Somewhere in Switzerland there’s a safety-deposit box that contains one of the most divisive literary manuscripts on earth. It’s been more than 30 years since it was deposited there, and locking it away was less a decision than a way of putting off the worst. If Vladimir Nabokov’s unambiguous request had been obeyed, the work, transcribed from 50 index cards on which the great writer noted down the bare bones of his final and incomplete novel, would have been immediately destroyed. But his executors – his beloved wife, Véra, and his adored son, Dmitri – vacillated.

To burn or not to burn. Dmitri, 73, seems closer than ever to fulfilling his father’s deathbed request and the cognoscenti are on tenter-hooks. They want to see Nabokov’s wishes respected but are tantalized by Dmitri’s description of the novel – “The Original of Laura” – as “brilliant, original and potentially radical.”

The dilemma at its heart – one of the most controversial and polarizing debates in modern literary culture – should have been settled many years ago, in the days and weeks after July 2, 1977, when Nabokov succumbed to undiagnosed fever and bronchitis and died in a clinic on Lake Geneva, aged 78. In among the 50 index cards, on which the great novelist, poet, short-story writer, lepidopterist and chess master had transcribed only a fraction of the novel that he had more or less perfected in his head, he had inserted an unequivocal note: the index cards were to be destroyed.

The protagonist and chief vacillator in this tale is Nabokov’s only son, Dmitri, a former opera singer-turned-racing car driver-turned meticulous translator, interpreter and devoted, occasionally prickly, defender of his father’s works. After Dmitri’s mother, Véra, died in 1991, it fell to her son to set a match to “Laura.” Only Dmitri and one other, unidentified, person know where “Laura” is, or have keys to the safe. But Dmitri never got out the matchbox. He is still “torn,” it is said, between his filial duty to one of the most exacting literary purists of the 20th century and the demands of “posterity.”

As late as 1974, Vladimir Nabokov was still chasing butterflies on Swiss mountain-sides. Brian Boyd, his most respected and diligent biographer, a confidant of both Véra when she was alive and Dmitri now, traces in “Laura’s” origins in the second volume of his excellent biography. We learn that the first reference to the novel is made in Nabokov’s diaries on Dec. 1, 1974, when he notes the title “Dying is Fun.” By April 3, 1976, the working title has changed to “The Opposite of Laura,” TOOL for short, and another diary entry reveals that Nabokov is “Proceeding at the rate of 5 or 6 cards per day, but a lot of rewriting.” Less than three months later, on June 17, 1976, Nabokov is in hospital with an undiagnosed infection; “Laura” is “completed in my mind” and, delirious for six weeks, he frequently imagines reading the book out to an audience consisting of “peacocks, pigeons, my long-dead parents, two cypresses, several young nurses crouching around, and a family doctor so old as to be almost invisible.”

Nabokov is obsessed with the novel but, weakened by illness and insomnia, his great task becomes committing the book to paper, the flesh cannot keep up with the demands of his still startling intellect. In Feb. 1977, Nabokov appears in a BBC documentary “his skin looks grey and flabby, and he breathes hard, he moves very slowly.” Time would tell that “he would never recover enough energy to transfer more than a fraction of his new novel from mental image to written text.”

Is Laura any good? Talk to enough Nabokov scholars and the outline of a plot emerges: Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.

Is “Laura” in a fit state for publication? Nabokov wrote most of his novels, including “Lolita” and “Pale Fire,” nonlinearly on index cards, which he would shuffle as part of his editing process. As “Laura” was unfinished and Nabokov often wrote the middle section of his stories last, it is questionable whether, published in her current state, “Laura” would resemble the book its author intended to write. These are fragments – 50 cards compared with the 2,000 cards it took Nabokov to commit “Ada, or Ardor” to paper.

Dmitri, why are you playing with us? Is this constant public vacillation on “Laura” an attempt to push up its market value? Or is it a sincere wringing of hands?

Boyd says: “I can’t imagine him physically destroying the text. Dmitri is a person who makes decisions and revisits them.” Then again: “He’s not going to cave in to public pressure. He quite likes that.”

The Times of London