The article is examines the publication history of the short story “Koplyanto, the Chukchi of the Anadyr” by Siberian writer Anton Sorokin (1884–1928) that appeared twice in the periodicals in Krasnoyarsk and Petrograd in 1916. The story was signed with the pen name “Konstantin Treplev” after A. P. Chekhov’s character in The Seagull, the writer of imitative symbolic dramas. Sorokin either failed to notice or deliberately pretended not to notice the parody of the Chekhov’s character. The choice of name may have been intended to provoke the Krasnoyarsk publisher V. M. Krutovsky, who refused to print the stories, signed by the real name of Sorokin, and expose him as a person who did not know the classical writings by Chekhov. Soon afterwards, the well-known writer and ethnographer V. G. Tan (Bogoraz) publicly accused Sorokin of borrowing the plot, details, and the protagonist’s name from one of Tan’s newspaper essays. Later memoirists and researchers of the Siberian literature wrote that Sorokin had appropriated someone else’s story and was therefore a plagiarist. This article challenges this accusation. Tan’s text belongs to the genre of newspaper journalism, whereas Sorokin’s story falls into the category of literary fiction (“modernist primitivism”). The authors of the article came to the conclusion about the independence of Sorokin, who acted as a mystifier, not a plagiarist. They demonstrate that his story engages playfully with the literary conventions of its time, including contemporary notions of copyright and literary taste.
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