Thomas and Kuznetsov

 Two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran an obituary of D.M. Thomas, a novelist known chiefly for his best seller The White Hotel. I read it when it came out in paperback forty-odd years ago. As the obituary remarked, it was a best seller in the United States, after doing not particularly well in Great Britain. My recollection is that Martin Amis had some snide things to say about this in some American magazine--the Atlantic or Harpers perhaps.

I think that Amis touched on a point that the Times omitted from the obituary. The obituary does remark that Thomas was inspired by Anatoli Kuznetsov's documentary novel Babi Yar. It does not remark that he quoted extensively from Kuznetov's book, in particular the testimony of Dina Pronicheva, one of the very few survivors of the mass murders at Babi Yar, and that Kuznetsov and Pronicheva, at least initially, received minimal acknowledgment in the front matter of the book.

Alvin Kernan's The Death of Literature gives a few pages to this, the meat of it being

The original edition of The White Hotel acknowledges some indebtedness to Kuznetsov and Pronicheva in small print on the copyright page: "I also acknowledge gratefully the use in Part V of material from Anatoli Kuznetsov's Babi Yar (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux; London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), particularly the testimony of Dina Pronicheva." The word "use" seems a circumlocution, especially in the context of the fulsome acknowledgment of quotation in the same paragraph that the Yeats estate required for a few lines of poetry. Two pages later, there is an elaborate "Author's Note," which explains, in much larger type, just how Thomas used Freud in constructing the theory of Lisa's hysteria and commenting on the complex relation of fact to fiction. But of the debt to Pronicheva and Kuznetsov, there is nothing more.
To put it bluntly, Thomas all but concealed that he had copied verbatim at least four or five pages, far beyond what any court has yet allowed as "fair user," from  Pronicheva and Kuznetsov. Furthermore, the pages "used" are by common agreement, the structural and emotional center of both books ...

 This all was gone over at the time in the letters section of the Times Literary Supplement, Kernan writes.

The Times's obituary quotes Thomas, speaking to People magazine in 1982, as saying

Suddenly, I saw a connection between the mass hysteria of the Holocaust and personal hysterias, and realized I had a novel.

I suspect that this sort of remark went over better in 1982 than it would now.  Freud's prestige here has diminished, I think.