Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0019342, Sat, 6 Feb 2010 07:29:33 -0500

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Dmitri Nabokov has become a character straight out of Nabokov
novel ...
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http://theplagiarists.org/wordpress/?p=707



Plagiarist Gregory 12:55 pm on February 4, 2010


Real Life Becomes Nabokov Novel, Nabokov’s Real Son Becomes Nabokov Character
So, this whole thing is a response to this article. So you can skip my blathering and just read that. Or you can read this and then that or that and then this. I would not recommend just reading this and not reading that, because that is really interesting. But you’re free to do as you like.



Vladimir Nabokov is one if the great titans of 20th-century literature (or maybe any century), and in English, certainly only Conrad competes with him when it comes to writers for whom it was a second language. In religion, it is often the converts who are the most passionate and dogmatic, more so than those born into the faith, and it has been said by much smarter people than me (though often repeated by me) that Nabokov approached English and loved it with the devotion of a convert. I read Lolita over a summer during college and found it to be a profound, funny, sad, and beautiful novel. And deeply moral – those who think the book is some pedophiliac fantasy are in for a rude surprise.



Anyway, enough about that book, anyone can go and on about that book. We’re here to talk about this book: The Original of Laura. This book has been sealed up for over 30 years, kept for a time in a literal Swiss vault, under an order of execution from its author, who demanded it be burnt upon his death. The romance of such self-deluded demands has been punctured somewhat for me, as few literary heirs seem to follow these commands. If you’re famous enough, it will be printed eventually. The only defense is to be a “literary” author – this ensures that your work will suffer editorial interference, but not actually be “completed” by another author as books left behind by authors of “popular” fiction often are (see posthumous works by Robert Ludlum, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien – wait, no, don’t).



Sometimes, this can be a blessing: most of Kafka’s best-known work was unpublished and supposed to be destroyed when he died, the “original scroll” version of On The Road reveals details (especially about the sexuality and sexual exploits of him and his companions) that add tremendously to our understanding of Kerouac and his companions. But this tendency to idolize and make dogma of every journal entry, every offhand scribble, every unexpected fart, has a new entry in its Hall of Fame.



The Original of Laura was the book Nabokov was working on when he died in 1977. There are various & conflicting accounts of how far along he was in creating it, but what was extant was a stack of 138 index cards (Nabokov wrote all his work on index cards). Those cards have now been reproduced, verbatim (both sides!) in a new book, which claims to be mostly complete. Rather than re-state the case to be made against this (absurd) claim, I direct you here, to an excellent and entertaining examination of the facts and the work itself.



The point for me, though, is the author’s contention that by becoming a puffed-up shadow of his father, by indulging in pretension and assumption and poor metaphor, by claiming knowledge from beyond the grave, and by becoming part of a bizarre post-modern game of reflexivity (is that a word?) and suspect literary analysis, that Dmitri Nabokov has become a character straight out of Nabokov novel. This is one of the most deeply funny things I’ve ever heard. I hope someone writes a play about it.



PS – What is up with the children of literary giants going into the posterity business rather than the writing business? Can anyone think of the child of a great writer who wrote in their own right and didn’t spend their lives continuing their famous parent’s career in some way?











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