10 Creators Who Desired the Destruction of Their Creations

Motivated by self-doubt, worries about controversial material, shifts in artistic focus, or even fleeting frustration, many creators and authors have either obliterated their own works or requested their destruction—leaving the world to ponder the lost masterpieces. These individuals, who sought to erase their creations, met with differing levels of success.

1. Franz Kafka

Throughout his life, Kafka released only a few short pieces, which received limited critical acclaim. Struggling with insecurity, Kafka destroyed a significant portion of his writings and, knowing his health was deteriorating, instructed his close friend and literary executor Max Brod to burn all his unfinished manuscripts upon his death without reading them.

Kafka succumbed to tuberculosis at 40 in 1924. Brod, believing Kafka’s works were too valuable to be lost, disregarded his friend’s final wishes. He published Kafka’s major works, such as The Trial in 1925, The Castle in 1926, and Amerika in 1927.

Brod fled Nazi-occupied Prague in 1939 and moved to Israel, where he later donated approximately two-thirds of Kafka’s documents to Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The rest of the papers were inherited by his secretary Esther Hoffe and subsequently her daughters, sparking a prolonged legal dispute with the National Library of Israel, which sought to claim Kafka’s papers for the country. In 2015, a Tel Aviv court ruled in favor of the National Library of Israel, granting them access to Kafka’s remaining documents and opening a new wealth of resources for Kafka researchers.

2. John Baldessari

Conceptual artist John Baldessari elevated the destruction of his creations to an art form, turning the act itself into a masterpiece. In 1970, Baldessari resolved to transition into a new artistic phase by obliterating all his early paintings produced between 1953 and 1966. He named this endeavor The Cremation Project, enlisting students from the University of California to help cut up his canvases and place them into a crematorium’s incinerator. The entire process was documented through film and photography, becoming an integral part of the artwork.

After the destruction was complete, Baldessari gathered the ashes and placed them in an urn. He also commissioned a plaque bearing his name and the dates May 1953–March 1966, resembling a tombstone.

3. Robert Louis Stevenson

For many years, it was believed that Robert Louis Stevenson burned the initial draft of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde after his wife Fanny harshly criticized the work. Stevenson had drawn inspiration for his horror tale from a vivid dream induced by medicinal cocaine. Despite being deeply in debt and living as an invalid following a hemorrhage, Stevenson’s creative fervor led him to complete the first draft in just three days.

Recently, a letter surfaced in which Fanny admitted she considered the story “a quire full of utter nonsense” and even threatened to burn it herself. Undeterred, Stevenson rewrote the 30,000-word manuscript by hand, and it was published to widespread acclaim shortly thereafter.

4. Vladimir Nabokov

Before his death in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov entrusted his wife Vera with the fragments of a novel titled The Original of Laura, instructing her to destroy it after his passing. Vera, however, found herself unable to fulfill his request, possibly overwhelmed by the thought of erasing his creative legacy. Upon Vera’s death, the manuscript was passed to their son Dmitri, who also hesitated to either destroy or publish it, keeping the unfinished work hidden for years.

In 2008, Dmitri, now elderly, decided to release his father’s unpublished work, assembling the novel from the index cards Nabokov had used to outline the story. Unfortunately, the long-awaited release fell short of expectations, with critics suggesting that the work might have been better off destroyed, as Nabokov had originally intended.

5. Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol’s comic novel Dead Souls (1842) cemented his reputation as the father of Russian realism. Deeply religious, Gogol believed it was his divine mission to write two sequels to his masterpiece, aiming to inspire a more virtuous life. However, his creativity waned, and despite years of effort, he found his progress on parts two and three deeply unsatisfying.

Gogol interpreted his struggles as divine disapproval and lost his sense of purpose. Seeking spiritual counsel, he fell under the influence of a zealous priest, Father Matvey Konstantinovsky, who in 1852 persuaded Gogol that his work was unworthy and urged him to burn the manuscript of Dead Souls, Part 2. Ten days later, Gogol passed away at the age of 42.

6. Dante Gabriel Rossetti

After the tragic death of his wife Lizzie Siddal from a drug overdose, poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was overcome with grief. As her coffin was sealed for burial at London's Highgate Cemetery, he secretly placed a notebook containing his latest poems inside. Years later, once his sorrow had subsided, Rossetti struggled to recall the lost verses. Desperate to recover them, he arranged for men to exhume his wife’s coffin and retrieve the notebook. Though the manuscript was severely damaged, Rossetti managed to publish the poems, which were met with widespread praise.

7. Claude Monet

In 1908, just before a major exhibition of his new water garden paintings in Paris, impressionist Claude Monet destroyed all of them. Despite spending three years on the works and having the exhibition already promoted, Monet felt dissatisfied with his creations. Armed with a knife and paintbrush, he slashed and ruined at least 15 large canvases.

This wasn’t Monet’s only act of destruction. As he neared the end of his life, the perfectionist artist, with the help of his step-daughter Blanche, destroyed up to 60 paintings stored in his studio, deeming them unworthy of his legacy.

8. Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins, a groundbreaking Victorian poet, achieved his greatest fame posthumously. Tragically, his early works were lost forever when he burned them in 1868 after joining the Jesuit order, choosing to focus on religion over art. For seven years, he abandoned writing until the 1875 shipwreck of the Deutschland, which claimed the lives of five nuns, inspired him to compose one of his most renowned poems, The Wreck of the Deutschland, marking his return to poetry.

9. Aubrey Beardsley

Aubrey Beardsley, a gifted Art Nouveau illustrator, gained fame for his illustrations in Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1894). His unique adaptation of traditional Japanese woodcut styles won him admirers, though his use of grotesque imagery and ties to the Decadent art movement also drew criticism. Battling tuberculosis, Beardsley immersed himself in his work, editing four issues of the arts journal The Yellow Book.

After Wilde’s indecency trial, public moral outrage led to Beardsley’s dismissal from The Yellow Book, partly due to his association with Wilde. He relocated to France for health reasons but died of tuberculosis at 25. Before his death, Beardsley pleaded with his publisher Leonard Smithers to destroy his erotic drawings. Smithers, however, preserved the works, ensuring Beardsley’s art endured.

10. Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, one of the 20th century’s most impactful artists, created provocative works that often explored religious themes and challenged societal norms. In 1944, Bacon destroyed numerous early surrealist pieces, deeming them inadequate in expressing his vision. This marked a pattern of destruction, as he frequently discarded works that failed to meet his standards. (Later in life, he regretted losing some pieces he retrospectively valued.) Despite this, Bacon’s prolific output ensured many works survived. At his death in 1992, his studio reportedly contained over 100 damaged artworks.