Australian author John Hughes has apologized for inadvertently plagiarizing parts of a Nobel Prize work after a Guardian Australia investigation found multiple similarities and some identical cases in his new novel, The Dogs, which has been nominated for Australia’s most prestigious literary award.
Nearly 60 identical similarities and phrases were found in a comparison of Hughes’ novel and the 2017 English translation of Svetlana Alexievich’s nonfiction book The Unwomanly Face of War.
After discovering some similarities between the books, Guardian Australia applied document comparison software to the two texts, which revealed 58 similarities and some identical phrases.
Guardian Australia also found conceptual similarities between the incidents described in the books, including the central scene from which The Dogs derives its title.
The Dogs is presented as Hughes’ original work, without reference to any other source or research.
Hughes, an Australian descendant of Ukrainian refugees, has received critical acclaim for his novel on the intergenerational impact of war trauma.
In addition to being selected in May for the Miles Franklin Award, the book was shortlisted for the Fiction Literary Awards of the First Victory of 2022 and the NSW of 2022.
Hughes’ protagonist, Michael, is the son of Russian and Italian immigrants who arrived in Australia after World War II. Near death, her mother, Anna, reveals her experiences fighting the Nazi army as a partisan. Anna’s memories are mostly presented by Hughes as transcripts that Michael makes of his discussions with her or in the third person.
Alexievich, born in Ukraine, is a Belarusian journalist and a former leader of the opposition movement to President Alexander Lukashenko; she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015 for her historic “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our times.”
Her 1985 book The Unwomanly Face of War is one of five books in her Voices of Utopia series, which describes life in the Soviet Union through oral testimonies. Collecting interviews he conducted with more than 200 women who fought for the Soviet Union in World War II, the nonfiction work took him more than four years to research and write.
When Guardian Australia sent a series of excerpts from The Dogs to Alexievich and asked him about the apparent use of his material, he sent a brief statement through a translator: “I’ve never heard of The Dogs or I was contacted by Hughes.
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When the same cases were presented, Alekevich’s award-winning translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s husband and wife team, described the similarities as “quite extraordinary.”
“These things don’t happen by chance – not with words, sequences, voices so specific,” they said. “It simply came to our notice then [Miles Franklin literary award] and the public ”.
“I’d like to apologize”
In a statement to The Guardian, Hughes said he had begun writing The Dogs 15 years ago, a process that involved “many recordings and transcripts” with his Ukrainian grandparents, who recounted many cases similar to those in the book. ‘Alexevich.
He said he had first read The Unwomanly Face of War when it came out in English in 2017, and had used it to teach students creative writing about voice, recognizing Alexievich as a source.
“I wrote down the passages I wanted to use and I haven’t gone back to the book since,” he said. “At some point, shortly after, I must have added them to the transcripts I had made of the interviews with my grandparents and over the years and … [had] come to think of them as mine. “
He said that his grandparents’ stories had been combined in his mind with Alexievich’s oral stories. “I couldn’t pick them up anymore, even if I wanted to.”
Hughes continued: “I’m not trying to justify myself here. I’m rather trying to explain how I could have used parts of another writer’s work so directly without realizing that I was doing it … At no point in the writing was not intended to pass on Alekevich’s work as mine, and I was really surprised when I saw the material included in the article (there is nothing more disturbing than discovering that your creative process is not is what you had assumed).
“I would like to apologize to Ms. Alexievich and her translators for using her unrecognized words.”
Hughes editor Terri-ann White told Upswell Publishing that she “stands firm with the author, despite the appropriations that are now evident in this text.”
As a writer, she said, she understood “how creativity can be mixed in making a long work.” After reading Aleksievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War when it was translated into English, he said, “I’m just sorry I didn’t acknowledge these descriptions.”
He said he would “amend and acknowledge these primary source materials in the book I published.”
Plagiarism
Many of the cases in The Dogs that are written in a similar way to Alexievich’s transcripts of The Unwomanly Face of War are presented as war memories of Anna.
In the scene in which The Dogs takes the title, Anna tells Michael for the first time that she had murdered her little sister to prevent the child’s cries from revealing the location of her partisan unit to the German soldiers. and their dogs.
Judges for the 2022 NSW Prime Minister’s Literary Awards referred to this revelation as central to the novel’s exploration of “the ways in which an unspoken secret can shape the present.”
The prologue to Alekevich’s book contains a transcribed account of an almost identical incident, told to Alekevich by an unnamed woman who witnessed it.
In the following excerpts, the ellipses inside the quotation marks are reproduced from the two books; they do not indicate omitted material.
From Aleksievich’s transcript:
Someone betrayed us … The Germans found out where the camp of our partisan unit was.
[W]and they were saved by the swamps where the punitive forces did not go.
For days, weeks, we were up to our necks underwater.
From The Dogs:
Someone betrayed us … The Germans found the camp. We were saved by the swamps. For days we were up to our necks. Mud and water.
From Aleksievich’s transcript:
The baby was hungry … She had to be breastfed … But the mother was hungry and had no milk.
From The Dogs:
The baby was hungry.
But she was also hungry and had little milk.
From Aleksievich’s transcript:
The baby cried. The punitive forces were close … With dogs … If the dogs heard it, they would kill us all. The whole group, about thirty people … Do you understand?
[W]we can’t look up. Neither the mother nor the others …
From The Dogs:
[T]the Germans were close … we hear the dogs. If the dogs heard it …?
We were thirty … No one could look at me … No one … You understand …
In a statement to Guardian Australia, Hughes said: they combined in my mind.
“Even the scene of the baby in the swamp (which corresponds to other horrifying tales of hidden people), I remember it as a story he told me, even though I now see it as the version of Alekevich I included.”
In another section of Hughes’ book, Anna describes Michael as falling in love during the war. As Hughes wrote, it is almost identical to a story told to Alexievich by Nina Yakovlevna Vishnevskaya, a senior sergeant and medical assistant in a Soviet tank battalion.
From the story of Nina Yakovlevna Vishnevskaya to Alexievich:
I remember once we fell into a circle … We dug into the ground with our own hands, we had nothing else. No shovels … Nothing … We were under pressure from all sides. We had already decided: that night we would either break or die. We thought we’d probably die … I don’t know if I should talk about it or not. I do not know …
We camouflaged ourselves. We sat there. We waited for the night to try to break somehow. And Lieutenant Misha T. — he was replacing our wounded battalion commander, who was about twenty — began to remember how he liked to dance, play the guitar.
From The Dogs:
I remember once we fell into a circle … We dug into the ground with our own hands, we had nothing else. No shovels … Nothing … We were under pressure from all sides. We had already decided that night that we would either break up or die … I don’t know if I should talk about it …
We camouflaged ourselves, the soldiers, me and the other two nurses who had been trapped there. We waited for the night to try to break somehow. And the young lieutenant who was replacing the wounded commander, who was about twenty years old, began to remember how he liked to dance and play the guitar.
Hughes presents another of Anna’s memories of her partisan unit finding a nurse who had been captured by the German army. It is also almost identical to the story of an unnamed Soviet woman in Aleksievich’s book.
Of Aleksievich:
One of our nurses was captured … A day later we recovered that village. There were dead horses, motorcycles, armored vehicles. We found her: eyes out, breasts cut off. He had been impaled on a stake … It was as cold as ice, and as white as it could be, and his hair was all gray … He was nineteen.
In his backpack we found house letters and a green rubber bird. A children’s toy …
From The Dogs:
When the village was recaptured the next day, there were dead horses, motorbikes, armored vehicles. They found the nurse: eyes out, cut breasts …