The Original of Laura Totally Explained

Everything about The Original Of Laura totally explained

The Original of Laura is a novel that Vladimir Nabokov was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It has never been published and its contents have been viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars. Nabokov had requested that upon his death the work be destroyed. His family debated for over 30 years whether to carry out this wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov announced plans to publish the work.

Background

According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974 under the title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976, he noted that the story was completed in his mind, but by then his health was failing rapidly., the equivalent of about 30 manuscript pages. (The use of index cards was normal for Nabokov, also used for many of his works, such as Lolita and Pale Fire.)

Executor's dilemma

Nabokov was a perfectionist and made it clear that, upon his death, any unfinished work was to be destroyed. Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov and wife Vera Nabokov became his literary executors but couldn't bring themselves to destroy Nabokov's final work, and so it was placed in a Swiss Bank vault where it has remained since his death. In 1991 Vera died, leaving Dmitri as the sole literary executor. Dmitri has wavered on whether to destroy the manuscript. On the one hand, he's said to feel bound to uphold his "filial duty" and grant his father's request, but he's also said the novel "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre." Dmitri has remarked cryptically that one other person possesses a key to the manuscript, but hasn't said who that person is. In the Nabokov Online Journal interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye, Dmitri also stated that he'd never seriously considered burning the manuscript.

Content

Several short excerpts of the work have been made public. In the late 1990s Dmitri read a portion of the book to a group of about 20 scholars at a centenary celebration of Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell University. The scholars Brian Boyd and Lara Delage-Toriel claim to have read the manuscript. In 1999 two passages from The Original of Laura were published in The Nabokovian, a scholarly publication devoted to Nabokov. Zoran Kuzmanovich, a scholar of Nabokov, said of passages he heard at Cornell University: "It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one's life." A writer in The Times attributed a widely differing plot description to discussions with unidentified scholars:

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 isn't clear how old Wild is, but he's preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.

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