The Nabokovs, back when Dmitri would do what his father told him

When he reviewed Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita, novelist Kingsley Amis cheekily asked, “Where’s all the sex, then?” As Stephen Smith of the BBC notes, “It was rumoured that ‘all the sex’ was in [Nabokov's] last book,” The Original of Laura. But no one has seen that unfinished book since Nabokov’s death in 1977. In fact, on his deathbed, the author asked his wife, Vera, to destroy the manuscript after he was gone. But as Smith notes, “Vera Nabokov never fulfilled her husband’s last wish. She agonised about what to do with the incomplete novel, while it gathered dust in the vaults of a Swiss bank …. On her own death, the burden passed to the Nabokovs’ only child, Dmitri.” Now, after agonizing about it for years, Dmitri Nabokov has decided to publish the mansucript, saying his father “would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn’t see death staring him in the face.” In an interview with Smith for the BBC News program Newsnight (which you can watch here), Dmitri Nobokov comments on the controversy that has erupted over his disobedience, but maintains, “My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn’t name a book one intends to destroy.”

Dmitri Nabokov’s decision brings to an end an impassioned argument that has been going on since his father’s death: Should Vladimir Nabokov’s wishes be observed, and this incomplete work lost forever; or should he be defied for the sake of some greater literary purpose? While many have chimed in, perhaps the most thoughtful and informed commentary has come from Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum, who corresponded with Dmitri Nabokov and wrote first this column on the dilemma itself, and then this follow-up after Dmitri told Rosenbaum he was leaning toward disobedience.