The Original of Laura - Publication of Excerpts

Publication of Excerpts

In the late 1990s Dmitri Nabokov read a portion of the book to a group of about 20 scholars at a centenary celebration of his father at Cornell University. The scholars Brian Boyd and Lara Delage-Toriel claim to have read the manuscript. In 1999 two passages from The Original of Laura were published in The Nabokovian, a scholarly publication devoted to Nabokov. Zoran Kuzmanovich, a scholar of Nabokov, said of passages he heard at Cornell University, "It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one's life."

The German weekly Die Zeit in its 14 August 2008 issue reproduced some of Nabokov's original index cards which had been obtained by journalist Malte Herwig. In the accompanying article, Herwig concluded that "Laura", although fragmentary, was "vintage Nabokov".

According to a 2006 account of the book by Lara Delage-Toriel, the narrator and protagonist of Nabokov's book receives a novel titled My Laura from a painter. The narrator realizes that the novel is in fact about his own wife Flora, whom the painter had once pursued. In this novel within the novel, Laura is "destroyed" by the narrator (the "I" of the book). Delage-Toriel also notes that the names of Laura and Flora, possibly refer to well-known High Renaissance portraits of women by Titian and Giorgione, both evoking the Italian sonneteer Petrarch's unconsummated obsession with a woman named Laura.

According to Delage-Toriel, the meaning of "the Original" is unclear:

Does it refer to the mistress of the “I,” the Laura of My Laura, or to the probable mistress of this novel’s author, the Flora of The Original of Laura? The manuscript’s playful juxtapositions obviously incite the reader to fuse both ‘originals’ into a single original, a gesture which Nabokov graphically performs in ‘chapter’ 5, by contriving an amusing hybrid, ‘Flaura’. On close observation of the manuscript, one notices that the name contains in fact two capital letters, ‘F’ and ‘L’, as though Nabokov had been loath to give precedence to either name and had instead opted for some typographical monster, a bicephalous cipher of sorts.

The Original of Laura was the subject of a 1998 literary prank which capitalized on its cachet as a mysterious "lost work" of a renowned author. Jeff Edmunds, a Pennsylvania State University employee and editor of the Nabokov website Zembla, posted an essay on his site entitled "The Original of Laura: A First Look at Nabokov's Last Novel". The essay, supposedly written by a Swiss scholar named Michel Desommelier, included concocted passages from Laura that fooled scholars and even Dmitri Nabokov. Edmunds then worked with Nabokov's Russian translator, Sergei Il'in, to publish the fake passages in Russian literary journals.