Here's a real life example of the right-to-destroy issue discussed a while back here, here, and here. "It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died." Ron Rosenbaum has the details in Slate.
Norm Geras wonders: "Could [Nabokov] have spared his son this problem by destroying the work himself before he died? For how long, if for any time at all, did he know he was dying? If he could have destroyed it himself and didn't, does that tell us anything about how resolutely set he was on having it destroyed?"
