SAVE IT says John Banville | BURN IT says Tom Stoppard

It is one of the most heated debates in contemporary literature: should Vladimir Nabokov’s final and incomplete novel be destroyed, as the author explicitly requested?

Fresh details of The Original of Laura — Nabokov’s last significant work — are revealed in times2 today, reviving a debate about the rights of an author to insist on his or her work being destroyed posthumously.

Almost 31 years after the novelist and short-story writer died in Switzerland The Times has pieced together the outline of the plot of Laura.

The book has been locked in a Swiss bank vault since Nabokov’s death but the few people who have seen it described it as brilliant and a technical tour de force. The question of whether the author’s son and executor, Dmitri Nabokov, should obey his father’s wishes and destroy the unfinished novel has been subject to increasingly heated debate in the literary world.

Laura, Mr Nabokov said, “would have been Father’s most brilliant novel, the most concentrated distillation of his creativity, but whose release in incomplete form he expressly forbade”.

The fragmentary plot centres on a man called Philip Wild, married to the wildly promiscuous Flora, and plays on the themes of death and what lies beyond, a subject that fascinated Nabokov. Wild becomes preoccupied with erasing himself from the toes upwards, and by a process of meditation manages to extinguish himself. One critic says of the novel that it resembles the pattern that evolved in Shakespeare’s later works, “where a master is extending his own technique in very, very concentrated ways”.

Dmitri Nabokov has publicly vacillated several times about carrying out his father’s dying wish. He said three years ago that he would probably destroy Laura, but it is thought he has yet to take a decision. He is 73 and in poor health. In an e-mail to The Times, he said: “I prefer not to comment, and allow everyone to conjecture as he pleases. Thus no one will be disappointed.”

Many authors, including the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, believe passionately in honouring Nabokov’s instructions and point out that the fragments would in no way represent the book the author had intended to write. But others argue that Laura is just one of several of Nabokov’s works that he wanted destroyed after his death.

Academics who are keen to see Nabokov’s final work also cite the examples of other prominent writers — notably Franz Kafka — who had their works published posthumously despite their explicit instructions.

Nicolai Gogol destroyed the second half of Dead Souls nine days before he died. It finishes in mid-sentence. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems during her lifetime and left strict instructions for her sister, Lavinia, to destroy the rest. Lavinia destroyed many of her letters but stopped short of the poetry and ensured her sister’s legacy.

Edward Elgar, on his deathbed, asked his friend W. H. Reed to destroy his unfinished third symphony but Reed never agreed.

Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra, prevented the destruction of an early draft of his best-known work, Lolita, when she blocked her husband’s path to the incinerator.

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