Dmitri’s Dilemma: The Posthumous Publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Unfinished Manuscripts

By Olivia Huff

Upon Vladimir Nabokov’s death in 1977 (Nabokov 2013), Dmitri Nabokov was left with an impossible choice: would he follow his father’s wishes and burn the unfinished draft of his novel The Original of Laura, or would he save the final work of the widely renowned novelist from destruction? His choice would become a point of controversy for the public, after the release of the unfinished novel raised a question of ethics. Should not the author’s dying wishes be respected? This became known as “Dmitri’s Dilemma”. The choice Dmitri faced provokes empathy from most who have finished reading Nabokov’s Laura. Inside, the author introduces an entirely new style of writing (as Nabokov’s acquaintance with the English language became more intimate) and a structural brilliance to his story-telling. It is clear, had Nabokov the chance to finish The Original of Laura, it would be considered one of his masterpieces. “Dmitri’s Dilemma” is an intriguing subject of authorship, editorial-ship, and executorship. It calls into consideration the individual responsibilities of the author and the editor to the book. The book is an entity entirely of its own upon publication, leaving judgments and opinions of the writing and editing completely up to the reader. This is the unique relationship between author-editor-book-and reader. The fragmented manuscripts compiled to make The Original of Laura are a special case for consideration. The novel illustrates not only the creative process and drafting style of the twentieth century master prose stylist Nabokov, but invites the reader to consider the editorial and decision-making processes when piecing together a story hand-written over a collection of 138 index cards.

Nabokov’s Authorship

The first object to consider in “Dmitri’s Dilemma” is Nabokov’s perceived ownership of his draft. This examination will call into question the nature of authorship in order to understand how to balance the ethics in play in this scenario. Who is more justified in their choice: Vladimir Nabokov, the author of an unfinished work that he wishes to destroy, or his son who not only saves the manuscripts, but publishes them for Nabokov’s readership. At first, many would jump to criticize Dmitri for not following his father’s dying wishes. Instead, I think of the similar story of Franz Kafka who requested also that his unfinished manuscripts be destroyed upon his death (Cock-Starkey 2016). How often have we missed the potential of a work of art due to the misguided actions of an author, who, after some illusion of perfection, or otherwise, deems their works unsuitable, dooming it to destruction. So Dmitri asks, “Should I be damned or thanked” (xviii) for the decision to save such a potential work from a tragic fate. The question becomes: does authorship denote ownership?

Roland Barthes in his essay “The Death of the Author” unpacks the performance of the author in a fascinating consideration of language and action and with it, seeks understanding of the true role of the author where literary culture has previously misconceived it. His concept is that of the “diminishing author” (Barthes 1977). Our notions of authorship have always consisted of the direct relationship the author has to their book. The author is to their book like a parent is to their child. The language suggests a clear genesis: a past and future: a creator and a creation. Barthes would argue that no such creator exists, that “It is language which speaks, not the author; to write is . . . to reach the point where only language acts, ‘performs’, and not ‘me’” (145). The present is missing from cultural definitions of authorship as Barthes has pointed out. We think of authors in terms of who they were before they started writing and think of texts only as the after-math. But, and any writer could testify to this, writing only becomes as the author becomes. This distinction is important because it contradicts the idea that authors father their books into existence. Allowing that idea accepts an author’s ownership of their texts, but Barthes continues to prove, such a thing is an impossibility, “…the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (146). Any given author is only working with knowledge that came from the authors he read and the speakers he’s heard before him. Authors are cumulating and transmuting words to serve their purposes, but ultimately there is no ownership of these words. Barthes detests the notion that writing represents the single voice of an author. It is popular practice to look to the person who produced a work for its explanation, but that ignores the purpose of writing. Once the act of writing is done, the author should be entirely removed from the reader’s process of absorbing the test. It has become all too common of a practice for readers to impose the identity of the author on a text, which ignores that the book exists now as a separate entity. We limit that range of a work by trying to find answers in its authorship.

My definition of author now provided, I can supply my answer to my previously posed question of ethics. I not only believe Vladimir Nabokov to be unjustified in his request to burn his draft of The Original of Laura, but I believe it is the duty of anyone able, to save such potential works from destruction. Following Barthes’ argument, Nabokov does not own his writing because authorship does not abide by the same rules as our culture’s traditional sense of ownership. If anything, it is the author’s duty to protect any conception of their work and decisions to share their work should not belong solely to the author.

I think the “Dmitri Dilemma” is interesting in regards to the fact that The Original of Laura is now included in the list of Nabokov’s works despite his clear and outspoken disapproval of the unfinished novel. Due to a culture obsessed with criticizing “the man and his work” it is understandable for an author to not want their drafting process published. Drafting is an imperfect art. In order to draft you must allow yourself to try and fail. Mistakes must be allowed. In the Laura manuscripts, there are countless examples of Nabokov’s imperfect composition process. He makes spelling and grammar errors, there are erasures and marginal notes, he crosses out entire sentences or produces a notecard with a single word or phrase on it. These notecards provide intimate knowledge of Nabokov’s creative process, but also highlight inconsistencies and the confused plot lines of an unfinished story. When you are judging an author based on their collective works, is it fair to consider works that the author does not accept? By Nabokov’s standards of perfection, it is understandable that he would not want an imperfect novel to represent him.

Michel Foucault’s essay “What is an Author?” responds to Barthes by continuing the conversation on authorship. As I am considering whether the Laura fragments should be considered part of Nabokov’s works based on the fact the author does accept them, I will refer back to Foucault and his criteria for attributing discourses to one author. In modern literary practice, an author’s name serves as a description. We are able to classify and define groups of texts by establishing their relationship to a single author. The author is the authentication factor when it comes to accepting works (Foucault 1998, 211). Foucault’s criteria deems that “if among several books attributed to an author one is inferior to the others, it must be withdrawn from the list of the author’s work (the author is therefore defined as a constant level of value)” (214). From here I will say that Nabokov would definitely consider the incomplete Laura manuscript inferior to his other works. It is reasonable to say that an unfinished draft, handwritten on notecards, could not compete with his finished novels such as Lolita (Nabokov 2010). Foucault’s third item of criteria states that “One must also exclude works that are written in a different style, containing words and expressions not ordinarily found in the writer’s production (the author is here conceived as a stylistic unity)” (214). Laura breaks all previous conceptions of Nabokov’s writing style. It is a never-before-seen example of his drafting process, but can a draft be truly representative of a writer’s capabilities especially when that writer is Nabokov? Due to the disjointed, messy and confused state of the notecard fragments, and following Foucault’s criteria, one could not consider Laura to, technically, be part of Nabokov’s works. Foucault concludes, for works to be attributed to one source, those works must be more or less equal. One can understand the objection to having Nabokov’s fragments of Laura published because it does not respect that authors have a choice in their expression and it was Nabokov’s choice not be represented by his unfinished drafts. Now, with the Laura fragments published, the author is defined by and linked to an incomplete form that is, arguably, unequal in its manifestation and expression and therefore not valid in the same way as his previously published novels are. Laura should not fall into the same group of works that we define Nabokov by, but be given a separate group altogether, in the same way we would not consider personal letters Nabokov composed or his grocery lists to be part of his list of accomplished works. Laura should be judged and valued on a separate basis because it provides readers with insight on the author’s incredibly unique compositional style. Nabokov’s index card can be studied by those who want to develop their own drafting process. These sections of writings will eventually expand into paragraphs and chapters. They are also subject to rearrangement as Nabokov plays with structure. I believe the fragments of Laura exist to encourage writers to explore drafting, composition, and editing in a free-form way. Nabokov’s style can be adopted by others who find inspiration in this manuscript writing.

The Production of The Original of Laura

It was through my initial study of the Hengwrt Chaucer that I began thinking about fragmented manuscripts and recognized the similarities between medieval and modern day production processes. The Hengwrt Chaucer is an early 15th century manuscript of The Canterbury Tales written by Geoffrey Chaucer (Chaucer [1395] - [1405]). Ralph Hanna, a notable expert of the Hengwrt manuscript, writes a detailed evaluation of Chaucer’s text in the chapter “The Hengwrt Manuscript and the Canon of The Canterbury Tales” from his book Pursuing History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts. His analysis follows the notes left by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert in The Text of the Canterbury Tales providing an example for understanding editorial procedure in the scenario that the editor and director of a publication are left with the fragments of a manuscript and no plan from the author for the order of the text. In this case, the editor’s decisions represent only one possibility of many regarding the way in which the author intended for his story to be told. Upon hearing this story, I saw immediate parallels between Chaucer and Nabokov and their editors. What I learned from Hanna is his process for dissecting and examining the fragments for evidence and clues pointing not only to the scribal and production process of the manuscript, but to Chaucer’s composition process. With a handwritten manuscript like Nabokov’s, I believe a similar breakdown of the fragments can be done.

The index cards begin clear enough. Starting with “Ch. One” (Nabokov 2013, 1) the cards are then numbered showing a clear progression of the story line. “Ch. Two” (41) and “Ch. Three” (77) follow this example: the cards with their numbers in the top-right corner. Card 1 of chapter two will read “Two 1” (41) in the corner and so on an so forth. Fragment “Ex [o]” (91) has four cards, then begins “Chapter Four” (99) followed by “Chapter Five” (107). The order of the fragments starts to lose clarity here. After “Chapter Five” (107) there is another “Chapter [Five]” (117). This index card dictates that the chapter number has been crossed out and the editor has left a footnote for the reader: “This chapter was originally numbered as chapter five, but the author seems to have intended to change its number” (117). Following this miscellaneous chapter are some unlabeled cards meaning that this fragment order is highly subjective and the published version is only one of the many possible variants of the story’s order. On page 129 begins the D fragments, then more miscellany, then the “Wild” fragments that the editor labels “[Chapter Seven]” (157). At this point, Nabokov’s classifying system for his notecards loses sense. His titles turn into things such as “Toes” (173), “Medical Intermezzo” (175), “Last Chapter” (185), and “First a, b, e, and d” (189-195). There are many cards such as these showing a clear delineation from the beginning half of his notes. This halfway mark suggests the author’s struggle with writing as the narrative breaks apart and mutates.

The editor choice to preserve the index cards in the publication of the Laura manuscript reflects Dmitri’s respect for the physical form of his father’s plan for production. I learned from studying Hengwrt that a partially planned codex usually contains miscellaneous content that scribes and their directors worked to piece together in order to create a relevant canon (Hanna 1996, 143). It is reasonable to assume that Nabokov’s editor engaged in a similar process as he filtered through the fragments scattered over more than 100 different note card. By following the clear instruction and order of chapter’s Dmitri was able to begin the story, but would then have to make editorial interventions in the second half of the novel which is made up of almost solely disconnected and miscellaneous cards. He makes editorial notes on cards that follow themes or make connections to earlier cards, but most of the writing exists in sporadic and disrupted, or rather, interrupted moments of prose.

As far as Nabokov’s composition process, I find the most intriguing note cards to be the fragments with only a few oddments written on them. For example, the final page of Laura is not an index card, but a piece of paper with the words “efface, expunge, erase, delete, rub out, wipe out, obliterate” written in large script (Nabokov 2013, 275). Nabokov has circled “efface” and scribbled another word out entirely. These synonyms placed at the end of the novel are in obvious connection to his wish for the work to be destroyed and were most likely not notes pertaining to the actual drafting of Laura and therefore, Dmitri could have technically left this fragment out of the manuscript. Yet, it is important in not only understanding Nabokov’s feelings towards the draft, but evidence of his writing process. He is noted for many of the beautifully enjoyable descriptions found in Laura and it makes sense that his drafting process includes finding as many ways to describe one thing as possible in order to find the perfect words. In another card, he writes down definitions for “Buddhism” (217): possibly research done for the sake of his novel. Again, it is not likely any of these sentences actually belong in Nabokov’s plan for the finished product, but the editor keeps these notes for the manuscript because, as of that moment in time, they consist of the book as we know it. This is The Original of Laura in its fixed form. We can conclude that none of the fragment orders can necessarily reflect Nabokov’s plan, but as Hanna states “In such a context . . . they are evidence of the difficulties manuscript supervisors had trying to make a text left manifestly incomplete at its author’s death look like a continuous whole” (Hanna 1996, 154).

In a final note on editing fragments, Robert J. Meyer-Lee writes in his chapter “Abandon the Fragments,” that:

The fragments are a hypostatization of an editor’s idea about the [book’s]

organization, or lack thereof, that the editor has included in his or her physical

constitution of the work. Such editorial inscriptions of literary structure, to be

sure, are inevitable and not in themselves problematic, yet because of their power

to shape the reader’s perception of the work, they require justification.

In a unique publishing act, Nabokov’s cards reproduced in The Original of Laura have perforated edges, allowing readers to separate them from the pages and rearrange the cards to their preferred order. A production choice like this, highlights the editor’s understanding that he, nor anyone else aside from Nabokov, can know the true order of the fragments. Meyer-Lee discusses the difficulty in the editorial process when it comes to works such as Nabokov’s, who was in the active process of composition at the time of his death, leaving only pieces of a plan for his editor to understand. In light of all these challenges, a manuscript like The Original of Laura is a gift to readers. It not only provides exclusive access to an esteemed author’s drafting process, but adds to the discourse surrounding literary ethics as readers consider “Dmitri’s Dilemma” while enjoying the last novel ever to be produced by Vladimir Nabokov.

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References

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Cock-Starkey, Claire. “10 Writers and Artists Who Wanted Their Work Destroyed.” Mental Floss, July 12, 2016. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/82874/10-writers-and-artists-who-wanted-their-work-destroyed#:~:text=FRANZ%20KAFKA&text=Plagued%20by%20self%2Ddoubt%2C%20Kafka,manuscripts%20on%20his%20death%2C%20unread.

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