Not long after, Anna sued Prescott for plagiarism, claiming that Prescott had presented her novel in press interviews as the untold story of Olga while her lawyers stated that “an astonishing number of substantial elements” had been copied from Anna’s book. In 2019, the American novelist Lara Prescott, herself named after Pasternak's tormented heroine, published her own fictional account of the CIA campaign, The Secrets We Keep, framing it through the lens of a Mad Men-era pool of typists engaged to help with the logistics, but also weaving in the passionate affair between Boris and Olga. The £2 million trial is set to begin on Wednesday. Lara, published in 2016, gives a full account of the whole remarkable history ( Doctor Zhivago was banned in Russia but smuggled out and published in Italy in 1957 shortly afterwards the CIA disseminated copies across Russia as part of a Cold War propaganda campaign) but concentrates on Olga’s role, not only as the inspiration for Lara, but the woman without whom the novel may never have been finished and almost certainly never published.Īnna's book is now at the centre of its own drama, with a High Court plagiarism battle between the Pasternak family and international publishing giants Penguin Random House.

Yet the story behind it is just as dramatic – an epic saga involving persecution, smuggled manuscripts, the CIA and, at its heart, a life-defining love affair between Boris and his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, a widow with two children whom Boris met in 1946. Immortalised on screen through the snow-swept love affair between Julie Christie's Lara and Omar Sharif's Yuri, his 1957 masterpiece remains an indelible critique of Stalin's Soviet Union, steeped in passion, politics and Boris's personal disillusionment with his homeland's new revolutionary ideals. “I told Anna that Boris would have been very proud of her.”īoris, of course, is the hero-poet-author of Doctor Zhivago and perhaps the most acclaimed Russian novelist of the 20 th century, still revered by ordinary Russians who like to quote his poetry in the street. “It was a very emotional experience,” he tells me in his light-filled South Kensington flat, the walls adorned with paintings by his grandfather, including one of his uncle Boris. After the flight he continued reading the book in his hotel room until he had finished it. Anna was sitting next to him but Charles remembers barely talking to her. On a flight to Milan about nine years ago, Charles Pasternak read the proofs of his daughter Anna's most recent book, Lara: The Untold Story that Inspired Doctor Zhivago.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak