What happened
Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir Nabokov, has decided to publish his father’s last work, The Original of Laura, despite his father’s dying wish that the manuscripts be destroyed.
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Dmitri’s decision to publish the book means that he “is a bad son AND Vladimir was a terrible father for putting his boy in this position,” said Gawker. And “if this last book turns out to be awful, Nabokov scholars will dismiss it as something he never wanted printed anyway. We all win. Except Dmitri.”
“I’d rather have more Nabokov than less in the world,” said Gregory Cowles in The New York Times blog Paper Cuts. If Vladimir Nabokov’s last work “doesn’t live up to his gratifyingly perfectionist standards—well, it arrives with bucketloads of context, and if nothing else it will give scholars another decoder ring to evaluate the cryptic Nabokovian oeuvre.”
The whole thing seems kind of fishy, said the blog The Literary Saloon. “We always equate heirs publishing posthumous work with a desperate attempt to cash in—is that what The Original of Laura has been reduced to, too?”
