Dmitri Nabokov, 73, has been torn for 30 years between his father's wish and the literary world's desire to view unfinished drafts of a manuscript known as 'The Original of Laura'. The work is currently stored in a Swiss bank.
Neither Dmitri, nor his mother, the writer's widow Vera, had the courage to carry out Vladimir's wish concerning his final words. Vera died in 1991, leaving Dmitri to decide the fate of the unfinished novel.
Dmitri, who has translated many of his father's works from Russian to English, justified his decision in an interview given recently to the German Der Spiegel magazine by saying that, "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'"
He earlier said, as quoted in the online magazine Slate, that Laura "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre."
The manuscript consists of about 50 index cards covered in Nabokov's handwriting. The writer utilized index cards as drafts of his works, but did not put them in any order for his final novel.
The Russian daily Noviye Izvestia said the book will be published in such a form as to allow readers to decide for themselves the sequence of events in the book.
Nabokov, born to a noble Russian family in St. Petersburg and given a top class education before his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution, is well known in the West as the author of the infamous 'Lolita'. He also wrote a host of other novels, including 'Pale Fire' and 'Bend Sinister.'
The novelist died in the Switzerland, where he spent the last 16 years of his life.
