Kate Connolly reports in The Guardian that Dimitri Nabokov, son and the sole surviving heir of Vladimir Nabakov, has said that he might burn the writer's last (unfinished) novel, The Original of Laura, as requested by his father. His mother, Vera, could not bring herself to dispose of it when she was alive, but after she passed away in 1991, the burden is now his. "But more than 30 years since his death, nobody has dared to incinerate the manuscript, a collection of 50 index cards that is languishing in a Swiss bank vault."
Dimitri Nabokov has described the work as the most "brilliant, original and potentially radical" script his father ever wrote.
Some fans argue that if the author really wanted the manuscript to be destroyed he would have done it himself. Kafka and Virgil, apparently, had similar requests, for their works to be destroyed after their deaths. But how much poorer the world would be if those wishes had been carried. It would have changed the entire history of thought.
Others, apparently, think that we should honour the author's wishes.
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