Legacy Matters

Dmitri's Choice

The rights of an author to insist on his work being destroyed posthumously are now being ferociously debated in the literary world.

An unfinished novel by Vladimir Nabokov lies locked in a Swiss bank vault and his son Dmitri, now 73 and in poor health, vacillates about his father's wishes to have it destroyed.

Burning question of whether to grant Vladimmir Nabokov's destructive last wish.

Many authors, including the playwright Sir Tom Stoppard, believe passionately in honouring Nabokov’s instructions and point out that the fragments would in no way represent the book the author had intended to write. But others argue that Laura is just one of several of Nabokov’s works that he wanted destroyed after his death.

Academics who are keen to see Nabokov’s final work also cite the examples of other prominent writers — notably Franz Kafka — who had their works published posthumously despite their explicit instructions.

Nicolai Gogol destroyed the second half of Dead Souls nine days before he died. It finishes in mid-sentence. Emily Dickinson published fewer than a dozen of her 1,800 poems during her lifetime and left strict instructions for her sister, Lavinia, to destroy the rest. Lavinia destroyed many of her letters but stopped short of the poetry and ensured her sister’s legacy.

Edward Elgar, on his deathbed, asked his friend W. H. Reed to destroy his unfinished third symphony but Reed never agreed.

Vladimir Nabokov’s wife, Véra, prevented the destruction of an early draft of his best-known work, Lolita, when she blocked her husband’s path to the incinerator.

As a general matter, I would side with honoring Nabokov's expressed wishes, but when I think of all the Emily Dickinson poems we would never seen, I'm not so sure.

Ron Rosenbaum, who has been involved with this question for the past two years in print and in email correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, wavers too and fully sympathizes with the dilemma of Dmitri's Choice.