Posted on Monday 21 January 2008
The final unpublished work of author Vladimir Nabokov’s, The Original of Laura, is close to being burnt,
following the author’s last wishes.
Nabokov, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, explicitly requested in his will that his unfinished novel should be destroyed when he died, saying that he loathed the thought of his readers seeing a work he had completed “in my mind” but had not realised on paper.
This weighty decision, namely to burn or not to burn, has rested on the shoulders of the late author’s sole surviving heir, Dimitri Nabokov, aged 73, since his mother Vera died in 1991. Dimitri is the only living person to have seen the entire manuscript and has not been able to bring himself to dispose of it.
For years Nabokov has felt torn between his father’s clear request and the increasing demands of the literary world to view this “final fragment of his father’s genius.” “Should Dmitri defy his father's wishes for the sake of "posterity"?” asks literary critic Ron Rosenbaum.
However Nabokov’s handling of the dilemma has recently come under considerable criticism, as he continues to tease his father’s fans with his description of the manuscript as "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity" and “brilliant, original and potentially radical” script he ever wrote.
Rosenbaum speaks for both fans and critics alike when he says: "Dimitri, with all due respect, I think the time has come to make a decision."
"Tell us why you think it's the distillation of (your) father's art ... Or give us Laura ... Or put us out of our misery and tell us that you intend to preserve the mystery forever by destroying Laura."
Now Nabokov, who has kept the literary world in limbo for years, has indicated that he may be very close to putting a match to the manuscript, which resides in a Swiss bank vault.