"The Original of Laura" is about an author
who loves himself to death. Not everyone will read "The Original of Laura" this
way; many readers of this auto-elegy won't agree that Nabokov has found the fun
in funeral..If we don't treat the text as pure surface, and if we don't want to
see it as a dying author's miscarriage, we will have to read it as Nabokov's
last metafictive parable. In no meaningful sense a novel, "Laura" has as its
closest predecessor probably Nabokov's 1957 poem "The Ballad of Longwood Glen,"
in which Art Longwood, "a local florist," climbs up into a tree and
disappears[...] the compensation for Art's disappearance is supposed to be the
poem they are in..." For Naiman, this book contains "one of the most
interesting short stories Nabokov never wrote."
JM: After reading
E.N's suggestion about TOoL's "closest predecessor", I was
immediately reminded of a short story Nabokov did write and which
"could be regarded...as a tongue-in-cheek story about the
strange case of one poet dissolving in another." It was
published soon after a poem,originally published in Russian by Vasiliy Shishkov
(in the Russkiya Zapiski,
1939) which had been greeted with "exceptional enthusiasm" by the
critic Adamovich*. The poem expresses a mixture of fun and
nostalgia concerning a passage into another region
resembling dissolution together
with "all the things
that already I cannot express." And yet, this poem concludes
with the promise of a "silent seed."
"In a moment
we'll pass across the world's threshold into a region—name it as you please:
wilderness, death, disavowal of language, or maybe simpler: the silence of love;
the silence of a distant cartway, its furrow, beneath the foam of flowers
concealed; my silent country (the love that is hopeless); the silent sheet
lightning, the silent seed."
TOoL's over exposure is at
present far from silent but Nabokov's seed, like hopeless
love, will certainly flourish in genius and
in parody.
..........................................................................................
* As VN describes it: "I could not resist elaborating the fun and...I published in the
same Poslednie Novosti...my prose piece "Vasiliy Shishkov."
Adamovich refused, at first, to acknowledge that it was Nabokov
(Sirin) who had invented Shishkov. Later, the critic admitted that
Nabokov "was a sufficiently skillful parodist to mimic
genius." and VN adds:" I fervently wish all
critics to be as generous as he."(Preface to a collection of
stories named "Tyrants
Destroyed")