Nabokov wanted his final,
unfinished work destroyed. Should his son get out the matches?
By
Ron Rosenbaum Posted Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2008, at 6:18 PM ET
Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the
most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I'm
hopelessly conflicted about it. It's the question of whether the last
unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a
Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested
before he died.
It's a decision that has fallen to his sole
surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has
been torn for years between his father's unequivocal request and the
demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his
father's genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura.
Should Dmitri defy his father's wishes for the sake of "posterity"?