SAVE IT says John Banville

BURN IT says Tom Stoppard

Somewhere in Switzerland there’s a safety-deposit box that contains one of the most divisive literary manuscripts on earth. It’s been over 30 years since it was deposited there, and locking it away was less a decision than a a way of putting off the worst. If Vladimir Nabokov’s unambiguous request had been obeyed, the work, transcribed from 50 index cards on which the great writer noted down the bare bones of his final and incomplete novel, would have been immediately destroyed. But his executors – his beloved wife, Véra, and his adored son, Dmitri – vacillated.

To burn or not to burn. Dmitri, 73, seems closer than ever to fulfilling his father’s deathbed request and the cognoscenti are on tenter-hooks. They want to see Nabokov’s wishes respected but are tantalised by Dmitri’s description of the novel –The Original of Laura –as “brilliant, original and potentially radical”. So this is a story about the demands of the literary world versus the posthumous rights of an author over his art. Or it’s a story about a son caught between a powerful urge to go against his late father’s wishes and an equally powerful urge to carry them out. Or, less likely but still a possibility, it is a story about money.

Whatever it is, the dilemma at its heart – one of the most controversial and polarising debates in modern literary culture – should have been settled many years ago, in the days and weeks after July 2, 1977, when Nabokov succumbed to undiagnosed fever and bronchitis and died in a clinic on Lake Geneva, aged 78. In among the 50 index cards, on which the great novelist, poet, short-story writer, lepidopterist and chess master had transcribed only a fraction of the novel that he had more or less perfected in his head, he had inserted an unequivocal note: the index cards were to be destroyed.

Three decades later, the questions have multiplied. Not just, should The Original Of Laura be consigned to the incinerator, as Vladimir Nabokov decreed. But also, why is Laurastill intact in a safe-deposit box in Switzerland? Why no decision? Why this intermittent and cryptic fanning of the public’s fascination with Laura by Dmitri? And why, if Laurais destined to take her secrets with her to her grave, have sufficient details about those 50 yellowing index cards leaked out for it to be possible here to construct a plausible hypothesis about what the book is about?

The protagonist and chief vacillator in this tale is Nabokov’s only son, Dmitri, a former opera singer-turned-racing car driver-turned meticulous translator, interpreter and devoted, occasionally prickly, defender of his father’s works. After Dmitri’s mother, Véra, died in 1991, it fell to her son to set a match to Laura. Only Dmitri and one other, unidentified, person know where Laura is, or have keys to the safe. But Dmitri never got out the matchbox. He is still “torn”, it is said, between his filial duty to one of the most exacting literary purists of the 20th century and the demands of “posterity”.

It’s a potentially distressing conundrum, but not one to which Dmitri is necessarily averse. Over the years we’ve seen him mischievously dip, toe-in, toe-out, of the fray. From Dmitri we know that The Original of Laura is “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity” .

Tantalisingly, he has also said that it “would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially radical book in the literary sense, very different from the rest of his oeuvre”. In the late 1990s Dmitri attended a centenary celebration of his father’s work at Cornell University, New York, where Nabokov used to teach, and asked the 20 or so academics assembled in front of him to identify an anonymous passage (the audience correctly guessed that it came from Laura). In 2005 Dmitri prompted an outcry when he let Ron Rosenbaum, the journalist and author, know that he would “probablydestroyLaura”. Last month we found out that Dmitri was a millimetre closer to pressing the destruct button because he had taken umbrage at some of the far-out readings of his father’s work; the psycho-scholars who believe that they see inLolita evidence that Nabokov was abused by his uncle. Dmitri was piqued and yet still no bonfire. Is it possible that Dmitri is teasing us with all this suspense, I asked him in an e-mail exchange. His one-sentence, characteristically elliptical response, in capitals, read: “NOW, WOULD I DO THAT?”

Add to this mix cameos by a handful of other significant characters: the cottage industry of academics who make their living off Nabokov studies and in whose interest it would be to publish Laura; the thousands of everyday Nabokovians who worship the ground the great man walked on and will never countenance any notion of refuting his wishes; the fellow novelists, Edmund White, for example, whose first book,Forgetting Elena, Nabokov famously endorsed, and who feels deeply divided about the fate of Laura. White cites the example of Virgil, who asked on his deathbed for the unfinished Aeneid to be destroyed but whose request was ignored by the Emperor Augustus, and, of course, Kafka, who wanted all his works obliterated.

On the other hand, White says, he was against the recent publication of Elizabeth Bishop’s abandoned works and juvenilia because “it gave you a sense of how it was done. The 67 poems she published during her lifetime were perfect.” ShouldLaurabe published? “We are all dying with curiosity,” White says. “I love Nabokov and I’ve read everything by him and there was no indication that he was tailing off at the end. On the other hand, when I give Nabokov to my students at Princeton [White is a professor of English], they say it is too literary for them. Nabokov’s career is at a delicate time as far as the next generation is concerned.” On the hand: “If a writer really wants something destroyed, he burns it.”

Why didn’t Nabokov burn Laura? Dmitri replies: “HE WAS HURRYING TO FULFIL HIS INSPIRATION. AND DID NOT KNOW HOW MANY DAYS HE HAD TO LIVE. IF HE HAD KNOWN, HE MIGHT HAVE ACTED BEFORE DEATH OVERTOOK HIM.” Is Dmitri sure that his father wanted Laura destroyed? “I THINK HE MADE IT PRETTY CLEAR THAT HE DIDN’T WANT HIS MEMORY TO BE HAUNTED BY UNFINISHED BOOKS.” And yet, Dmitri strings us along. The decision is a matter of “FILIAL DUTY” he e-mails me to say. But suggestions that he faces a “Hamlet-like” inner conflict-may be exaggerated: “RATHER, IT IS LIKE A MUTED INTERROGATORY BUZZ THAT OCCASIONALLY RISES TO THE SURFACE OF MY CONSCIOUSNESS (I DO HAVE MUCH ELSE TO THINK ABOUT).”

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