New Nabokov book to be published

Vladimir Nabokov (1899 - 1977) was a master of the English language and a brilliant writer. This was all the more impressive because he was born and raised in Russia; English was not his first language.

His most famous novel was Lolita, but he has a long and distinguished bibliography, both in Russian and English.

Why am I mentioning all this? Well, Nabokov's son Dmitri has finally decided to publish a his father's last working novel, The Original of Laura, based on a series of his father's notes. The reason why it took so long was because the author made it very clear he wanted it burned after his death, not published.

Both Marginal Revolution and Andrew Sullivan are not pleased.

I am of two minds about this. On the one hand, an author's wishes on his own works should be respected. On the other hand, this reminds me very much of the fate of Virgil's Aeneid, the greatest written work of all time, in my opinion. Virgil also didn't complete it before he died in 19 B.C., and also ordered the manuscript destroyed. Fortunately, Emperor Augustus himself intervened and saved this work for all future generations. He ordered Virgil's assistants to correct any obvious grammatical errors, but not to add or remove anything else from the work. And the classic was born.

So what does this have to do with the topics of this site? Maybe nothing, except that the Aeneid is actually a sequel to Homer's Iliad, where we are introduced to the famed "shield of Achilles"...