Nabokov - The Origins of Laura

Nabokov’s 18th novel began, we can assume, as his other works did, with his particular and powerful alchemy. He started writing it in 1975 and persisted while hospitalized the few months before his death in 1977. He relied on his signature creative approach (the note cards included here are testament to that), but the book was never finished. In this event, he asked that the draft be destroyed. That we are able to publish a portion of it today is a privilege and a relief to admirers, biographers and readers of every stripe, but that it would survive was never a certainty.

Rarely has an author’s dying request been so contested and concerned so many. Since the manuscript’s existence became known, wife Véra Nabokov and son Dmitri have been subject to pleas and pieces in the press debating the matter. Among those leading the charge to preserve the novel was journalist Ron Rosenbaum. In a 2005 column in The New York Observer he describes “a terrible literary tragedy in the making”; in 2008 he is more conversant in all sides of the issue, querying on the one hand, “Does it matter what V.N. would feel, since he’s long dead?” And on the other, “Do we owe no respect to his last wishes because we greedily want some ‘key’ to his work…? Does the greatness of an artist diminish his right to dispose of his own unfinished work?” Véra was never able to answer these questions in her lifetime and left them to her son. As recently as 2005, at the age of 75, the opera singer, writer and translator of his father’s work let it be known that he was prepared to fulfill his father’s wishes. But, as he writes in his introduction to the forthcoming The Original of Laura, he first had to open the precious index-card box: “I needed to traverse a stifling barrier of pain before touching the cards he had lovingly arranged and shuffled. After several tries…I first read what, despite its incompleteness, was unprecedented in structure and style, written in a new ‘softest of tongues’ that English had become for Nabokov. I attacked the task of ordering and preparing, and then dictating, a preliminary transcript.… Laura lived on in a penumbra.... Very gradually I became accustomed to this disturbing specter that seemed to be living a simultaneous twin life of its own in the stillness of a strongbox and the meanders of my mind. I could no longer even think of burning Laura.”