Vladimir Nabokov died on July 2, 1977. From 1960 to the end of his life he lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland. The Original of Laura is a novel that he was writing at the time of his death. His son, Dmitri Nabokov, decided to withhold the unfinished manuscript from publication. According to Dmitri, the novel was roughly half finished at Nabokov's death, and Dmitri's father ordered the manuscripts destroyed, not wanting to leave the unfinished work behind. Yet neither Vera, his wife, nor Dmitri, his son, destroyed the manuscript. It exists with limited access in an undisclosed location.
Late in 2005, in an e-mail to Ron Rosenbaum, a literary columnist for the New York Observer, Dmitri Nabokov said he plans to destroy the book before his death. [Well, that’s odd. Why to destroy? Why not let it remain as it is?--L.B.]
In the interview (1999) Dmitri Nabokov said: “You know, my father left an unfinished novel at the time of his death, called 'The Original of Laura.' According to a note of his, he had written half before he died. He saw his own writing more or less as undeveloped film: images that still required to be recorded--on paper, in this case. There was only one such project left at the time of his death, and he ordered it destroyed. Burned, incinerated, whatever. He didn't like unfinished things.
Neither V [Vladimir's wife and Dmitri's mother] nor I had the courage to destroy the thing. We knew that if we did not destroy it someone eventually would read it and indeed publish it. My mother, when she died, left me the legacy of deciding this very thorny question, and I'm now in the process of making the decision to give that novel to a worthy institution where it would be secured in the proper microclimate, and where it would be available to highly qualified scholars--and where its publication would not immediately be allowed but envisioned sometime in the future.”
Zoran Kuzmanovich, a professor of English at Davidson College in North Carolina and the editor of the journal Nabokov Studies, later told Salon Books that few people outside the circle of Nabokov's family and friends have heard about "Laura," and even fewer have had any direct exposure to the unfinished novel. But Kuzmanovich heard Dmitri read a few passages from the work a few years ago at a Cornell University conference. "It was vintage Nabokov," he reports. "It sounds as though the story is about aging but holding onto the original love of one's life."

“Manuscripts don't burn.”
(Mikhail Bulgakov, "The Master and Margarita")

Dmitri Nabokov's blog:

http://dmitrinabokov.blogspot.com/