No, in fact, all involved, lawyers, relatives, executors, would try to enforce his final wishes. Every project and enterprise would go to whom he intended, and every bit of his empire would be treated as he had indicated. And if this did not happen, not only would the law be invoked but there would emerge an entirely justifiable perception of justice miscarried. There would be outrage.
Would it be acceptable for you or I or other strangers to try to claim parts of this man's fortune, perhaps the mansion he designed and had custom-made, or the companies he built through years of hard work, or the unfinished memoirs he had intended to have no one except perhaps his wife or son read? Would we have any legal or moral basis for demanding that any of these things be turned over to us? No, we would not, and we would condemn any such endeavor perpetrated by others. We would not violate the dying wishes of this remarkable man anymore than we would want our own wishes violated in this way.
So then why is it that in death we respect the entrepreneur, but hesitate when it comes to the last wish of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century?
Vladimir Nabokov asked, quite explicitly, that his unfinished work, Laura, be destroyed. Initially, the work existed only on index cards written by Mr. Nabokov himself. Since the writer's death, his son Dimitri has transferred the content of the cards to conventional manuscript pages, and to date, he has not yet complied with his father's dying wish.
Mr. Nabokov is hardly alone in leaving meticulous instructions for what should be done with his unfinished work: Michel Foucault destroyed most of his manuscripts before his death, and his will prohibited posthumous publication of any of his work. Virgil, on his deathbed, asked Augustus to burn the unfinished Aeneid--a request Augustus disregarded. And we would know neither Emily Dickinson nor Kafka as we do were it not for the posthumous violation of their explicit instructions. So while there may not be a precedent for going against the wishes of our brilliant entrepreneur, there is ample precedent for violating Vladimir Nabokov's wish. Add to that the fact that Mr. Nabokov wanted to destroy Lolita, and suddenly, in a single paragraph we have gone from a case for why Mr. Nabokov's will ought to be carried out to doubts that furnish us with reasons for why it perhaps ought not.
But surely in cases of such importance, the decision should take into account more than precedent? Surely this decision should be reached not by generalization, but by the examination of the particulars in this very particular case? After all, Mr. Nabokov may have thought to destroy Lolita, but he did not actually do it. Writers may edit, abandon, revisit or destroy their works, but the great ones are great because they have the ability to judge good from bad. It is Mr. Nabokov's sound judgment with regard to writing that made him a great author. We shall never know how many projects he abandoned and destroyed while he was living, but we do know the ones he allowed to be published, and in them we see the product of creativity, editing, and genius. We see the result of his artistic vision realized. The writer may have a tortured relationship with his own creation, he may not see it as truly good though readers of that same work may disagree, but in Mr. Nabokov's case, at least, we may look at the works he did publish and conclude reasonably that he knew what to save and what not to save. Unless we ourselves have shown judgment as exemplary as his was in our own life's works, unless we ourselves can say that the things we have done artistically are of the same caliber as those of Mr. Nabokov's, should we not defer to his judgment--judgment which his body of existing work proves to be sound, good, and impressive? Those who argue that author's are not the best judge of their own work need only look at Nabokov's oeuvre to see that he was.
Some people assert, "If authors wanted their writing destroyed, they would or should have done it themselves while living." An example might perhaps suffice to illustrate why this is a facile statement. Virgil fell unexpectedly and fatally ill while traveling; this is why he had to ask Augustus to do what he would have done in advance had he been clairvoyant, had he known that he would soon die. Do we expect writers to conjure up superhuman strength while on their deathbeds and dispose of their unfinished manuscripts, memoirs, and other writings? Should a writer destroy what he might be working on, what he intends to continue working on later, just in case he might unexpectedly die before he has a chance to return to it? Would we say that our brilliant entrepreneur should have disposed of his empire himself, and since he only expressed what he wanted done as he was dying, and did not do it himself while he was living, we should ignore his will?
Furthermore, those who insist on arguing from precedent in this case, only support the decision to comply with Mr. Nabokov's dying wish. Most of Virgil's Aeneid was already written when he died, and the work exposed in its incomplete form is still quite coherent and exceptional. The same may be said of the works of Dickinson and Kafka. The same does not appear to be true of Laura. The manuscript is not near completion: if I am mistaken in this supposition, I urge Mr. Dimitri Nabokov to correct me, but in doing my research for this piece, I read nothing to indicate the contrary. In fact, everything printed about Laura to date as well as the public observations made by those who have allegedly been allowed to view the manuscript support this conjecture. So assuming it is safe to think in this case that a novel of his father's that is still largely on index cards is not even near its penultimate form, what we have is the skeletal beginning of a novel, a novel that is near either its initial or intermediate stages, a novel that is no where near completion. Who does its publication satisfy and at what cost?
Its publication satisfies the salivating, grasping lovers and haters of Mr. Nabokov, people who stand to make money off of the discarded works of the genius, and in a way, those who find novelty entertaining. After all, what is more of a novelty than the imperfect--since it is unfinished--work of a great mind. Do we truly, if we are entirely objective, believe that such an outline will give us greater insight into Vladimir Nabokov than his completed works do? If we believe this, we confess that we are not equal to the task of reading Nabokov because in every one of his works, the skeleton is present. We need only try a little harder to find it. Moreover the publication of the unfinished Laura might actually damage the overall artistic vision that Mr. Nabokov spent his life trying to realize. To illustrate this point most clearly, I use a historical example in which it is taken to its logical extreme: had Nietzsche's sister, after Nietzsche fell ill, not shamelessly and tastelessly published--editing as she pleased and without his explicit consent--everything she could find that had been written by her brother, would we not now have a better, less easily confused understanding of what the philosopher wanted to say since the philosophy he published would have been edited by him, would have been a realization of his overall philosophical vision?
What we do here when we ask that the content of those index cards, the intellectual, physical, and spiritual property of Mr. Nabokov, be given to us in violation of his will is steal from him. We become grave robbers. And at what cost? We take an otherwise impressive and complete legacy and render it imperfect. The oeuvre of original work that the author himself did not ruin while living, we ruin for him, as he is no longer alive to defend or protect it, by the addition of something he explicitly requested not be added. Such an act is tantamount to vandalism; it is comparable, in a manner of speaking, to my sabotaging Da Vinci's oeuvre by drawing a mustache on the original Mona Lisa.
I, who never knew Mr. Nabokov, can still surmise from what I have read by him that the release of an incomplete work, a work that falls short of his artistic vision fully realized, is something he would never want. One need only consider carefully his 1941 novel, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, to arrive at the same conclusion. If his words are not enough, then perhaps the words of another author who published his opinion on these issues might help: Milan Kundera wrote, "Aesthetic wishes show not only by what an author has written but also by what he has deleted." Those who believe that Nabokov's dying wish ought to be ignored should read Kundera's essay Testaments Betrayed (Les Testaments Trahis).
It is difficult to convey clearly the simultaneously pleasant and painful relationship a writer has with what he writes. A great writer rarely considers himself great; it is society that labels him in this way. To produce the work he does, he rips apart his soul in order to find and convey some fragment of truth, to see before him perfection. When he writes, he transmits through this act the highest and the best of which he is capable. Sometimes he lives in poverty or sickness for years; sometimes he is not appreciated in his own lifetime; sometimes he is persecuted; sometimes he spends his whole life on a single work; sometimes no one believes in him; often he hardly believes in himself. When he fails, he feels he has betrayed the sublime; he wonders how he can live. And yet he writes because so long as he lives, he must write. The process is similar to being in labor for years at a time, and despite the effort and hours spent, even then giving birth to a stillborn child--a work that remains unfinished or falls short of the writer's artistic vision. What human being wants to see his bloody still-born children, not buried and left in peace as he would like, but exposed to the world and passed from stranger to stranger in a carnivalesque nightmare in which they hack at and play with the lifeless body. Strangers who pronounce that after all that has been suffered to produce that piece of our soul, what was created is not ours, that our soul belongs not to us, but to them.
Even now, I fall short of what I attempt to convey in this last paragraph.
Dear Mr. Dimitri Nabokov, please do as your father asked, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because you believe in and trust his judgment as I do. Do as your father asked because you know how he suffered to produce his work, because you do not wish to see him robbed or exploited for money. Do it for your love of genius, for your love for him.
