Before his death in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov instructed his wife, Vera, to burn the unfinished draft of a novel called "The Original of Laura"—a handwritten mélange of notes on 138 index cards. Vera ignored the instruction. Instead, she temporized for 16 years about whether to publish the book in its incomplete form, and never did. When she died in 1991, the cards were still locked in a Swiss bank vault. Dmitri Nabokov, the novelist's 75-year-old son, has now liberated them. Indeed, they are displayed for all to see, precisely duplicated on detachable cards—one per page, with printed transcriptions underneath—in the...