| Sumario: | Perhaps no book has ever produced so much interest and impatience as Nabokov's last novel, The Original of Laura. The purpose of this paper is to set The Original of Laura into Nabokov's 'metanovel' and to weigh it on its own merits, considering features such as themes, images, characters and style that make his prose so outstanding or, simply, Nabokovian. The themes and images of the novel have been developed by Nabokov since the very beginning of his literary career. The Original of Laura has a complex 'matreshka-type' of narrative, thus resembling his previous novels such as The Gift and Ada. One can easily recognize a web of metatexts and intertextual allusions to masterpieces of other writers, as well as Nabokov's own previous works. The style of the novel can also be identified as typically Nabokovian: the text abounds in puns, alliterations and intense vocabulary, including French expressions, and mixing up different registers.Due to its fragmental form, one can hardly follow the plot development of the novel and the least one can do is to treat it as the last reflection of Nabokov's pure art.
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