An article in Slate outlines a truly interesting dilemma in literary culture:
It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.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”? …
To burn or not to burn? It’s not a question we can argue over forever. Time is running out, and the stakes are high: Dmitri’s past pronouncements suggest that Laura is not merely another scrap of paper. At one point he called it “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity.”
So do you honour your father’s wish, or add to knowledge and scholarship? On the one hand, Nabokov was a perfectionist who made it clear that he only wanted his finished works to become public. On the other hand, this manuscript fragment might add immeasureably to the Nabokov canon.
One gets the feeling that only because Dmitri is family does he feel that he has an obligation to honour Vladimir’s wishes. Dmitiri was not the first family member to have to agonize over this decision: Vladimir’s wife Véra was first charged with burning the MS, but never did. However, if Dmitri stalls much longer the decision will be easily made: If the fate of the manuscript eventually falls to a non-family literary executor it will almost certainly get published. And the scholars will then be free to dissect it to their hearts’ content.