The Original of Laura, an incomplete novel by which Russian author was published 32 years after his death?
The Original of Laura The Original of Laura The Original of Laura is an incomplete novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It was finally published, after 30 years of private debate, on November 17, 2009. Nabokov had requested that the work be destroyed upon his death, but his family hesitated to carry out his wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. Over the next years its contents were viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars. In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov announced plans to publish the work,
The Original of Laura novel, Laura is "destroyed" by the narrator (the "I" of the book). Delage-Toriel also notes that the names of Laura and Flora, possibly refer to well-known High Renaissance portraits of women by Titian and Giorgione, both evoking the Italian sonneteer Petrarch's unconsummated obsession with a woman named Laura. According to Delage-Toriel, the meaning of "the Original" is unclear: Does it refer to the mistress of the “I,” the Laura of My Laura, or to the probable mistress of this novel’s author, the Flora of The Original of Laura? The manuscript’s playful juxtapositions obviously incite the reader to fuse both ‘originals’