Nabokov's Final Riddle

摘要

He may be dead, but this fall Vladimir Nabokov is back with a new novel, The Original of Laura-or at least the beta version. Before he died in 1977, the author of Lolita andPaleFire asked his family to burn this last, unfinished work. But after three decades of soul-searching, his son, Dmitri, has decided to finally publish the unusual manuscript, written on 138 numbered index cards now yellowed with age. Nabokov routinely composed on such cards, shuffling and reshuffling the deck as he wrote. It was like constructing a puzzle. As a boy in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nabokov devised chess problems, played with codes and ciphers, and later wrote his own crosswords-devices that would find their way into his later fiction. The novels and stories are generously seasoned with acrostics, anagrams, number games, and whodunits, not to mention parodies, puns, and multiple layers of hidden allusions. Codes and concealed meanings were central to Nabokov's world-view, says Brian Boyd, an authority on the writer's life and work. "Nabokov felt that the thrill of discovery was one of the highest things life had to offer," Boyd says. "But he also felt that ultimately the whole of reality seemed to be constructed as if by some great cosmic prankster."