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Dmitri's ChoiceNabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches?

By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
Vladimir Nabokov. Click image to expand.

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

It's a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father's unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father's genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura. Should Dmitri defy his father's wishes for the sake of "posterity"?

For the past two years I've involved myself in this question in print and in e-mail correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, but a recent communication from Dmitri to me suggests that a decision may be near. And so the time seems right to share with Slate readers my own deeply divided feelings about Dmitri's choice and to see what they make of his dilemma.

What I'd like to do is convey to Dmitri the best of your responses to this (literally) burning question, since he deserves to know the sentiments of the intelligent reading public as well as those of the close-knit coterie of Nabokovians greedy to view the body of Laura's text.

Dmitri's predicament goes beyond Laura. It's one that raises the difficult issue of who "owns" a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it's in?

To burn or not to burn? It's not a question we can argue over forever. Time is running out, and the stakes are high: Dmitri's past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity."

Think of that: the final "distillation" of the work of perhaps the greatest, certainly the most complex, writer of the past century. Is it the "key to all mythologies"? The Jamesian "figure in the carpet"? The lens through which—should it survive—we might retrospectively refocus our vision of Nabokov's art?

On the other hand, Dmitri has also said Laura "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre." Which is not the same as saying that it is a "distillation" in the conventional meaning of the term. It suggests a new revelation.

Or perhaps Laura is both, since V.N.'s "distillation" might be an unexpected revelation as well.

As things stand, there's a chance we may never know. What we do know is that the Laura manuscript consists of approximately 50 index cards covered in V.N.'s handwriting. Dmitri has said in the past that the text amounts to some 30 conventional manuscript pages. (To those familiar with what is perhaps Nabokov's greatest work, Pale Fire, the use of index cards as a draft medium will not seem strange. Indeed the parallels to Pale Fire's account of a struggle over the disposition of an index-card manuscript border on the uncanny.) But in any case, before he died in 1977, Nabokov made clear that he wanted those cards destroyed.

At the time, the task fell to V.N.'s adored and devoted wife, Véra, but for one reason or another, by the time she died in 1991, she had not gotten around to putting a match to Laura. The grim task then fell to Dmitri, who has long been an assiduous and acerbic defender of his father's literary legacy from those he regards as egregious misinterpreters—and it now appears that such "misinterpretations" may prove to be a factor in swaying his sentiments on the fate of Laura.

And so this is Dmitri's choice: become the means of transmission of his father's last words and—against his wishes—allow the manuscript to be disclosed to the world. Or be the instrument of its destruction, and take the knowledge of its content to the grave.

It is, alas, an either/or, one or zero decision. And now comes news—via an e-mail to me from Dmitri—of a new twist in the case. Via a mutual friend, Dmitri sent me some comments on the nature and fate of Laura that he made in a forthcoming interview he expects will be published in a journal called Nabokov Online Journal. Comments he shared with me out of courtesy since he goes to some lengths to gently refute some previous speculations of mine on the identity of Laura's Laura. The new pronouncement makes it seem like, once again, he is inclined toward putting a match to Laura.

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Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Photograph of Vladimir Nabokov in 1976 from AP Photo.
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Comments from the Fray Editor

Author Ron Rosenbaum actually solicited readers' views on the Nabokov dilemma, and perhaps it was this that led to a very well-behaved and thoughtful Fray--an unexpected side effect. Fearful syzygy was the first of many readers to cite the comparable case of Kafka, who asked Max Brod to destroy his works. Dairving says "The dead have no wishes," while Moebius is equally clear: "Burn it. For the dying to have faith in the living he should have done it long ago." Alex K brought the tone down, but made us laugh, with this: "Boy--I wish someone had destroyed the last drunken email I sent."

Comments from the Fray

Sell half of the notes and give the money to a worthy charity. The rights of the dead should not outweigh the needs of the living, and by burning the other half you preserve the wonderful mystery of it all.

--Nacoran

(To reply, click here)

Now we're going to start taking orders from dead people? I think not. It doesn't matter a whit what VN wanted-- they guy's dead, gone, not here. We're people, we don't take orders from ghosts. Sure, we respect a lot of ghosty stuff-- the Bible, the Constitution, the Magna Carta.. Lots of things that were thought up and written down by people who came before. But this is a case of here and now. If D sets fire to the ms, he goes down in history as a book-burning pinhead. If he sets the ms free, then the literary world gets to ooh and ah and deconstruct for years, decades, centuries…

--ihatethenewlogin

(To reply, click here)

How about neither? Of course it shouldn't be published; it's not a finished work. Reading this fragment as a work of literature is pointless. But as an item of scholarship, it has value. Donate it to a library, where scholars, who have a very different motivation for reading the scraps of an author's life, whether unfinished novel or grocery lists, can get at it. Those of us who read can get what we need of it from the next biography that is published. Burn it? Don't be ridiculous.

--fnarf

(To reply, click here)

Dmitry Vladimirovich, I would first like to thank you for your thoughtful handling of your parents' legacy. One can hardly imagine a heavier burden, and you have carried it well. I am sure that no matter what decision you make, and it does seem like a zero-sum proposition, you will do it with care and love for both your father and those who love your father's work.

I only have one suggestion: if you do decide to carry out the elimination of Laura, please do not do so because you fear that some might subject the work to bad reading and ideologies of "oneiromancy and mythogeny." I would venture that this will occur regardless of your decision. Some would-be witchdoctor will conjure and publish his idea of what the work ought to have been. Some worse offender will invent reasons for why it had to be destroyed, what it could have contained.

Unfortunately, if you destroy it, there will be no solid grounds for rebuttal. More unfortunately, you will be depriving the good readers of joy because of the bad behavior of others. While those who regard art poorly surely deserve the cold shoulder, don't those who honor it deserve reward? In any case, they don't deserve the punishment, too.

So, if you banish Laura, do so because you were asked to do so by the man who gave you his legacy. By all means, honor that. But for those of us who have worn out their copies of Invitation and Ada for the pure joy of those books and who would love to read more, it would be tragic on the level of Hamlet to have that opportunity destroyed for the misdeeds of a vulgar, if vocal, few.

--danaadamfu

(To reply, click here)

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