Anna In Her Own Words (or Somebody Else's)

Our favorite accused spy, Anna Chapman,is now being accused of something else – plagiarism.

Russian bloggers claim that a recentarticle she wrote for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper on Russia'smost famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, contained a passage taken almost“word for word” from a book on Pushkin by Russian writer OlegMatveyechev, according to The Guardian. They quoted the paragraph inquestion from Chapman's article, which argued that Pushkin was aninspiration for the Russian revolution and could have rivaledShakespeare in impacting the world had he not died at age 37, but TheGuardian did not offer up the quote from Matveyechev's book forcomparison, so there's no telling (at least from The Guardian'spiece) about the validity of the bloggers' claim.

Since returning to Russia, Chapman haskept herself in the public eye, the article in Pravda being thelatest example. But some are accusing her of merely being the typeof fame-seeking pseudo-celebrity we seem to churn out by the dozenhere in the West – Chapman was recently heckled by students at anappearance at St. Petersburg University. Chapman also indirectlymade the news in the US in the past few days as the FBI releasedsurveillance video of the undercover sting that brought down thealleged Russian spy ring last year.