Final Nabokov Work Planned for November
Compiled by JULIE BLOOM writing in The New York Times, April 19, 2009

He wanted to burn “Lolita” too. Vladimir Nabokov instructed that his final unfinished manuscript be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, decided last year to defy his father’s wishes and publish it instead.

Penguin Classics will release “The Original of Laura” simultaneously in the United States and Britain on Nov. 3, BBC News reported. Vladimir Nabokov wrote the work on 138 index cards, which have been stored for the past 30 years in a bank vault in Switzerland, where Nabokov died in 1977. Each of the cards will be reproduced with a transcript of the text on the facing page. Alexis Kirschbaum, an editor at Penguin Classics, said, “It was quite emotional for Dimitri because it was a big decision to publish, which took him decades.”

In 2010 Penguin plans to release a collection of Nabokov’s poems that have not previously appeared in English.