Why did Nabokov's son decide to publish his father's unfinished novel? Now?
BEFORE Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Speak, Memory” and other masterworks, died in Lausanne, Switzerland, in July 1977, he had been hard at work on another novel. The previous December, he told The New York Times that the “not quite finished manuscript” was called “The Original of Laura,” that it had already been “completed in my mind” and that during a recent hospital stay, “in my diurnal delirium,” he had “kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden.” Shortly afterward, Nabokov’s editor at McGraw-Hill revealed that the author was about to do the actual writing, in pencil on 3-by-5-inch index cards (Nabokov never worked with a typewriter). Then, in words parroted by the editor, Nabokov would “deal himself a novel.”
Nabokov, however, was able to build only part of the complete deck — 138 index cards, with many erasures and much emendation — before falling ill for the last time. Known as an artistic perfectionist and a literary purist, he left behind instructions that the cards were to be destroyed. But neither his wife, Véra, nor his son, Dmitri, now nearly 74, could bring themselves to carry out Nabokov’s injunction. Since Véra’s death in 1991, Dmitri — who was also a translator of his father’s early work and is now his literary executor — had by some accounts been wrestling mightily with the question of whether to follow his father’s wishes and consign the cards to the flames, or to preserve the manuscript for posterity.
The last work of a modern master, however fragmentary, is a matter of public interest and scholarly importance. The nuances of “Laura” and her fate have been hotly debated on bookish Web sites and elsewhere, with Tom Stoppard, for example, calling for the matches and John Banville urging clemency in The Times of London. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that “Laura” will indeed be published, and suggests in a Q. and A. conducted by e-mail with the Week in Review that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated....
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Nabokov, however, was able to build only part of the complete deck — 138 index cards, with many erasures and much emendation — before falling ill for the last time. Known as an artistic perfectionist and a literary purist, he left behind instructions that the cards were to be destroyed. But neither his wife, Véra, nor his son, Dmitri, now nearly 74, could bring themselves to carry out Nabokov’s injunction. Since Véra’s death in 1991, Dmitri — who was also a translator of his father’s early work and is now his literary executor — had by some accounts been wrestling mightily with the question of whether to follow his father’s wishes and consign the cards to the flames, or to preserve the manuscript for posterity.
The last work of a modern master, however fragmentary, is a matter of public interest and scholarly importance. The nuances of “Laura” and her fate have been hotly debated on bookish Web sites and elsewhere, with Tom Stoppard, for example, calling for the matches and John Banville urging clemency in The Times of London. Now, Dmitri Nabokov has announced that “Laura” will indeed be published, and suggests in a Q. and A. conducted by e-mail with the Week in Review that, in fact, her peril has been exaggerated....