Vladimir Nabokov, his masterpiece and the burning question
Nabokov's last novel lies in a Swiss vault, hailed by the few who have read it as his finest work – but before he died he ordered that the manuscript be destroyed. What should his son Dmitri do? Our correspondent reports, and reveals the plotline of the secret masterpiece
Somewhere in Switzerland there’s a safety-deposit box that contains one of the most divisive literary manuscripts on earth. It’s been over 30 years since it was deposited there, and locking it away was less a decision than a a way of putting off the worst. If Vladimir Nabokov’s unambiguous request had been obeyed, the work, transcribed from 50 index cards on which the great writer noted down the bare bones of his final and incomplete novel, would have been immediately destroyed. But his executors – his beloved wife, Véra, and his adored son, Dmitri – vacillated.
To burn or not to burn. Dmitri, 73, seems closer than ever to fulfilling his father’s deathbed request and the cognoscenti are on tenter-hooks. They want to see Nabokov’s wishes respected but are tantalised by Dmitri’s description of the novel –The Original of Laura –as “brilliant, original and potentially radical”. So this is a story about the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art. Or it’s a story about a son caught between a powerful urge to go against his late father’s wishes and an equally powerful urge to carry them out. Or, less likely but still a possibility, it is a story about money.
Whatever it is, the dilemma at its heart – one of the most controversial and polarising debates in modern literary culture – should have been settled many years ago, in the days and weeks after July 2, 1977, when Nabokov succumbed to undiagnosed fever and bronchitis and died in a clinic on Lake Geneva, aged 78. In among the 50 index cards, on which the great novelist, poet, short-story writer, lepidopterist and chess master had transcribed only a fraction of the novel that he had more or less perfected in his head, he had inserted an unequivocal note: the index cards were to be destroyed.
Three decades later, the questions have multiplied. Not just, should The Original Of Laura be consigned to the incinerator, as Vladimir Nabokov decreed. But also, why is Laurastill intact in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland? Why no decision? Why this intermittent and cryptic fanning of the public’s fascination with Laura by Dmitri? And why, if Laurais destined to take her secrets with her to her grave, have sufficient details about those 50 yellowing index cards leaked out for it to be possible here to construct a plausible hypothesis about what the book is about?
The protagonist and chief vacillator in this tale is Nabokov’s only son, Dmitri, a former opera singer-turned-racing car driver-turned meticulous translator, interpreter and devoted, occasionally prickly, defender of his father’s works. After Dmitri’s mother, Véra, died in 1991, it fell to her son to set a match to Laura. Only Dmitri and one other, unidentified, person know where Laura is, or have keys to the safe. But Dmitri never got out the matchbox. He is still “torn”, it is said, between his filial duty to one of the most exacting literary purists of the 20th century and the demands of “posterity”.
It’s a potentially distressing conundrum, but not one to which Dmitri is necessarily averse. Over the years we’ve seen him mischievously dip, toe-in, toe-out, of the fray. From Dmitri we know that The Original of Laura is “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity” .
Tantalisingly, he has also said that it “would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially radical book in the literary sense, very different from the rest of his oeuvre”. In the late 1990s Dmitri attended a centenary celebration of his father’s work at Cornell University, New York, where Nabokov used to teach, and asked the 20 or so academics assembled in front of him to identify an anonymous passage (the audience correctly guessed that it came from Laura). In 2005 Dmitri prompted an outcry when he let Ron Rosenbaum, the journalist and author, know that he would “probablydestroyLaura”. Last month we found out that Dmitri was a millimetre closer to pressing the destruct button because he had taken umbrage at some of the far-out readings of his father’s work; the psycho-scholars who believe that they see inLolita evidence that Nabokov was abused by his uncle. Dmitri was piqued and yet still no bonfire. Is it possible that Dmitri is teasing us with all this suspense, I asked him in an e-mail exchange. His one-sentence, characteristically elliptical response, in capitals, read: “NOW, WOULD I DO THAT?”
Add to this mix cameos by a handful of other significant characters: the cottage industry of academics who make their living off Nabokov studies and in whose interest it would be to publish Laura; the thousands of everyday Nabokovians who worship the ground the great man walked on and will never countenance any notion of refuting his wishes; the fellow novelists, Edmund White, for example, whose first book,Forgetting Elena, Nabokov famously endorsed, and who feels deeply divided about the fate of Laura. White cites the example of Virgil, who asked on his deathbed for the unfinished Aeneid to be destroyed but whose request was ignored by the Emperor Augustus, and, of course, Kafka, who wanted all his works obliterated.
On the other hand, White says, he was against the recent publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s abandoned works and juvenilia because “it gave you a sense of how it was done. The 67 poems she published during her lifetime were perfect.” ShouldLaurabe published? “We are all dying with curiosity,” White says. “I love Nabokov and I’ve read everything by him and there was no indication that he was tailing off at the end. On the other hand, when I give Nabokov to my students at Princeton [White is a professor of English], they say it is too literary for them. Nabokov’s career is at a delicate time as far as the next generation is concerned.” On the hand: “If a writer really wants something destroyed, he burns it.”
Why didn’t Nabokov burn Laura? Dmitri replies: “HE WAS HURRYING TO FULFIL HIS INSPIRATION. AND DID NOT KNOW HOW MANY DAYS HE HAD TO LIVE. IF HE HAD KNOWN, HE MIGHT HAVE ACTED BEFORE DEATH OVERTOOK HIM.” Is Dmitri sure that his father wanted Laura destroyed? “I THINK HE MADE IT PRETTY CLEAR THAT HE DIDN’T WANT HIS MEMORY TO BE HAUNTED BY UNFINISHED BOOKS.” And yet, Dmitri strings us along. The decision is a matter of “FILIAL DUTY” he e-mails me to say. But suggestions that he faces a “Hamlet-like” inner conflict-may be exaggerated: “RATHER, IT IS LIKE A MUTED INTERROGATORY BUZZ THAT OCCASIONALLY RISES TO THE SURFACE OF MY CONSCIOUSNESS (I DO HAVE MUCH ELSE TO THINK ABOUT).”
If the time comes, how does Dmitri intend to destroy Laura? Death by paper shredder? A ceremonial burning? “PERHAPS I ALREADY HAVE [destroyed Laura], AND PREFER NOT TO REVEAL THE METHOD.”
Oh Lord, Dmitri. When will you put us out of our misery? Nabokov’s first cousin, Ivan Nabokov, a publisher now based in France, who shared a room with Dmitri when they were both students at Harvard, told me, perhaps somewhat wearily, that “I’ve not talked to Dmitri about this for quite some time”, and that he “thought this matter was settled some time ago”. Ivan speculated that, “the fact that he called to ask people for advice implies that he has decided not to do [burn] it”. It is Ivan’s view that Laura is “a fragment, unfinished and unpublished and in my opinion, it should be destroyed. I don’t think it would do him [Vladimir Nabokov] any good at all if it were published.” Ivan dislikes the essentially parasitical nature of “university people” who want the work published for their own ends. “[Nabokov] didn’t want it published, he was very painstaking all his life. It was his whole aesthetic philosophy that a work of art is something you burnish and perfect.”
As late as 1974, Vladimir Nabokov was still chasing butterflies on Swiss mountain-sides. Brian Boyd, his most respected and diligent biographer, a confidant of both Véra when she was alive and Dmitri now, traces in Laura’s origins in the second volume of his excellent biography. We learn that the first reference to the novel is made in Nabokov’s diaries on December 1, 1974, when he notes the title Dying is Fun. By April 3, 1976, the working title has changed to The Opposite of Laura, TOOL for short, and another diary entry reveals that Nabokov is “Proceeding at the rate of 5 or 6 cards per day, but a lot of rewriting”. Less than three months later, on June 17, 1976 Nabokov is in hospital with an undiagnosed infection; Laura is “completed in my mind” and, delirious for six weeks, he frequently imagines reading the book out to an audience consisting of “peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible”.
Nabokov is obsessed with the novel but, weakened by illness and insomnia, his great task becomes committing the book to paper, the flesh cannot keep up with the demands of his still startling intellect. In February 1977, Nabokov appears in a BBC documentary “his skin looks grey and flabby, and he breathes hard, he moves very slowly”. Time would tell that “he would never recover enough energy to transfer more than a fraction of his new novel from mental image to written text”.
Boyd has seen the resulting fragments. When Véra first read them out to him many years ago in the Montreux Palace, he advised both Véra and Dmitri against publishing. But Boyd said to me last week that “I have since changed my mind.” In part Boyd puts the U-turn down to the passing of time. He argues that it’s now so long since Nabokov’s death that “in a sense his misgivings about publication have been honoured to an extent”. Since that first reading, “I reread it in better circumstances and I think it is a fascinating novel. It is very fragmentary, people shouldn’t expect to be swept away. He is doing some very brilliant things with the prose, the story just flashes by, the characters are rather unappealing. It seems a technical tour de force, just as Shakespeare’s later works where he is extending his own technique in very, very concentrated ways.” The text is as “grotesque in some ways as, and unsavoury in different ways from,Lolita. It’s the kind of writing that induces admiration and awe but not engagement”.
Other people have seen the text. Only a handful, but, with a little digging, it becomes apparent that this most delicate of literary quandaries is not quite as veiled in secrecy as it once was. Zoran Kuzmanovich, the editor of the Journal of Nabokov Studies, was in that Cornell lecture room on the day Dmitri surprised his audience with an impromptu reading of Laura. “To me the passage or passages he read sounded very much like the passages of Nabokov’s densest, erotically charged prose,” he told me.
“I wrote in my notes that Laura may well be a woman and a book and that its chocolate mousse prose was not entirely safe from sounding like a parody of Lolita.”
Is Laura any good? Talk to enough Nabokov scholars and the outline of a plot emerges: 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.
Is Laura in a fit state for publication? Nabokov wrote most of his novels including Lolita and Pale Fire nonlinearly on index cards, which he would shuffle as part of his editing process. As Laura was unfinished and Nabokov often wrote the middle section of his stories last, it is questionable whether, published in her current state, Laura would have resembled the book that its author had intended to write. These are fragments – 50 cards compared with the 2,000 cards it took Nabokov to commit Ada or Ardor to paper.
“It seems revealing that the novel itself seems to be about work that seems to be unfinished,” says Boyd. “How finished it would have been if completed, I don’t know. There would have been deliberate lacunae.”
The abbreviationTOOL, Boyd speculates, may be a deliberate reference to the writer’s tool, in Nabokov’s case, the pencil. Nabokov the perfectionist took pride that he used up the rubber at the end of the pencil faster than the lead. “I almost wonder whether the title is an acronym. I think it wasn’t accidental.”
Even Dmitri was fooled when an American librarian published a convincingly rendered fake Laura. In 1991, a 35-year-old cataloguing specialist at Penn State University posted a critical essay ostensibly written by a Swiss professor, “Michel Desommelier”, entitled The Original of Laura: A First Look at Nabokov’s Last Novel. The article quoted as yet unseen portions of the manuscript and, of course, it’s always possible that what details we have are similarly made up.
What is the book about, Dmitri? “THAT WOULD BE TANTAMOUNT TO A PIECEMEAL PUBLICATION. SORRY.” I ask Dmitri whether he agrees that Max Brod was right to have ignored Franz Kafka’s wishes to destroy his work? Dmitri e-mails me another one of his coquettish one-sentence comebacks: “I AM VERY FOND OF METAMORPHOSIS.” I expect that Dmitri enjoys this neat irony. Vladimir Nabokov would never have written his brilliant lecture on Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis if Max Brod had gone ahead and torched his friend’s work.
Dmitri, what are you saying? Why are you playing with us? Is this constant public vacillation onLauraan attempt to push up its market value? Or is it a sincere wringing of hands? Kuzmanovich suggests that rather than destroy the document, “it would be a relatively simple way to avoid the burn-or-publish dilemma; it could be done easily by way of an archive. . . if it is sealed for 50 or 100 years, those critics’ (mis)interpretations Dmitri detests would be safely dead.”
Boyd says: “I can’t imagine him physically destroying the text. Dmitri is a person who makes decisions and revisits them.” Then again: “He’s not going to cave in to public pressure. He quite likes that.”
So much more than just Lolita
April 23, 1899 Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov is born in St Petersburg to a politician father and an aristocratic mother. Learns English and French from governesses.
1917 The family flees the Bolsheviks to Crimea, and then to England where Nabokov and his brother attend Cambridge University.
1923 Moves to Berlin.
1925 Marries Jewish émigré Véra Slonim. Publishes novels in Russian: Mashen’ka (1926) and Dar (1938).
1934 Son Dmitri is born.
1937 They flee the Nazi regime for Paris and then New York in 1940.
1941 Teaches at Stanford University and later Harvard and Cornell. Publishes his first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
1947 Publishes Bend Sinister.
1955 Publishes Lolita. Graham Greene calls it one of the best books of 1955. It is banned in Paris and not published in full in America and the UK until 1958.
1962 Publishes Pale Fire, called his most perfect novel.
1967 Translates Lolita into Russian, calling the original imperfect.
