The Original of Laura - Executor's Dilemma

Executor's Dilemma

Nabokov was a perfectionist and made it clear that, upon his death, any unfinished work was to be destroyed. Nabokov's wife, Vera, and their son, Dmitri, became his literary executors, but ultimately ignored his will, and did not destroy the manuscript. Dmitri noted that Vera Nabokov "failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, 'to age, weakness and immeasurable love.'" They placed it in a Swiss bank vault, where it has remained since his death. In 1991 Vera died, leaving Dmitri Nabokov as the sole literary executor. Dmitri wavered on whether to destroy the manuscript. On the one hand, he felt bound to uphold his "filial duty" and grant his father's request, but he also said the novel "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre." Dmitri noted "his father, ... or his 'father’s shade,' would not 'have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.'"

Scholars and enthusiasts disagreed over whether the manuscript should be made public; as the (London) Times posed the question: "the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art." The younger Nabokov remarked cryptically that one other person possessed a key to the manuscript, but did not say who that person was. Like Nabokov, many observers were on the fence about the disposition of the manuscript. The author Edmund White compared the author's last request to Virgil's request to destroy the Aeneid (ignored by Augustus Caesar) or Franz Kafka's request to destroy his papers (ignored by Max Brod). Nabokov weighed in on Nikolai Gogol's decision to burn the sequels to Dead Souls.

The journalist Ron Rosenbaum, who corresponded with Dmitri Nabokov, said that the son had been inclined toward destroying the manuscript, swayed by criticism of his father, such as allegations of plagiarism that arose from the discovery of a 1916 German short story, "Lolita" with some similarities to Nabokov's work, or critics who had interpreted Nabokov's work as suggesting that Nabokov was sexually abused.

In April 2008 Dmitri Nabokov told many publications, including Nabokov Online Journal and Der Spiegel, that he intended to publish the manuscript after all. In the Nabokov Online Journal interview with Suellen Stringer-Hye, Nabokov stated that he had never seriously considered burning the manuscript. Once Dmitri decided to publish the manuscript, "several short excerpts were published in advance - in the Sunday Times Magazine and also Playboy, to which Nabokov was a contributor."

BBC Newsnight predicted that the novel's publication was "likely to be the literary event of 2009."