Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

First published:Priglashenie na kazn’, serial, 1935-1936; book, 1938 (English translation, 1959)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Dystopian

Time of work: The future

Locale: The capital of a fictional European country

Principal Characters:

• Cincinnatus C., a condemned prisoner, who awaits death
• Pierre, his jolly executioner
• Rodion, the turnkey
• Rodrig Ivanovich, the director of the prison
• Emmie, his twelve-year-old daughter
• Roman Vissarionovich, Cincinnatus’s court-appointed attorney
• Marthe, Cincinnatus’s faithless wife
• Cecilia C., Cincinnatus’s mother

The Novel

Invitation to a Beheading is a metaphysical, dystopian novel set in a nameless, timeless, and nightmarish land. The hero, Cincinnatus C., a neurasthenic young teacher of defective children, has been condemned to death for the crime of “gnostical turpitude,” the perception and knowledge of forbidden things in a world where all things are already named and known to all. More concretely, his offense is being opaque in a society whose citizens are all transparent, devoid of fresh perceptions, lacking dark, secret corners in their minds or souls. Cincinnatus is “different.”

The novel opens with the pronouncement of Cincinnatus’ sentence and his return to the hilltop prison, where he is to await the unknown day of his beheading. The plot is simple. Cincinnatus, the only prisoner in the vast fortress, sits in his cell, where he is attended to by the bluff jailer, Rodion, who serves the prisoner his food and cleans; Rodrig Ivanovich, the frock-coated prison director, who makes official calls; and his lawyer, Roman Vissarionovich, who encourages Cincinnatus to pursue pointless legal formalities. Apart from discovering the date of his execution, Cincinnatus is chiefly interested in arranging a last visit with his beloved but unfeeling and promiscuous wife, Marthe. Both events are incomprehensibly elusive, as are most things in the story. On the morning of Marthe’s supposed visit, Cincinnatus, amid great fanfare, is instead introduced to a new prisoner and soon-to-be executioner, the fat and jolly Pierre. As the days pass, Pierre forces his odious friendship on the condemned man. Pierre seems to enjoy strange privileges and comes to visit Cincinnatus frequently.

Cincinnatus spends much of his time writing private thoughts in his diary. Haunted by the sense of his own uniqueness, that which sets him apart from all other members of his society, he writes, “I am the one who is alive"not only are my eyes different, and my hearing, my sense of taste"not only is my sense of smell like a deer’s, my sense of touch like a bat’s"but most important, I have the capacity to join all of this into one point.” Equally strong is his belief that he “know[sj a paramount thing that no one here knows.” Cincinnatus senses that he is in his prison world by mistake and that his true home is a bright, radiant universe peopled by others like himself. His diary probes this other universe and, by implication, the problematic nature of death as a possible gateway between worlds. He increasingly doubts the reality of the world in which he has spent his wretched existence.

Meanwhile, Cincinnatus receives a series of callers, each more bizarre than the last. In addition to the unwelcome visits from Pierre, Cincinnatus at last receives a theatrical visit from Marthe, accompanied by her new lover and her entire grotesque family. The scene is an exercise in absurdist black humor. The condemned man, reared in an orphanage, is also visited by his mother, Cecilia C., whom he barely knows. Although he doubts her authenticity (as he does that of almost all of his surroundings), he is struck by her comment that his father, a nocturnal passing stranger, was like him. A final “guest,” Emmie, the prison director’s daughter, is often in and out of his cell and childishly talks of a rescue.

As the nights pass, Cincinnatus hears digging sounds. Finally, the cell wall splits open and Pierre and Rodrig burst through with gales of laughter. They force Cincinnatus to crawl back through their tunnel to Pierre’s cozy cell, where they have tea and Cincinnatus is treated to a showing of the heads-man’s ax. Crawling back toward his own cell, Cincinnatus unexpectedly finds himself free, on a cliffside. Emmie appears and leads him through a door which, alas, leads to the director’s apartment, where Rodrig and Pierre are having dinner. It has all been an elaborately staged hoax. There is, however, one more theatrical event. It is a bizarre custom for the condemned man and his executioner to attend a gala dinner given by the town fathers on the eve of the execution. There, Cincinnatus and Pierre are treated to an elaborate light show which spells out their initials on a distant hillside.

The morning of the ceremonial public beheading arrives. As Cincinnatus leaves the prison with Pierre, his cell slowly starts to disintegrate. As they are driven through the streets, further signs of dissolution appear. Cincinnatus mounts the scaffold and places his head on the executioner’s chopping block, but the crowd becomes increasingly transparent and the scene confused. The ax falls, and “amidst the dust, and the falling things, and the flapping scenery, Cincinnatus made his way in that direction where, to judge by the voices, stood beings akin to him.”

The Characters

Invitation to a Beheading is not a realistic novel, and author Vladimir Nabokov has not attempted to create rounded, believable characters. Most are frankly caricatures. Cincinnatus is the exception. Blond, thin, physically slight, he is a dreamy, unassertive young man of morose, reflective temperament. He is absorbed in the past, in nature, and in literature. His senses and his unworldly perceptions are extraordinarily acute, for Cincinnatus is an artist"although his diary is the only tangible expression of his talent and unique intuitions. He is the only “real” person in a false universe with its totalitarian society and imperceptive, philistine citizens.

Pierre, the executioner, is the character most directly opposed to Cincinnatus. The two are contrasted in many ways. Cincinnatus is delicate, slender, and neurasthenic. Pierre is robust, plump, and jolly. The contrasts continue: deep integrity/shallow vulgarity, artist/philistine, victim/executioner. This dichotomous relationship comes to a head at the gala dinner party, where the initials of the two men are intertwined in colored lights. In the original Russian text, the paired initials are revealed as inverted mirror images of each other, reflecting the characters’ relationship to each other"an effect that is lost in the English translation. Pierre is the essence of his banally trivial totalitarian society, just as Cincinnatus is the embodiment of that remote, ideal world which he intuits. The unctuously evil Pierre with his plump white hands and smelly feet is one of the great characters of Russian literature.

The trio of Rodion, Rodrig, and Roman constitutes a set of somewhat sinister puppets, evoking a comic opera combining the Marx brothers and the Three Stooges. The three are carefully individuated: Rodion, the fat turnkey with his red beard, cornflower-blue eyes, and bass-baritone voice; Rodng, the pompous, frock-coated prison director with his pitch-black toupee and fruity bass tones; and Roman, the fidgety, lean lawyer with his harelip and tenor voice. By following their ominous antics, the careful reader will soon discover that the three performers sometimes exchange roles and identities, along with their costumes, wigs, and makeup. Even the paternity of young Emmie is uncertain, for at times she is referred to as the director’s daughter, and at others, Rodion’s.

Emmie, at twelve, is a nymphet in a sinister, make-believe world. Fey, ballerina-like, and ethereal but with erotic undercurrents, she tantalizes Cincinnatus with hints of escape: first with a series of crude, cartoonlike drawings depicting an escape and then, even more explicitly, with a suggestion that they should flee and be married. She, too, proves to be part of the hoax.

Only two characters have realistic qualities. Cecilia C. pays a visit to her doomed, illegitimate son, whom she has seen only once since his birth. Cincinnatus suspects her, as he does all those who surround him, of being a mere puppet and regards her with doubt even after she tells him the secret of his “different” father. As she is about to leave, however, Cincinnatus catches in her gaze “that ultimate, secure, all-explaining and from-all-protecting spark that he knew how to discern in himself also.” Another more realistic, though almost incidental, character is the taciturn prison librarian, who brings Cmcinnatus treasures from the past. As Cincinnatus mounts the scaffold before the festive crowd, the librarian sits on the steps, doubled up and vomiting. Together with Cincinnatus, these two are the only characters with an inkling of another world, a higher reality.

Critical Context

Invitation to a Beheading is Nabokov’s most artifice-saturated and technically sophisticated novel. Together with Dar (1937-1938, 1952; The Gift, 1963), the last of his Russian-language novels, it stands at the pinnacle of his Russian oeuvre. With his emigration from France to the United States in 1940, the trilingual Nabokov began writing only in English. Invitation to a Beheading is Nabokov’s earliest major statement of “the two-world theme” which underlies so much of his work. The gifted heroes in their wretched, illusory, fictional worlds sense, from intricate patterns around them, that an ideal and meaningful world exists, the world of the all-powerful author. The point of transition between the two worlds is death. Death is at the center of much of Nabokov’s writing, despite the fact that he is the author of two comic masterpieces, Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962). The two-world theme, with its focus on death, extends from Invitation to a Beheading, written in 1934, to Nabokov’s last completed novel, Look at the Harlequins! (1974).

Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction is a unique literary phenomenon. An absolute master of two languages, he made contributions to both Russian and English literature that place him among the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century.

Sources for Further Study

Alter, Robert. “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics,” in TriQuarterly. XVII (Winter, 1970), pp. 41-59.

Johnson, D. Barton. “The Two Worlds of Invitation to a Beheading,” in Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov, 1985.

Peterson, Dale E. “Nabokov’s Invitation: Literature as Execution,” in PMLA. XCVI (1981), pp. 824-836. Rampton, David. “Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister,” in Vladimir Nabokov: A Critical Study of the Novels, 1984.

Stuart, Dabney. “All the Mind’s a Stage: The Novel as Play,” in Nabokov: The Dimensions of Parody, 1978.