I was having one of those days. It was nauseatingly bright all morning and dreary when the afternoon covered the sky with clouds. No one was saying the right thing, and to the friend that asked if I was “sick or tired or something”: yeah, don’t even say that when I’m in a good mood. On the way back from class, prepared to hide from the world in a shuttered room with only Netflix for company, I got the unfailingly splendid email from the RHO announcing a package.
The contents: The Original of Laura, a “novel in fragments” published more than 30 years after author Vladimir Nabokov’s death and just released in paperback. The result: Netflix was replaced with reading the whole book in one 40-minute sitting, and “one of those days” was replaced with a hell of a good mood.
Laura is the meditation of a dying narrator whose philandering wife is the eponymous protagonist; it was a dying author’s introspection on love, sex, and art. Unfortunately, even a monolith of exceptionality must eventually fade and die. Professor Ward, the protagonist, decides to rid himself of his life through repeated, gradual amputation, beginning at his toes until he disappears entirely. He said, “the process of dying by auto-dissolution afforded the greatest ecstasy known to man.” By writing this last novel, Nabokov almost took an active role in his own deterioration as well, beautifying it and impassioning himself (and therefore his readers) as he always did.
But don’t read The Original of Laura just yet if you’re a Nabokov novice, as it’s not one of his “masterpieces”—I actually hesitate to call it a novel, even if “in fragments” as the cover page suggests. Instead, it’s a glimpse into Nabokov’s mind, his writing process, and his skill, which is significant even in his last years.
Nabokov’s son, Dmitri, published it after the death of his mother, who followed her husband’s dying wish to refuse to release of the work in progress. And it is just that—the paperback is made up of 138 one-sided notecards in Nabokov’s own hand. Which is the coolest thing I could imagine—this is a personal invitation to get to know one of the most incredible artists of the last century.
Nabokov calls writing and Lepidoptera (the study of butterflies) “the most intense pleasures known to man”—probably not the first criteria you look for in an idol. Still, he is a classier and more fitting Most Interesting Man in the World; the only thing he has in common with the Dos Equis man is his disregard for the opinions of others.
Nabokov didn’t allow others’ opinions to limit him. In fact, he totally disregarded common wisdom, forming his own, untainted opinions. The dedication in The Original of Laura reads: “To all the worldwide contributors of opinion, comment, and advice, of whatever its stripe, who imagined that their views, sometimes deftly expressed, might somehow change mine.”
He distanced himself from most politics and abhorred the Soviet Union, having escaped Russia just before its formation. But more interestingly, he distanced himself from anything he found boring, unartistic, and disingenuous. His greatest dislikes, as he revealed in a 1968 New York Times interview, were all things “philistine…and bourgeois.”
Perhaps his obstinacy and sass were rude at times, but who else do you know dares to critique the idols of his genre? The man scorned Dostoyevsky and some of Tolstoy with solid reasoning and no qualms, though they are the heroes of the homeland in which he had so much pride (pre-USSR).
Though his mother tongue was Russian, Nabokov was fluent in five languages. I know I wish I could accomplish this feat alone, and I bet my fellow SFS-ers feel the same. Nabokov didn’t always write in English, but when he did, he wrote novels like Lolita (one of the most banned and honored novels of the 20th century). There is even an almost perverse pleasure in reading this master’s unfinished and unpolished ideas in The Original of Laura. Even on his scattered notecards, Nabokov is a magician with words.
I doubt I’ll ever write a sentence as stunning as some of Nabokov’s prose. We can’t be as intellectual, individualistic, and sure of ourselves every day. Sometimes, your head hurts, you can’t stand the aggravating bros sitting behind you in lecture, you’re a little (or a lot) hung-over, everyone says the wrong thing, and no one “gets it”—fine, no amount of comforting and empathy will change your mind. But try reading Nabokov. He gets it in a way that a human presence rarely does, because he writes “for myself in multiplicate, a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts… not for sticky groups,” as he said in the same New York Times interview.
Let his passion, his incredible wordplay, and his imagery wake you from your funk. Nabokov’s prose (and you really want to call it prose, not words) is magnetic in spite of its brutal subject matter, making the brief story almost irrelevant in comparison to the way it’s communicated. First, read one or two of his novels (Lolita; Pale Fire) and some of his short stories. If you fall in love with him and the feeling his books bring like I think you will, read The Original of Laura. It will remind you to seek out beauty and individuality in your life, even (and especially) on “one of those days.”
