Daniele Fabbri:We know about the feud between Wilson and Nabokov. But in the early radiant era of their correspondence, Nabokov wrote to Bunny: "I liked your Tolstoy piece very much." (Nov 1, 1948) The piece was a Wilson's review of a book about Tolstoy (The New Yorker, Aug 28, 1948). The review's title was: "The Original of Tolstoy's Natasha". Is this title the original of "The Original of Laura"?

 

Jansy Mello: An interesting hypothesis, but hard to check. Perhaps we could also conjecture that, if Wilson’s title somehow preyed on VN’s mind, it must have been more because the idea of an original lying in the background of a manifest piece, than related to a plot. Did you find any points in common between the original do LT’s Natasha and VN’s Laura?( Nabokov valued, mostly, “Anna Karenin”, and had harsh words about War and Peace)