Think of Laura

The Original Of Laura (Dying is Fun)

By Vladimir Nabokov,

edited by Dmitri Nabokov

Alfred A. Knopf

Available at select

National Book Store Branches

Vladimir Nabokov, the great Russian author celebrated for writing seminal English language masterpieces like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Pnin, was a man whose art subtly underscored mysterious, metaphysical questions about living, love, loss, and death. Delving into his rich and undeniably colorful life certainly lends much insight into the genius of a writer famed for his potent prose, his profoundly detailed rendering of the human psyche, and his peculiarly defined aesthetic model that bears its distinctive mark throughout his prolific bibliography.

As a child, Nabokov was reared in an educated, aristocratic household deeply cultured in arts and literature. The family’s massive collection of books weaned his imagination on cornerstones of the Western canon. Because of their position in society, he was raised trilingual, and was exposed to a confluence of French and English customs that were in the mode among the St. Petersburg elite. Later, his life would be marked by a sense of displacement, death, and loss due to the events that unfolded in Europe in the following decades.  Before his family’s Soviet-imposed exile to Western Europe, his father — a staunch defender of Semitism and a leader of the opposition party — was killed by right-wing assassins, forcing the Nabokovs to flee Russia.  When the Nazis invaded Paris during the Second World War, Nabokov absconded the Old World for the United States, where he became an itinerant instructor teaching literature in prestigious universities like Harvard and Cornell. 

As he would later discover in America, Nabokov was not merely displaced geographically, but also faced the prospect of abandoning his own linguistic heritage for an entirely new idiom. And although history will remember him as one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary English prose stylists, there always remained in his writing an undercurrent of nostalgia for his lost culture (Humbert Humbert, the beloved, if somewhat leering narrator of Lolita, subtly pines for the relics of the Old World).  Anyone who has read him will doubtlessly find Nabokov’s writing strongest when he expresses himself in that stylized diction — at once febrile, almost decadently violent, and always, as John Updike famously noted, titillating.

 Perhaps readers will not be perplexed then by the familiar undertow of death that laces his posthumously released The Original of Laura — a jagged story about artistic consciousness and mortality told through its narrator Philip Wild, “a brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer and a gentleman of independent means” who ecstatically fantasizes about a “delicious dissolution” of his body “from heel to hip, then the trunk, then the head when nothing was left but a grotesque bust with staring eyes.”  This fragmented novel, resembling more a verbal blueprint, was dubbed by his son as “an embryonic masterpiece whose pockets of genius were beginning to pupate here and there on his ever-present index cards.” 

That The Original of Laura channels the author’s fetish with nymphets, metaphysical questions about reality, and urgent contemplations about existence and oblivion is no doubt telling of a nascent project distilled from a lifelong intimacy with the craft.  Like Pale Fire, Laura is an edited, metafictional sketch that tells the story of the unattractive Philip and his promiscuous wife, Flora, who intermittently blends into an inner narrative as the fictional Laura.  Her character is modeled as a nymphet who attracts the wiles of a persistent Englishman named Hubert H. Hubert (echoes loudly of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert), who happened to have lusted for in his youth a girl named Aurora Lee (again, an homage to Lolita’s Annabel Lee).

Philip, a writer who constantly prattles on with stream-of-consciousness introspections about existence and death, mirrors his life into a bizarre, fetishist story about “Laura-Flora,” through which brief insertions of the author’s character (his background as a tennis coach and a disgruntled professor of Russian literature make cameo appearances) offer glimpses into his personal wrestling with these same ideas and questions.

  Written in a “desperate sprint against Fate,” Laura in several ways stands as a fragmented distillation of his perennial themes and narratives, seasoned this time with an even more poignant obsession with the macabre. When this valedictory nymphet was conceived, Nabokov understood that his days were numbered, thus opening Laura not only to a hasty, desultory recollection of previous works, but moreover, to a cluttered mixer of ideas about existence, death, and its more patrician cousin, dissolution. 

Pale Fire’s Charles Kinbote couldn’t have more accurately described Laura when he called John Shade’s poem something “extremely rough in appearance, teeming with devastating erasures and cataclysmic insertions.”

Nabokov, ever the perfectionist, instructed his wife to have Laura burned (Lolita once nearly met the same fate), but her “procrastination due to age, weakness, and immeasurable love” allowed the manuscript to escape cremation while laying dormant for more than three decades in a Swiss bank vault. Laura thus “lived on in a penumbra,” arising only now from the shadows when Dmitri and Alfred A. Knopf reproduced his index cards in this distracting punch-out format that the author would probably have regarded as unpolished (the manuscript would likely have gone through a revision) and disrespectful, considering that the final sheet reads destructively with the words “Efface. Expunge. Erase. Delete. Rub out. Wipe out. Obliterate.”

Truth be told, Laura, given the reckless manner in which it was published, regrettably remains for the greater part a novelty, an ingenious memento of the thought processes that governed Nabokov’s genius.  In many respects, this preliminary draft signifies the greatest elements of Nabokov’s writing, redolent with idiosyncrasies like his playful way with words (“monstrously magnifying a trivial tiff”), his inserted references about his synesthesia (“the orange awnings of southern summer”), and surreal renderings of a world drenched in theatrical artifice (“a romantic refuge where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the only signs of an earlier period of literature”). 

 Yet at the same time, these little segments represent only an incomplete mosaic of ideas that conform little to his grand artistic designs.  Unlike The Enchanter (his clumsy Ur-Lolita), Laura does not even stand as a crudely drawn predecessor to an important masterpiece. Nor, like Pnin, does it read like an intricately written, tragicomic cultural afterthought to his experiences as a Russian émigré living in America.  And unlike The Gift, his penultimate Russian novel, it is wanting in the ambition, the complexities, and the originality that creatively concealed a heartfelt ode to his mother country. 

Despite the abundance of riches contained in this manuscript, it ultimately lacks the precision and the holistic grandeur that completes a great Nabokov novel.  It is a puzzling affair, striated with a hauntingly tormented feel that palpably translates his struggle to complete the work during his final days at Lausanne.   While the manner in which he dispenses with mysterious, even beautiful and philosophical passages about death unquestionably reveal his lifelong meditations on these great, mysterious questions, Laura reveals itself sadly as a disembodied product, a fleshless backbone of his imagination without the verve nor the magic that made Vladimir Nabokov a legend of modern letters.