BEFORE Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita,” “Pale Fire,” “Speak, Memory” and other masterworks, died in Montreux, 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. STEVE COATES
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It’s been three decades since your father’s death. Why did it take you so long to decide the fate of “Laura”, and how did you come to your final decision? How difficult has it been?
In the words of one blogger, 30 years is tantamount to eternity in the given context, which would absolve me from any disobedience of my father’s wishes. More seriously, it did not take me 30 years to come to a decision with regard to burning the manuscript. I had never imagined myself as a “literary arsonist.” I also recalled, parenthetically, that when my father was asked, not very long before his death, what three books he considered indispensable, he named them in climactic order, concluding with “The Original of Laura” — could he have ever seriously contemplated its destruction?
It took the passing of time, the input of a few good advisers, and, above all, some concentrated thinking on my part, for the idea to crystallize of what exactly to do with the precious cards. Safekeeping, no matter how secure, would never guarantee their permanent immunity from revelation. To publish, then, but how?
How do you respond to those who suspect a financial motivation?
It’s true that my wheelchair requires some costly modifications to fit into the trunk of a Maserati coupe.
Why would your father have wanted “Laura” destroyed?
In a calmer moment, if he were no longer in a race against death to complete the work, I think, sincerely, that he would not. By the same token, if one wants to finish something before dying, one perseveres to the utmost, rather than destroying it. This should be an obvious answer to a rather fatuous question some have posed: Why didn’t he burn it well ahead of time and have done with it?
Your mother didn’t have the heart to burn it either. There’s a famous story about how she stopped your father from burning his manuscript of “Lolita.”
It was an entirely different situation. What my father was carrying to the incinerator was a draft of the completed work, which the publishers feared and, he strongly suspected, the public was bound to misconstrue. At that stage, the working title was “Juanita Dark.” Had she been incinerated, even if not at the stake, she would have become a latter-day Juanita d’Arc.
You have guarded this manuscript very closely. How many people now have seen it, or have direct knowledge of its contents?
Excluding those present at my father’s oneiric reading, five or six.
It is said to involve a corpulent scholar married to a wildly promiscuous woman named Flora; is that accurate?
So far so good.
Can you offer any other tidbits?
Here are a couple of lines I have previously quoted to no one: “A process of self-obliteration conducted by an effort of the will. Pleasure bordering on almost unendurable ecstasy. ...”...
