Bozovic, Marijeta. Love, Death, Nabokov: Looking for The Original of Laura. 2011

Marijeta Bozovic’s article “Love, Death, Nabokov: Looking for The Original of Laura” argues that love and death are leitmotifs in all of Nabokov’s works, but in The Original of Laura, a quantitative difference becomes qualitative. Not only is Laura expressly about the coupling of Eros and Thanatos, to name the formula, but the topos is even theorized. The metaphor turns literal in the experiments of the brilliant and mad Wild. Why imagine that death and ecstasy are one, when you can experience it? This paper envisions the Original of Laura as a brilliant parody of and response to all things Eros and Thanatos, and posits as one potential source – the psychoanalytic origin is, of course, Freud – Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World.