A father's dying wish is an imperative that few would ignore.But what happens when the father is a great artist? Filial duty struggles with the desire to add one last work to a lifetime's output. Such is the dilemma, outlined in times2 today, that faces Dmitri Nabokov. His father, Vladimir, was famous for the novel Lolita and beloved for a body of work that is piercingly insightful of human nature and couched in virtuoso prose. When he died, 30 years ago, the author requested that an incomplete novel be destroyed. A decision is still awaited.

Dmitri Nabokov is not the first to be thus torn. Tradition holds that Virgil, on his deathbed, instructed that the Aeneid be burnt. Kafka told his friends to destroy his unpublished works. In both cases, the wishes were disregarded, and the writings were published to enduring acclaim. But where authors and loved ones have acted in haste, there have been lamentable losses. The playwright Eugene O'Neill, gravely ill, asked his wife to help him to burn his unfinished work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, devastated by the death of his wife Lizzie Siddal, buried his poems with her. Years later, he regretted this, and retrieved them.

Roland Barthes was not referring to a writer's literal death when he wrote in The Death of the Author that “literature is ... the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.” But as Barthes said: “To write is to reach”, and Dmitri Nabokov's father reached so many that to burn his last notes would be too great a loss. Dmitri Nabokov is a respectful and devoted son. It is out of respect that he should disobey his father's wish.