The decade-long legal struggle over the exclusive rights to Nobel Prize-winner Boris L. Pasternak's manuscripts and notes came to a head on April 20 last. A Moscow court ruled in favor of his daughter-in-law Natalia Pasternak by dismissing the appeal of Olga Ivinskaya, the woman who was the model

for "Lara," his most famous heroine, in the novel "Doctor Zhivago." The Italian publication of the novel in 1957 made the poet-novelist renowned in the outside world but an outcast within the U.S.S.R. Though Pasternak had declined to accept his 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, the Soviet government had him thrown out of the Writers' Union and had banned his works. In 1987, however, it "rehabilitated" him. Ivinskaya, Pasternak's inspiration and mistress for 14 years, had kept the author's archives until he passed away in 1960. At that point, the KGB, the former U.S.S.R.'s intelligence service, had confiscated the materials. Ivinskaya had sued Natalia Pasternak, who was married to the writer's son Yevgeny, after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. A court of first instance had held for Natalia in August 2000 in a continuation of the suit by the family of Ivinskaya who had died in 1995. Citation: Agence France-Press (Online), Moscow, April 20; 2001 W.L. 2388837.