Dmitry Nabokov, son of the famous Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, is suing a publishing house ?Nezavisimaya Gazeta? for damages to the amount of more than 700 thousand roubles. His attorney Vadim Uskov informed that a law suit had been filed yesterday to the Basmanny District Court of Law for damages caused by a book titled ?Nabokov On Nabokov...? put out by the publishing house.

6 thousand copies of the above book were published in 2002. The writer?s interviews, his critical essays and reviews were used for the book. ?The book bearing the title ?Nabokov On Nabokov...? is based upon the book titled ?The Strong Opinions? published in the U.S. in November of 1973,? said the attorney. According to him, the Russian publishers have broken the law ?On Copyright and Related Rights? by publishing Vladimir Nabokov?s works and interviews without obtaining the permission from his son Dmitry who is a legal heir to the writer?s copyright. The attorney claims that the publisher used the ?counterfeit? photographs of the writer by scanning them from other publications. In particular, Uskov holds a photo image of Vladimir Nabokov by a well known Swiss photographer Horst Tapp as ?counterfeit?. The photograph was used for the book?s cover.

The lawsuit also puts forth the demands for declaring a breach of non-property copyrights committed by Nikolai Melnikov who compiled the book. ?There?re lots of insulting remarks made by Melnikov on Vladimir Nabokov in the foreword and commentaries. That?s why we put him as a defendant in the suit,? said Uskov. As by RIA-Novosti News Agency, a total sum of damages claimed is 720 thousand roubles.

The defendants deny the claims. According to Olga Morozova, senior editor of the publishing house, she is not aware of the lawsuit. ?A year ago we were approached by an attorney who suggested we make the peremptory payment of $8 thousand for ?the needs of the museum of Nabokov in St. Petersburg,? said she. She claims that ?since all the materials used in the book date back to the pre-copyright protection times, no copyright protection rules apply to any of them, no permission required for their reprint.?

With regard to half of the photographs used in the book, it?s impossible to trace the artists who took them since the photographs were borrowed from Western periodicals of the ?40s and ?60s, according to the senior editor. ?Of all the pictures whose authorship can be determined, only one by Gerald Clark dates back to 1974, all the others belong to a pre-copyright era,? said Morozova. Nikolai Melnikov claimed that his foreword and commentaries contained ?no insults whatsoever?. ?I?ve tried to show in an unbiased manner how Nabokov was shaping his image,? said he.