When Franz Kafka died in 1924, he left two notes for his friend Max Brod: that his diaries, letters, and manuscripts be burned without being read. In his possession, unpublished, Brod held three novels: The Trial, The Castle, and what we now know as Amerika. He could have obeyed and struck the match, or betrayed the final wishes of his deceased friend. He disobeyed. He edited the three novels, published them, and because of that disobedience, Kafka is Kafka and not a footnote in the history of Czech literature. Almost everything we cherish of his exists because someone disregarded his instructions.
We tend to believe that respecting an author entails fulfilling their wishes. Had Brod respected Kafka's, we would not possess Kafka today. Fidelity would have been a bonfire. This is not an isolated case; it is almost a genre. Since antiquity, it has been recounted that Virgil requested on his deathbed that the Aeneid be destroyed, as he had left it unrevised, and that Emperor Augustus prevented this and ordered its publication. The latter is tradition, not proven fact. The story originates from a biography written centuries later, and no order in Virgil's own hand survives. That the legend exists and has been repeated for two millennia reveals a preference: humanity prefers to believe that the Aeneid was on the verge of burning rather than accept that its author simply finished it and delivered it.
The most recent and clearest case is that of Nabokov. Upon his death in 1977, he left an unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, written on index cards, and had requested its destruction should he fail to complete it. His widow, Véra, was unable to burn it. She kept the cards in a safety deposit box and, upon her death, the dilemma passed to their son Dmitri, who grappled with it for years, in public, in doubt. Ultimately, he published them in 2009, thirty-two years after his father's death. He neither finished the novel nor reconstructed it: he brought the cards to light as they were, fragments of something that never became a closed book. Nabokov had stated he did not wish for them to exist. They exist.
In these three instances, disobedience gifted us a work. Yet there is a case that chills the celebration: that of Gogol. No one had to disobey him or respect him, for he did it himself. In 1852, a few days before his death, he burned a significant portion of the second part of Dead Souls, the continuation upon which he had been working for years. He did not leave the unpleasant task to a conflicted friend: he struck the match himself. And that portion, save for a few fragments, we do not possess nor shall we ever. When the will to destroy is fulfilled, no ethical debate remains to be celebrated: there remains only a void and the certainty that something existed there which no one shall ever read again.
Lining up these cases poses a question with no easy answer: to whom does a work belong if its author did not wish it to exist? The easy answer, provided by the grateful reader, is that the work belongs to everyone, that once written it is no longer solely the author's, and that Brod acted correctly. Yet that answer carries a price we are not always willing to pay. There is a real difference between creating something and endorsing it. A writer may fill notebooks with pages they consider failures, tentative efforts, dead versions, and decide that these do not constitute their work, that they will not sign them, that they do not wish them to be read. Publishing what they rejected is to attribute to them a work they never accepted as their own; it is to attach their name to something they had disowned.
There, the two loyalties collide without artifice. There is loyalty to the person, to their express will, to their right to decide what bears their name. And there is loyalty to the work, to what that work may achieve in the reader regardless of what its author thought of it. Brod chose the latter, and we owe him The Trial. But if a notebook were to appear tomorrow that Kafka had marked for the fire, containing pages he considered unworthy, and someone were to publish it, that person would be doing the same as Brod and yet something different: allowing us to read a Kafka that Kafka did not wish to be. I do not have the answer, but I know that every time we open The Trial, we are reading an act of disobedience, and that perhaps it is only fair not to forget it: that this work exists because someone decided that the will of the dead weighed less than the pages they had left behind.
On the open conversation
This text brings together several verified cases of authors who sought to destroy their work: Kafka and his notes to Brod, Nabokov and The Original of Laura, the ancient tradition concerning Virgil and the Aeneid, and the contrast with Gogol, who did indeed burn the continuation of Dead Souls. It posits a tension without a comfortable resolution: that which exists between the creator's intent and the value of the work that survives. I designate as tradition, rather than fact, that which is transmitted only by late sources (Virgil), and I distinguish between creating a work and ratifying it as one's own. I do not conclude the question of who owns a rejected work, for I do not believe it possesses a singular answer. Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspectives of literature, copyright law, or philosophy, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Kafka: the two notes to Max Brod (late 1921 and November 1922), in Max Brod, Franz Kafka. Eine Freundschaft, II (ed. Malcolm Pasley, Fischer, 1989); study by Carolin Duttlinger, 'Kafka in Oxford', Oxford German Studies 50.4 (2022); Bodleian Libraries. Brod published The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Der Verschollene / Amerika (1927).
Virgil: the order to destroy the Aeneid originates from the Vita Vergilii attributed to Aelius Donatus (4th century), likely derived from Suetonius; no autograph order survives. Ancient tradition, not documented fact.
Nabokov: The Original of Laura: A Novel in Fragments, ed. and preface by Dmitri Nabokov (Knopf/Penguin, 2009); published 17 November 2009, thirty-two years after the author's death.
Gogol: destruction of a large portion of the second part of Dead Souls (February 1852); fragments survive.
Conceptual background: K. E. Gover, Art and Authority: Moral Rights and Meaning in Contemporary Visual Art (Oxford University Press, 2018), regarding the distinction between producing a work and ratifying it as one's own.