Dimitri Nabokov’s Burning Question
- Posted by: Andrew Price
- on January 16, 2008 at 10:08 pm
Vladimir Nabokov’s last work, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura, is locked in a Swiss bank vault. Before his death, he made it clear that he wanted the work to be burned, unpublished (it’s slightly less clear why). The decision falls to his son, Dimitri, who’s read the work and calls it “the most concentrated distillation of [my father's] creativity.”
The question: should Dimitri respect his father’s request and burn Laura or should he gift humanity with a new, possibly exceptional, Nabokov novel?
