Vladimir Nabokov had requested that his last work, fragments of an unfinished novel The Original of Laura, be destroyed after his death. But it won't be, as his son Dmitri has (after tortuous deliberation) decided to go against his father's wishes and publish the work. Via Marginal Revolution, which has several previousdiscussions. Tom Stoppard, whose opinion is worth listening to, thinks it should be destroyed:
It’s perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. There is no superior imperative. The argument about saving it for the "greater good" of the literary world is null, as far as I’m concerned. There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces. But our desire to possess them all is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that’s going and it’s a tragedy if we don’t. It’s nonsense, an impossible desire for absoluteness. At best, it’s natural curiosity – personally, I’d love to read Nabokov’s last work, but since he didn’t want me to read it, I won’t – and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.
Stoppard is right about the neurosis, and ultimately I agree with his conclusion, but I can't quite buy his reasoning. Hard-nosed, unsentimental materialist that I am, I don't think that the wishes of dead people should carry much weight in and of themselves. They're dead, they don't care any more. However, live people do count, and they are faced with subtle and competing interests (as various MR commenters have pointed out). On the one hand, sure, we might be curious about Nabokov's last work. However, there is some degree to which the moral control over the disposition of a manuscript accrues to the family or whoever survives the author. If they felt strongly that they would be happier knowing that the author's wishes had been respected, that would be a perfectly valid reason for carrying them out. But that doesn't seem to be the case here; after thinking through the issues very carefully, Dmitri Nabokov came down on the side of letting it become public, even concocting a little story to excuse the apparent contravenance of his father's instructions:
From his winter home in Palm Beach, Dmitri justified his decision by saying, "I'm a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, 'You're stuck in a right old mess - just go ahead and publish!'"
But there is one more set of interests to be accounted for: those of authors and creators who are not yet dead, but someday will be. (Most of us, I imagine.) If I create something right now, I certainly have the right to destroy it. But I might also want to have the confidence that, if I leave instructions that it should be destroyed, they will be carried out. Otherwise I might be tempted to destroy it ahead of time, and regret it later. More generally, if we treat the stated wishes of the deceased as strictly irrelevant in the calculation of social goods, wills and other sorts of legacies will become relatively meaningless. It's not just about respecting the wishes of the dead; it's about letting living people live with some confidence that their reasonable requests will be carried out once they're gone.
