the original of laura. nabokov’s posthumous finale.
Virgil asked that Aeneid be destroyed upon his death. Augustus decided to save it for posterity. Kafka wanted a friend to burn a collection of manuscripts on his decease. The friend ignored the request. The Trial and The Castle resulted.
Now to Nabokov.
On his deathbed, Vladamir Nabokov asked his wife, Vera, to destroy a partial manuscript, written on 138 index cards. She didn’t. This week Penguin Classics will publish a facsimile edition of that manuscript – Vladamir Nabokov’s unfinished 18th novel, The Original of Laura. (Otherwise embargoed until 17th November.)
As executor of the Nabokov estate, Dimitri Nabokov defends his decision to hold on to his father’s work. In his introduction to The Original of Laura he writes: “When the task passed to me [on his mother’ death] I did a great deal of thinking…I decided that, in putative retrospect, Nabokov would not have wanted to allow [the manuscript] to burn like a latter-day Jeanne d’Arc.”
So here it is. Nabokov’s finale. The Original of Laura. Wherein a wonderfully large man called Philip Wild marries a very promiscuous woman and meditates on the nature of death.
