Saving Vladimir Nabokov
A literary ethical dilemma involving the unpublished writings of Vladimir Nabokov is discussed at length by journalist Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate. It seems that Nabokov’s sole remaining unpublished work – a manuscript titled The Original of Laura – is mouldering away somewhere in a Swiss bank vault, unread. But Nabokov’s sole surviving heir – his 73-year-old son Dmitri – is torn about what he should do with it. Should he destroy it, as his father specifically requested, or ignore those wishes and unveil it to the world?
For the past two years I’ve involved myself in this question in print and in e-mail correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, but a recent communication from Dmitri to me suggests that a decision may be near.
[…]
Dmitri’s predicament goes beyond Laura. It’s one that raises the difficult issue of who “owns” a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it’s in?
To burn or not to burn? It’s not a question we can argue over forever. Time is running out, and the stakes are high: Dmitri’s past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity.”
So, to burn or not to burn? What say you, gentle readers?
In a nice Nabokovian way, “to burn or not to burn?” is a single question which has an obvious answer on the ethical side (burn) and an obvious answer on the literary side (do not burn), but those are of course contradictory. If Dimitri is being a good son, then he has to respect the wishes of his father; if he is being a good member of the literary community, then he has to save “Laura.”
If I were voting, I would vote to save!
Publish, but with a notice that the author expressly requested that the manuscript not be published. In this way, a reader will recognize that the work should not be viewed as genuinely representative of the author’s work. Moreover, in a perfect world, readers would read incomplete posthumous books only after reading all of an author’s published works.
[…] looks like Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri has resolved his dilemma about what to do with a fragmentary manuscript his late father left behind. (Quick recap: Vladimir […]