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http://blog.oregonlive.com/books/2008/04/dmitri_saveslauraozick_wins_pr.html
Dmitri saves "Laura"
Cynthia Ozick
Dmitri Nabokov had a visit from his dead father Vladimir and decided to
publish the manuscript he's been threatening to burn. It's called "The
Original of Laura" and it was written on about 50 index cards by
Vladimir Nabokov, who stated in his will that he wanted the cards
destroyed. Dmitri Nabokov, his father's executor, has been hemming and
hawing for years about what to do, but apparently a visit from the old
man's ghost sealed the deal.
"I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it," Dmitri
Nabokov told Der Spiegel, "then my father appeared before me and said,
with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead
and publish!' "
Cynthia Ozick, the president of the Brian Doyle Fan Club, just won two
big awards. One of them has Nabokov's name on it. Ozick's not ready for
the literary scrap heap, either. Her new book, "Dictation," a short
collection of four long stories, is hot off the presses.
Complete article and photos available at the following URL:
http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/04/27/vladimir-nabokov-and-my-bookshelves/
Vladimir Nabokov and My Bookshelves
With The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, now set to
be published, and NPR re-running a feature today on Lolita, I thought it
might be a good time to share photos of my Nabokov collection (after the
cut below).
[ ... ]
The photo above, by the way, is by Jacob McMurray for my SF Site piece
on lost books. At the time I suggested Martin Amis might finish The
Original of Laura:
Nabokov intended to complete this novel after finishing Look at the
Harlequins!, but ill health prevented him from doing so. For many years,
all Nabokovites had to sustain them were such Laura notes as
“Inspiration. Radiant insomnia. The flavour and snows of beloved
alpine slopes. A novel without an I, without a he, but with the
narrator, a gliding eye, being implied throughout.” None of which
revealed much about the plot. In 1999, a friend of the Nabokovs — a
roving entomologist on a Fulbright — found a series of notecards hidden
in the casing of a Nabokov butterfly case donated to Cornell University
upon his death. The notecards sketched out a preliminary draft of The
Original of Laura. Dmitri Nabokov then enlisted the help of Martin Amis
to complete the novel. In that a first person narrator replaces
Nabokov’s “gliding eye” and that Amis inserted several seedy
characters and changed the setting of the novel to London’s underbelly,
one might wonder if it would have been better had the notecards remained
with the butterflies.
Of all the photos below, the one that is most frustrating to me–if a
photograph can frustrate–is the one showing Nabokov’s Russian
translation of Alice in Wonderland. It would be wonderful to know
Russian and be able to read his version, since I imagine it is
significantly changed from the original to fit his native language.
[ ... ]
http://tatterdemallion.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/laura-again/
Laura, again
Saving Laura, Part 2; Or, Nabokov’s Walled Garden
A year before his death, Vladimir Nabokov responded to a Book Review
survey which asked authors for comments on their three most enjoyed
books of the year. The last book that he mentioned was his own, the
controversial and never-published manuscript Laura. It seems as if the
book will be published after all, a turn that has me torn between !!!!
and regret. The scale has been tipped a bit towards !!!! by the last
paragraph of the NYT blog linked to above, which quotes Nabokov’s
comments on The Original of Laura:
“The third, as he wrote, is ‘The Original of Laura. The not quite
finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking
before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone
through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it
aloud to a small dream audienconsisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses,
several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to
be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of
coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners
than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly
published.’”
Lovely, lovely Nabokov! I want that book despite myself.
~ by feather on April 26, 2008.
Dmitri Nabokov interview on deciding to save his father's last work from
the flames - at the below URL:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/openbook
This week on Open Book: Dmitri Nabokov; William Sutcliffe on men who
refuse to grow up; and writing "faction".
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/books/28arts-SONPLANSTOPU_BRF.html
Arts, Briefly
Son Plans to Publish Nabokov’s Last Novel
Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: April 28, 2008
Dmitri Nabokov plans to defy the wishes of his father, Vladimir Nabokov,
by publishing his father’s final, incomplete novel rather than
destroying the manuscript by fire. The Guardian of London reported that
Dmitri, 73, told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “I’m a loyal son and
thought long and seriously about it. Then my father appeared before me
and said with an ironic grin: ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess. Just go
ahead and publish.’ ” For three decades the fragments of the novel, “The
Original of Laura,” on a collection of 50 index cards, have been in a
bank vault in Switzerland, where Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita”
and “Pale Fire,” died in 1977. Dmitri Nabokov, his father’s literary
executor, once described it as “the most concentrated distillation” of
his father’s creativity. In an interview with the BBC, Dmitri Nabokov
said he found “very disturbing” the thought that no one would ever read
the manuscript. But he said he would not complete it himself. “I would
never presume to finish my father’s works for him because there are so
many strands and threads and thoughts there that perhaps might have been
developed further,” he said. “And simply I don’t have the right.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/thomas-sutcliffe/thomas-sutcliffe-the-dead-shouldnt-have-the-last-word-817248.html
Thomas Sutcliffe: The dead shouldn't have the last word
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
One of the great deficiencies of the dead is that they never change
their minds. One of their advantages is that there's very little they
can do about it when someone changes it for them. Indeed, they can even
be enlisted to back up their own overruling.
When Dmitri Nabokov announced the other day that he planned to publish
his father's final manuscript, in direct contravention of his father's
request that it should be burned, he told the German magazine Der
Spiegel: "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it. Then
my father appeared before me and said with an ironic grin: 'You're stuck
in a right old mess. Just go ahead and publish'". So, after 30 years of
tantalising seclusion in a Swiss bank vault, the extant fragments of The
Original of Laura will finally be made public. Mr Nabokov Sr. wasn't
available to confirm the accuracy of his son's account.
There are Nabokov loyalists who profess to be appalled by this – though
I have a suspicion that they will master their affront sufficiently to
read the book when it comes out. Personally I think Dmitri has done the
right thing – and even if Nabokov's rough draft would have been a
smaller loss than two notorious victims of successful literary
incineration – Jane Austen's letters and Byron's memoirs – it is better
to have it than not. Dmitri's argument – that his father would probably
have thought otherwise had he had enough time to cheer up – might be
specious but it will do in the absence of anything better. But all this
is too flippant, some will say. If wepredecessors then we have no right to expect that our own requests will
be honoured. And when it comes to property there's obviously some weight
to that argument. Last wills and testaments matter because their absence
would create a wilderness of competing claims.
When it comes to ideas, though, following the instructions of the dead
can be far more dangerous – and obedience itself is likely to create a
chaos of contending interpretations. And the greater the gap between the
issuing of the instruction and our continuing attempts to carry them
out, the bigger the problem gets. Some will regard Dmitri as a betrayer
of his father's intentions. I take him as an exemplary hero of
scriptural exegesis – wisely recognising that the ultimatum was issued
under very specific circumstances and that posterity has some claim to
reconsider the matter.
His decision made me think of exegetists currently engaged in a far more
critical and important re-evaluation – the Muslim scholars who, in
various places and to various degrees, are beginning to suggest that
simplistically literal readings of seventh-century writings might not
match every detail of contemporary life and that it's important to
maintain the distinction between the hadith (or sayings and deeds of the
prophet) and the divinely dictated word of God.
It's not a distinction I recognise myself, but it's a start in
emancipating contemporary Muslims from prohibitions that have long
outlived their usefulness – and, like Dmitri, it argues that sometimes
heirs have responsibilities other than unthinking obedience. To say
otherwise is to abdicate from one of the most important human duties
there is – which is occasionally to change one's own mind in the face of
changed circumstances. The dead can offer us wisdom, guidance and
instruction – but when they give us orders we should respectfully ignore
them.
[ ... ]
http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/blogs/daily/2008/04/dmitri-nabokov.html
April 28, 2008
Culture
Dmitri Nabokov Says His Father's Last Novel Will Be Published
Dmitri Nabokov, the son of literary master and Lolita author Vladimir
Nabokov, announced last week that he will publish his father’s last
novel, The Original of Laura, against the author’s dying instruction
that the manuscript—presently in the form of 138 index cards resting in
a Swiss vault—be destroyed. The question of whether the book would be
burned or not has long tortured Nabokov scholars and fanatics, who
seemed to shudder at either possibility.
But Dmitri, who controls the novel’s fate, never planned on sending
Laura to the incinerator. “It’s not that I’ve been racking my brain for
the past 30 years or suffering or agonizing as some people have
suggested,” he told me. “I never intended to burn it. I just didn’t know
how to deal with it.” He concedes that public pressure, notably from the
“impatient” journalist Ron Rosenbaum (Dmitri’s description, not mine),
is what pushed him to announce his decision. “When [my father] was
dying, he was running a hundred-yard dash, or a hundred-card dash,
against death,” Dmitri says. “He was highly stressed and highly desirous
of achieving the goal at the end of the book. And at the same time, he
was unwilling to leave it trailing behind him in an unfinished state.
But one’s state of mind when facing imminent death is not always the
most definitive state of mind. I feel that now, if he were to be
speaking to me from this world or some other world, he would smile
wryly, and say ‘Look, I see what kind of mess you are in. Why don’t you
just go ahead and publish it? Have fun. Make some money if you want. And
don’t worry about it.’ I felt that his presence was somewhere there,
sustaining and supporting my decision.”
“There was never any back and forth, and I’ve not changed my mind since
my father’s death,” he insists. “I have spoken of the problem, and I’ve
said that it was a difficult matter to decide, but my decisionwavered.” So why tease the public and let the question linger? “I’ve
never teased really. One can be clever, one can try to reveal a little
bit without revealing everything, one can write with a sense of humor,
but I don’t think that I can be accused of deliberately teasing anyone.”
Dmitri can’t reveal who is publishing the novel, when it will be
available, or what the plot is about, but what he can tell me is that
the protagonist is “a brilliant scholar. Very, very fat. Comically fat.
Comically unattractive. And plagued with a marriage to a much younger
and hopelessly promiscuous wife. At a certain point, he begins almost
jokingly, almost playfully, to ponder the question of self-destruction.
But then he decides that he doesn’t want to even think of permanent
suicide. Instead, he desires a reversible suicide. And so he begins with
his toes and works up, but always perceiving a return on an interior
screen on the inside of the eyelids.” These details are in line with
what Dmitri has said about the book in past interviews. “It contains
some of the most original imagery, some of the most unbelievable turns
of phrase that we don’t find elsewhere in his work,” he claims. “The
writer’s craft is taken to a new high.”
It’s no secret that Dmitri is not happy with the scrutiny and
controversy that his father’s Lolita has had to endure, particularly
with interpretations that suggest its pedophiliac plot was somehow
autobiographical. When I ask if Laura has any autobiographical
significance, Dmitri instantly responds, “Hell no. My father had too
much fantasy of his own for that to be necessary.” Later, he amends his
answer, saying that while his father “sometimes endowed his characters
with certain traits of real people, or even occasionally introduced real
people into his works…Laura is a wonderful figure of his fantasy.”
Nabokov’s final work of fiction is incomplete, which Dmitri assures me
is the sole reason the author insisted it never be shared with the
world. “He was extremely reluctant ever to have unfinished fragments
trail behind him, like a kind of ambiguous cape,” he explains. I ask
Dmitri if he or anyone else will finish the narrative. “No,” he replies.
“I would never permit myself that luxury or that agony of dealing with
my father’s themes and unterminated thoughts. The book is quite complete
as it is. It leaves room for further development. It leaves space for
further embellishment of themes and ideas. And it does have an ending,
several possible endings in fact. However, I don’t think he would want
anyone else to finish it.”
When I press him for more details, Dmitri says, “Soon we will all
discover together.” Indeed we will. —Kate Ahlborn
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Dmitri saves "Laura"
Cynthia Ozick
Dmitri Nabokov had a visit from his dead father Vladimir and decided to
publish the manuscript he's been threatening to burn. It's called "The
Original of Laura" and it was written on about 50 index cards by
Vladimir Nabokov, who stated in his will that he wanted the cards
destroyed. Dmitri Nabokov, his father's executor, has been hemming and
hawing for years about what to do, but apparently a visit from the old
man's ghost sealed the deal.
"I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it," Dmitri
Nabokov told Der Spiegel, "then my father appeared before me and said,
with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead
and publish!' "
Cynthia Ozick, the president of the Brian Doyle Fan Club, just won two
big awards. One of them has Nabokov's name on it. Ozick's not ready for
the literary scrap heap, either. Her new book, "Dictation," a short
collection of four long stories, is hot off the presses.
Complete article and photos available at the following URL:
http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/04/27/vladimir-nabokov-and-my-bookshelves/
Vladimir Nabokov and My Bookshelves
With The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, now set to
be published, and NPR re-running a feature today on Lolita, I thought it
might be a good time to share photos of my Nabokov collection (after the
cut below).
[ ... ]
The photo above, by the way, is by Jacob McMurray for my SF Site piece
on lost books. At the time I suggested Martin Amis might finish The
Original of Laura:
Nabokov intended to complete this novel after finishing Look at the
Harlequins!, but ill health prevented him from doing so. For many years,
all Nabokovites had to sustain them were such Laura notes as
“Inspiration. Radiant insomnia. The flavour and snows of beloved
alpine slopes. A novel without an I, without a he, but with the
narrator, a gliding eye, being implied throughout.” None of which
revealed much about the plot. In 1999, a friend of the Nabokovs — a
roving entomologist on a Fulbright — found a series of notecards hidden
in the casing of a Nabokov butterfly case donated to Cornell University
upon his death. The notecards sketched out a preliminary draft of The
Original of Laura. Dmitri Nabokov then enlisted the help of Martin Amis
to complete the novel. In that a first person narrator replaces
Nabokov’s “gliding eye” and that Amis inserted several seedy
characters and changed the setting of the novel to London’s underbelly,
one might wonder if it would have been better had the notecards remained
with the butterflies.
Of all the photos below, the one that is most frustrating to me–if a
photograph can frustrate–is the one showing Nabokov’s Russian
translation of Alice in Wonderland. It would be wonderful to know
Russian and be able to read his version, since I imagine it is
significantly changed from the original to fit his native language.
[ ... ]
http://tatterdemallion.wordpress.com/2008/04/26/laura-again/
Laura, again
Saving Laura, Part 2; Or, Nabokov’s Walled Garden
A year before his death, Vladimir Nabokov responded to a Book Review
survey which asked authors for comments on their three most enjoyed
books of the year. The last book that he mentioned was his own, the
controversial and never-published manuscript Laura. It seems as if the
book will be published after all, a turn that has me torn between !!!!
and regret. The scale has been tipped a bit towards !!!! by the last
paragraph of the NYT blog linked to above, which quotes Nabokov’s
comments on The Original of Laura:
“The third, as he wrote, is ‘The Original of Laura. The not quite
finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking
before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone
through it some 50 times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it
aloud to a small dream audienconsisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses,
several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to
be almost invisible. Perhaps because of my stumblings and fits of
coughing the story of my poor Laura had less success with my listeners
than it will have, I hope, with intelligent reviewers when properly
published.’”
Lovely, lovely Nabokov! I want that book despite myself.
~ by feather on April 26, 2008.
Dmitri Nabokov interview on deciding to save his father's last work from
the flames - at the below URL:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/mainframe.shtml?http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio4_aod.shtml?radio4/openbook
This week on Open Book: Dmitri Nabokov; William Sutcliffe on men who
refuse to grow up; and writing "faction".
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/books/28arts-SONPLANSTOPU_BRF.html
Arts, Briefly
Son Plans to Publish Nabokov’s Last Novel
Compiled by LAWRENCE VAN GELDER
Published: April 28, 2008
Dmitri Nabokov plans to defy the wishes of his father, Vladimir Nabokov,
by publishing his father’s final, incomplete novel rather than
destroying the manuscript by fire. The Guardian of London reported that
Dmitri, 73, told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “I’m a loyal son and
thought long and seriously about it. Then my father appeared before me
and said with an ironic grin: ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess. Just go
ahead and publish.’ ” For three decades the fragments of the novel, “The
Original of Laura,” on a collection of 50 index cards, have been in a
bank vault in Switzerland, where Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita”
and “Pale Fire,” died in 1977. Dmitri Nabokov, his father’s literary
executor, once described it as “the most concentrated distillation” of
his father’s creativity. In an interview with the BBC, Dmitri Nabokov
said he found “very disturbing” the thought that no one would ever read
the manuscript. But he said he would not complete it himself. “I would
never presume to finish my father’s works for him because there are so
many strands and threads and thoughts there that perhaps might have been
developed further,” he said. “And simply I don’t have the right.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/columnists/thomas-sutcliffe/thomas-sutcliffe-the-dead-shouldnt-have-the-last-word-817248.html
Thomas Sutcliffe: The dead shouldn't have the last word
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
One of the great deficiencies of the dead is that they never change
their minds. One of their advantages is that there's very little they
can do about it when someone changes it for them. Indeed, they can even
be enlisted to back up their own overruling.
When Dmitri Nabokov announced the other day that he planned to publish
his father's final manuscript, in direct contravention of his father's
request that it should be burned, he told the German magazine Der
Spiegel: "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it. Then
my father appeared before me and said with an ironic grin: 'You're stuck
in a right old mess. Just go ahead and publish'". So, after 30 years of
tantalising seclusion in a Swiss bank vault, the extant fragments of The
Original of Laura will finally be made public. Mr Nabokov Sr. wasn't
available to confirm the accuracy of his son's account.
There are Nabokov loyalists who profess to be appalled by this – though
I have a suspicion that they will master their affront sufficiently to
read the book when it comes out. Personally I think Dmitri has done the
right thing – and even if Nabokov's rough draft would have been a
smaller loss than two notorious victims of successful literary
incineration – Jane Austen's letters and Byron's memoirs – it is better
to have it than not. Dmitri's argument – that his father would probably
have thought otherwise had he had enough time to cheer up – might be
specious but it will do in the absence of anything better. But all this
is too flippant, some will say. If wepredecessors then we have no right to expect that our own requests will
be honoured. And when it comes to property there's obviously some weight
to that argument. Last wills and testaments matter because their absence
would create a wilderness of competing claims.
When it comes to ideas, though, following the instructions of the dead
can be far more dangerous – and obedience itself is likely to create a
chaos of contending interpretations. And the greater the gap between the
issuing of the instruction and our continuing attempts to carry them
out, the bigger the problem gets. Some will regard Dmitri as a betrayer
of his father's intentions. I take him as an exemplary hero of
scriptural exegesis – wisely recognising that the ultimatum was issued
under very specific circumstances and that posterity has some claim to
reconsider the matter.
His decision made me think of exegetists currently engaged in a far more
critical and important re-evaluation – the Muslim scholars who, in
various places and to various degrees, are beginning to suggest that
simplistically literal readings of seventh-century writings might not
match every detail of contemporary life and that it's important to
maintain the distinction between the hadith (or sayings and deeds of the
prophet) and the divinely dictated word of God.
It's not a distinction I recognise myself, but it's a start in
emancipating contemporary Muslims from prohibitions that have long
outlived their usefulness – and, like Dmitri, it argues that sometimes
heirs have responsibilities other than unthinking obedience. To say
otherwise is to abdicate from one of the most important human duties
there is – which is occasionally to change one's own mind in the face of
changed circumstances. The dead can offer us wisdom, guidance and
instruction – but when they give us orders we should respectfully ignore
them.
[ ... ]
http://www.vanityfair.com/ontheweb/blogs/daily/2008/04/dmitri-nabokov.html
April 28, 2008
Culture
Dmitri Nabokov Says His Father's Last Novel Will Be Published
Dmitri Nabokov, the son of literary master and Lolita author Vladimir
Nabokov, announced last week that he will publish his father’s last
novel, The Original of Laura, against the author’s dying instruction
that the manuscript—presently in the form of 138 index cards resting in
a Swiss vault—be destroyed. The question of whether the book would be
burned or not has long tortured Nabokov scholars and fanatics, who
seemed to shudder at either possibility.
But Dmitri, who controls the novel’s fate, never planned on sending
Laura to the incinerator. “It’s not that I’ve been racking my brain for
the past 30 years or suffering or agonizing as some people have
suggested,” he told me. “I never intended to burn it. I just didn’t know
how to deal with it.” He concedes that public pressure, notably from the
“impatient” journalist Ron Rosenbaum (Dmitri’s description, not mine),
is what pushed him to announce his decision. “When [my father] was
dying, he was running a hundred-yard dash, or a hundred-card dash,
against death,” Dmitri says. “He was highly stressed and highly desirous
of achieving the goal at the end of the book. And at the same time, he
was unwilling to leave it trailing behind him in an unfinished state.
But one’s state of mind when facing imminent death is not always the
most definitive state of mind. I feel that now, if he were to be
speaking to me from this world or some other world, he would smile
wryly, and say ‘Look, I see what kind of mess you are in. Why don’t you
just go ahead and publish it? Have fun. Make some money if you want. And
don’t worry about it.’ I felt that his presence was somewhere there,
sustaining and supporting my decision.”
“There was never any back and forth, and I’ve not changed my mind since
my father’s death,” he insists. “I have spoken of the problem, and I’ve
said that it was a difficult matter to decide, but my decisionwavered.” So why tease the public and let the question linger? “I’ve
never teased really. One can be clever, one can try to reveal a little
bit without revealing everything, one can write with a sense of humor,
but I don’t think that I can be accused of deliberately teasing anyone.”
Dmitri can’t reveal who is publishing the novel, when it will be
available, or what the plot is about, but what he can tell me is that
the protagonist is “a brilliant scholar. Very, very fat. Comically fat.
Comically unattractive. And plagued with a marriage to a much younger
and hopelessly promiscuous wife. At a certain point, he begins almost
jokingly, almost playfully, to ponder the question of self-destruction.
But then he decides that he doesn’t want to even think of permanent
suicide. Instead, he desires a reversible suicide. And so he begins with
his toes and works up, but always perceiving a return on an interior
screen on the inside of the eyelids.” These details are in line with
what Dmitri has said about the book in past interviews. “It contains
some of the most original imagery, some of the most unbelievable turns
of phrase that we don’t find elsewhere in his work,” he claims. “The
writer’s craft is taken to a new high.”
It’s no secret that Dmitri is not happy with the scrutiny and
controversy that his father’s Lolita has had to endure, particularly
with interpretations that suggest its pedophiliac plot was somehow
autobiographical. When I ask if Laura has any autobiographical
significance, Dmitri instantly responds, “Hell no. My father had too
much fantasy of his own for that to be necessary.” Later, he amends his
answer, saying that while his father “sometimes endowed his characters
with certain traits of real people, or even occasionally introduced real
people into his works…Laura is a wonderful figure of his fantasy.”
Nabokov’s final work of fiction is incomplete, which Dmitri assures me
is the sole reason the author insisted it never be shared with the
world. “He was extremely reluctant ever to have unfinished fragments
trail behind him, like a kind of ambiguous cape,” he explains. I ask
Dmitri if he or anyone else will finish the narrative. “No,” he replies.
“I would never permit myself that luxury or that agony of dealing with
my father’s themes and unterminated thoughts. The book is quite complete
as it is. It leaves room for further development. It leaves space for
further embellishment of themes and ideas. And it does have an ending,
several possible endings in fact. However, I don’t think he would want
anyone else to finish it.”
When I press him for more details, Dmitri says, “Soon we will all
discover together.” Indeed we will. —Kate Ahlborn
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
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