Ottessa Moshfegh Plagiarized Olga Tokarczuk

I read Olga Tokarczuk's 2009 novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead between March 18 and 22, 2020. Originally published in Polish, an English translation, by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, first saw print in 2018 by Fitzcarraldo Editions, and later in 2019 by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.

I read Ottessa Moshfegh's 2020 novel Death in Her Hands between July 16 and 17, 2020. Though slated for release in April of this year, its publication, by Penguin Press, also an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, was delayed until June, I assume due to COVID-19-related issues.

In this blog post, I contend that Ottessa Moshfegh plagiarized Olga Tokarczuk, heavily and creditlessly lifting from the latter's novel's premise, style, and general literary devices.

Spoiler alert: if you're concerned about the integrity of the novels' mysteries remaining in tact, for you, as an engaged fiction reader, I suppose you should not keep reading this blog post. In order to point out the damning similarities between the books, I must spoil their plots.

Both novels are written in the first person, narrated by an eccentric and elderly female protagonist, who has elected to lead a relatively isolated existence in the rural outskirts of her respective country (for Tokarczuk, this is Poland near the Czech border; for Moshfegh, this is somewhere in the eastern United States, a fictional town, not terribly far from the coast, called Levant), when her life is upended by happening upon a mysterious suggestion of murder, located on her own sweeping and untended property.

Both protagonists are Eastern European. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is the story of Janina Duszejko, whose first name feels wrong to her, and whose surname is chronically mispronounced, as "Duszeńko," for instance, by the townspeople she resents and suspects of having some foul play in the murder mystery. Death in Her Hands is the story of Vesta Gul, who is embarrassed by her first name's unconventionality, and whose surname is chronically mispronounced as "Gool" by the townspeople from whom she feels hostilely alienated.

Both protagonists are cynophiles. Janina Duszejko refers to her since-dead dogs as "my Little Girls." They were killed by the townspeople she hates during a hunting spree, maybe an accident. Vesta Gul has a dog named Charlie, whom she adopted after the death of her husband, and has become the center of her affection and attention, that is, before stumbling upon the note in the woods ("Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body."), which sets the novel's plot in motion.

There is, however, no evident corpse at the onset of Vesta's account. Just the note on the forrest path. In Janina's case, there is a clear death: her neighbor "Big Foot," whom she herself has named, given a predilection for assigning appellations to everyone she encounters based on physical and affective attributes. In Tokarczuk's work, more explicit murders unfold, which her protagonist attributes to the local animals as vengeance for a sustained culture of wanton, sometimes unlawful hunting and general disregard for animal rights in the region. In Moshfegh's novel, no bodies are unearthed, although as Vesta's psychological stability unravels, she does kill her own dog in a state of desperation and confusion, as well as proceeds to allergically induce suicide, at the end of the novel.

At the end of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, it's revealed that Janina was the serial killer, and she is smuggled out of the country to hiding by a scientist she has become romantically entangled with. In Death in Her Hands, Vesta's late husband was a scientist.

Like Janina, Vesta assigns names to the townspeople, as well. In a chapter, which seems to almost overtly outline the plagiaristic process, Moshfegh's narrator devises a list of seemingly fictional suspects and players Magda's murder. One name particularly that she conceives, "Ghod," is reminiscent of the tonal and eerily nicknaming style of Janina. In addition to "Big Foot," some of the latter's sobriquets include "Boooroos," "Oddball," "Innocenta," "Black Coat," "Mrs. Merrilegs," and "Wolf Eye."

Both protagonists resent and distrust their neighbors and residents of their respective localities. They both live in smaller enclaves near relatively larger, though still rural, towns. They both think of these locals as slovenly and stupid and inferior to their rich, creative interior lives. They both maintain a healthy skepticism of law enforcement and have multiple run-ins with unscrupulous cops. They both refer to themselves as "little old lad[ies.]"

Both novels are indebted to the poetry of William Blake. Tokarczuk's particularly so: Blake lines appear as epigraphs for each chapter, and one of the main characters is enmeshed in an ongoing attempt to translate the poet's work to Polish. Besides, the title of the novel is a direct allusion to "Proverbs of Hell" (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), in which the line "Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead" appears. Moshfegh, on the other hand, assigns the name Blake to one of her suspected townspeople, then later, at a library, a book has literally fallen off a shelf, and when she picks it up, opens to the line "They stumble all night over bones of the dead" from "The Voice of the Ancient Bard," published in Songs of Innocence and Experience, and penned at a concomitant period in Blake's career as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The inclusion of this line, in light of its deus ex machina appearance in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel, incited the urgency for me to outline what to that point had felt like a series of unlikely parallels between her and Tokarczuk's novels. This felt, to me, given all the other undeniable likenesses her work bore to Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, impossible to justify as mere coincidence.

After the end of Death in Her Hands proper, the author includes a note about how she'd drafted the text in 2015 and let it sit before returning to it after the publication of 2018's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. That said, she also provides us with the "clue" that her Croatian mother may have harbored some feelings about the story, and even graces us with an unilluminating, and truly tagged-on interview with said matriarch, as a kind of postscript to the plagiarized work. Simple investigation into translation history tells us that Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was published in Croatian in 2013.

Given we know how quickly Moshfegh wrote her first novel Eileen, which was published by Penguin in 2015, and claimed to have been penned in just two months (its author following a how-to guide on novel writing), those two years would've provided Dubravka Sajfar Moshfegh ample time to read and relate the plot and premise to her daughter, and for Ottessa to compose her own "take" on text. Moshfegh herself even makes a point to disclose that she "drafted [her novel] very quickly" in the aforementioned postscript. In 2015 Olga Tokarczuk had not won a Nobel Prize, and none of her major work was available in English in the United States. This kind of speculation is fairly pointless on my part; for all we know Ottessa Moshfegh can read any other number of languages Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was available in prior to its English translation. In the end, nothing excuses the clear textual derivation or can logically be accounted for as happenstance.

Perhaps Moshfegh thought she'd get away with lifting Tokarczuk's narrative foundation. Or perhaps, like Vesta Gul, who in the second chapter of Death in Her Hands discovers a “TOP TIPS FOR MYSTERY WRITERS!” web article, and in its third chapter, fills out the article's "character profile questionnaire," the novelist incorporated deliberate suggestions into her own text as to the roots and rings of its origin, for the obsessive-prone readers among us to unearth. I, for one, am unwilling to overlook the stark affinity between Moshfegh's climatic reveal of Magda's surname, Tanasković, and the full effect the two combined, Magda Tanasković, with the name of Poland's most celebrated modern novelist...

In either case, the consequence is the same: Ottessa Moshfegh plagiarized Olga Tokarczuk.

I may be forgetting to include other indicators that led me to this conclusion, or there may be other instances I did not notice. I hereby reserve the right to edit this blog post to append any further evidence of my argument.

Why Penguin Random House LLC allowed this to happen is beyond me, from a perspective of artistic integrity. The whole effect seems to bespeak an eerily hush-hush tone. Note the fluctuations in publication release and hype surrounding the novel (a promotional article surfaced in the New York Times in April, then for a while it was being slated for release in August, then September), and then the silent drop in June, during height of Black Lives Matter and pandemic-centric media, followed by very meager, wary coverage upon its suddenly unpromoted release. Still, I know why publishing houses like Penguin exist, and it's to generate profits for shareholders. Two books with the same plot can't sell worse than one. And what do they stand to lose in a copyright dispute? They own both.

In a recent write-up for The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Franklin points out "a befuddling number of details in common" between the two novels. She continues, "I want to be clear that I am not accusing Moshfegh of plagiarism." I want to be clear that I am.