Burning Books

Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum has this about his interaction with Dmitri Nabokov, son of the late writer Vladimir Nabokov. It seems that Dmitri was instructed by his father to burn the latter’s index-carded notes for a work entitled The Original of Laura . Dmitri, quite naturally, has had difficulty coming to a decision as to whether to honor his father’s dying wishes. Is sitting in a safe deposit box the outline for another Lolita, Pale Fire, Invitation to a Beheading, or The Defense ? It now seems that a decision as to the notes’ fate is imminent.

While reading this, I couldn’t help but think of other great writers/thinkers who either tried to burn their own books or asked others to burn their books: Nikolai Gogol and Franz Kafka, to name just two. I sincerely doubt Nabokov wanted his notecards destroyed as some eleventh-hour act of penance, as in the case of Gogol (and even there motive is squirrelly), so one can only assume that the issue was one of proprietary control: Either he didn’t want someone publishing what was unfinished and thereby no one’s business, or he didn’t want someone trying to write his own novel based on Nabokov’s notes. In either case, as Rosenbaum asks, who owns a work of art? And what if that “art” is in inchoate form?

I remember having a related discussion in graduate school, when Ted Turner starting “colorizing” classic films. The great one, Orson Welles, fearing Citizen Kane was next, famously exploded: “Keep Ted Turner and his damned crayolas away from my movie!” But if Welles did not “own” the film, and Turner “owned” the library in which Kane reposed—was it legally Turner’s to mar? And if so, is there nevertheless a higher standard that should supersede legal ownership? If one owns a building formally declared a “landmark,” what you can and cannot do to the structure is very strictly controlled. Should there be the equivalent with works of art declared “classics”? (And what about preliminary drafts of a work by an artist or author whose other works have already achieve classic status?)