MOSCOW, July 27 (RIA Novosti) - Vladimir Nabokov's final unfinished novel will be published in Russia after it hits the shelves in the United States and Britain in November, a Russian publisher said on Monday.
Nabokov's draft of the English-language novel, entitled 'The Original of Laura,' has lain in a Swiss bank for more than three decades, intriguing the literary community and readers as the Russian-born writer's heirs disobeyed his dying wish for it to be burned.
The Azbuka publishing house, which holds the license to publish the novel in Russia, said the precise date of a Russian translation of the book will be announced at a later date.
The writer's son, Dmitri Nabokov, who translated many of his father's works from Russian into English, earlier said that Laura "would have been a brilliant, original, and potentially totally radical book, in the literary sense very different from the rest of his oeuvre."
Nabokov, the author of the infamous Lolita, made his wife, Vera, promise to burn the manuscript before he died in 1977 in Switzerland, where he spent the last 16 years of his life. She could not bring herself to do so, and left Dimitri to decide after she died.
Dmitri justified his decision last year to publish the incomplete novel in an interview: "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'"
The manuscript consists of index cards covered in penciled handwriting. The writer had not put the cards in order for the novel.
Media reports earlier said the book will be published in a form that will allow readers to decide for themselves the sequence of events in the book.
Nabokov was born to an aristocratic Russian family in St. Petersburg, where he lived until his family fled the Bolshevik Revolution. He is also well known in the West as the author of Pale Fire and Bend Sinister.
