Does your country have literary conspiracy theories?

2 comments

1. Allegedly Mikhail Sholokhov plagiarized his Nobel prize winning novel And Quiet Flows the Don.

   Also there are serious doubts about Putin’s edition of national anthem lyrics authorship.

2. Don’t know if it’s conspiratorial enough: There is a 1906 book called *Josephine Mutzenbacher* which is extremely pornographic, being the autobiography of a fictional prostitute. Since an author would inevitably get in trouble for such a book it was published anonymously. So who wrote it?

   The common opinion is that it was Felix Salten, the same man who wrote *Bambi* — yes that Bambi from the Disney movie. However, as far as I know the attribution of Mutzenbacher is based on rather flimsy evidence. So in the end, who knows?