Dmitri Nabokov is clearly very much like his father, dispatching vague, all-caps e-mails to enquiring minds and in general being a half-pugnacious, half-endearing jokester. That is certainly the impression one gets from the brief interview with Dmitri in the NYT’s Week in Review.

His father was probably the best novelist of the 20th century, and the hard core of Nabokov’s readers have followed with interest the winding and much-speculated-upon fate of Laura, his final, unfinished work.

Vladimir apparently instructed his wife and Dmitri to burn his unfinished work. They did not. And now it appears, after three decades of vacillating, that Laura is bound for publication.

It’s unclear how complete the work is — as the interview notes, Nabokov famously wrote on index cards and “dealt” himself novels by rearranging their order. However, it has been known for some time that the novel concerns an academic who is downtrodden at the indiscretions of his much younger flame — typical characters at least — who decides to will himself out of existence. Nabokov himself described it to his son — or so the Times interview has it — as one of his three most important novels.

To say nothing of the ethics of disobeying a genius’s dying command to his son, I am, for purely selfish reasons, thrilled to see that Laura is being published, however fragmentary it may be.