Posted on 01/18/2008 6:35:32 AM PST by forkinsocket
Nabokov wanted his final, unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches?
Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.
It's a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father's unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father's genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura. Should Dmitri defy his father's wishes for the sake of "posterity"?
For the past two years I've involved myself in this question in print and in e-mail correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, but a recent communication from Dmitri to me suggests that a decision may be near. And so the time seems right to share with Slate readers my own deeply divided feelings about Dmitri's choice and to see what they make of his dilemma.
[...]
Dmitri's predicament goes beyond Laura. It's one that raises the difficult issue of who "owns" a work of art, particularly an unfinished work of art by a dead author who did not want anything but his finished work to become public. Who controls its fate? The dead hand from the grave? Or the eager, perhaps overeager, readers, scholars, and biographers who want to get their hands on it no matter what state it's in?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
My belief is this is purely a matter of respect between father and son. If he decides to destroy it as was his fathers wishe, the world will not miss a beat.
Publish it.
I suppose I have a jaundiced eye for N since reading a portion of his lectures on Don Quixote. I love Don Quixote and for N to call the novel not very good was too much for me.
I re-examined the books of N's that I'd read and concluded that N wasn't really very good. After Lolita, which is only preverse, what do you have? Pnin? Pale Fire? Ada?
Pale Fire I thought had some moments but it certainly is no Monsignor Quixote.
I'll point out that he has already translated and published a piece by his father which his father publicly stated he never wanted to see the light of day.
Maybe Nabakov realized his work was carp, and didn’t want that to be the one for which he would be remembered. Since I’ve never read any of his writings, it makes no difference to me, but if he left explicit instructions, they should be followed.
Perhaps his father made the request on his death bed. And if his son has already published his fathers work against wishes then it is of course all about the money. Imagine that?
I would disagree.
Dmitri Nabokov is Vladimir Nabokov's only child.
He inherited his father's entire estate and is very comfortable.
The sales of the new work he published were minimal: it was mostly intended as a nugget for academics and hardcore fans of his father's work.
It wasn't a bestseller and no one expected it to be.
Dmitri makes more money in a day from his father's novel Lolita than he would from twenty years of sales of either of his father's posthumous works.
I cannot argue because I really don’t know. But one mans fortune is another mans pittance. If the son had all he ever needed then there was really no excuse for not following his fathers wishes.
So ‘Pale Fire’ fails because it’s not as good as Don Quixote (a book Nabokov hated btw)? That’s like saying Stravinsky fails since he isn’t as good as Bach. The trilogy of Lolita, Pale Fire and Ada is unrivalled in 20th century English language imaginative writing.
And of course this should be published.
Sorry, after reading this, the author comes off as little more than a self absorbed, intellectual vulture. The fact that the son has dithered over his father's final request for 30 years illustrates his lack of respect for his father choice.
The human race somehow managed to survive the Roman burning of the library at Alexandria. It will go on quite nicely witout knowing the content of those 50 index cards.
Pale Fire doesn’t “fail”. I don’t think its as “good” as Don Quixote, IMO. Then again, I would take issue w/ your ranking of 20th century English literature; if linguistic acrobatics is your cup of tea I’d point you towards Burgess’ “Napolean Symphony”.
Pale Fire is the novel that would have been the most difficult to anticipate in the year 1901.
Ok, why do you say that? Afterall it was written sometime in the late 50’s or 60’s if I remember correctly.
What is N trying to say? Angst? The futility of modern man? Finding one beautiful little butterfly in the abyss of the existential void is reason enough? Is reason enough?
No doubt this is why he hated Don Quixote. That character is satruarated w/ pathos and wisdom and insight into human nobility. Nobility, of course, stands against every modern ethos, it requires from us a higher purpose; something more than the transient beauty of a butterfly.
I suppose it's quixotic of me to look for the bold in the washed out colors of the post-modern era. I'm sick of angst and stories that have nothing to tell. I'll take my place beside the Don's modern decendent the sublime and beloved Padre Quixote, elevated by kindness alone to Monsignor.
btw, I've always loved borges.
“What is N trying to say?”
N sneered at this question and maintained that it derives from inartistic objectives. Pale Fire is about a whole raft of things including the nature of literary criticism. The poetry of exile, the connection between art the monstrous.
Nabokov thought Cervantes was crude and savage. He detested the belly laughs Cervantes wanted his readers to derive from his hero’s discomfiture, and he repeatedly compared the ‘fun’ of Don Quixote to Christ’s humilation and crucufixion, the Spanish Inquisition and modern bullfighting.
Well of course he did. Which is why I find it easy to sneer at him, in spite of his gifts.
Follow along; an "artist" of pedophilia accuses another of being savage and crude! That's a blind spot big enough for the MACK truck of common sense to slide through sideways. Only in academia could one get away w/ such hypocracy.
Obviously, artistic objectives trump bourgoise sensibilities, harumph, harumph. Which explains "Piss Christ" and a Madonna smeared w/ dung. Those then are the progeny of N and his ilk.
OTH, the western lexicon is filled w/ Cervantes' children, from quixotic to "tilting at windmills" they remain relevant. That is because Quixote is all too human, we see ourselves in him and for every time he was knocked on his can we can match him bruise for bump. And the belly laughs are an important part of it.
Honest Quixote is noble at last and his creator Cervantes will be celebrated long, oh so very long, after N is merely a footnote in the history of the degeneration of Western Literature.
Just MO, I mean no disrespect to you.
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