RE: Burning Books

I think your metaphor , of colorizing film or tearing down buildings, will not work for Nabokov’s unpublished, unfinished work , Anthony. Even your title of “burning books” doesn’t quite catch it, for the text from Nabokov isn’t yet a book.

In other words, this isn’t destroying a work the author already released to public view. The question is rather whether Nabokov’s son should obey his father’s wishes and destroy the file cards that sketched something the artist did not think ready or appropriate. Admittedly, such wishes are sometimes refused. Would I be happier if Virgil’s dying request that his friends destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid had not been overridden by the emperor? No. But in this case, we are not talking about the artist’s masterwork. I think filial piety ought to reach at least far enough to say that a great and intensely self-conscious artist such as Nabokov probably had a better understanding of the shape of his work and career than his heirs do.

Ron Rosenbaum is an acquaintance of many of us here in New York, and I’ve written him to say I think the novelist’s wishes should be followed.