Category Archives: 21st century

Harry Potter Duels Tanya Grotter: The Magic of International Copyright

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Covers of five volumes in the Russian Tanya Grotter series. Gift of Elena Alexeyeva.

Maybe you haven’t heard of Tanya Grotter (or her magic double-bass). But J. K. Rowling has, and she isn’t exactly happy about Tanya . . .

Tanya Grotter is the eponymous main character of a series of Russian fantasy novels written by Dmitri Yemets (Дми́трий Емец). Published by the Moscow based publisher Eskmo, the series began in 2002 with Tanya Grotter i Magicheskii Kontrabas (Tanya Grotter and the Magic Double-Bass). The series follows a young girl with magic powers. Orphaned when her parents are killed by an evil sorceress, she receives a distinguishing scar on her nose during the attack. Subsequently, she is poorly treated by her foster family (the Durnevs, her distant relatives) until she leaves home and finds her true place in the world attending the Tibidokh School of Magic. Sound a little too familiar?

Perhaps also suspiciously similar, “Grotter” in this Cyrillic type looks an awful lot like “Potter” with its free standing stylized “Г”. Pictured here the front board of the 2008 edition of Таня Гроттер и исчезающий этаж (Tanya Grotter and the Vanishing Floor). Moskva: ĖKSMO, 2008. (Cotsen RECAP-91551). Gift of Elena Alexeyeva.

J.K. Rowling and Time Warner, the producers of the Harry Potter movies, think it does. But that hasn’t stopped Russian audiences from falling in love with the series. During a nine-month period between 2002 and 2003, Russian booksellers sold 600,000 copies of Tanya Grotter books, compared to about 1.5 million copies of Russian translations of the Harry Potter series (which are, I might add, are twice as expensive than Yemets’s series).1

It could be called “Tanya Grotter and the Unnecessarily Risque Outfit”. But this book cover is from the 2007 edition of Таня Гроттер и проклятье некромага (Tanya Grotter and the Curse of the Necromancer). Moskva: Ėksmo, 2007. (Cotsen RECAP-91555). Gift of Elena Alexeyeva.

So in 2003 when the Dutch publisher Byblos was hoping to capitalize on the huge popularity of Emets’ work in Russia by bringing a translation of the work to the Western European book market, the Harry Potter team had a different idea. Byblos’s small edition of 7000 copies was blocked from publication in Dutch court after a short legal battle which turned on a strict interpretation and enforcement of international copyright  and an author’s authority over adaptations of their works.

Rowling is well known for keeping a tight leash on fan fiction and other adaptations of her work, often serving cease and desist letters or bringing piratical publishers to court (of which there are tons!).2 This kind of centralization is easier than one might think since international copyright controls very much favor the “original author”. According to Tim Wu at Slate: “Under the Trade Related International Property treaty [for member of the World Trade Organization], original authors ‘enjoy the exclusive right of authorizing adaptations, arrangements and other alterations of their works'”.3 In other words any work that is derivative of some earlier work (with a current copyright and vigilant author) must be officially authorized by that original author in order to be officially published.

Yet Yemets and his publishers maintain that Tanya Grotter is not an outright piracy. Rather they claim it is a parody of Rowling’s work, a characteristically Russian “cultural response” incorporating much material from Russian folklore and fairy tales.4 The series also seems to borrow from Greek mythology (for some reason) in a way that the Potter series does not.

This 2005 edition of Таня Гроттер и колодец Посейдона (Tanya Grotter and the Well of Poseidon). Moskva: ĖKSMO, 2004. (Cotsen RECAP-91552) not only has a theme connected to Greek mythology but features a nod to Russian folklore with this depiction of a very determined and  Baba Yaga- like man (wizard?) riding a flying mortar. Gift of Elena Alexeyeva.
Another Greek god in the 2007 cover of Таня Гроттер и локон Афродиты (Tanya Grotter and the Lock of Aphrodite’s Hair). Moskva: ĖKSMO, 2005. (Cotsen RECAP-91553). Gift of Elena Alexeyeva.

The whole controversy revolves around where to draw the line between theft of original content and derivation. Satire and parody are necessarily derivative. So how can we tell the difference between bad parody (bad in the sense that the satire isn’t obvious or actually critical) and good piracy (good in the sense that it obviously resembles the work that “inspired” it)? Is there any formal difference between fan fiction, parody, and piracy? Or does it depend, not on the content of the derived works, but simply on the tastes of the authors and gatekeepers of the original work and how they view and judge subsequently related works?

Witch as cheerleader on the cover of the 2006 edition of Таня Гроттер и перстень с жемчужиной (Tanya Grotter and the Pearl Ring). Moskva: ĖKSMO, 2006. (Cotsen RECAP-91554). Gift of Elena Alexeyeva.

These are philosophical questions, and probably too philosophical given the subject at hand. But perhaps by reading Tanya Grotter you can decide for yourself whether or not the series is a parody or a piracy. In case you don’t (like me) read Russian, there are free (and very unauthorized) translations available in PDF on the web. Uploaded and translated by the enigmatic Jane H. Buckingham, you can find Tanya Grotter (and other Emets titles) in the links below from Scribd.com.

For your scholarly erudition and philosophical contemplation:

Tanya Grotter And The Magic Double Bass

Tanya Grotter And The Vanishing Floor

Many thanks to Elena Alexeyeva of Princeton
for her generous gift of Potteriana in Russian!

 

  1. The Curse of Tanya Grotter ↩︎
  2. Harry Potter Lawsuits and Where to Find Them ↩︎
  3. Harry Potter and the International Order of Copyright ↩︎
  4. Russia’s Tanya Grotter ‘copies Potter’s magic’ ↩︎

The Marlon Bundo Affair: Rabbits on the Right and Left of Cultural Politics

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Am I the only person who remembers last March’s tempest in a tea pot?  When Last Week Tonight with John Oliver hustled into print a picture book allegedly about BOTUS Marlon Bundo (Bunny of the United States) a day before the publication date of the one by his owners Charlotte and Karen Pence, wife and daughter of Vice President Pence?

Independent booksellers called out Oliver for choosing Amazon as the distributor of a heart-warming but barbed story about the courtship and marriage of the rabbits Marlon and Wesley.  Its author Jill Twiss pointedly dedicated it to “every bunny who has ever felt different” and the last line is “it doesn’t matter if you love a girl bunny or a boy bunny, or eat your sandwich backward or forward.”  The first printing sold out overnight and for weeks Amazon couldn’t fulfill orders and offered no ship date without a word of apology.  I lost patience and got a copy within a few days from a small independent bookstore in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

Marlon Bundo’s a Day in the Life of the Vice President. Washington, DC: Regnery Kids, an imprint of Regnery Publishing, [2018]. (Cotsen)

Oliver and  Company got its fifteen minutes of fame until the media moved on to less amusing but more important events as they erupted on the national scene.  The two books have continue to sell. Today on Amazon’s list of the one hundred best-selling children’s books about rabbits, A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo is number two after Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd. Numbers four, seven, eight, and nine are, respectively Dorothy Kunhardt’s Pat the Bunny, Margery Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, and Brown’s The Runaway Bunny.  The Pences’ Marlon Bundo made number thirty-four, barely ahead of the Kindle edition of Last Week Tonight’s Marlon Bundo and Bunnicula in a Box.  I won’t analyze these titles because that would be breaking butterflies on wheels.  It won’t be long until the field will be left again to Bianco, Brown, and Potter.  The conventional plots and pleasant but forgettable illustrations will not make either Marlon Bundo book a contender for the 2018 Caldecott Medal, whatever your politics.

John Oliver’s baiting the vice president for his views on gay marriage was the only angle the media covered.   Nobody thought to cover it as a formidable case of industrial espionage: just how did the Last Week Tonight team obtain advance knowledge of the Pences’ book and rush their illustrated satire through the press on time?  The Marlon Bundo affair is also, I’d argue, a timely reminder that the prevailing view of the children’s book market centers on firms with mainstream liberal values.  We are much more likely to have heard of Chronicle Books, the publisher of A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, than Regnery Kids, the publisher of Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President.

Thanks to John Oliver and his merry pranksters, I  realized I had brushed up against the conservative book publisher’s existence when buying political children’s books during the 2016 election, but didn’t make the connection until later in March.   The motto of Regnery Kids is “Great Americans of today inspiring great Americans of tomorrow” and its brand consists of children’s books that are “non-partisan, entertaining, brilliantly written and illustrated by award-winning authors and artists.”  Its stable includes Fox News personalities such as Janice Dean and Rachel Campos Duffy and the nation’s ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, creator of the “Ellis the Elephant” series.  Regnery’s Little Patriot’s Press has at least six titles featuring Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts characters.

Who knew that Regnery is no newcomer to conservative publishing?  Founded in 1947, it has published notable writers like Russel Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., and Donald Trump. Since 1993, it has been a part of Eagle Publishing,  a subsidiary of Salem Media Group, which is owned by the very successful and wealthy Christian broadcasters Edward G. Atsinger II and his brother-in-law Stuart Epperson.

For the benefit of future scholars of twenty-first century American children’s book publishing, the collection of the Cotsen Children’s Library really should include good samples of books produced by firms like Regnery Kids, along with the better-known award-winning authors and illustrators, which have traditionally set the ethos and aesthetics for the genre.  Silently passing over Regnery would be like refusing to collect the eighteenth-century children’s book publisher John Marshall because of his involvement in the Cheap Repository Tract project masterminded by archconservative Evangelist Hannah More to make sure the masses had reading that wouldn’t radicalize them….