I'm not budging from my "burn it" stance regarding Vladimir Nabokov's dying wish to have his final novel torched. Then Tom Stoppard comes along and nails it, and has me grinning for the rest of the day:

It's perfectly straightforward: Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it. There is no superior imperative. The argument about saving it for the "greater good" of the literary world is null, as far as I'm concerned. There are parallel universes, might-have-been worlds, full of lost works, and no doubt some of them would have been masterpieces. But our desire to possess them all is just a neurosis, a completeness complex, as though we must have everything that's going and it's a tragedy if we don't. It's nonsense, an impossible desire for absoluteness. At best, it's natural curiosity--personally, I'd love to read Nabokov's last work, but since he didn't want me to read it, I won't--and it’s hardly modest to make one’s own desire more important than his.

And I can't resist sharing the last sentence, because I love Stoppard's "fuck you" attitude:

In all honour, we must honour the only fact: that he said "Burn it." Everything else is speculation--mostly self-serving speculation on the part of the Nabokov industry, the last people we should listen to.

I'd gleefully burn those fifty notecards myself.

Comments

[Nonanon]

Ha,
You and me, Brandon. I say flame that sucker. And slap Dmitri while you're at it for making this such a painful process.

I LOVE the Tom Stoppard stuff. Talk about telling it like it is. Did you read John Banville's suggestion? (at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3364188.ece). That literary critics and authors, like Harold Bloom and John Updike, should look at it and decide if it's worthy to be shared with other readers? I thought that was the stupidest thing I'd read all year. I'd always wanted to read some John Banville but now I think I'll pick up copies of some Stoppard plays instead.

[Brandon]

I'm getting tired of this discussion. I've yet to see a good reason for not burning it. Kafka is a poor comparison, and as to the argument that "if he wanted to, he would've"--that's just ridiculous. He intended to finish it, so of course he didn't toss it in the incinerator. And who are we to assume control of what Nabokov didn't publish and never wanted us to read in the first place? The poor guy is dead, so he obviously can't pipe up. Not that he needs to: he had the final say years ago. Just because he was an author doesn't mean he should be exempt from having his final wishes carried out.

Dmitri should enlist in my services. I'd put an end to this whole process real quick.