Dmitri's ChoiceNabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches?
Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
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StumbleUponDmitri also spends time in the interview refuting some public speculations I've made about the nature of Laura. I had suggested that Laura might owe something to Otto Preminger's classic obsessive detective film of the same name, which features a portrait, an "original," of a Laura. And then, delving deeper into the matter at the suggestion of some readers, I investigated Petrarch's famous sonnets to Laura, the 14th-century "Canzonieres," which are credited with initiating the Renaissance sonnet tradition and which a littérateur like Nabokov could not have been ignorant of. Given Dmitri's dismissal of the Lolitologists, I approached his comments on my theories with some trepidation. But he found an extremely generous way of saying I was wrong on just about every point:
He rules out the influence of either Otto Preminger's Laura or Petrarch's Canzoniere 141. He denies the similarity I'd felt I'd found between Petrarch's image of a butterfly flying into a woman's eyes, mistaking their blue for the sky, and the image in the opening stanza of Pale Fire's poem in which a bird mistakenly flies into "the false azure" reflected in a window's pane, citing his father's punctiliousness about differentiating classes of winged creatures.
I must admit I have never found a critique more flattering—in the interview he calls my theories "intelligent" and seems to particularly appreciate my comparison of his difficult position vis a vis his father to Hamlet's—nor more mystifying. At the end of his discussion of Laura, he informs us that "Laura" is not even the original's name in The Original of Laura.
When I asked him, in an e-mail, to explain this apparent paradox, he declined to respond. He did add that he has copied out into more conventional manuscript pages the contents of the index cards—whose number he told me on the phone he could not remember precisely.
Well, I will set aside for the moment both my gratitude for being refuted in such a fashion—and my continued disagreement with Dmitri about the parallelism of the Petrarchan image of a butterfly (an iconic Nabokov figure) flying into the beautiful blue of a woman's eyes and the image of a bird flying into "the false azure" of Pale Fire's windowpane. I think the resemblance trumps the animal-class difference. (See if you agree with me or Dmitri; you can find both passages here.) More significant perhaps is that disputing my Laura speculations provoked Dmitri into calling into question the identity—or at least the name—of the "original" in Laura.
What then can the title mean? There are just too many unanswered questions, which multiply every time Dmitri speaks. This may be his intention; it certainly focuses our suspenseful attention on him and his decision, potentially one of the most consequential decisions in contemporary literary history. But I think it's time to end the suspense.
Dmitri, with all due respect, I think the time has come to make a decision. Tell us what you want to tell us about Laura (including the "real" name of the original). Tell us why you think it's the "distillation of [your] father's art." Tell us, please, what that can mean. Or explain why Laura is such a "radical" departure from his previous work. Or give us Laura and let us tie ourselves into knots deciding. Or put us out of our misery, and tell us that you intend to preserve the mystery forever by destroying Laura. But please don't continue to tease us.
You could also, I suppose, tell us that you have decided to find some third solution, by offering limited access to Laura for scholars, or by placing the decision in trusted hands to be made after your death, thus relieving you of an almost impossible burden.
I could understand such a compromise, but somehow I think the decision should be a deliberate one by a Nabokov heir rather than one made by fate or committee. When we spoke (by e-mail) two years ago, Dmitri revealed there were two keys to the safe deposit vault in Switzerland containing Laura. Who has the other one? What are his or her responsibilities? When I asked again this time about this mysterious secret-sharer, he declined to respond.
And the typescript version of Laura you mention in the interview. Where is that and what will its fate be? It's time to lay your cards on the table, Dmitri. Where is that and what will its fate be? It's time to lay your cards on the table, Dmitri.
And Slate readers: You're a literate bunch. Even if you're not Nabokov aficionados, you must have an opinion on the larger issue raised about the final wishes of an artist for an unfinished work of art he didn't want the world to see: Should Dmitri burn Laura? Record your advice here.
I still can't make up my mind. Part of me desperately wants to read Laura. But I have a superstitious dread of violating V.N.'s wishes. Maybe you can help me—as well as Dmitri—choose. But I think it's time to decide one way or another: The suspense is killing me.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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