Sandy Klein:
The Original of Laura - according to Wylie, “has bee n under lock and
key for years” ...
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6599865.html?industryid=47150
Wylie will also be working on previously
unpublished titles from three big literary estates: there's the last
work from Vladimir Nabokov, The Original of Laura, which was unfinished
at the time of the author's death and, according to Wylie, “has been
under lock and key for years”; Robert Bolano's The Third Reich; and,
from Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera, La Ninfa Inconstante.
JM: Thanks to a
tip by Akiko Nakata, I was able to learn about Page
Stegner and his 1966 book, "Escape into Aesthetics",
which mentions the Portuguese King Sebastian in connection to Sebastian
Knight. He wrote "There is yet another
Sebastian whom our Sebastian resembles. King of Portugal in the
fourteenth century, he was a mystic and a fanatic...His subjects,
however, refused to believe him dead, and he had a number of
ipersonators[...] In fact Sebastianism became a religion that migrated
to Brazil with the Portuguese settlers[...]While Sebastian Knight
ruled only over literary subjects, and crusaded only for the conquest
of a married woman's affections, he was, it seems, something of a
mystic and did have an obscured identity, and one does wonder about the
Brazil nut that V. unearthed from the recesses of his half brother's
overstuffed armchair." (p.70)
At the time Stegner published his
work Nabokov was still living and this is why, in his first chapter, "Backgrounds
of an Artist" he only developed Nabokov's "three arcs", inspired
in SM's image of a "colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is
how I see my own life", and by VN's description ( also in SM, p.204) of
"Hegel's triadic series". Stegner's three arcs were the "thetic", the
"antithetic" and, then, the "synthetic" ( More recently, in 1982, we
are able to follow "Nabokov's Fifth Arc", edited by
J.E.Rivers and Charles Nicol, where the editor explain that "Nabokovian
forms are open forms, and there is always the implicit "And so on"
before they add, as the fifth, "the arc of literary history").
Anyway, it was Stegner who mentioned (p.11) another VN novel, "The
Exploit" and added:"about
which I have no information whatever. It has never been translated to
my knowledge."
Query: After so many
years since Stegner wrote about The Exploit this
Russian novel, quite probably, has already been published, translated
and appears under the same or another title, in this case it might even
be one I'm already familiar with. What is it's actual title in Russian
and in English?
[EDNote: The Exploit is Podvig, in English changed to Glory
because VN disliked the verbal meaning of "exploit" (see the
foreword).~SB]