Lolita fans and Ada, or Ardor aficionados, take heart: Publishers Lunch reports on an article for The Independent in which the beloved literary master’s son, Dmitri Nabokov, promises that his father’s unfinished novel, THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA, will be published after all.
It was written on 138 index cards by the Russian-American author as he lay dying in hospital. Just before he died in 1977, he made his wife, Vera, promise to throw the manuscript on the fire. She could not bring herself to do it.
Which begs the question: We’d all love to have another Nabokov novel to lust over (and rumor has it that this book is even lustier and more scandalous than Lolita), but how can one justify publishing a book against the author’s explicit wishes? Does the interest of the reading public outweigh the dying wishes of the author? What are your thoughts?
From a writer’s perspective, if, on my deathbed, I told my husband to make sure a novel-in-progress never saw print, I know that he would respect that wish. Granted, Nabokov presents a unique problem. He is such an iconic writer, with such an enormous following, that one could easily win the argument that it is in the best interests of literary history to put his unfinished novel in the public forum. According to his 73-year-old son Dmitri, who spoke to the BBC, “My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them…He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he did not see death staring him in the face. He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it.” Watch the BBC interview here. Read the article in The Independent here.
Let’s say you’re Nabokov’s son or daughter. What would you do?
