

First, the Samara historian Grigory Tsidenkov accused the writer Guzel Yakhina of in the novel Echelon to Samarkand using stories and facts he found in the archives (and published in LiveJournal) . Yakhina herself denied this and even published evidence of her own archival research (“Novaya Gazeta” Nos. 26, 28), but this did not prevent the development of the scandal and, it seems, caused the next one to come to life.

Natalya Rapoport, a chemist professor who has lived in America for a long time, accused Lyudmila Ulitskaya of having once used her idea (and her stories about her father's work as a pathologist) for a scenario about a pre-war plague epidemic in Moscow. Ulitskaya did not include the pieces written jointly with her in the final script, but now (that is, more than 40 years later), when Ulitskaya's script came out as a book,

Natalya Rapoport assures that Ulitskaya stole at least half of her authorship from her.

As new waves of mutual hatred flared up in social networks, many began to recall similar cases, the most famous of which are unquoted and unsigned quotes from the diaries of the Soviet writer Vera Panova in Mikhail Shishkin's novel Venus Hair. Then the writer responded to accusations of plagiarism with a postmodernist manifesto: “Old words will make a fundamentally new book, about something completely different, because this is my choice, my picture of my world, which has not yet been and will never be ...”

At first glance, all these three cases seem dissimilar, but they are deeply united by one thing - this is one way or another the rebellion of those who "supplies" the material against the one who turns it into art.

“We are dealing with symptoms of some deeper and more interesting things than just hurt pride, a feeling of underfulfillment or envy,” researcher Maria Maiofis wrote on her Facebook. – The question of the relationship between the writer and the “providers” who guide him in the search for sources or present these sources in their own publication or even in personal communication has become relevant and acute ... It seems that we are witnessing a historical moment when the “providers” declare that they are, if not co-authors, then at least actors who had a direct influence on the emergence of a new work, that their role should also be taken into account and recognized.

And the well-known historian Alexander Etkind wrote that the alignment of relations between the “creator” and those who provide him with materials for creativity is one of the key problems of the so-called new ethics. “If everything is in motion and there is hope for the correction of abuse in gender relations or, for example, between teachers and students, there is also hope for new forms of justice between authors and “muses”, journalists and scientists, producers and consultants.”

What I am about to write is unpleasant to me, but I think they are right.

I have lived my life believing that art is in many ways more important than a person. Not in the sense, of course, that one can kill for the sake of art, but certainly that the freedom to create this very art is more important than almost everything else. Not only political and censorship freedom, but freedom in general, including the freedom of appropriation and transformation. “And again, the skald will compose someone else’s song and pronounce it like his own,” wrote my favorite poet, and in my understanding this applied not only to all kinds of “rehashings”, but also to all kinds of borrowings, because art, I believed, is more important than human insults and similar misunderstandings.

To be honest, I (and probably many of my and previous generations) still feel that way now. But I think differently.

You can't get away from modernity. From the fact, for example, that social networks make many voices audible, and not just the voices of those who are “especially valuable” and have access to media platforms. From the fact that the very idea that something (including art) can be “more important than life” and its rules is compromised by how often we were offered all sorts of nonsense as what is “more important”. From the fact that fatigue from the cult of the stars has accumulated and it is replaced by increased suspicion towards them. We found out long ago that genius and villainy are compatible, respectively, genius must be compatible with simple human rules.

And yes, now those who are engaged in art in any of its manifestations must take this into account.

I'll be honest, I'm even a little glad that I'm not doing it.