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The Fate of Nabokov's LauraA Slate critic helps save Nabokov's last novel from destruction.

By Ron RosenbaumPosted Friday, April 25, 2008, at 5:12 PM ET

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Sounds simple enough, right? Then she goes on to say how Laura and Flora team up to find a clue to the location of the Holy Grail in a late painting by Leonardo da Vinci. (Kidding!)

Seriously, this summary has all the characteristic complexity of Nabokov's last two novels, Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins!, taken to some exponentially dizzying new level. And for all we know, it may, from that empyrean perspective, cast new light on what came before. On the other hand—and perhaps this is what troubled V.N. to the point that he wanted it destroyed—its imperfect state might, if used as lens through which to examine past work, prove seriously misleading.

But Lara's Laura isn't the only plot summary out there. A month after my Slate piece appeared, a writer for the London Times published an article containing a different summary of Laura that she claimed she had cobbled together from discussions with Nabokov scholars she didn't identify. Here's what she presents:

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.

The differences are rather significant. Are there two Lauras? It is possible to conceive they are parts of the same novel examined from different angles. But the man making himself disappear by meditating himself into oblivion from the toes up?

Maybe that's why Nabokov wanted it burned.

In any case, my encounters with these various fragmentary apparitions of Laura left me wanting more than ever to read the whole manuscript and spend the rest of my life trying to evaluate its relation to the rest of V.N.'s work, but things were looking grim in the period between Dmitri's ALL-CAPS E-MAIL to me threatening a private cremation and the very end of my appearance on that Australian talk show.

Ramona Koval, the program's host, had spent a half-hour eliciting opinions from Boyd (who's now in favor of saving Laura), Harvard scholar Leland de la Durantaye (in favor of burning), and me (still conflicted). And then she sprung her surprise: an e-mail from Dmitri to one of the show's producers, a woman named Sarah L'Estrange (could there be a better name in this Nabokovian perplexity?), that offered what looked like a decision at last.

The full e-mail can be found at the end of the show's transcript. But the essence is this: Dmitri says he reached a decision after an imagined ghostly conversation with his dead father—one in a far different key from Hamlet's talk with his dead dad.

"I have decided," Koval quoted Dmitri, "that my father, with a wry and fond smile, might well have contradicted himself upon seeing me in my present situation and said, "Well, why don't you mix the useful with the pleasurable? That is, say or do what you like but why not make some money on the damn thing?' "

And so the imagined shade of V.N., demonstrating indulgent and affectionate fondness for his son's "present situation" (it's not clear what exactly that means, but it could refer to financial or heath problems or just the worldwide outcry to save Laura), gave him ghostly permission to raise some funds with it.

That's putting it far too vulgarly, of course. For one thing, selling Laura might be best for the manuscript. I'm sure there are respectable scholarly institutions, museums, and foundations that would pay considerable sums to take on the guardianship of the last fictional creation of the greatest novelist of the past century, perhaps limiting access to scholars and—alas—probably excluding the "sleuths and stirrers" responsible for their windfall.

But still I found myself a little surprised by Dmitri's revelation. It certainly could be interpreted as an opportunistic communion, what with his father's spirit so genially granting Dmitri the right to discard his original wish and giving him permission to enrich himself.

But then I had an argument with my girlfriend over Dmitri's motivations, and she insisted she sensed something else going on. "It's not about the money," she insisted, "There's more to it."

And after a couple of days thinking about it, I decided she might well be right. This incident could be just as much—or more—about Dmitri creating for himself (and us) a fond image of a loving father lovingly indulging his son. It might be about him, the way he'd like to see his father as a parent. How faithful this vision is to the original we can never know. But who could begrudge the son this image?

So it's a ghost story, but it's also a kind of love story. I await the next ALL-CAPITAL-LETTER E-MAIL.