Literary Scandal

The New Republic takes exception to Nabokov’s posthumous “novel” while levelling charges of bad taste against his son and extortion against Knopf publishing. “So this is what we’ve all been waiting for? The last, lost work of the great master, all but complete, so rumor had it, at the time of his death, sequestered for decades in a Swiss vault, ‘brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical,’ according to his son and heir, ‘the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity’–and all that it amounts to, we now learn, is a handful of crumbs, a bit of lint, a few coins. Well, print it in a scholarly journal, sell it to The New Yorker, put it in a catchall collection of unpublished work. I was not for burning, as Nabokov decreed, but after dithering for two decades, after Ron Rosenbaum’s Web-based worldwide plebiscite, after all the prefatory gestures of a small-time conjurer building up to the culminating bunny, is this really what Dmitri Nabokov proposes to foist on us? Scarcely thirty pages worth of text, packaged into a brick of a book (curb weight 2.4 pounds) and modestly priced at, ahem, thirty-five bucks. It’s a sham, a scam. I don’t think Dmitri did it for the money–Lolita’s child must be rolling in it. But I do think Knopf did, and they must have drafted a platoon of cosmetologists to gussy up this pig. Lipstick? Lipstick, rouge, high heels, falsies, and a little black cocktail dress.”