All sort of people are getting in on the debate about Nabokov’s dying wish that we brought to your attention last month. Here’s a little update.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution says:

Dead people don’t count in the social welfare function… Don’t destroy the output.

Nice.

We agree with Sir Tom Stoppard of The Times:

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.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.