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One of the great deficiencies of the dead is that they never change their minds. One of their advantages is that there’s very little they can do about it when someone changes it for them. Indeed, they can even be enlisted to back up their own overruling.
When Dmitri Nabokov announced the other day that he planned to publish his father’s final manuscript, in direct contravention of his father’s request that it should be burned, he told the German magazine Der Spiegel: “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it. Then my father appeared before me and said with an ironic grin: ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess. Just go ahead and publish’”. So, after 30 years of tantalising seclusion in a Swiss bank vault, the extant fragments of The Original of Laura will finally be made public. Mr Nabokov Sr. wasn’t available to confirm the accuracy of his son’s account.
There are Nabokov loyalists who profess to be appalled by this – though I have a suspicion that they will master their affront sufficiently to read the book when it comes out. Personally I think Dmitri has done the right thing – and even if Nabokov’s rough draft would have been a smaller loss than two notorious victims of successful literary incineration – Jane Austen’s letters and Byron’s memoirs – it is better to have it than not. Dmitri’s argument – that his father would probably have thought otherwise had he had enough time to cheer up – might be specious but it will do in the absence of anything better. But all this is too flippant, some will say. If we disregard the wishes of our predecessors then we have no right to expect that our own requests will be honoured. And when it comes to property there’s obviously some weight to that argument. Last wills and testaments matter because their absence would create a wilderness of competing claims.

independent.co.uk

Dmitri Nabokov, son of Vladimir Nabokov, has decided to publish his father’s last work, The Original of Laura, despite his father’s dying wish that the manuscripts be destroyed.
What the commentators said
This has certainly been a “most tortuous dilemma” for Dmitri Nabokov, said Kate Connolly in a Guardian blog. “If he fails to carry out his father’s last will, Dmitri is effectively betraying him, but carry it out and the world loses forever what is potentially a precious gift from the grave from one of the greatest 20th-century novelists.” But one thing’s for sure: “Publication of The Original of Laura is sure to satisfy much curiosity.”
Dmitri’s decision to publish the book means that he “is a bad son AND Vladimir was a terrible father for putting his boy in this position,” said Gawker. And “if this last book turns out to be awful, Nabokov scholars will dismiss it as something he never wanted printed anyway. We all win. Except Dmitri.”
“I’d rather have more Nabokov than less in the world,” said Gregory Cowles in The New York Times blog Paper Cuts. If Vladimir Nabokov’s last work “doesn’t live up to his gratifyingly perfectionist standards—well, it arrives with bucketloads of context, and if nothing else it will give scholars another decoder ring to evaluate the cryptic Nabokovian oeuvre.”
The whole thing seems kind of fishy, said the blog The Literary Saloon. “We always equate heirs publishing posthumous work with a desperate attempt to cash in—is that what The Original of Laura has been reduced to, too?”

theweekdaily.com