None of which should be news to anyone who read this Vanity Fair item from last April, in which Nabokov's son Dmitri—whose decision to publish Laura in spite of his father's instructions to burn it—described the book's plot in much greater detail than he's doing now that The Independent has moved him to "finally Error: Break shortcode syntax invalid his silence" about the book's contents.

Speaking of breaking silences, did we mention that Laura will be published by Knopf? Because it will be. Unclear when, because the person overseeing the project— LuAnn Walther, the editorial director of Knopf's paperback imprint Vintage—has been declining to comment on it ever since Andrew Wylie, the agent on the Nabokov Estate, agreed to sell Knopf the rights back in July.

As far as we know the ink on the contract might not be all the way dry (it wasn't as late as September), but the working assumption at Knopf seems to be that Laura is, for all intents and purposes, theirs.

In a convoluted way, my plea to Dmitri Nabokov, the son, translator and defender of his father’s legacy (“Dear Dmitri Nabokov: Don’t Burn Laura!”, The Observer, Nov. 28, 2005) has apparently resulted in the revocation of the threat.

I suppose I should feel good, but in fact I feel uneasy. I can see the arguments on the other side. I spoke of my conflicted feelings in the initial column: about the argument that Nabokov deserves to have his unequivocally expressed wishes carried out—The Original of Laura (full title) burned. But if she lives or dies, I think, as we’ll see, it’s now possible to make an educated guess about the identity of the original Laura of The Original of Laura.

Why the conflicted feelings over this apparent rescue? Well, Nabokov made clear that he didn’t want to leave behind an imperfect version of something he cherished. Despite what we might want him to want, he wanted the incomplete manuscript of Laura—30 to 40 index cards of handwritten draft that Dmitri says would have become “the most concentrated distillation of [his father’s] creativity”—destroyed. Before he died in 1977, VN asked his wife Véra to do it, and when she hadn’t by the time of her death 14 years later in 1991, the burden of his father’s injunction was bequeathed to Dmitri.

Dmitri, an honorable and devoted son, obviously has a conflict. His father wanted him to do one thing; the world wants him to do something else. Most of those who know about Laura—and, until recently, not many did—hoped or assumed that Dmitri would ultimately find some way to make the manuscript available. After all, it was a document that might provide both clues to the final aesthetic direction of the greatest writer of the past century—and a new perspective from which to look at his astonishing, puzzling, endlessly rewarding past work.

I certainly would like to study it, but I don’t feel that the argument for preserving it is as obvious as most people seem to assume. The argument that “Nabokov’s genius belongs to the world” in effect punishes him for being the greatest writer of the past century, by declaring he is so great that we need pay no attention to him, to his heartfelt wishes about the disposition of his drafts. I can see Nabokov’s stern face saying, “But I said destroy it and I meant destroy it. What part of ‘destroy it’ don’t you understand?” Well, I can’t see him saying the last sentence, but I’m talking about the sentiment, the gravamen, here.

Before I get deeper into this question and the fascinating debate that has subsequently developed about who the “Laura” of The Original of Laura might be, let me explain my claim that The Observer saved Laura.

After my story was published, two developments rapidly ensued. It was picked up in the European press from Ireland to Moscow, and the headlines were variations on the theme of “NABOKOV SON TO DESTROY FATHER’S LAST WORK.” I had cited Dmitri’s comment from his e-mail to me that he would “probably destroy it.” The headlines omitted “probably,” but they put a spotlight on Dmitri as the sole custodian of a work he had described as something that 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 final distillation! All we know about the novel’s content, aside from the fact that it’s a “distillation” of something, is the testimony of the editor of Nabokov Studies, Professor Zoran Kuzmanovich, who apparently heard Dmitri read some excerpts of it at a gathering of Nabokovians at Cornell in the 90’s. Professor K. tells us that Laura seemed to concern “aging but holding onto the original love of one’s life.”

My Observer story put the focus on the apparently perilous situation of the manuscript, whatever Dmitri (now 71) decides. He told me that knowledge of the location of the safe-deposit box containing Laura (which he disclosed to me was in Switzerland) was limited to him and “one [unidentified] assistant”—raising the question of whether the manuscript might be lost before anyone had a choice whether to burn or preserve it. I called upon some museum, foundation or university to offer a plan for its preservation and access for scholars. At the very least, get it out of the questionable confines of some bank vault. Banks have been known to be robbed, flooded or burned, after all. The locations of secret Swiss safe-deposit boxes have been known to be lost upon the death of their holders, due to the banking-secrecy laws there.

And so it appears that once The Observer made his threat public, and the eyes of the world were upon him, awaiting his decision, Dmitri rethought words he may have uttered in haste or irritation. What he initially told me was that because of “the repugnant atmosphere typical of current ‘Lolitology,’” as he called it, “I shall probably destroy it.” In the past, he’d spoken of consigning it at some point to a scholarly institution that would preserve but not publish it, and that would permit access to certain scholars. While it may have contravened his father’s wishes to destroy the unfinished work (maybe a third of a short novel), it was a reasonable compromise. Was his displeasure over “Lolitology” (presumably a reference to the furor over the claim by German scholar Michael Maar that VN had, in some conscious or unconscious way, taken the name and plot of Lolita from a forgotten 1916 German short story with that title) reason enough for consigning Laura to the ashes?

Was he punishing those he felt were not giving Lolita its due by blaming them for denying us a parting glimpse at where VN might have been going after his final published novels, Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins!

Whatever Dmitri’s thinking process, when someone in the press reached him for comment on my Observer column, Dmitri denied he intended to destroy Laura, which was fine with me. Exactly what I’d hoped for, in fact. What was not fine with me was a report in the press that what I’d written was somehow a distortion of his words. I have his e-mail. There was no distortion.

But if all this allowed him wiggle room to back off from the threat of destruction, I am happy to be of service. After all, it may well have saved Laura from the ashes (though I can make his e-mail available if any confusion persists).

And now, with the eyes of the world upon Dmitri and Laura, that fateful couple, perhaps (as I called for) some responsible institution or foundation will make public a plan for the preservation of Laura.

The current situation, with the manuscript deteriorating over time in a safe-deposit box of unknown security or manuscript-preservation ability, is not a good solution. Nor is allowing only one other person to know its location.

‘The Revengeful Ghost’

But should it be preserved at all? Among the arguments that broke out on the Nabokov discussion list I subscribe to was the question of whether Dmitri has an obligation to carry out his father’s wishes. One Nabokovian posted a message under the subject line “Burn ‘Laura’, Dmitri,” arguing that we had no right to inspect something VN clearly did not want us to see. Those who argue that he didn’t really mean it have only speculation on their side, and a belief that literary history has more of a claim on the unfinished work’s fate than its author.

Did he mean it? One of the most important responses to my column came from Professor Abraham Socher of Oberlin. I wrote about his important TLS piece on Nabokov, Frost and the origin of the opening lines of “Pale Fire” last summer (The Observer, July 18, 2005). Last week, Professor Socher sent me an astonishing excerpt from Nabokov’s first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

In the passage Professor Socher sent me, the speaker is examining his dead brother’s personal effects.

“My first duty after Sebastian’s death was to go through his belongings. He had left everything to me and I had a letter from him instructing me to burn certain of his papers … but I soon found out that except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed them long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement: the printed book … the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.”

“That rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement”: Whom could the narrator be thinking of?

“That rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement”: VN speaking of himself? I e-mailed Professor Socher to ask him if he felt there was any irony about “that rare type of writer” in the context.

He said he felt Sebastian was, in fact, “a Nabokovian figure,” and he supplied the passage in the ellipsis he had made as he typed the passage into his first e-mail; a passage that begins after “the perfect achievement.” A passage that is a moving tribute to “the printed book” as the final, Platonic form of written literature, of a writer’s intentions as opposed to its imperfect manuscript or typescript precursors:

“[T]he printed book … its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript, flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm.”

It’s almost too perfectly resonant: the revengeful ghost can’t help conjuring up an allusion to the revengeful ghost in Hamlet, a dead father urging his son on to destroy the “imperfect copy” of himself, his brother and murderer, the usurper, Claudius. And here was Dmitri, a son, haunted, like Hamlet, by the ghost of his father, urging destruction of an imperfect version of himself.

Those who wish to comfort themselves by saying, “Well, Nabokov probably didn’t mean it” when he said to destroy the imperfect Laura will have to contend with Sebastian Knight’s sentiment, first published in 1941, which makes the later injunction to destruction seem not only a longstanding inclination, but both heartfelt and premonitory—not a whim or a coy invitation to disregard his wishes.

Dmitri has already shown that he is (honorably) conflicted. Who is Hamlet here—Dmitri, us, both?

The too-easy argument against admitting the relevance of the Sebastian Knight passage is that it refers to “the litter of the workshop”—and that Laura, however incomplete or unfinished, is not “litter.” Still, the passage doesn’t refer only to “litter,” but to a far more advanced but imperfect “spectre” of the final Platonic form, an incomplete or early (“uncouth”) draft. In a passage from VN’s letters I quoted in my last column, he writes of having finished Laura in his mind some “fifty times,” but not on paper, and of fearing that a “stumbling” version of it could notlive up to its final form in his mind: the printed book. Just as in Sebastian Knight.

But again, some have asked why he didn’t burn it himself rather than give instructions for his wife, Véra, to do it. But perhaps VN meant to do it himself but was prevented when final illness incapacitated him, leading him to delegate the task. After all, he almost threw the manuscript of Lolita in the incinerator before Véra stopped him. We’re glad, most of us, that she did, but this does not necessarily mean he wanted a far less finished draft of ­Laura to see the light.

We may never know, but is that an excuse to disregard his wish?

Petrarch, de Sade and Laura’s Original

But let’s set aside for the moment the debate over whether to destroy Laura and glance at the debate that followed the publication of my Observer piece: Who was “Laura”? What does it mean to say “the Original of Laura”? In my initial essay, I had offhandedly suggested the possibility of the 1944 Otto Preminger film Laura, about a detective who becomes obsessed with the portrait of a woman whose apparent murder he’s trying to solve—obsessed with “the original” of the Laura in the painting.

But I’m always impressed by the erudition of The Observer’s readership, and before the end of the first day the paper was out, two people had e-mailed me to suggest that Laura must bear some relation to the Laura of Petrarch, the great 14th-century poet known as a progenitor of the love-sonnet sequence tradition later taken up by Shakespeare. Petrarch’s Rime in Vita e Morta di Madonna Laura, also known as the Canzoniere, contains dozens of sonnets devoted to a mysterious married woman, “Laura,” love for whom drives the poet mad (he practically stalks her) and later leads him to seek after a higher, more spiritual love.

Almost simultaneously, several members of the Nabokov list-serve began discussing Petrarch’s Laura (as well as Otto Preminger’s) as a possible source, and inspired by their suggestions, I consulted an edition of Petrarch, the 2004 translation by David Young, and found three striking passages that may add something to the debate. And indeed, the third one suggests a solution.

First, a footnote in Mr. Young’s introduction actually refers to a controversy over what you might call “the original of Laura.” It seems that one of Petrarch’s contemporaries challenged him by saying there could be no such being as Petrarch’s “Laura,” no real human “original,” but that he invented her and his love for her out of thin air.

Petrarch’s response is fascinating. Instead of taking credit for such an imaginative achievement, he bridled at the charge: Are you saying, he asked his challenger, that “there is no Laura … and that concerning the living Laura, by whose person I seem to be captured, everything is manufactured: my poems are fictitious, my sighs pretended. Well on this head I wish it were all a joke, that it were a pretense and not a madness! But believe me, no one can simulate [madness] without great effort; to labor to appear mad, to no purpose, is the height of madness... we can in health imitate the behavior of the sick, but we cannot simulate pallor.”

Pretty amazing “distillation,” one might say, of what would, six centuries later, be preoccupations of Nabokov’s art—simulation and reality, fiction and truth, whether “the truest poetry is the most feigning,” as Shakespeare put it. It certainly suggests that if Petrarch and Laura are not themselves the literal subject of The Original of Laura, the question of “originality” may well be.

After all, many consider the Laura poems the origin of the Romantic love tradition in Western literature—and thus the origin of the way we experience love and love’s madness.

And here’s the second shocker that I came upon in Mr. Young’s introduction: the de Sade connection. He says that the Laura of the sonnets “existed, surely, and she came from the Avignon area … where Petrarch lived in his youth. She had blond hair, striking eyes, and considerable composure. She may well have been the Laura … who married into the de Sade family, a name made infamous much later by the notorious Marquis (a historical irony that would have greatly amused Petrarch and, one guesses, Laura herself).”

And, needless to say, Nabokov, had he come across it. Laura: from Petrarch to de Sade, love leading to Light and Darkness. (Look at the Harlequins!, those creatures of light and darkness, the title of VN’s last complete novel.)

The final and most suggestive discovery I made was in Petrarch’s poem No. 141 in the Canzoniere, a sonnet to Laura.

The opening quatrain struck me as a remarkable precursor to the opening lines of “Pale Fire,” the poem in the novel Pale Fire, the famous quatrain that begins “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.” On the most basic level, it’s a description of a bird flying blindly—and fatally—into a window because it’s deceived by the reflection of the sky, deceived into thinking it’s seeing “the original” of the sky, the real sky, when it’s only an image on glass.

Now here (in Mr. Young’s translation) is the opening quatrain of Petrarch’s poem No. 141:

The way a simple butterfly, in summer,

will sometimes fly, while looking for

the light,

right into someone’s eyes, in its desire,

whereby it kills itself and causes

pain ….

Amazing how it chimes with “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain …. ” Here, a winged creature kills itself by flying into the “azure” of Laura’s eyes. Petrarch, the butterfly blinded by the “allure” of Laura’s eyes. In “Pale Fire,” we also have a reflected image: For Nabokov, the reflected sky of art deceives unto death. Amazing not just how the Petrarch quatrain involves a winged creature, but even more amazing that it’s a butterfly, since Nabokov was famous as a lepidopterist.

I think I may have found—with the invaluable help of the Nabokovians who pointed to Petrarch—the lines that are the original of The Original of Laura! At least its conceptual, aesthetic origin. And perhaps the “original” of “Pale Fire” as well.

Prove me wrong, Dmitri, although the only way you can prove me wrong is by preserving—and letting me read—the original of The Original of Laura.

In a convoluted way, my plea to Dmitri Nabokov, the son, translator and defender of his father’s legacy (“Dear Dmitri Nabokov: Don’t Burn Laura!”, The Observer, Nov. 28, 2005) has apparently resulted in the revocation of the threat.

I suppose I should feel good, but in fact I feel uneasy. I can see the arguments on the other side. I spoke of my conflicted feelings in the initial column: about the argument that Nabokov deserves to have his unequivocally expressed wishes carried out— The Original of Laura (full title) burned. But if she lives or dies, I think, as we’ll see, it’s now possible to make an educated guess about the identity of the original Laura of The Original of Laura.

Why the conflicted feelings over this apparent rescue? Well, Nabokov made clear that he didn’t want to leave behind an imperfect version of something he cherished. Despite what we might want him to want, he wanted the incomplete manuscript of Laura—30 to 40 index cards of handwritten draft that Dmitri says would have become “the most concentrated distillation of [his father’s] creativity”—destroyed. Before he died in 1977, VN asked his wife Véra to do it, and when she hadn’t by the time of her death 14 years later in 1991, the burden of his father’s injunction was bequeathed to Dmitri.

Dmitri, an honorable and devoted son, obviously has a conflict. His father wanted him to do one thing; the world wants him to do something else. Most of those who know about Laura—and, until recently, not many did—hoped or assumed that Dmitri would ultimately find some way to make the manuscript available. After all, it was a document that might provide both clues to the final aesthetic direction of the greatest writer of the past century—and a new perspective from which to look at his astonishing, puzzling, endlessly rewarding past work.

I certainly would like to study it, but I don’t feel that the argument for preserving it is as obvious as most people seem to assume. The argument that “Nabokov’s genius belongs to the world” in effect punishes him for being the greatest writer of the past century, by declaring he is so great that we need pay no attention to him, to his heartfelt wishes about the disposition of his drafts. I can see Nabokov’s stern face saying, “But I said destroy it and I meant destroy it. What part of ‘destroy it’ don’t you understand?” Well, I can’t see him saying the last sentence, but I’m talking about the sentiment, the gravamen, here.

Before I get deeper into this question and the fascinating debate that has subsequently developed about who the “Laura” of The Original of Laura might be, let me explain my claim that The Observer saved Laura.

After my story was published, two developments rapidly ensued. It was picked up in the European press from Ireland to Moscow, and the headlines were variations on the theme of “NABOKOV SON TO DESTROY FATHER’S LAST WORK.” I had cited Dmitri’s comment from his e-mail to me that he would “probably destroy it.” The headlines omitted “probably,” but they put a spotlight on Dmitri as the sole custodian of a work he had described as something that 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 final distillation! All we know about the novel’s content, aside from the fact that it’s a “distillation” of something, is the testimony of the editor of Nabokov Studies, Professor Zoran Kuzmanovich, who apparently heard Dmitri read some excerpts of it at a gathering of Nabokovians at Cornell in the 90’s. Professor K. tells us that Laura seemed to concern “aging but holding onto the original love of one’s life.”

My Observer story put the focus on the apparently perilous situation of the manuscript, whatever Dmitri (now 71) decides. He told me that knowledge of the location of the safe-deposit box containing Laura (which he disclosed to me was in Switzerland) was limited to him and “one [unidentified] assistant”—raising the question of whether the manuscript might be lost before anyone had a choice whether to burn or preserve it. I called upon some museum, foundation or university to offer a plan for its preservation and access for scholars. At the very least, get it out of the questionable confines of some bank vault. Banks have been known to be robbed, flooded or burned, after all. The locations of secret Swiss safe-deposit boxes have been known to be lost upon the death of their holders, due to the banking-secrecy laws there.

And so it appears that once The Observer made his threat public, and the eyes of the world were upon him, awaiting his decision, Dmitri rethought words he may have uttered in haste or irritation. What he initially told me was that because of “the repugnant atmosphere typical of current ‘Lolitology,’” as he called it, “I shall probably destroy it.” In the past, he’d spoken of consigning it at some point to a scholarly institution that would preserve but not publish it, and that would permit access to certain scholars. While it may have contravened his father’s wishes to destroy the unfinished work (maybe a third of a short novel), it was a reasonable compromise. Was his displeasure over “Lolitology” (presumably a reference to the furor over the claim by German scholar Michael Maar that VN had, in some conscious or unconscious way, taken the name and plot of Lolita from a forgotten 1916 German short story with that title) reason enough for consigning Laura to the ashes?

Was he punishing those he felt were not giving Lolita its due by blaming them for denying us a parting glimpse at where VN might have been going after his final published novels, Transparent Things and Look at the Harlequins!

Whatever Dmitri’s thinking process, when someone in the press reached him for comment on my Observer column, Dmitri denied he intended to destroy Laura, which was fine with me. Exactly what I’d hoped for, in fact. What was not fine with me was a report in the press that what I’d written was somehow a distortion of his words. I have his e-mail. There was no distortion.

But if all this allowed him wiggle room to back off from the threat of destruction, I am happy to be of service. After all, it may well have saved Laura from the ashes (though I can make his e-mail available if any confusion persists).

And now, with the eyes of the world upon Dmitri and Laura, that fateful couple, perhaps (as I called for) some responsible institution or foundation will make public a plan for the preservation of Laura.

The current situation, with the manuscript deteriorating over time in a safe-deposit box of unknown security or manuscript-preservation ability, is not a good solution. Nor is allowing only one other person to know its location.

‘The Revengeful Ghost’

But should it be preserved at all? Among the arguments that broke out on the Nabokov discussion list I subscribe to was the question of whether Dmitri has an obligation to carry out his father’s wishes. One Nabokovian posted a message under the subject line “Burn ‘Laura’, Dmitri,” arguing that we had no right to inspect something VN clearly did not want us to see. Those who argue that he didn’t really mean it have only speculation on their side, and a belief that literary history has more of a claim on the unfinished work’s fate than its author.

Did he mean it? One of the most important responses to my column came from Professor Abraham Socher of Oberlin. I wrote about his important TLS piece on Nabokov, Frost and the origin of the opening lines of “Pale Fire” last summer ( The Observer, July 18, 2005). Last week, Professor Socher sent me an astonishing excerpt from Nabokov’s first English-language novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

In the passage Professor Socher sent me, the speaker is examining his dead brother’s personal effects.

“My first duty after Sebastian’s death was to go through his belongings. He had left everything to me and I had a letter from him instructing me to burn certain of his papers … but I soon found out that except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed them long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement: the printed book … the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist.”

“That rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement”: Whom could the narrator be thinking of?

“That rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except for the perfect achievement”: VN speaking of himself? I e-mailed Professor Socher to ask him if he felt there was any irony about “that rare type of writer” in the context.

He said he felt Sebastian was, in fact, “a Nabokovian figure,” and he supplied the passage in the ellipsis he had made as he typed the passage into his first e-mail; a passage that begins after “the perfect achievement.” A passage that is a moving tribute to “the printed book” as the final, Platonic form of written literature, of a writer’s intentions as opposed to its imperfect manuscript or typescript precursors:

“[T]he printed book … its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript, flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm.”

It’s almost too perfectly resonant: the revengeful ghost can’t help conjuring up an allusion to the revengeful ghost in Hamlet, a dead father urging his son on to destroy the “imperfect copy” of himself, his brother and murderer, the usurper, Claudius. And here was Dmitri, a son, haunted, like Hamlet, by the ghost of his father, urging destruction of an imperfect version of himself.

Those who wish to comfort themselves by saying, “Well, Nabokov probably didn’t mean it” when he said to destroy the imperfect Laura will have to contend with Sebastian Knight’s sentiment, first published in 1941, which makes the later injunction to destruction seem not only a longstanding inclination, but both heartfelt and premonitory—not a whim or a coy invitation to disregard his wishes.

Dmitri has already shown that he is (honorably) conflicted. Who is Hamlet here—Dmitri, us, both?

The too-easy argument against admitting the relevance of the Sebastian Knight passage is that it refers to “the litter of the workshop”—and that Laura, however incomplete or unfinished, is not “litter.” Still, the passage doesn’t refer only to “litter,” but to a far more advanced but imperfect “spectre” of the final Platonic form, an incomplete or early (“uncouth”) draft. In a passage from VN’s letters I quoted in my last column, he writes of having finished Laura in his mind some “fifty times,” but not on paper, and of fearing that a “stumbling” version of it could notlive up to its final form in his mind: the printed book. Just as in Sebastian Knight.

But again, some have asked why he didn’t burn it himself rather than give instructions for his wife, Véra, to do it. But perhaps VN meant to do it himself but was prevented when final illness incapacitated him, leading him to delegate the task. After all, he almost threw the manuscript of Lolita in the incinerator before Véra stopped him. We’re glad, most of us, that she did, but this does not necessarily mean he wanted a far less finished draft of ­ Laura to see the light.

We may never know, but is that an excuse to disregard his wish?

Petrarch, de Sade and Laura’s Original

But let’s set aside for the moment the debate over whether to destroy Laura and glance at the debate that followed the publication of my Observer piece: Who was “Laura”? What does it mean to say “the Original of Laura”? In my initial essay, I had offhandedly suggested the possibility of the 1944 Otto Preminger film Laura, about a detective who becomes obsessed with the portrait of a woman whose apparent murder he’s trying to solve—obsessed with “the original” of the Laura in the painting.

But I’m always impressed by the erudition of The Observer’s readership, and before the end of the first day the paper was out, two people had e-mailed me to suggest that Laura must bear some relation to the Laura of Petrarch, the great 14th-century poet known as a progenitor of the love-sonnet sequence tradition later taken up by Shakespeare. Petrarch’s Rime in Vita e Morta di Madonna Laura, also known as the Canzoniere, contains dozens of sonnets devoted to a mysterious married woman, “Laura,” love for whom drives the poet mad (he practically stalks her) and later leads him to seek after a higher, more spiritual love.

Almost simultaneously, several members of the Nabokov list-serve began discussing Petrarch’s Laura (as well as Otto Preminger’s) as a possible source, and inspired by their suggestions, I consulted an edition of Petrarch, the 2004 translation by David Young, and found three striking passages that may add something to the debate. And indeed, the third one suggests a solution.

First, a footnote in Mr. Young’s introduction actually refers to a controversy over what you might call “the original of Laura.” It seems that one of Petrarch’s contemporaries challenged him by saying there could be no such being as Petrarch’s “Laura,” no real human “original,” but that he invented her and his love for her out of thin air.

Petrarch’s response is fascinating. Instead of taking credit for such an imaginative achievement, he bridled at the charge: Are you saying, he asked his challenger, that “there is no Laura … and that concerning the living Laura, by whose person I seem to be captured, everything is manufactured: my poems are fictitious, my sighs pretended. Well on this head I wish it were all a joke, that it were a pretense and not a madness! But believe me, no one can simulate [madness] without great effort; to labor to appear mad, to no purpose, is the height of madness... we can in health imitate the behavior of the sick, but we cannot simulate pallor.”

Pretty amazing “distillation,” one might say, of what would, six centuries later, be preoccupations of Nabokov’s art—simulation and reality, fiction and truth, whether “the truest poetry is the most feigning,” as Shakespeare put it. It certainly suggests that if Petrarch and Laura are not themselves the literal subject of The Original of Laura, the question of “originality” may well be.

After all, many consider the Laura poems the origin of the Romantic love tradition in Western literature—and thus the origin of the way we experience love and love’s madness.

And here’s the second shocker that I came upon in Mr. Young’s introduction: the de Sade connection. He says that the Laura of the sonnets “existed, surely, and she came from the Avignon area … where Petrarch lived in his youth. She had blond hair, striking eyes, and considerable composure. She may well have been the Laura … who married into the de Sade family, a name made infamous much later by the notorious Marquis (a historical irony that would have greatly amused Petrarch and, one guesses, Laura herself).”

And, needless to say, Nabokov, had he come across it. Laura: from Petrarch to de Sade, love leading to Light and Darkness. ( Look at the Harlequins!, those creatures of light and darkness, the title of VN’s last complete novel.)

The final and most suggestive discovery I made was in Petrarch’s poem No. 141 in the Canzoniere, a sonnet to Laura.

The opening quatrain struck me as a remarkable precursor to the opening lines of “Pale Fire,” the poem in the novel Pale Fire, the famous quatrain that begins “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane.” On the most basic level, it’s a description of a bird flying blindly—and fatally—into a window because it’s deceived by the reflection of the sky, deceived into thinking it’s seeing “the original” of the sky, the real sky, when it’s only an image on glass.

Now here (in Mr. Young’s translation) is the opening quatrain of Petrarch’s poem No. 141:

The way a simple butterfly, in summer,

will sometimes fly, while looking for

the light,

right into someone’s eyes, in its desire,

whereby it kills itself and causes

pain ….

Amazing how it chimes with “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain …. ” Here, a winged creature kills itself by flying into the “azure” of Laura’s eyes. Petrarch, the butterfly blinded by the “allure” of Laura’s eyes. In “Pale Fire,” we also have a reflected image: For Nabokov, the reflected sky of art deceives unto death. Amazing not just how the Petrarch quatrain involves a winged creature, but even more amazing that it’s a butterfly, since Nabokov was famous as a lepidopterist.

I think I may have found—with the invaluable help of the Nabokovians who pointed to Petrarch—the lines that are the original of The Original of Laura! At least its conceptual, aesthetic origin. And perhaps the “original” of “Pale Fire” as well.

Prove me wrong, Dmitri, although the only way you can prove me wrong is by preserving—and letting me read—the original of The Original of Laura.

To the Editor:

Re “Hillary’s Iraq: Ambiguous Hawk in a Fog of War” [Ben Smith, Nov. 28]: Vietnam analogies are of limited—if any—use when looking at the current situation in Iraq; but the analogy between the Democrats in 1968 and the Democrats in 2008 is more flawed than most.

Yes, as Mr. Smith points out, Hubert H. Humphrey, not Eugene McCarthy, got the nomination. But how? Back then, many states did not have primaries, and so party bosses picked the candidates. In fact, the uproar over 1968 led to the wider use of primaries. If there had been the number of primaries then that there are now, Humphrey would never have had a chance at getting the nomination—since he didn’t even become a candidate until Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew.

Even with that obstacle, an anti-war candidate—Robert Kennedy—probably would have won the nomination had he not been shot.

And whatever else the McCarthy backers did or did not accomplish, they did force out the major pro-war candidate: L.B.J.

But even if one is to accept the analogy, it’s hardly reassuring for hawkish Democrats like Hillary. In 1968, they did win the nomination—but they lost the election.

Maybe if Democrats in 2008 nominate someone who has been correct on the disaster in Iraq, they can avoid that fate.

Gail Robinson

Brooklyn

To the Editor:

Come now! In Mr. Smith’s piece, he correctly points out that the junior Senator from New York’s calibrated stance could leave her behind; however, saying that her “complex position on the war is moving into the political foreground” mischaracterizes her position. Her position is not complex; it is strictly based on whichever way the political wind is blowing at the time. One characteristic of the junior Senator is that she is disingenuous on several issues, among them abortion, her religiosity, the Iraq war and more.

She is more concerned about trying to position herself to please as many voters as possible than saying what she really thinks. Mr. Smith was also correct in saying that national politics in recent years has not favored nuance. Mrs. Clinton is filled with nuance and duplicity. Anyone who thinks her position on the war is heartfelt and sincere is extremely naïve, and I have a bridge to sell you.

The details laid out in this piece should convince any objective voter that Mrs. Clinton neither instills any sense of confidence, nor any sense that she would be a capable leader.

Nancy Barell

Manhattan

Let Me at Laura

To the Editor:

I enjoyed Ron Rosenbaum’s article “Dear Dmitri Nabokov: Don’t Burn Laura! Let Draft Gather Dust” [The Edgy Enthusiast, Nov. 28] and agree that it would be a shame to lose Nabokov’s final (albeit unfinished) work. I always feel as though readers aren’t given enough credit—I can certainly appreciate that the work is unfinished and wasn’t ready for publication, but would enjoy seeing what the man was working on in his last year. However, with the current celebrity climate that Mr. Rosenbaum mentions, Dmitri’s fears are well-based. Thanks for the Nabokov news.

Michael Novak

Queens

To the Editor:

I read Mr. Rosenbaum’s article with interest. I was surprised that in his comments about the title, he omitted mention of perhaps the most famous literary Laura of all: Petrarch’s muse. From Mr. Rosenbaum’s description of Nabokov’s last work, it would seem that relationship was much on his mind, as it certainly related to Vera and multiple other women, real and fictive. I certainly hope Dmitri decides to reject his father’s command—Mr. Rosenbaum’s solution seems a reasonable compromise. Ah, to have an hour alone with that safe-deposit box (and the key).

Paul Witcover

Manhattan

Potter Deserves Better

To the Editor:

My mother used to say that she thought The New Yorker hired critics who hated the subjects they covered. Now I believe the same is true of The New York Observer.

Rex Reed obviously fails to understand or enjoy films. In his most recent crotchety non-review, he managed to trash Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which is clearly one of the best films of the year [“Goblets of Ire,” On the Town, Nov. 21].

Mr. Reed said he might be too old for the movie? Well, I’m about his age, and I’ve read all the Harry Potter books and seen all of the movies. I, too, am a writer; I’m also a film historian and work in a bookstore. I think J.K. Rowling belongs on the same shelf as J.M. Barrie, E. Nesbit, L. Frank Baum and Lewis Carroll.

Mr. Reed isn’t too old—he’s just completely out of touch, locked in his insular Upper East Side world, and has utterly lost his sense of wonder and imagination.

I feel sorry for him.

John Kaufman

Allston, Mass.

But I feel I would be remiss not to alert the world of letters to the dire new twist in the fate of The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s last unpublished manuscript. It exists now in a safe-deposit box whose location is known to only two people. If what I’ve just learned is true, it’s likely never to see the light of day—indeed, it may well be destroyed.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t know of the existence of The Original of Laura until very recently, when I learned about its peril. I only came upon reference to it as I was thinking of writing about a surprising new disclosure in the German scholar Michael Maar’s new book, The Two Lolitas. I’d written about Maar’s “cryptomnesia” theory—which attempts to connect a 1916 German story called “Lolita” with Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita—in the April 19, 2004, issue of The Observer, when his essay was initially published in English in London’s TLS. But the new book takes a new turn. And as I was Googling to see whether anyone had seen the significance of Maar’s “Atomite”* discovery, I came across an essay by Harvard professor Leland de la Durantaye on Lolita in The Village Voice, in which he mentions the existence of The Original of Laura:

“When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Original of Laura. His express wish was that it be destroyed upon his death. Before him, Virgil and Kafka had left similar instructions [to destroy their work]; neither was obeyed. Nor was Nabokov. His wife, Véra, found herself unable to carry out her late husband’s wishes, and when she passed away in 1991 she bequeathed the decision to their son. The manuscript’s location is kept secret.”

NOT ENTIRELY SECRET ANY MORE; I learned something about its location directly from the author’s son, translator and fierce custodian of the VN legacy, Dmitri Nabokov, in a recent e-mail exchange—in which he also disclosed something shocking, which I’ll get to.

But first, what do we know about The Original of Laura? Yes, it is mentioned in Brian Boyd’s biography, but I was relieved to discover I was not alone in my cryptomnesia (O.K., amnesia). At a recent, incredibly appealing—and packed—“Evening of Catullus,” a Bookforum reading from Peter Green’s new translation of the brilliant and imaginatively obscene Roman poet (I translated all the nasty bits in college! Along with the epic beauty of poem 64, of course), the only person I found who’d heard of Nabokov’s Laura among the erudite attendees was the critic Geoffrey O’Brien, also editor in chief of the Library of America (which published three volumes of Nabokov works).

No surprise, really: We have had only sporadic mentions over the years, which have produced conflicting impressions. Most say the incomplete manuscript of Laura was a part (a third? a half?) of what was to be a short novel. It is said to take the form of index cards, on which Nabokov wrote his first drafts. Some say, confusingly, it was 30 to 40 “pages”; some say more.

The only reference I could find by the author himself certainly makes it seem enticing. It’s from the Selected Letters, 1940-1977 (edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli), dated October 30, 1976. In it, VN describes “The Original of Laura, the not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some fifty times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.”

Just a hundred words or so about Laura, and you can see how its creator was enchanted by it. Fifty times! Peacocks and pigeons! Diurnal delirium, dream audience, walled garden …. And VN reading it, feeling that his “stumblings and fits of coughing” made it less a success than he hoped the finished version “will have … with intelligent reviewers when properly published.”

It was not to be, and perhaps in that last clause, there’s a hint of the origin of his wish for it to be burned. Even in his dream, he was upset by an audience hearing an impaired, “stumbling” version of something he cherished. An anticipation of what, in his illness, he intuited the situation might become? It’s beautiful but heartbreaking, considering what happened.

He died eight months later, leaving behind the burning imperative. So many writers have expressed similar inflammatory wishes and designs. Gogol—VN’s biographical study of whom is one of his most underrated works—actually did it. (The second part of Dead Souls—unbearable!)

But what about an incomplete first draft—would it tell us anything? Why had he ordered it burned? I was thinking of the controversy over “Hand D” in Shakespeare studies. A chapter in my forthcoming book deals with the controversy over the alleged Shakespearean handwritten contribution, a 147-line scene, in the never-published play Sir Thomas More—an unfinished scene, a first draft with cross-outs, cuts, changes. It’s impossible to know for certain, despite thematic suggestiveness, if this is the only example of Shakespeare’s handwritten playwriting in existence, but are we interested?

We are interested—it could, if authentic, tell us something about his creative process, his thematic preoccupations. And in this case, we know it’s VN, and, what’s more, we have the testimony of Dmitri Nabokov, who has read it all and on one occasion quoted passages.

In The Literary Encyclopedia, Dmitri, an accomplished opera singer, now 71, is quoted saying that Laura “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 Times’ Mel Gussow quotes Dmitri in 1998 saying it would have been “a brilliant, original and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense, very different from the rest of his oeuvre [but] my father gave the order to destroy it.”

And then Professor Zoran Kuzmanovich, editor of Nabokov Studies, told Salon that Laura seemed to be about “aging but holding onto the original love of one’s life.”

At this point, I think we need to pause for a little speculative title analysis. I once—rather successfully, according to some noted Pynchonians—speculated upon the unreleased Mason & Dixon just on the basis of the title, linking it to “the transit of Venus,” as indeed Pynchon did.

But The Original of Laura? If we take Professor Kuzmanovich’s word for it, it sounds like a tribute of some kind to VN’s wife, Véra. But then Lolita is a return to a lost love as well, the Annabel of Humbert’s childhood. And, needless to say, VN’s finest work, Pale Fire, concerns the disposition of a dead author’s index-card draft.

Part of me wants to believe it was at least half-inspired by Laura, the movie about a detective haunted by a woman whose murder he’s trying to solve. An obsession derived from, fixated on a painting of Laura. Portraits are often said to be taken “from the original.” But what if The Original of Laura were somehow related not to a woman or a painting, but to a literary work? What if it were inspired by the original Lolita, the 1939 Russian novella Nabokov called The ­Enchanter, the manuscript of which he thought he had destroyed, but which was rediscovered in 1959 and translated and published in English after VN’s death.

Already haunting The Original of Laura are ghost afterimages: a parody/homage in McSweeney’s three years ago authored, it appears, under an apparent pseudonym by Penn State Library cataloging specialist Jeff Edmunds.

Then there was the controversy over whether samples of the original of The Original of Laura were entered into a Nabokov “prose-alike” contest sponsored by The Nabokovian magazine—or were they fake originals of The Original?

THERE WAS A READING OF BRIED PASSAGES FROM LAURA by Dmitri at Cornell some years ago that led Professor Kuzmanovich to conclude it was about “the original love of one’s life.” And I’ve heard there’s an “explanation” of some sort of Laura in the Nabokov-Edmund Wilson letters. I only found a copy at the last minute, but riffling though it, there certainly don’t seem to be any excerpts, and I’ve yet to find a clue to the nature or genesis of Laura. (Professor de la Durantaye points out the Wilson correspondence came to an end long before Nabokov spoke of writing Laura.)

I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere productive with this, so let us now turn to its fate.

Through a mutual friend, I was able to get an e-mail to Dmitri Nabokov, who had, I’d been told, some kind words for my thoughts on Pale Fire in a previous Observer piece (July 18, 2005). He was gracious enough to reply to an e-mail I sent asking him for comment on Laura and its disposition. He said two things.

First, that the safe-deposit box containing The Original of Laura was located in Switzerland, in a bank vault, and only Dmitri—and one other person (unidentified)—knew where.

And second, that he will probably destroy it before he dies! Destroy it because of his father’s wishes and what he described as the repellent (he used another word) atmosphere of what he called “Lolitology” these days.

I had known there was trouble in Lolita-land even on the much-celebrated 50th anniversary of that novel. I subscribe to a Nabokov e-mail list serve; I’d witnessed the entire list implode and cease posting for some time due to an explosive controversy between Dmitri and some members of the list over a remark in a new VN biographical study—a blow-up I did not follow as carefully as I’m sure I should have.

And there was the European press’ thick-witted reaction to the Michael Maar thesis about the 1916 “Lolita,” claiming it involved “plagiarism”—which Maar made abundantly clear he did not think was involved at all.

I think you have to understand the difficulty of Dmitri’s position. Whatever we may think VN really meant, his instructions were extremely clear: Destroy it. His wife Véra died before destroying it. It’s Dmitri’s responsibility, and it’s easy for you to say he has a responsibility to the literary world to give us this last fragment of his father’s genius.

On the other hand … VN’s dream of reading Laura aloud in the “walled garden” … It was a nightmare: VN trying to read the story, but stumbling and regretting it. Hoping against hope it would be “properly published.” Clearly, he did not wish a version that “stumbled” in any respect to see the light of day.

Until very recently, the reports were that Dmitri was considering placing the manuscript in the trust of a university, a museum or a foundation, whose trustees would decide upon limited access for scholars.

But if what he says in his e-mail to me holds true, it’s for the flames. I just hope he didn’t make up his previously undecided mind in response to my e-mail. How would I live with that? That’s really the fear that has driven me to alert the world to the imminent possibility of a safe-deposit-box withdrawal and a fire to follow.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I UNDERSTAND DMITRI'S IMPATIENCE with the biographical fetishism that has invaded literature—a product of celebrity culture, I’d argue. I certainly see it in the cultural capital of Shakespeare biographies as compared to studies of Shakespeare’s work.

If the destruction of The Original of Laura is inevitable (and I think it isn’t, and would like to add my voice to what I’m sure will be those of others pleading with Dmitri not to burn it), it’s the reductive biographizing—pathographizing—of literature that is responsible.

Read the works! Life is too short to care more deeply about the life of the one who wrote them, whose secrets are usually irretrievable anyway.

Meanwhile—this is urgent—won’t some foundation or university library (I’d vote for my alma mater’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) step forward with a detailed plan for funding the preservation of The Original of Laura, this irreplaceable literary treasure? And present the plan to Dmitri and the Nabokov estate. That way, he won’t have to choose between destruction and vague statements of good intentions. Time is running out. What if the safe-deposit box’s location gets lost?

And if something is worked out and The Original of Laura is saved from the flames, they’d better let me read it.

But I feel I would be remiss not to alert the world of letters to the dire new twist in the fate of The Original of Laura, Vladimir Nabokov’s last unpublished manuscript. It exists now in a safe-deposit box whose location is known to only two people. If what I’ve just learned is true, it’s likely never to see the light of day—indeed, it may well be destroyed.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I didn’t know of the existence of The Original of Laura until very recently, when I learned about its peril. I only came upon reference to it as I was thinking of writing about a surprising new disclosure in the German scholar Michael Maar’s new book, The Two Lolitas. I’d written about Maar’s “cryptomnesia” theory—which attempts to connect a 1916 German story called “Lolita” with Nabokov’s 1955 Lolita—in the April 19, 2004, issue of The Observer, when his essay was initially published in English in London’s TLS. But the new book takes a new turn. And as I was Googling to see whether anyone had seen the significance of Maar’s “Atomite”* discovery, I came across an essay by Harvard professor Leland de la Durantaye on Lolita in The Village Voice, in which he mentions the existence of The Original of Laura:

“When Nabokov died in 1977, he left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Original of Laura. His express wish was that it be destroyed upon his death. Before him, Virgil and Kafka had left similar instructions [to destroy their work]; neither was obeyed. Nor was Nabokov. His wife, Véra, found herself unable to carry out her late husband’s wishes, and when she passed away in 1991 she bequeathed the decision to their son. The manuscript’s location is kept secret.”

NOT ENTIRELY SECRET ANY MORE; I learned something about its location directly from the author’s son, translator and fierce custodian of the VN legacy, Dmitri Nabokov, in a recent e-mail exchange—in which he also disclosed something shocking, which I’ll get to.

But first, what do we know about The Original of Laura? Yes, it is mentioned in Brian Boyd’s biography, but I was relieved to discover I was not alone in my cryptomnesia (O.K., amnesia). At a recent, incredibly appealing—and packed—“Evening of Catullus,” a Bookforum reading from Peter Green’s new translation of the brilliant and imaginatively obscene Roman poet (I translated all the nasty bits in college! Along with the epic beauty of poem 64, of course), the only person I found who’d heard of Nabokov’s Laura among the erudite attendees was the critic Geoffrey O’Brien, also editor in chief of the Library of America (which published three volumes of Nabokov works).

No surprise, really: We have had only sporadic mentions over the years, which have produced conflicting impressions. Most say the incomplete manuscript of Laura was a part (a third? a half?) of what was to be a short novel. It is said to take the form of index cards, on which Nabokov wrote his first drafts. Some say, confusingly, it was 30 to 40 “pages”; some say more.

The only reference I could find by the author himself certainly makes it seem enticing. It’s from the Selected Letters, 1940-1977 (edited by Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli), dated October 30, 1976. In it, VN describes “ The Original of Laura, the not quite finished manuscript of a novel which I had begun writing and reworking before my illness and which was completed in my mind: I must have gone through it some fifty times and in my diurnal delirium kept reading it aloud to a small dream audience in a walled garden. My audience consisted of peacocks, pigeons, my long dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.”

Just a hundred words or so about Laura, and you can see how its creator was enchanted by it. Fifty times! Peacocks and pigeons! Diurnal delirium, dream audience, walled garden …. And VN reading it, feeling that his “stumblings and fits of coughing” made it less a success than he hoped the finished version “will have … with intelligent reviewers when properly published.”

It was not to be, and perhaps in that last clause, there’s a hint of the origin of his wish for it to be burned. Even in his dream, he was upset by an audience hearing an impaired, “stumbling” version of something he cherished. An anticipation of what, in his illness, he intuited the situation might become? It’s beautiful but heartbreaking, considering what happened.

He died eight months later, leaving behind the burning imperative. So many writers have expressed similar inflammatory wishes and designs. Gogol—VN’s biographical study of whom is one of his most underrated works—actually did it. (The second part of Dead Souls—unbearable!)

But what about an incomplete first draft—would it tell us anything? Why had he ordered it burned? I was thinking of the controversy over “Hand D” in Shakespeare studies. A chapter in my forthcoming book deals with the controversy over the alleged Shakespearean handwritten contribution, a 147-line scene, in the never-published play Sir Thomas More—an unfinished scene, a first draft with cross-outs, cuts, changes. It’s impossible to know for certain, despite thematic suggestiveness, if this is the only example of Shakespeare’s handwritten playwriting in existence, but are we interested?

We are interested—it could, if authentic, tell us something about his creative process, his thematic preoccupations. And in this case, we know it’s VN, and, what’s more, we have the testimony of Dmitri Nabokov, who has read it all and on one occasion quoted passages.

In The Literary Encyclopedia, Dmitri, an accomplished opera singer, now 71, is quoted saying that Laura “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 Times’ Mel Gussow quotes Dmitri in 1998 saying it would have been “a brilliant, original and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense, very different from the rest of his oeuvre [but] my father gave the order to destroy it.”

And then Professor Zoran Kuzmanovich, editor of Nabokov Studies, told Salon that Laura seemed to be about “aging but holding onto the original love of one’s life.”

At this point, I think we need to pause for a little speculative title analysis. I once—rather successfully, according to some noted Pynchonians—speculated upon the unreleased Mason & Dixon just on the basis of the title, linking it to “the transit of Venus,” as indeed Pynchon did.

But The Original of Laura? If we take Professor Kuzmanovich’s word for it, it sounds like a tribute of some kind to VN’s wife, Véra. But then Lolita is a return to a lost love as well, the Annabel of Humbert’s childhood. And, needless to say, VN’s finest work, Pale Fire, concerns the disposition of a dead author’s index-card draft.

Part of me wants to believe it was at least half-inspired by Laura, the movie about a detective haunted by a woman whose murder he’s trying to solve. An obsession derived from, fixated on a painting of Laura. Portraits are often said to be taken “from the original.” But what if The Original of Laura were somehow related not to a woman or a painting, but to a literary work? What if it were inspired by the original Lolita, the 1939 Russian novella Nabokov called The ­Enchanter, the manuscript of which he thought he had destroyed, but which was rediscovered in 1959 and translated and published in English after VN’s death.

Already haunting The Original of Laura are ghost afterimages: a parody/homage in McSweeney’s three years ago authored, it appears, under an apparent pseudonym by Penn State Library cataloging specialist Jeff Edmunds.

Then there was the controversy over whether samples of the original of The Original of Laura were entered into a Nabokov “prose-alike” contest sponsored by The Nabokovian magazine—or were they fake originals of The Original?

THERE WAS A READING OF BRIED PASSAGES FROM LAURA by Dmitri at Cornell some years ago that led Professor Kuzmanovich to conclude it was about “the original love of one’s life.” And I’ve heard there’s an “explanation” of some sort of Laura in the Nabokov-Edmund Wilson letters. I only found a copy at the last minute, but riffling though it, there certainly don’t seem to be any excerpts, and I’ve yet to find a clue to the nature or genesis of Laura. (Professor de la Durantaye points out the Wilson correspondence came to an end long before Nabokov spoke of writing Laura.)

I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere productive with this, so let us now turn to its fate.

Through a mutual friend, I was able to get an e-mail to Dmitri Nabokov, who had, I’d been told, some kind words for my thoughts on Pale Fire in a previous Observer piece (July 18, 2005). He was gracious enough to reply to an e-mail I sent asking him for comment on Laura and its disposition. He said two things.

First, that the safe-deposit box containing The Original of Laura was located in Switzerland, in a bank vault, and only Dmitri— and one other person (unidentified)—knew where.

And second, that he will probably destroy it before he dies! Destroy it because of his father’s wishes and what he described as the repellent (he used another word) atmosphere of what he called “Lolitology” these days.

I had known there was trouble in Lolita-land even on the much-celebrated 50th anniversary of that novel. I subscribe to a Nabokov e-mail list serve; I’d witnessed the entire list implode and cease posting for some time due to an explosive controversy between Dmitri and some members of the list over a remark in a new VN biographical study—a blow-up I did not follow as carefully as I’m sure I should have.

And there was the European press’ thick-witted reaction to the Michael Maar thesis about the 1916 “Lolita,” claiming it involved “plagiarism”—which Maar made abundantly clear he did not think was involved at all.

I think you have to understand the difficulty of Dmitri’s position. Whatever we may think VN really meant, his instructions were extremely clear: Destroy it. His wife Véra died before destroying it. It’s Dmitri’s responsibility, and it’s easy for you to say he has a responsibility to the literary world to give us this last fragment of his father’s genius.

On the other hand … VN’s dream of reading Laura aloud in the “walled garden” … It was a nightmare: VN trying to read the story, but stumbling and regretting it. Hoping against hope it would be “properly published.” Clearly, he did not wish a version that “stumbled” in any respect to see the light of day.

Until very recently, the reports were that Dmitri was considering placing the manuscript in the trust of a university, a museum or a foundation, whose trustees would decide upon limited access for scholars.

But if what he says in his e-mail to me holds true, it’s for the flames. I just hope he didn’t make up his previously undecided mind in response to my e-mail. How would I live with that? That’s really the fear that has driven me to alert the world to the imminent possibility of a safe-deposit-box withdrawal and a fire to follow.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I UNDERSTAND DMITRI'S IMPATIENCE with the biographical fetishism that has invaded literature—a product of celebrity culture, I’d argue. I certainly see it in the cultural capital of Shakespeare biographies as compared to studies of Shakespeare’s work.

If the destruction of The Original of Laura is inevitable (and I think it isn’t, and would like to add my voice to what I’m sure will be those of others pleading with Dmitri not to burn it), it’s the reductive biographizing—pathographizing—of literature that is responsible.

Read the works! Life is too short to care more deeply about the life of the one who wrote them, whose secrets are usually irretrievable anyway.

Meanwhile—this is urgent—won’t some foundation or university library (I’d vote for my alma mater’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library) step forward with a detailed plan for funding the preservation of The Original of Laura, this irreplaceable literary treasure? And present the plan to Dmitri and the Nabokov estate. That way, he won’t have to choose between destruction and vague statements of good intentions. Time is running out. What if the safe-deposit box’s location gets lost?

And if something is worked out and The Original of Laura is saved from the flames, they’d better let me read it.

It was 4 P.M. on a Friday, about the time one's blood sugar faints away, and Ms. Pera was at New York University's Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, on West 12th Street, for an "espresso talk." The subject was her new novel, Lo's Diary , a retelling of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita from the nymphet's point of view. Thirteen members of the university community faced the 43-year-old author, who came to talk about the book that no American reviewer wants to praise.

One after the other, Salon , The Washington Post Book World , Time magazine, Los Angeles Times Book Review , Newsweek , The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review took umbrage with Ms. Pera's novel. First flay, then filet.

Ms. Pera seemed to be taking in stride their criticism of her creative powers and writing style. "If Time magazine cuts me to pieces, this is the way it should be," she said. "It was not a surprise."

But perhaps the second part of her North American tour was feeling a bit light. New York City was Ms. Pera's only stop in the United States, and the schedule was shaping up like so: an interview with the trade magazine Publishers Weekly , the N.Y.U. visit and a chat with The Observer . Ms. Pera had spent the previous week in Canada, where she had been interviewed by two daily newspapers, visited with some university folks and attended the Vancouver International Writers & Readers Festival. There had been four book signings in Toronto and Vancouver; there were no book signings in New York. Also no television appearances; once scheduled, they had evaporated. "The negative reviews obviously had an effect on people not being interested in talking to her," said Ellen Ryder, an independent publicist hired by Publishers Group West, which distributes titles for Foxrock Inc., Ms. Pera's American publisher.

But here on West 12th Street, people were very interested in hearing from Ms. Pera and had followed the history of her book, from its 1995 publication in her native Italy (where the book has sold about 20,000 copies) to its American debut on Oct. 29. Nabokov's son and sole proprietor of the literary estate, Dmitri, had tried to block the book on its way to English-language publication, claiming copyright infringement. Then he worked out a settlement and wrote a preface to Ms. Pera's novel. Ms. Pera wrote an afterword, but she withdrew after learning Mr. Nabokov had read it; she was not given the opportunity to read his. She hopes to publish the afterword in a periodical.

"There was a lot of copyright problems, a lot of debate," Ms. Pera told her audience. "If Vladimir Nabokov had been alive, copyright problems probably wouldn't have arisen. I think he would've had a sense of humor. I would've sent it to him, shyly, to a great writer." She smiled and raised her eyebrows.

Ms. Pera's book and its journey to the printing press represents a sort of Gordian knot of legal and esthetic issues. Does Lolita belong to the world, or to the Nabokov estate? Is Ms. Pera's book a ripoff or a reimagining? Esthetic judgment pulls things a bit tighter: If an author "borrows" a recognizable character for a book, does it have any bearing on copyright whether the book is considered bad or good? Several recent novels that revisit famous works-for instance, Ahab's Wife , by Sena Jeter Naslund, and The Hours , by Michael Cunningham-have thrown such questions into greater relief. (In Ms. Naslund's case, Herman Melville's Moby Dick is in the public domain.) Lo's Diary visits a work whose copyright doesn't expire until 2050.

Other recent books have resuscitated little Lo, among them Roger Fishbite , by Emily Prager, and Love in a Dead Language: A Romance , by Lee Siegel. But Ms. Pera's book is the one that stirred Nabokov fils to action.

Ms. Pera told her N.Y.U. audience a story she had heard, about a visit Nabokov père once made to Cambridge University. "Apparently, Véra [Nabokov's wife and secretary] interrupted the lecture and started ordering students to stop taking notes: 'You're taking my husband's ideas.' Dmitri is following in the family business," Ms. Pera quipped.

She went on. "My book is a protest of the easy way of killing the heroine by having her die. There was a great need to talk about Lolita. Lolita is a book about the desire of a man, a desire for things young and immature and defenseless, a longing for this kind of unattainable youth. I incarnate his 'bad reader,' a character who takes the story at face value and takes on a life of her own. I take Lolita out of Nabokov's world. My Lolita is not a nice girl, not mother loving. She's not normal. The child cannot be loved because she did not have the chance to develop a personality that would be lovable. My book is not about lust, it's a lot about mother hatred. Another big taboo, I discovered."

The audience, nine of whom were women, sat in silence.

Ms. Pera said things were fine until the book approached the English language market. "Finnish, who cares? Greek, who cares? But English, that's a lot of money," said Ms. Pera.

At 4:30, she said, "I read a little." She rolled her R a little. "The first passage is about a day she's not yet succeeded in seducing Humbert Humbert. Some of the reviews, she was seen as too aggressive, too calculating. I think it's rubbish. That's what young people are like, they think they can conquer people." She began to read. She gestured as she read. She tossed her head, wrinkled her forehead, shrugged her shoulders.

Ms. Pera stopped to talk about her research for the book. "I wanted to know what the times were like. I read quite a few diaries of girls of the time. I got a hold of photographs of the time, magazines of the time. Lolita is a myth, an emblem of our time, of this postwar period, the most important one. And she is a coeval to atomic energy," said Ms. Pera "She's a tough kid but has the kind of abnormal energy that you cut, like when an atom is split. Writing about Lolita is a lot about writing about the violence of our time and surviving it.

"Some people said she's horrible because she's cynical and I thought, Do you write the truth in a diary? I doubt it. If you are to write the truth, that you're helpless in the hands of someone else, you wouldn't be able to go on. The diary is like armor. The novel begins at the end of the book, after she gets out of the armor."

Soon it was time for espresso and butter cookies.

Francesca Magniani, a 27-year-old, third-year doctoral student from Padua, did not think Lo's Diary in any way slighted Nabokov's masterpiece. "Not at all," she said. "It's like a pretext for reading the book. It's always an homage to an author when you take their world and work on it, even when it's a polemical approach."

A man who had not read Ms. Pera's work was similarly sanguine. "I think you'd be able to enjoy it more if you read Nabokov first," said Livio Caroli, 55, who plays oboe with the New York City Opera. "There are many Lolitas in opera," said Mr. Caroli. "Carmen. There is also Manon. La Traviata , by Verdi. A woman always the symbol," he said. "There's a Lolita at least a couple of productions a week."

Francesco Erspamer, the 45-year-old chair of the Italian department at N.Y.U. who arranged Ms. Pera's talk, said he did not consider Lo's Diary a "rewriting" of Lolita . He read the book in Italian. "It's a very postmodern book, because there's heavy use in postmodernism literature of characters by other people," said Mr. Erspamer. "Decontextualizing is typical." But if the book didn't have the Nabokov connection, would he have been interested in the book? "I enjoyed reading the book," he said. "I didn't have in mind Lolita ." And yet, "Without that, it's weaker or less interesting. It needs another text to refer to. You have to know Lolita is already a literary character."

The group dispersed, and Ms. Pera sat down to talk a bit more about her literary mission. "I felt a kind of anger the way she was so easily disposed off and killed." And swept into pornography's lexicon. "You go on the Internet and find lots of porno sites with Lolita," said Ms. Pera. She named some: "Lolita Land, Lolita Bootymania, Lolita X-Com, with tons of rape pics and Kosovo Lolita rape."

To the charge that her book does not even begin to approach Nabokov's mastery, Ms. Pera said, "Of course it's not the same Lolita. I'm not trying to compete with Nabokov, I'm trying to get people to think anew. Why a new opera? Why a new movie? You want to express something in the own sensibility of your time."

Is Ms. Pera working on another book? "Yes, Dmitri Nabokov's true diary," she quipped. Actually, her next one "is a book of nonfiction on utopian socialists in Europe." She is also working on another work of fiction; it "is not taking issue with any other book or character."

Even if it did, this is a different thing than the kind of appropriation that really gets under her skin: "When you use beautiful, famous music, the climax of a musical piece, for instance, with all its power, and use it to sell commodities. Wagner's Valkyrian song can be used for a car. And then the sense of the music is distorted by this unwanted subconscious association, and it's all ruined for you this pleasure. And I get angry about that," she said, "because no one asked Wagner or Rossini or Beethoven. Here is a common culture we all share, it's being distorted and no one can protect it. The reception of this music has no defense. It's been banalized, trivialized."

Could the same argument be made against Lo's Diary ? "I don't feel I'm doing that," said Ms. Pera. "I feel I'm really seriously taking on something that concerns all of us in a serious way. I'm not making commodity, not making commercial. If anything, I am rescuing this Lolita image from this worn-out porno exploitation. I'm not using Lolita to advertise a condom line or an erotic lingerie line."

The Publishing column can be reached at emanus@observer.com.

But Mr. Lane wasn't selling, and the first American edition of Lolita was published by G.P. Putnam & Sons in 1958. Now the 76-year-old Mr. Rosset is getting another crack at publishing Lolita's tale, although not the one that Nabokov wrote–a tale, in fact, which Nabokov's son and sole heir, Dmitri, has gone to court in France and the United States to squelch. It is Lo's Diary , a 1995 novel by an Italian woman named Pia Pera, which retells Lolita from the nymphet's point of view. In addition to Italy, where it was titled Diario di Lo , the novel has been published in five countries. On the morning of his interview with The Observer , Mr. Rosset had obtained the rights from Italian publisher Marsilio Editori to publish the American edition. And on March 19, Mr. Rosset, assisted by First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus and some tweedy expert witnesses, will try to convince Judge Sidney Stein of Federal District Court in Manhattan to let him publish. Mr. Garbus, who predicts the case will go to the Supreme Court, said Lo's Diary is " Lolita from a feminist perspective."

Other publishers have already taken a pass, after Dmitri Nabokov, who lives in Montreux, Switzerland, and has translated much of his father's work, screamed copyright infringement. Macmillan U.K. was going to publish Lo's Diary , but backed off. Mr. Nabokov also succeeded in convincing Alfred A. Knopf to scuttle plans to publish the book. "We were always somewhat concerned about the legal aspects of publishing the book, and finally decided not to proceed," said William Loverd, a spokesman for Knopf president Sonny Mehta. Then Farrar, Straus & Giroux, after announcing it would publish the book, pulled out. "I think it's a mistake morally," said Farrar president Roger Straus. "It smells wrong to me. It's poaching on someone else's territory."

Mr. Nabokov declined to be interviewed for this article. His lawyer, Peter Skolnik, spoke on behalf of his client about Lo's Diary . "No. 1, it's a very bad book," said Mr. Skolnik. "He felt it was vulgar, and badly done. Whereas the allusions to sexuality in Nabokov's Lolita are eloquent and brilliantly written, the parallels in the Pera are lewd and tawdry, stripped of the elegance of Nabokov's prose. It's cheap and crass."

But when Mr. Rosset first read about Ms. Pera's book in The New York Times last October, he was captivated. "I was astounded first of all because of its affinity to Lolita ," he said. "I was astounded that it had been bought by Macmillan, Knopf was also involved, I believe, and then Farrar Straus–and then all three walked away from it. That was very intriguing, because I had respect for all three companies and their editors. I couldn't believe they had decided to do a book that was inferior just to exploit its name–and then to walk away from it! It amazed me. So I decided I better find out about it."

He read it and liked it. "Humbert's idealizing a girl as a sex object–he's not worried about her feelings," said Mr. Rosset. "Here's the object reacting and giving her feelings and insights into why he's doing what he's doing and she's doing what she's doing. She's extremely intelligent. Gradually, we get that the girl is extraordinarily pretty, and also a little bit of an exhibitionist."

"I respect Roger Straus, but I think he is wrong," said Mr. Rosset. "Somebody has to challenge [Mr. Nabokov]." Referring to Farrar, Knopf and Macmillan, he said, "Their birthright as publishers is to publish."

So the publication of Lo's Diary has taken on a personal meaning for Mr. Rosset. "I saw an opportunity to make up for lost time. I saw my chance," he said.

Hedy Lamarr, Naked

If Mr. Rosset gets the all-clear from Judge Stein, Lo's Diary will come out from Foxrock Books, Mr. Rosset's independent publishing house, which operates out of his loft and which recently published Kenzaburo Oe's Seventeen and J and Samuel Beckett's Eleuthéria . The space, which has a warm, slightly 1970's Oriental feel, also serves as home to Evergreen Review , Mr. Rosset's on-line literary magazine. The loft's dual uses were evident in the bathroom, which boasts tasteful paintings of naked women and a wall phone opposite the toilet.

In the main room, the bookcases are lined with Beckett, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Alexander Trocchi, Hubert Selby, Allen Ginsberg and Heinrich Böll. There is a set of framed black-and-white photographs Mr. Rosset took in western China in 1944 and 1945, while serving in the Army Photographic Division (one of his teachers was the director John Huston). The kitchen area is separated by fringe of hanging wooden beads from the 1970's tchotchke store Azuma.

Mr. Rosset moved about the loft with the contained frenzy of a featherweight prizefighter. His common-law wife, Astrid Myers, a petite woman of 60 with light eyes and calm bearing, works alongside him on his endeavors. "I've repeatedly asked her to marry me," said Mr. Rosset, who has been married four times previously.

"My first impulse is always 'Do it!' then figure out how to do it," said Mr. Rosset, of his instinct to publish Lo's Diary . "I happen to loathe the mayor of our city, but I saw a cartoon in Newsday of him saying, 'Ready, fire, aim!' That's Giuliani, but it's also me." He sat back down in the Mies van der Rohe and drank some cola from a tall glass tumbler. He gestured toward the chair he was sitting on. "I don't like them, but they're real."

Barnet L. Rosset Jr. grew up in a privileged Chicago household–his father was a wealthy banker–and went to Swarthmore College to be near his high school sweetheart. Meanwhile, a British publisher named Jack Kahane, father of Maurice Girodias, the man who would later publish Lolita , had published Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer , a book the Swarthmore freshman picked up at the Gotham Book Mart. Mr. Rosset had never read anything like it. Soon enough he dropped out, studied film for a semester at the University of California at Los Angeles, and by 1942 he was an infantryman overseas. When the war was over, he eventually ended up in New York taking night classes at the New School. "I took a class on Proust from Alfred Kazin," he said. His first wife, Joan Mitchell, was a well-known painter, and the couple hung out at the Cedar Tavern with Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. They bought painter Robert Motherwell's East Hampton, L.I., home. "It was a Quonset hut," said Mr. Rosset. "Think of a barrel made out of metal and you cut it in half. It was used as an emergency shelter during World War II." And they entertained. "My wife didn't know how to cook an egg," said Mr. Rosset. "I did the cooking and she did the washing." In 1951, he bought the fledgling Grove Press for about $3,000.

In the early 1960's, Mr. Rosset wanted to publish Tropic of Cancer in America. He challenged the obscenity laws, in a case titled Grove Press v. Richard Gerstein as State Attorney, State of Florida which went to the Supreme Court. He won.

Mr. Garbus said his plan is to invite experts to testify that Lo's Diary is a "transformative" work and not a "derivative" one. "It has many of the same events, but it has other things, too," said Mr. Garbus. "There are no paragraphs from the other book. There are no sentences from the other book." He added that Mr. Rosset "would be agreeable to paying the estate, and putting on the cover that the book is not authorized by Nabokov."

Mr. Rosset sat back and told a story.

"I remember this sort of apocryphal story," he said. "In the film Ecstasy , Hedy Lamarr was very beautiful and maybe or maybe not a great actress, and the film was made in Europe with glimpses of her sort of nude. It was a very interesting film, and it was the story of an old man in love with a young woman. Henry Miller wrote a great deal about it. Hedy Lamarr is running around in the fields, a free spirit, and the husband is incredibly jealous.

"So Hedy Lamarr's real husband was a top steelmaker in Europe who was Jewish, and he tried to buy up every copy of that film. He succeeding in doing nothing. He did buy a lot of copies, but other people had copies and they ripped them up and made new films. I saw at least four or five versions myself. And eventually he died in a concentration camp, and the film was banned–here, everywhere. He carried on a battle against that film until the fascists killed him. It was an incredible tragedy. He was more involved in stopping that film which maybe showed his wife nude than he was in saving his own life! Ultimately, what he did was sort of destroy the film, because it got so chopped up that nobody really now knows what the exact version was of the original film. It was a young woman just wanting to express herself freely. She wasn't having intercourse with somebody. It was very philosophical, very beautiful. What it resulted in was censorship, ruined as a work of art. Dmitri is now trying to prevent Hedy Lamarr's prototype from expressing herself.

"I'm not saying I don't believe in copyright protecting authors," Mr. Rosset said. "But it's an interesting problem, where a thing has gone on and become a property of the world. People are doing something creatively, and to try and stop it is futile.… It's like Picasso claiming he owns the city of Guernica."

Mr. Rosset shook his empty glass so that the ice clinked. Ms. Myers appeared at his elbow. Mr. Rosset held the tumbler aloft.

"Do you want this freshened?" Ms. Myers asked.

Mr. Rosset turned. "Hmm? Yes."

Tribute or Disaster?

Dmitri Nabokov's lawyer said that if Lo's Diary is allowed to be published, it will be a "disaster" for publishing.

"What you will see is every time a publisher comes out with a successful book, the next publisher, who knows that successful books are hard enough to come by, will say, 'Oh, well, let's just take that book and put it into the point of view of another character–the law will allow us to do that,'" said Mr. Skolnik. "It will set a terrible precedent for publishers, if every time there's a success, it can simply be ripped off in this way by somebody saying, 'It's a different perspective, it's a different work.'"

The court fight is coming at a fortuitous time: The New York Public Library is mounting a Nabokov exhibit honoring his centennial year.

Whether Barney Rosset, like Humbert Humbert, can recapture his first love, Lolita , "by incarnating her in another" remains to be seen. The English translation of Lo's Diary is ready to be sent to the printers. If Mr. Rosset defeats Dmitri Nabokov's legal challenge, the book could be in stores by fall.

"I think he's working against his own self-interest," Mr. Rosset said of Mr. Nabokov. "This is a compliment to his father, a tribute to him."

The Publishing column may be reached at emanus@observer.com.