The Original of Laura

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The Original of Laura is a novel that Vladimir Nabokov was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It has never been published and its contents have been viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars. Nabokov had requested that upon his death the work be destroyed. His family debated for over 30 years whether to carry out this wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov announced plans to publish the work.

[edit] Background

According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974 under the title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976, he noted that the story was completed in his mind, but by then his health was failing rapidly.^[1]

When Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, he was still working on the novel, since retitled The Opposite of Laura and finally The Original of Laura. The incomplete manuscript consists of Nabokov's own handwriting across about 125 index cards ^[2], the equivalent of about 30 manuscript pages.^[3][4] (The use of index cards was normal for Nabokov, also used for many of his works, such as Lolita and Pale Fire.^[3])

[edit] Executor's dilemma

Nabokov was a perfectionist and made it clear that, upon his death, any unfinished work was to be destroyed. Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov and wife Vera Nabokov became his literary executors but could not bring themselves to destroy Nabokov's final work, and so it was placed in a Swiss Bank vault where it has remained since his death. In 1991 Vera died, leaving Dmitri as the sole literary executor.^[5] Dmitri has wavered on whether to destroy the manuscript. On the one hand, he is said to feel bound to uphold his "filial duty" and grant his father's request, but he has also said the novel "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre."^[3]

Scholars and enthusiasts have disagreed over whether the manuscript should be made public, as The Times posed the question: "the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art."^[1] Dmitri has remarked cryptically that one other person possesses a key to the manuscript, but has not said who that person is.^[3] Like Dmitri, many observers are on the fence about the fate of the manuscript. The author Edmund White has compared the request to Virgil's request to destroy the Aeneid (ignored by Augustus Caesar) or Franz Kafka's request to destroy his papers (ignored by his executor Max Brod).^[1] Nabokov himself weighed in on Nikolai Gogol's decision to burn the sequels to the magnificent novel Dead Souls.

The journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who corresponds with Dmitri, has said that in recent years Dmitri has been inclined toward destroying the manuscript, swayed by criticism of Nabokov such as allegations of plagiarism that arose from the discovery of a 1916 German short story, "Lolita" with some similarities to Nabokov's work, or critics who have interpreted Nabokov's work as suggesting that Nabokov himself was sexually abused.^[3] In April of 2008 Dmitri told many publications including Nabokov Online Journal and Der Spiegel that he intends to publish the manuscript after all.^[6] In the Nabokov Online Journal interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye, Dmitri also stated that he had never seriously considered burning the manuscript. ^[7]

[edit] Content

Laura, painted 1506 by Giorgione

Flora, painted 1515 by Titian

Several short excerpts of the work have been made public. In the late 1990s Dmitri read a portion of the book to a group of about 20 scholars at a centenary celebration of Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell University. The scholars Brian Boyd and Lara Delage-Toriel claim to have read the manuscript. In 1999 two passages from The Original of Laura were published in The Nabokovian, a scholarly publication devoted to Nabokov.^[8] Zoran Kuzmanovich, a scholar of Nabokov, said of passages he heard at Cornell University: "It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one's life."^[5]

According to a 2006 account of the book by Lara Delage-Toriel, the narrator and protagonist of Nabokov's book receives a novel titled My Laura from a painter. The narrator realizes that the novel is in fact about his own wife Flora, whom the painter had once pursued. In this novel within the novel, Laura is "destroyed" by the narrator (the "I" of the book). Delage-Toriel also notes that the names of Laura and Flora, possibly refer to well-known High Renaissance portraits of women by Titian and Giorgione, both evoking the Italian sonneteer Petrarch's unconsummated obsession with a woman named Laura.^[9]

According to Delage-Toriel, the meaning of "the Original" is unclear:

Does it refer to the mistress of the “I,” the Laura of My Laura, or to the probable mistress of this novel’s author, the Flora of The Original of Laura? The manuscript’s playful juxtapositions obviously incite the reader to fuse both ‘originals’ into a single original, a gesture which Nabokov graphically performs in ‘chapter’ 5, by contriving an amusing hybrid, ‘Flaura’. On close observation of the manuscript, one notices that the name contains in fact two capital letters, ‘F’ and ‘L’, as though Nabokov had been loath to give precedence to either name and had instead opted for some typographical monster, a bicephalous cipher of sorts.^[9]

A writer in The Times attributed a widely differing plot description to discussions with unidentified scholars:^[8]

Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.^[1]

[edit] References