Andrew Lykiardopoulos KC and Henry Edwards successfully represented the Defendant Lara Prescott in Pasternak v Prescott, the recent litigation concerning Doctor Zhivago.
The Claimant was the journalist Anna Pasternak, the great-niece of Boris Pasternak. Ms Pasternak wrote Lara: The Untold Love Story and the Inspiration for Doctor Zhivago, published in 2016. Lara is a non-fiction account of the relationship between Nobel-prize novelist, Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya, the real-life inspiration for the female protagonist of Doctor Zhivago, Lara Antipova.
Ms Prescott, the Defendant, wrote The Secrets We Kept, a best-selling novel published in 2019. Half of The Secrets We Kept is focussed on the story of Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya’s romance and the writing of Doctor Zhivago and half on fictional CIA agents involved in the real-life CIA initiative during the Cold War to disseminate Russian language copies of Doctor Zhivago throughout the USSR.
Ms Pasternak alleged that Ms Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept infringed copyright in Lara. Ms Pasternak argued that Ms Prescott had copied the selection and arrangement of historical detail that can be found in seven chapters of Lara. Ms Pasternak also advanced claims based on an English translation of Légendes de la rue Potapov, the memoir of Olga Ivinskaya’s daughter, Irina Emélianova, the copyright in which Ms Pasternak had taken assignment of from the translator.
In a thorough 150-page judgment, Edwin Johnson J ruled that Ms Pasternak’s main claims based on Lara all failed, finding that Ms Prescott did not copy any of the alleged features of selection and arrangement. He found that the works were fundamentally different and that any apparent similarities derived from the use of common historical sources by both authors.
As for the claim on Légendes, though recognising that this was a much more minor aspect of the claim, the Judge found that Ms Prescott had infringed the copyright in three sentences of the translation. Ms Prescott’s use of the three sentences was found to involve fair dealing and would have benefitted from the quotation defence under s.30(1ZA) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 if there had been sufficient acknowledgement of the translator.