Vision solves book dilemma
BY DIANE EVANS DELMIO.COM
Sunday, May 11, 2008
LITTLE ROCK — Sounds like the late Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov just pulled off a literary feat. Thirty-one years after his death, and from the grave, he’s giving the world a story. And it’s playing out through his son, Dmitri Nabokov, and how he has resolved his moral dilemma over whether to destroy or to publish the incomplete manuscript of his father’s last novel, The Original of Laura.
Vladimir’s dying wish was for his son to destroy the work, written in pencil on about 50 index cards.
But now, Dmitri has announced he will preserve the work - and that he finally has his father’s blessing.
According to The Guardian of London, the 73-year-old Dmitri told the German news magazine Der Spiegel: “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.’”
As an aside, the online magazine Slate is saying it helped nudge the decision, because in January it carried a commentary by Ron Rosenbaum, prodding Dmitri to make a decision one way or another. Makes you wonder: DoesSlate think that Rosenbaum influenced Dmitri? Or Vladimir?
So what’s in store with the publication of Laura?
In the past, Dmitri called the book “the most concentrated distillation of [his father’s] creativity” and a “radical” departure from his previous novels.
In the Paper Cuts Web log in The New York Times, writer Lawrence Van Gelder noted the nuggets he discovered digging around the newspaper’s archives.
One article, published in January 1977, reported that Vladimir had completed his new novel in his head but would not reveal details.
“I must have gone through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden,” the novelist wrote. “My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be invisible.”Diane Evans, a former Knight Ridder columnist, is president of DelMio.com, a new interactive online magazine on books for writers and readers.
Readers may send her e-mail at diane.evans@delmio.com.
Travel, Pages 98 on 05/11/2008
