Showing posts with label Dmitri Nabokov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dmitri Nabokov. Show all posts

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Dmitri's dilemma

My friend Simar sent me this article from Slate. It's an interesting dilemma, I'd say:

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 It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.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"?