http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/04/nabokov_original_of_laura.html
Nabokov's last work will not be burned
Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir, has decided to publish The Original of Laura, the novel his dying father commanded be destroyed
An author's troubling legacy ... Vladimir Nabokov and wife Vera in 1965. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Having kept the literary world in a state of suspense for years over whether he was prepared to carry out his long-standing threat to burn his father's last novel, Dmitri Nabokov has finally announced that he is prepared to save it from destruction.
Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura will now not be thrown onto the flames, the 73-year-old has told Der Spiegel magazine, arguing that his father, the creator of Lolita and Pale Fire who died in 1977, would not want his son to suffer any more over his most tortuous dilemma.
If he fails to carry out his father's last will, Dmitri is effectively betraying him, but carry it out and the world loses forever what is potentially a precious gift from the grave from one of the greatest 20th-century novelists. The moral arguments over this have been discussed on this blog before.
From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'"
He told the magazine that he had made up his mind to do so.
It was, Der Spiegel states, this "conversation" with his father that "persuaded him against assuming the role of literary arsonist".
We may assume that he will be widely thanked for his decision, even if the fragments of the novel - a collection of 50 index cards that has been languishing in a Swiss bank vault for three decades - are not of the standard of his other works.
But remarks like Dmitri's that The Original of Laura is in fact "the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity" and Nabokov scholar Zoran Kuzmanovich's observation that what he had heard of The Original of Laura was "vintage Nabokov", are tantalising enough to make one want to read it.
Publication of The Original of Laura is sure to satisfy much curiosity.
Dmitri has taken much stick for the indecisive way he has dealt with the issue, prompting the US literary critic Ron Rosenbaum to appeal to him in the online magazine Slate, "don't continue to tease". He wrote: "Dmitri, with all due respect, I think the time has come to make a decision... Tell us why you think it's the 'distillation of [your] father's art'... Or give us Laura... Or put us out of our misery and tell us that you intend to preserve the mystery forever by destroying Laura."
We await the "concentrated distillation", which is apparently about how to hold on to the joys of love in old age, with great excitement as well as a bit of trepidation.
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