In Sketchy ‘Original of Laura,’ Nabokov Jousts With Death - The New York Times The New York Times Books |In a Sketchy Hall of Mirrors, Nabokov Jousts With Death and Reality Search Books | Books of The Times In a Sketchy Hall of Mirrors, Nabokov Jousts With Death and Reality Continue reading the main story Given the shape of Vladimir Nabokov ’s own life, it’s hardly surprising that death — and its cousin loss — permeated his fiction like a potent but noxious perfume. Nabokov’s wealthy, aristocratic family was forced to flee Russia in the wake of the Revolution, and in 1922 his father, a liberal politician, was shot at a rally in Berlin, trying to protect another man from an assassin. The Nazis would later drive Nabokov and his wife and son from Europe to America, where they moved from sublet to sublet, motel to motel.

Although he gave up his beloved Russian and reinvented himself as one of the great prose stylists of the English language, an exile’s detachment and nostalgia would always lurk beneath the surface of his playful, glittering prose, and a heightened awareness of mortality would create a powerful undertow in his novels and short stories. Indeed, death comes to Nabokov characters with astonishing swiftness, variety and heartlessness. He famously dispatched the narrator’s mother in “Lolita” with a two-word parenthesis “(picnic, lightning)” and subjected other creations to death by fire, poison, ski jump, suicide, bus accident, strangulation, gunshot, assorted illnesses and firing squad. In “The Original of Laura” — fragments of a novel that Nabokov left unfinished at his death and that his son, Dmitri, decided, after much agonizing, to publish against his father’s wishes — he imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes. It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life.

“The process of dying by auto-dissolution,” Philip asserts, “afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story Philip’s grotesque story was sketched out by Nabokov on index cards, which, according to his son, he worked on “feverishly” during the last months of his life in a hospital in Lausanne, Switzerland; he left express instructions with his wife, Vera, that “Laura” should be burned if it remained unfinished at the time of his death. Vera Nabokov (who had once saved “Lolita” from going up in smoke, when her husband became convinced that it would always remain a victim of incomprehension) failed to carry out this task, her procrastination due, her son writes, “to age, weakness and immeasurable love.” After years of procrastination himself, Dmitri decided that his father, who died in 1977, or his “father’s shade,” would not “have opposed the release of ‘Laura’ once ‘Laura’ had survived the hum of time this long.” Photo Nabokov Credit Jerry Bauer Was Dmitri right to publish “The Original of Laura: (Dying Is Fun)”?

Do the index cards (reproduced with meticulous care by the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, in an ingenious punch-out format) represent, as Dmitri has said, “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity? Does this fragmentary manuscript constitute the makings of “a brilliant, original and potentially radical book”? Or does the unfinished manuscript — like works left behind by Ernest Hemingway and published after his death by his estate — simply feel like an embarrassing and unfortunate coda to the master magician’s oeuvre? In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision. Just as “The Enchanter,” a precursor to “Lolita” that was written in 1939 and published after his death, reads like a crude, often flat-footed version of its famous descendant, so these fragments of “Laura” — so cryptic and sketchy — represent an incomplete, fetal rendering of whatever it was that Nabokov held within his imagination.

Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of “Laura” will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans, who will find many of the author’s perennial themes and obsessions percolating through the story of Philip, an “enormously fat creature” with “ridiculously small feet, ” and his wildly promiscuous wife, Flora, who seems to have been the inspiration for a fictional character named Laura. Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up Privacy Policy Like the heroine of “Lolita,” Flora-Laura was a nymphet who attracted the attention of her mother’s lover — in this case an importunate Englishman named Hubert H. Hubert (bizarrely recalling Humbert Humbert in “Lolita”). And like so many of the author’s earlier heroes, Philip is a writer whose transactions with life and art mirror Nabokov’s own jousting matches with reality and his love of artifice and sleight of hand.

In these pages readers will find bright flashes of Nabokovian wordplay (“The potentate had been potent till the absurd age of 80”) and surreal, Magritte-like descriptions: “The street lights were going out in alternate order, the odd numbers first. Along the pavement in front of the villa her obese husband, in a rumpled black suit and tartan booties with clasps, was walking a striped cat on an overlong leash.” They will also find some small, walk-on parts that read like parodic self-portraits: a tennis teacher “who had coached players in Odessa before World War I and still retained his effortless exquisite style”; a professor of Russian literature, “bored to extinction by his subject”; and an “old illusionist who is able to go behind a screen in the guise of a Cossack and instantly come out at the other end as Uncle Sam.” Most hauntingly, given the circumstances of its composition, “Laura” explores the subjects of death and the otherworldly with contemplative urgency.

Philip speaks of finding a way “to woo death,” of discovering “an element of creativeness” in the willful “process of self-obliteration.” And there are notes about how extinction can signify an “absorption into the divine essence” — notes suggesting that art affords an escape route from the chronological tyranny of time, and that death, like a caterpillar’s entry into a chrysalis, may only be a stage of transformation on the way toward rebirth as one of the author’s beloved butterflies. The final irony concerning “The Original of Laura,” of course, is the fact that its very form — an incomplete manuscript — recalls a favorite Nabokovian device: the notion of a set of “strange pages” or imperfect scribblings found, edited or annotated by another character. This device — H.

H.’s memoir edited and published after his death (“Lolita”), say, or John Shade’s poem, introduced and commented upon by a scholar named Charles Kinbote (“Pale Fire”) — was not only a clever, postmodernist frame deployed by Nabokov in his endlessly inventive pursuit of complication, but it was also a sort of metaphysical statement on Art and the Artist, a rumination upon the inscrutable mysteries of creation. THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | Nabokov's final literary striptease Nabokov's final literary striptease By Stephen Smith Newsnight Culture Correspondent In an exclusive interview, the son of novelist Vladimir Nabokov tells Newsnight why he is defying his father's wishes to posthumously publish the controversial writer's final novel. Stephen Smith goes in search of Nabokov's lost novel After the death of the notorious libertine Lord Byron, who was mad, bad and dangerous to know, his memoirs were thrown into the fire at the offices of his publishers John Murray in Edinburgh, in 1824. The poet's literary executors decided to destroy Byron's journals in order to protect his reputation.

Byron's short but eventful life had taken him to Switzerland, among other places, and his Prisoner of Chillon was inspired by the brooding medieval castle of the same name on Lake Geneva. A hundred and fifty years or so after Byron's death, another writer associated with sexual controversy passed away on the banks of the lake, posing a conundrum to his own executors. He was Vladimir Nabokov, author of the brilliant but scandalous Lolita (1955), a blackly comic account of middle-aged Humbert Humbert's infatuation with a 12-year-old girl. At the time of his death in 1977, Nabokov was working on another novel, said to deal with some of the same challenging if uncomfortable themes. Last wish The novelist Kingsley Amis, reviewing Lolita, had written mischievously, "Where's all the sex, then?" 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 It was rumoured that "all the sex" was in this last book.

Nabokov made his wife Vera promise him on his deathbed that the manuscript would go the same way as Byron's diaries. The book never appeared, and the world was entitled to think that it had read the entire corpus of the dazzling stylist. But 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. She could not bring herself to commit the manuscript to the flames. On her own death, the burden passed to the Nabokovs' only child, Dmitri. A man who has combined the careers of opera singer and racing driver, Dmitri was also a respected and assiduous translator and editor of his father's works. But it seems he could no more resolve the dilemma of Nabokov's last book than could his mother. Subject of speculation Over the years, and particularly since the advent of the internet, the fate of the novel has been much debated by Nabokov readers and academics.

With something of his father's talent for creating a stir, Dmitri has given the impression that he was prepared to see the book disappear for good, only to leave others with a strong sense that publication was in the offing. Vladimir Nabokov's final, incomplete novel is to be published in 2009. The affair of Nabokov's last book has become a kind of literary striptease, with tantalising glimpses of this sensation flitting into public view. Its title was said to be The Original of Laura. A scholarly journal devoted to Nabokov studies ran a competition inviting readers to submit prose in the style of the author. Of the five entries published by the magazine, two were said to be by Nabokov himself, unpublished fragments of Laura. Its plot apparently concerns a portly academic called Philip Wild, and Flora, his much slimmer, "wildly promiscuous" wife. Flora catches Wild's eye because of her resemblance to a young woman he had once been in love with. Wild is preoccupied by his own mortality, and resolves to obliterate himself from the toes upward, through the power of meditation.

Death, be it ever so unlikely, is a theme of the book, as it is in so much of Nabokov. All the principal characters in Lolita are dead by the time Humbert tells his tale, Humbert included. Some biographers have traced this fascination to the hapless end of Nabokov's own father, a Russian noblemen and politician, killed by a bullet meant for someone else with whom he happened to be sharing a platform at the time. Finally, at the age of 73, Dmitri Nabokov has said that his father's last book will be spared the bonfire. Indeed, it will be published next year in what is likely to be the literary event of 2009. Dmitri Nabokov pictured with his father, Vladimir, in 1961. Newsnight went to meet Dmitri at his house in Montreux, where he talked for the first time in a television interview about what led him at last to his decision. "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." Of his father's last wish, Dmitri said: "He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn't see death staring him in the face. He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it." Dividing opinions It's perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. Tom Stoppard With all due ceremony, a white-gloved attendant shimmered into Dmitri's sitting room, bearing the book from the vaults. It consisted of a grey wallet containing dozens of hand-written index cards. It was Nabokov's practice, having conceived of a novel in his head, to plot it out on cards in longhand, before producing finished pages. Because of Dmitri's unsleeping filial protectiveness, not to mention the terms of his publishing deal, we were not allowed to read the masterpiece through, let alone film it to anything like its full extent. The book will be published unfinished, just as the master left it. The literary world is in two minds about it. John Banville, winner of the Booker prize, worries that it might compare unfavourably to Nabokov's greatest achievements.

But he told us it is as fascinating and compelling as unpublished work by Joyce or Beckett would be. Tom Stoppard says: "It's perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it." Scholars note that Nabokov had form in this area, once wishing to see a match applied to a novella of his called The Enchanter, ironically a kind of prequel to Lolita. Perhaps it is true that his final work is even more scandalising than the earlier book, that it has "all the sex" in it. The last of the veils hasn't quite slipped from Laura yet. 10 Unfinished Novels | ShortList Magazine Entertainment 10 Unfinished Novels Death is such a messy business. All that pain, remorse and expense. Best avoided really. And when the Grim Reaper does finally put in an appearance it’s always at a most inopportune time. You could still be plotting how to finish putting that shelf up. Or plucking up the courage to invite Rita from your whist group out for a fish supper. Perhaps you were in the middle of writing your magnum opus. The tome that would have floored literary circles the world over.

Unfinished novels are such a troublesome business. Just like that death malarkey. Herewith, 10 great unfinished books. If only they’d tried a bit harder. Procrastinated less. Which, of course, is rich coming from us. We've never started a book, let alone not finished one. (Images: Rex Features) The Mystery of Edwin Drood – Charles Dickens When he died, aged 58, in 1870, Charles Dickens was exactly halfway through his final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. As well as mixing in the usual Dickensian tropes of social commentary and colourful characters, his death meant that Drood’s puzzling disappearance was never resolved. Many have attempted to piece together the clues the author left behind, not least a recent BBC adaptation, but perhaps Dickens’s last great act was leaving behind a classic whodunit. The Original of Laura – Vladimir Nabokov Like many authors, feted Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov left express intentions that any unfinished work should be destroyed upon his death. Following his passing in 1977, his final book, The Original of Laura, wasn’t destroyed but held in a bank vault as his son deliberated whether to publish it.

In 2009, it finally saw the light of day. A fragmented novel concerned with ageing and the complexities of love, literary figures despaired that the man behind the classic Lolita should not have had his final wish honoured. The Love of the Last Tycoon – F Scott Fitzgerald Towards the end of his enigmatic, innovative and controversial life, F Scott Fitzgerald worked on the fringes of Hollywood. It’s thought he found such work below him, but it obviously provided the inspiration for his last work, The Love of the Last Tycoon. A thinly veiled account of movie mogul Irving Thalberg, Fitzgerald completed 17 of his proposed 31 chapters before he died in 1940. Edited by his friend Edmund Wilson it was published the year after his death. The Mysterious Stranger – Mark Twain Mark Twain had worked on three versions of this novel by the time he died in 1910. Unfortunately, none were finished. However, one theme that underpinned all three attempts was Twain’s caustic attacks on the failings of organised religion. Six years after his death a version was published but seems to have clumsily pieced together bits of the different versions.

Twain, who was endlessly debated during his lifetime, was continually pored over in death. Poodle Springs – Raymond Chandler (and Robert B Parker) Philip Marlowe is one of literature’s most enduring figures. A tough, complicated and brooding detective, he was a gift for the cinema age – as portrayed memorably by Humphrey Bogart. Created by Raymond Chandler, Marlowe was stepping out for his eighth novel when Chandler died in 1959. However, to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth, contemporary crime writer Robert B Parker, with the blessing of the Chandler estate, completed the novel based upon the four chapters of hardboiled prose Chandler wrote. Weir of Hermiston – Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for the archetypal boy’s own adventure Treasure Island, but at the time of his death he was working on what acolytes have since deemed his masterpiece. Weir of Hermiston is an epic novel set during the Napoleonic Wars at the beginning of the 19th Century. Focussing on the travails of Archie Weir, it touches upon the tragic effects of conflict within the family, love and social commentary. Not pirates and buried treasure then.

The Ivory Tower – Henry James The creation of modern America towards the end of the 19th Century was a rich source of material for novelists of the age. Henry James was one such writer, his books, drenched in realism and literary allusions are now seen as fascinating critiques of this time. The Ivory Tower was one such book – a tale of unfathomable riches and the consequences of such wealth upon two families and the rising industrial classes – it was left unfinished when James died in 1916, although it was published the following year. The Garden of Eden - Ernest Hemingway Although he started work on The Garden of Eden in 1946, it was still uncompleted when Ernest Hemingway died 15 years later. It didn’t see the light of day for another 25 years. The novel tells the story of newlyweds David and Catherine Bourne. While on honeymoon both the Bournes fall for the beautiful Marita, thus setting off a chain of destructive events. The novel itself ran to 800 pages and when it was finally published a number of cuts had to be made which upset Hemingway devotees.

The Pale King – David Foster Wallace Before he committed suicide aged just 46 in 2008, David Foster Wallace was regarded as one of the brightest and most inventive voices in American fiction. His 1996 work, Infinite Jest, was acclaimed as a Great American Novel. The following year he began work on the book that he would still be writing at the time of his death. A complex, multi-layered book that focuses on the human condition and the minutiae of daily life, The Pale King runs to 500 pages and was, according to Wallace, only a third finished. Yet, after much editing it was published in 2011. The First Man – Albert Camus Student fave Albert Camus was working on perhaps his most realistic and certainly his most personal novel when he was killed in a car crash in 1960. The First Man is based upon his childhood in Algeria, and examines the vexed issues of colonialism, family relationships and politics, while touching upon the more authentic experiences of childhood. Camus’s daughter transcribed the unfinished manuscript and it was finally published in 1994.

Read more on: 10 Famous Authors and Their Unfinished Manuscripts | Mental Floss 10 Famous Authors and Their Unfinished Manuscripts istock Like us on Facebook What do we do when an author dies with their work unfinished? Do we let it molder in vaults, stash it away in archives, or publish it for all the world to see—even if that’s not what the author intended? The problem crops up more often than you might think, since most authors have many less-than-polished drafts hiding somewhere in the files. And while some authors have asked for unfinished work to be destroyed, doing so just might deprive the world of a treasure. Read on for several examples of unfinished manuscripts from famous authors—some of which you might not have known were technically incomplete. 1. VLADIMIR NABOKOV // THE ORIGINAL OF LAURA Before he died in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov left behind an unfinished manuscript for a book he tentatively titled The Original of Laura. In 138 index cards, the book told the story of an “unnamed ‘man of letters’ and a nubile 24-year-old,” as the Guardian put it .

In 2008, Nabokov’s son Dmitri revealed that his father had given him spectral permission to publish the book. According to Dmitri , his father appeared to him from beyond and said: “You’re stuck in a right old mess. Just go ahead and publish.” 2. CHARLES DICKENS // THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD When he died in 1870, Dickens had completed only six of his planned dozen installments for The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Unfortunately, his death meant that the identity of the story’s murderer was never revealed—but things might have been different, if Queen Victoria had been into spoilers: Three months before his death Dickens sent a letter to the Queen offering to tell her "a little more of it in advance of her subjects.” She declined the offer, and now we’ll never know what he might have told her. That hasn’t stopped at least a dozen people from writing continuations and adaptations, including one from a Vermont printer who claimed to have channeled Dickens’ ghost with his “spirit pen.” 3.

VIRGIL // THE AENEID An epic poem set in the years after the Trojan War, The Aeneid was left unfinished when its author, Virgil, died in 19 BC. According to tradition, Virgil asked that the manuscript be burned, but Emperor Augustus ordered that Virgil’s literary executors publish it with as few changes as possible. 4. MARK TWAIN // THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER At his death in 1910, Twain left behind three unfinished manuscripts of three different but related stories—"The Chronicle of Young Satan," "Schoolhouse Hill," and "No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger.” All involved Satan, Satan's nephew, or “No. 44.” Twain’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, cobbled the three together into a 1916 book called The Mysterious Stranger, based mostly on “The Chronicle of Young Satan” but with the ending from “No. 44.” The extent to which the work was Paine’s product, as opposed to Twain’s, wasn’t known until the 1960s, when editors published a second version that supposedly stuck closer to Twain’s original intent.

The dark, dreamlike story is now considered Twain’s last great work. 5. KAFKA'S NOVELS We would have very little of Franz Kafka’s works if it weren’t for his rebellious friend and fellow writer Max Brod. Kafka didn’t publish much during his life, and left his three big novels—The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika—unfinished when he died in 1924. He asked Brod, his literary executor, to destroy them, but Brod disobeyed, to our benefit. 6. ERNEST HEMINGWAY // THE GARDEN OF EDEN Ernest Hemingway began The Garden of Eden in 1946 and worked on it intermittently for more than 15 years until his death in 1961, when he left it unfinished. However, the book was finally published in 1986, after a controversial editing process that cut it down by at least two-thirds and ripped out an entire subplot. Intriguingly, some scholars have argued that Hemingway was forging a new direction with the work, both in style and content, which the editing sacrificed and compressed. 7.

TRUMAN CAPOTE // ANSWERED PRAYERS During the last years of his life, Truman Capote frequently claimed to be working on a book called Answered Prayers. (He signed the contract just two weeks before In Cold Blood hit bookstores and became a spectacular success.) But despite repeatedly extended deadlines with his editors and a generous advance, Answered Prayers was never completed. In 1971, during an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show, Capote referred to it as his “posthumous novel,” saying "either I'm going to kill it, or it's going to kill me.’” Four chapters of the book were finally published in Esquire in 1975 and 1976, with disastrous results: the book was a thinly veiled account of the lifestyles of the rich and famous, many of whom were Capote’s friends. Stunned after recognizing themselves in the chapters, most of Capote’s friends abandoned him—sending the writer into a depressive spiral of drugs and alcohol from which some say he never recovered. The book’s remaining chapters are something of a mystery.

They may still be languishing in a safe deposit box somewhere ( some think they’re in a locker at the Los Angeles Greyhound Bus Depot). Others think they may have never existed, despite all of Capote’s talk. Nevertheless, three of the chapters from Esquire were published in book form in 1987 (three years after Capote died) under the title Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. Critics weren’t kind. One said : "It was never finished because it wasn't going anywhere." 8. GOGOL // DEAD SOULS Russian writer Nikolai Gogol left much of the second part of his masterwork Dead Souls unfinished. He is said to have burned a large portion of a completed part two just a few weeks before his death during a religious fast. As is, the book ends mid-sentence, although scholars debate whether or not this was intentional. 9. ROBERT MUSIL // THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES One of the most important European novels of the 20th century was left unfinished by its author, Austrian Robert Musil, at his death in 1942.

Musil worked on the three-volume "story of ideas," which takes place in Vienna at the onset of World War I, for more than 20 years—eventually producing a manuscript that stretched close to 2000 pages. Two of the volumes were published in the 1930s, and the last volume was published posthumously with the help of Musil's wife, Martha. Though it brought Musil little attention during his life, it's now considered a seminal work of literary modernism. 10. GEOFFREY CHAUCER // THE CANTERBURY TALES Chaucer worked on The Canterbury Tales for 25 years, until his death in 1400. Although it already contains more than 20 tales—supposedly told by pilgrims conducting a story-telling contest while on their way to Canterbury Cathedral—Chaucer originally planned the work to be much longer. The incomplete nature of the tales led other medieval authors to try and finish what Chaucer started, although he undoubtedly would have won any story-telling contest himself. Vladimir Nabokov (Creator) - TV Tropes Vladimir Nabokov You need to login to do this.

Get Known if you don't have an account Share "It's no use, he sees her He starts to shake and cough Just like the old man in That book by Nabokov." — The Police , "Don't Stand So Close to Me", referring to the book Lolita Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Набо́ков, 22 April [Old Style 10 April] 1899 ï¿½ 2 July 1977) was a novelist, polyglot, genius, Caustic Critic and (occasionally) right bastard; and a close relative of the authors V. Sirin and Vivian Darkbloom . Born in Russia, Nabokov was forced to flee the country at the age of 19, due to some revolution or other , which left him with very anti-communist feelings. His father was a liberal politican and member of the provisional government after the February Revolution.

After the rise of the Bolsheviks, he and his family went to Berlin, but Nabokov's father ended up being assassinated by a pro-Tsarist right-winger while trying to stop him from assassinating someone else. This episode is reflected in many of Nabokov's writings. He spent the next two decades in Europe writing novels in Russian, then brought his family to the United States in 1940 , where he taught literature and wrote novels in English (making him one of very few authors to be able to write good literature in more than one language). The controversial subject matter of one of these made him very famous, and he was able to quit teaching and write full time. Eventually he settled in Switzerland, where he continued writing novels in English, and died in 1977. He experienced synesthesia (in his case, he saw letters as colors), and was an accomplished amateur lepidopterist (that means he loved butterflies). Nabokov's study of butterflies was significant enough that an entire genus of butterflies, Nabokovia, was named after him. He was also very fond of unreliable narrators .

Works written in Russian: Mary (a story of memory and first love, as well as a snapshot of emigre life, made into a film starring Cary Elwes) King, Queen, Knave (a story of adultery with a playing card motif) The Defense (metatextual portrait of a chess prodigy, made into a film starring John Turturro; also called The Luzhin Defense) The Eye Ada, or Ardor (Nabokov's doorstopper , an epic tale of obsessed love in an alternate 19th century ) Transparent Things Look at the Harlequins! (the autobiography of a novelist eerily similar to Nabokov in many ways and dramatically different in others) The Original of Laura (incomplete, and published posthumously by his son, after 30 years of soul searching as Nabokov wanted the rough draft destroyed after his death) He is also the author of numerous short stories, poems, plays, lectures, translations (most notably of Eugene Onegin ), and biographies ( Nikolai Gogol 's and his own).

Incidentally, he said his first name rhymes with "redeemer" and his last name is pronounced "nuh-BOCK-off," and indeed in Russian it does and it is, though English-speakers rarely say it that way — largely thanks to The Police , whose "Don't Stand So Close To Me" popularized the mispronunciation. :: Indexes :: Vladimir Nabokov | American author | Britannica.com Vladimir Nabokov Alternative Title: Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov Vladimir Nabokov Sylvia Plath Vladimir Nabokov, in full Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (born April 22, 1899, St. Petersburg , Russia —died July 2, 1977, Montreux , Switzerland ), Russian-born American novelist and critic, the foremost of the post-1917 émigré authors. He wrote in both Russian and English, and his best works, including Lolita (1955), feature stylish, intricate literary effects. Nabokov was born into an old aristocratic family. His father, V.D.

Nabokov, was a leader of the pre-Revolutionary liberal Constitutional Democratic Party ( Kadets ) in Russia and was the author of numerous books and articles on criminal law and politics, among them The Provisional Government (1922), which was one of the primary sources on the downfall of the Kerensky regime. In 1922, after the family had settled in Berlin, the elder Nabokov was assassinated by a reactionary rightist while shielding another man at a public meeting; although his novelist son disclaimed any influence of this event upon his art, the theme of assassination by mistake has figured prominently in Nabokov’s novels. Nabokov’s enormous affection for his father and for the milieu in which he was raised is evident in his autobiography Speak, Memory (revised version, 1967). Nabokov published two collections of verse, Poems (1916) and Two Paths (1918), before leaving Russia in 1919. He and his family made their way to England, and he attended Trinity College , Cambridge , on a scholarship provided for the sons of prominent Russians in exile.

While at Cambridge he first studied zoology but soon switched to French and Russian literature; he graduated with first-class honours in 1922 and subsequently wrote that his almost effortless attainment of this degree was “one of the very few ‘utilitarian’ sins on my conscience.” While still in England he continued to write poetry , mainly in Russian but also in English, and two collections of his Russian poetry, The Cluster and The Empyrean Path, appeared in 1923. In Nabokov’s mature opinion, these poems were “polished and sterile.” Between 1922 and 1940 Nabokov lived in Germany and France, and, while continuing to write poetry, he experimented with drama and even collaborated on several unproduced motion-picture scenarios. A five-act play written 1923–24, Tragediya gospodina Morna (The Tragedy of Mr. Morn), was published posthumously, first in 1997 in a Russian literary journal and then in 2008 as a stand-alone volume. By 1925 he settled upon prose as his main genre .

His first short story had already been published in Berlin in 1924. His first novel , Mashenka ( Mary), appeared in 1926; it was avowedly autobiographical and contains descriptions of the young Nabokov’s first serious romance as well as of the Nabokov family estate, both of which are also described in Speak, Memory. Nabokov did not again draw so heavily upon his personal experience as he had in Mashenka until his episodic novel about an émigré professor of Russian in the United States , Pnin (1957), which is to some extent based on his experiences while teaching (1948–58) Russian and European literature at Cornell University , Ithaca , New York . Britannica Stories EU Considers Rules For Robots His second novel, King, Queen, Knave , which appeared in 1928, marked his turn to a highly stylized form that characterized his art thereafter. His chess novel, The Defense, followed two years later and won him recognition as the best of the younger Russian émigré writers. In the next five years he produced four novels and a novella.

Of these, Despair and Invitation to a Beheading were his first works of importance and foreshadowed his later fame. During his years of European emigration, Nabokov lived in a state of happy and continual semipenury. All his Russian novels were published in very small editions in Berlin and Paris. His first two novels had German translations, and the money he obtained for them he used for butterfly-hunting expeditions (he eventually published 18 scientific papers on entomology ). But until his best seller Lolita , no book he wrote in Russian or English produced more than a few hundred dollars. During the period in which he wrote his first eight novels, he made his living in Berlin and later in Paris by giving lessons in tennis, Russian, and English and from occasional walk-on parts in films (now forgotten). His wife, the former Véra Evseyevna Slonim, whom he married in 1925, worked as a translator. From the time of the loss of his home in Russia, Nabokov’s only attachment was to what he termed the “unreal estate” of memory and art. He never purchased a house, preferring instead to live in houses rented from other professors on sabbatical leave.

Even after great wealth came to him with the success of Lolita and the subsequent interest in his previous work, Nabokov and his family (he and his wife had one son, Dmitri) chose to live (from 1959) in genteelly shabby quarters in a Swiss hotel. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The subject matter of Nabokov’s novels is principally the problem of art itself presented in various figurative disguises. Thus, The Defense seemingly is about chess, Despair about murder, and Invitation to a Beheading a political story, but all three works make statements about art that are central to understanding the book as a whole. The same may be said of his plays, Sobytiye (“The Event”), published in 1938, and The Waltz Invention. The problem of art again appears in Nabokov’s best novel in Russian, The Gift , the story of a young artist’s development in the spectral world of post-World War I Berlin. This novel, with its reliance on literary parody, was a turning point: serious use of parody thereafter became a key device in Nabokov’s art.

His first novels in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) and Bend Sinister (1947), do not rank with his best Russian work. Pale Fire (1962), however, a novel consisting of a long poem and a commentary on it by a mad literary pedant , extends and completes Nabokov’s mastery of unorthodox structure, first shown in The Gift and present also in Solus Rex, a Russian novel that began to appear serially in 1940 but was never completed. Lolita (1955), with its antihero, Humbert Humbert , who is possessed by an overpowering desire for very young girls, is yet another of Nabokov’s subtle allegories: love examined in the light of its seeming opposite, lechery. Ada (1969), Nabokov’s 17th and longest novel, is a parody of the family chronicle form. All his earlier themes come into play in the novel, and, because the work is a medley of Russian, French, and English, it is his most difficult work.

(He also wrote a number of short stories and novellas, mostly written in Russian and translated into English.) British Culture and Politics Nabokov’s major critical works are an irreverent book about Nikolay Gogol (1944) and a monumental four-volume translation of, and commentary on, Pushkin ’s Eugene Onegin (1964). What he called the “present, final version” of the autobiographical Speak, Memory, concerning his European years, was published in 1967, after which he began work on a sequel, Speak On, Memory, concerning the American years. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest As Nabokov’s reputation grew in the 1930s so did the ferocity of the attacks made upon him. His idiosyncratic , somewhat aloof style and unusual novelistic concerns were interpreted as snobbery by his detractors—although his best Russian critic, Vladislav Khodasevich, insisted that Nabokov’s aristocratic view was appropriate to his subject matters: problems of art masked by allegory . Nabokov’s reputation varies greatly from country to country.

Until 1986 he was not published in the Soviet Union , not only because he was a “White Russian émigré” (he became a U.S. citizen in 1945) but also because he practiced “literary snobbism.” Critics of strong social convictions in the West also generally hold him in low esteem. But within the intellectual émigré community in Paris and Berlin between 1919 and 1939, V. Sirin (the literary pseudonym used by Nabokov in those years) was credited with being “on a level with the most significant artists in contemporary European literature and occupying a place held by no one else in Russian literature.” His reputation after 1940, when he changed from Russian to English after emigrating to the United States, mounted steadily until the 1970s, when he was acclaimed by a leading literary critic as “king over that battered mass society called contemporary fiction.” Andrew Field The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind a stack of index cards filled with the text of what was to become his final novel, The Original of Laura.

On his deathbed, he instructed his wife, Véra, to burn the unfinished work. She instead placed it in a Swiss bank vault, where it remained the object of much speculation for three decades. With Véra’s death in 1991, responsibility for the final work fell to the Nabokovs’ son, Dmitri. In 2008 he announced his decision to allow its publication. The Original of Laura, which the younger Nabokov referred to as “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity, was released in 2009. Though it proved to be in a highly incomplete state, the text was nevertheless marked by Nabokov’s celebrated facility with allusion and wordplay. The story revolves around an obese intellectual, Philip, and his young, wild wife, Flora, who is the seeming subject of a scandalous novel written by one of her former lovers. The work also offers a view of Nabokov’s final writings on the theme of mortality, as Philip courts his own end via an act of “auto-dissolution,” a kind of willed erasure.

Trending Topics Vladimir Nabokov - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up) (1899-1977). The Russian-born American writer Vladimir Nabokov would probably have remained a fairly obscure novelist had it not been for his authorship of Lolita, published in 1955. Because of the furor this novel raised with critics and public alike, it became widely read, and it was eventually made into a play and a motion picture. The seemingly scandalous story line is simple: the antihero Humbert Humbert’s passion for young girls. But the novel is in no way pornographic. It is a parody: true love is examined in the light of its opposite. The whole body of Nabokov’s writings has been characterized as dealing with problems of art masked by allegory. The plots are devices by which he examined the nature of art itself.

Article Contributors Dmitri Nabokov on his father's unfinished novel - Salon.com Monday, Apr 19, 1999 9:21 AM UTC Dmitri Nabokov on his father's unfinished novel Dmitri Nabokov on his father's unfinished novel Topics: Books , Entertainment News On Thursday night, Dmitri Nabokov, 64, was nursing a leg he had jabbed with a pole on an airport tarmac on his way to New York. “I didn’t really feel the pain — it was all that spurting blood that really made me ill,” the former opera singer told Salon Books. Nabokov was at Town Hall in Manhattan, along with a pack of celebrated writers and critics, to pay homage on the centenary of the birth of his father, Vladimir Nabokov, the author of “Lolita.” Dmitri Nabokov still serves as his father’s translator and literary executor. He is normally press-shy, but backstage after the ceremony, Salon Books asked him about his thoughts on the posthumous publication this summer of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “True at First Light.” “You know more than you admit,” was his curious response.

“In Hemingway’s case, his heirs aren’t necessarily doing him a favor. Some of the things he wrote are very praiseworthy, and some of the things he wrote he did not want published, including one thing that one of his heirs actually rewrote — first corrected, and then rewrote. That’s something I would never consider doing to any of my father’s work. I translate it as best I can. I adapt, where I can, [Russian] sentence length to the American and English languages — which are different, but neither of which supports extremely long sentences. But I don’t ever alter the meaning of the words.” So much for Hemingway. What other case did Dmitri Nabokov have in mind? “You know, my father left an unfinished novel at the time of his death, called ‘The Original of Laura.’ According to a note of his, he had written half before he died. He saw his own writing more or less as undeveloped film: images that still required to be recorded — on paper, in this case. There was only one such project left at the time of his death, and he ordered it destroyed. Burned, incinerated, whatever. He didn’t like unfinished things.

“Neither Vira [Vladimir’s wife and Dmitri’s mother] nor I had the courage to destroy the thing,” he went on. “We knew that if we did not destroy it someone eventually would read it and indeed publish it. My mother, when she died, left me the legacy of deciding this very thorny question, and I’m now in the process of making the decision to give that novel to a worthy institution where it would be secured in the proper microclimate, and where it would be available to highly qualified scholars — and where its publication would not immediately be allowed but envisioned sometime in the future.” Zoran Kuzmanovich, a professor of English at Davidson College in North Carolina and the editor of the journal Nabokov Studies, later told Salon Books that few people outside the circle of Nabokov’s family and friends have heard about “Laura,” and even fewer have had any direct exposure to the unfinished novel. But Kuzmanovich heard Dmitri read a few passages from the work a few years ago at a Cornell University conference. “It was vintage Nabokov,” he reports.

“It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one’s life.” Will Nabokov lovers ever get their hands on the great novelist’s final book? For now, the question seems only to give his son and literary executor a bad case of the butterflies. Craig Offman is the New York correspondent for Salon Books. The Original of Laura - Vladimir Nabokov: an overview of the reviews and critical reactions The Original of Laura With a Preface by Dmitri Nabokov - Return to top of the page - Why we haven't reviewed it yet: Haven't gotten a copy Chances that we will review it: Good -- if/when we get a copy - Return to top of the page - The NY Rev. of Books . Michael Maar Review Consensus: The book is nicely presented (except for Dmitri's contribution ...), but it is what it is: fragmentary From the Reviews: "Dmitri Nabokov's introduction is a lamentable performance, stridently defensive, slippery on particulars, and frequently repellent in tone. (...) This edition is a triumph of the book maker's art, and the design, by the Nabokovianly named Chip Kidd, is masterly.

(...) The Original of Laura is altogether too knowing for its own good, and the tone grates on the ear and the nerves, so that one feels that one has been buttonholed by a relentlessly garrulous flaneur. Still, the book is deeply interesting, not so much for what it thinks itself to be as for what we know it is: a master's final work." - John Banville, Bookforum "Given these fragmentary facts, remarkable editorial measures needed to be taken so as to make a book out of these bits of light and their surrounding darkness. The result lies halfway between a scholarly edition and a children�s book." - Leland de la Durantaye, Boston Review "Thirty-two years after Nabokov�s death at 78, its publication feels more like a generous gift to readers than a ploy for fame or fortune. This is in great part due to the dazzlingly clever presentation of the material.

By reproducing facsimiles of Nabokov�s 138 penciled index cards at the top of each page and printing typeset transcriptions with minimal editorial changes and notes below, Chip Kidd, associate art director at Knopf, has designed a format that reminds us forcefully, in graphic terms, that The Original of Laura is a work in progress and not an ordinary manuscript. (...) The manuscript gets stranger and more fitfully elliptical in the second half, which largely concerns Wild�s description of his weird psychological experiments." - Heller McAlpin, Christian Science Monitor "The Original of Laura could have been published badly, as if it were a new Lolita. Instead it has been better published than I could have imagined. (...) His style may be most extraordinary not so much as prose but as story.

That opening sentence wins no prizes as prose -- plain diction, and a double concession that weakens the force of the statement -- but as storytelling it astounds.For centuries, I predict, scholars of narrative will focus on the opening chapter of The Original of Laura as proof of the new finds to be made in fiction -- in characterisation, setting, action, speech, narration." - Brian Boyd, Financial Times "Ein Sammelsurium von Entwurfsfragmenten, denen der plotoffenbarende Mittelteil fehlt, breitet sich Das Modell für Laura vor dem Leser aus wie ein kalligraphisch verzaubernder, labyrinthisch verwilderter Garten ohne Pavillon im Zentrum (.....) Selten hat es in der Geschichte der Literatur eine tragischere Lektüre gegeben als die eines Werks, das zu lesen der Schmach gleichkommt, einem Begräbnis beizuwohnen als ausgeladener Gast." - Markus Gasser, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung "But that's literally it, there's nothing there.

The gimmick is that you can take the index cards out (they're perforated), to shuffle them as if you were the author yourself. The actual purpose, it strikes me, is literally to create the hole that is already metaphorically there. Which is pretty damn Nabokovian, I have to admit, though you should really go the distance and set fire to the index cards as if you were the author's wife. Then you can use the book to smuggle cigarettes into school. This is a bewildering act of brand dilution." - Thomas Leveritt, Independent on Sunday "(N)ot so much a book as a devotional object, which photographically reproduces every single index card and even allows the reader to punch out these perforated simulacra and shuffle through them, just as the author did. (...) To be blunt: As a novel -- even as the sketch of a novel, with operating instructions enclosed -- The Original of Laura is largely an exercise in frustration.

There are enough Nabokovian touches, at least in the earlier section, to tantalize any devotee of the English language." - James Marcus, The Los Angeles Times "Es ist unverkennbar, dass das Gravitationszentrum des Romans nicht in den angeblich fertiggestellten ersten 50 Karten liegt, sondern in den Einträgen der zweiten Hälfte. (...) Noch ärgerlicher als die schwachen Flora-Partien ist die Edition des Buches. (...) Das Nachwort wird indes durch die Qualität der Übersetzung noch unterboten." - Andreas Isenschmid, Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag "These cards are merely an interesting mess. Whereas as a novel they are as unfinished as can be, they do leave my esteem for Nabokov the man, as different but not entirely distinct from the writer, pretty much finished." - John Simon, The New Criterion "It turns out to be an exquisite thing. Knopf has tried to bring us as close as possible to the original of The Original of Laura, and the result is a showpiece of intelligent book design built on a deep respect for the manuscript. (...) .

It�s a fascinating read on many levels. If Knopf were to publish a series of painstakingly reproduced Nabokov manuscripts, I�d pawn my Kindle to buy them all. The Original of Laura is a glorious mess." - Sam Anderson, New York "Nabokov's published works are so flawless in their finish that the raw material of their making is almost shocking. (...) The Original of Laura offers us only clues to what the finished book would have become. It would have been about sex and death and fiction; it would have played games with art and the biographical fallacy; it would have been strange and sad. It would have been really something." - John Lanchester, The New York Review of Books "In The Original of Laura (...) he imagines the death of his protagonist, a writer and neurologist named Philip, as a sort of Nietzschean act of will, as an exercise in self-erasure conducted body part by body part, beginning with his toes. It is the ultimate fantasy of a writer who wants to exert complete control over the narrative of his own life.

(...) In many respects, the release of a rudimentary version of his last novel does a disservice to a writer who deeply cherished precision and was practiced in the art of revision. (...) Yet, at the same time, these bits and pieces of Laura will beckon and beguile Nabokov fans (.....) Most hauntingly, given the circumstances of its composition, Laura explores the subjects of death and the otherworldly with contemplative urgency." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "But although The Original of Laura has, at long last, been properly published -- assuming it was proper to publish it at all -- there�s not enough of it to be properly reviewed, as Nabokov himself would surely understand. (...) The style of Nabokov�s very last work hardly seems �unprecedented� either, but especially for an aging, ailing man, he was in fine form." - David Gates, The New York Times Book Review "The book is actually a completed draft of roughly half of a (very slim) novel and a series of notes towards the rest. (...) What we are being presented with, then, is a kind of literary conjuring trick.

We are invited to believe that we are reading not a made-up story but a slice of real life, before it was brushed up, elaborated upon and turned into fiction. (...) It seems likely that this book will have a more significant impact on the size of Dmitri Nabokov's bank balance than it ever will on the world of letters." - William Skidelsky, The Observer "This very unfinished work reads largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self, references to source material, self-critique, sentence fragments and commentary (.....) Mostly, this amounts to a peek inside the author�s process and mindset as he neared death. Indeed, mortality, suicide, impotence, a disgust with the male human body -- and an appreciation of the fit, young female body -- figure prominently." - Publishers Weekly "If we don't treat the text as pure surface, and if we don't want to see it as a dying author's miscarriage, we will have to read it as Nabokov's last metafictive parable.

(...) We, at least, have this gorgeous book, which eventually will be seen, when it is packaged less distractingly, as one of the most interesting short stories Nabokov never wrote." - Eric Naiman, San Francisco Chronicle "A beautiful object, superbly bound and lovingly furnished, its title fading across the cover from left to right with allusive aptness, The Original of Laura, (which Nabokov subtitled Dying is Fun -- though for him the opposite was the case), is an old man's fumble, a failed attempt at sleight of hand, so often Nabokov's stock in trade.(...) (T)his novel is a flawed, truncated mosaic, its sentences glittering, sometimes opaque, here and there risible with strained alliteration." - Tom Adair, The Scotsman "At a mere 9,000 or so words, The Original of Laura is at best a short-story sketch, at worst a collection of 138 notecards (which Nabokov preferred to use to compose, leaving it to his wife, Vera, to type the manuscript), slapped together in just enough of a semblance of order to afford the reader a peek at a possible structure and a hint of

 the underlying ideas.

(...) It is safe to say that what is published as the novel titled The Original of Laura (Dying Is Fun) is not a result Nabokov desired or would welcome. Not only does it go against his expressed wishes, it goes against his very aesthetic sensibility, against his entire life as an artist. Too sick to destroy the notecards that contain The Original of Laura, the master is now eternally exposed to a gloating, greedy world of academics, publishers, and all the other card-shuffling mediocrities titillated by the sight of a helpless genius." - Aleksandar Hemon, Slate "The Original of Laura itself has, in the mind of a fevered coterie, somehow become a lost masterpiece. If no one had ever been allowed to read it, it would have stayed like that forever. Unfortunately, it turns out to be rambling, trite, and, evidently, a very early draft of some quite confused material." - Philip Hensher, The Spectator "Mr.

Adair, übernehmen Sie, würden wir hier am liebsten abschließend ausrufen, denn der britische Schriftsteller Gilbert Adair, als Stilmimetiker wie erzählerischer Strukturvirtuose gleichermaßen ausgewiesen, scheint unter den Lebenden wie keiner geeignet, aus dem tristen, unfertigen Papierstapel noch etwas Gold zu machen." - Gustav Seibt, Süddeutsche Zeitung "A lot of people believe that Nabokov is one of the few truly great writers of the 20th century, so a certain amount of pomp in the novel�s presentation is forgivable. Even so, it seems excessive to serve up a few rough, scribbled fragments of what would have been Nabokov�s 18th novel as if they were the raw material of a work that already enjoyed classic status. Does anything about this interrupted project even begin to justify such lavishness? The quick answer has to be a loud and scarcely qualified "No".

(...) The Original of Laura is at best an elegant literary folly: a handsome piece of book-making, but hardly a real book." - Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times "So is Laura worth the wait and the hype? Emphatically not, as far as the story in itself is concerned. (...) It�s fairly easy to work out where the story will go, but it barely begins to get there. (...) Penguin have created an extraordinarily handsome book (.....) But all in all Dmitri Nabokov would have served Vladimir�s memory most nobly by publishing this fragment in an academic journal for the benefit of scholars. By seeking to turn it into a moneyspinner, he may have inflicted some severe damage on his father�s reputation." - Jonathan Bate, The Telegraph "It is a clever conceit, and beautifully produced. Bibliophiles will be grateful for the book�s chunky but elegant design. Bookshops will be equally grateful for the shrink-wrapped plastic cover that guards it from inquisitive fingers.

Presumably the publisher is hoping that neither will notice the crafty sleight of hand that involves transforming fragments of a novel into "a novel in fragments" (.....) (A)s Nabokov�s writing disintegrates into stray notes and orphan phrases, it ends up looking more like a shortened story, one that is full of pregnant hints and glimpses but never gets much beyond elegant throat-clearing. The Original of Laura is many things, including a set of chess pieces waiting for a game, Nabokov�s final love letter to the power of the unsaid and a narrative that, like most of his best work, centres on someone who is falling apart, but it is emphatically not a novel." - Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, The Telegraph "For readers who are devoted to Nabokov (I'm one), The Original of Laura affords its own ecstasies. It comes at you as a reprieve, a final appearance from an old friend you thought was already gone for good.

It's a shambles, a heap of shards, but they're Nabokov's shards and no one else's" - Lev Grossman, Time "The Penguin hardback is beautiful, and the inspiration to facsimile the original cards -- so much so that that you can tear them out by their perforations if you would prefer your own card-index version -- is better than a gimmick. Faith to the original in every sense is essential here, because what we are really doing is looking at a curiosity, not reading a masterpiece. The story is unsurprising for a man who has always been obsessed by middle-aged longing for girls too young for sex with middle-aged men who long for them. (...) There are some wonderful index cards (.....) The problem is that Laura is slight, and it doesn�t do any good to pretend otherwise. A literary sensation it is not" - Jeanette Winterson, The Times "It is an assembly of fragments of a novel, notes towards a final text that was clearly some years away from completion.

It contains moments of expected brilliance, amid plenty of humdrum early drafting." - Stephen Abell, Times Literary Supplement "The first effect of reading The Original of Laura gives less pleasure than a certain squeamishness. The bony, tentative hand of illness can be found on the cards themselves. The lineaments of a serious literary undertaking are obvious, too, but in only a few places can one discern even a hint of the technical brilliance, the penchant for parody, the irresistible flippancy that we would recognize as the work of the author of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada." - Alexander Theroux, Wall Street Journal "Apart from a few enchanting phrases -- "the orange awnings of southern summers" -- there's just not much here. (...) Where the action was intended to go remains elusive, and without any serious editorial apparatus it's difficult even to speculate. In consequence, this book remains only a posthumous collection of rough drafts and authorial notes, more novelty than anything else. The Original of Laura is for Nabokov completists only." - Michael Dirda, The Washington Post "The incomplete and increasingly rambling text shows some signs of technical brilliance.

But the parody and word play that define Nabakov's sensibilities are rarely present within the somewhat abstract and ultimately simple plot." - Christian Bourge, The Washington Times "Niemand weiß, was aus diesem buddhistisch gefärbten Gedankenexperiment hätte werden können, aber das Wenige, das uns vorliegt, ist von seltener Ödheit und Blässe. Von dem dunklen metaphysischen Kosmos, in den uns Nabokovs große Romane ziehen, ist Laura weit entfernt. Die traurige Wahrheit ist: Dying is not fun. Und um ein anderes bekanntes Wort des Meisters abzuwandeln: Details sind fast immer willkommen." - Michael Maar, Die Zeit Quotes: "I can tell you, however, that the subtitle Dying Is Fun is deadly serious in a deeply disturbing way. Talk about your "death panels"!

There have been hints of the book's dark tone in print, but wait till you see what's on these index cards." - Ron Rosenbaum, Slate (24/9/2009) "It is not "A novel in fragments", as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov's manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling -- "bycycle", "stomack", "suprize"), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind.

(...) Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago." - Martin Amis, The Guardian (14/11/2009) Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. - Return to top of the page - and the Book's Reception : Vladimir Nabokov's fragmentary last 'manuscript' -- a pile of index cards (well, that is how he worked) --, The Original of Laura (also known as Dying is Fun) has been the subject of much discussion over the years since the master's death.

While the author's last wishes were explicit and clear (like Kafka's) -- burn it -- his son (and (self-serving) literary executor) Dmitri vacillated for decades before finally instead going for the big payout and allowing publication of the 'work'. The discussion about the author's wishes is probably more interesting than the actual work, but it certainly has helped garner enormous amounts of pre-publication press coverage. Early reviews suggest -- unsurprisingly -- that it's more of a literary curiosity than anything else (and many are sure that Nabokov would not have wanted it published in this form). - Return to top of the page - V. Sirin | Article about V. Sirin by The Free Dictionary V. Sirin | Article about V. Sirin by The Free Dictionary Also found in: Dictionary , Thesaurus , Wikipedia . Nabokov, Vladimir (vlädē`mĭr näbô`kŏf), 1899–1977, Russian-American author, b. St. Petersburg, Russia. He emigrated to England after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and graduated from Cambridge in 1922.

He moved to the United States in 1940. From 1948 to 1959 he was professor of Russian literature at Cornell. He moved to Switzerland in 1959. One of the great novelists of the 20th cent., Nabokov was an extraordinarily imaginative writer, often experimenting with the form of the novel. Although his works are frequently obscure and puzzling—filled with grotesque incidents, word games, and literary allusions—they are always erudite, witty, and intriguing. Before 1940, Nabokov wrote in Russian under the name V. Sirin. Among his early novels are Mary (1926, tr. 1970) and Invitation to a Beheading (1938, tr. 1959). His first book in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938). Nabokov's most widely known work is undoubtedly Lolita (1958). The story of a middle-aged European intellectual's infatuation with a 12-year-old American "nymphet," Lolita was considered scandalous when it was first published.

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) is a philosophical novel that is both the chronicle of a long incestuous love affair and a probe into the nature of time. Among Nabokov's other novels are Bend Sinister (1947), Pnin (1957), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974). His unfinished final novel, which he wanted destroyed, was published as The Original of Laura (2009). Nabokov's volumes of poetry include Poems and Problems (1970) and the posthumous Selected Poems (2012). Among collections of his short stories are Nine Stories (1947), Nabokov's Dozen (1958), and A Russian Beauty (1973); many of them are gathered in The Stories of Vladimir Nobokov (1995). Among his other writings are his first major work, a play entitled The Tragedy of Mister Morn (1923–24), posthumously published in Russian (1997) and English (2013).

His other works include a critical study of Gogol (1944); translations from the Russian, notably a four-volume version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1964); and several autobiographical volumes, most notably Speak, Memory (1966). His college lectures, posthumously published, include Lectures on Literature: British, French, and German Writers (1980) and Lectures on Russian Literature (1981). Nabokov also was an internationally recognized lepidopterist. He and his wife collected hundreds of species of butterflies, and he was the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. In the years since his death, his scientific stature has grown. His theories of the evolution and classification of the Polyommatus blue butterfly, once discredited, have since been shown by genetic studies to be remarkably accurate. Bibliography See his selected letters (1989, ed. by M. J. Bruccoli and D. Nabokov) and letters to his wife (2015, ed. by B. Boyd); biography by B.

Boyd (2 vol., 1990–91); studies by A. Field (1967), W. W. Rowe (1971), D. Fowler (1974), L. Toker (1989), M. Wood (1995), M. Maar (tr. 2010), and R. Roper (2015); B. Boyd and R. M. Pyle, ed., Nabokov's Butterflies (2000); J. W. Connolly, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov (2005). See also biography of his wife by S. Schiff (1999). Nabokov, Vladimir Dmitrievich Born in 1869 in Tsarskoe Selo, now Pushkin; died Mar. 28, 1922, in Berlin. Russian criminologist and political figure. After graduating from the faculty of law at the University of St. Petersburg in 1890, Nabokov served in the chancellery of the State Council.

From 1896 to 1904 he was a professor of criminal law in the Jurisprudence College, editor of the bourgeois-liberal legal journals Pravo and Vestnik prava, and a contributor to the journal Osvobozhdenie. Because he defended persons in tsarist courts, he was deprived of his aristocratic title of kammerherr in 1904. Nabokov took part in the Zemstvo congresses of 1904–05 and in the Union of Liberation. He was one of the founders of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Cadets) and cochairman of its central committee and editor and publisher of its organ, Vestnik partii narodnoi svobody, as well as of the newspaper Rech’. He was a deputy to the First State Duma and a signer of the Vyborg Appeal. Nabokov was brought to trial for his correspondence relating to the Beilis case in 1913. After the February Revolution of 1917, Nabokov managed the affairs of the bourgeois Provisional Government.

After the October Revolution, in accordance with the decree of the Soviet government of November 28 (December 11) regarding leaders of the Cadet Party, he was subject to arrest. In December 1917 he went into hiding in Gaspra, in the Crimea. In 1919 he became minister of justice in the bourgeois nationalist government of the Crimea. Nabokov, in emigration after 1920, joined the right wing of the Cadet Party. With I. V. Gessen he published the newspaper Rul’ in Berlin. He was killed by a monarchist émigré. Nabokov’s memoirs about the Provisional Government were reprinted in Moscow in 1924. A. S. N

Question: The Original of Laura, an incomplete novel by which Russian author was published 32 years after his death?
Answer: Vladimir Nabokov