Invitation to a Beheading 
by 

Vladimir Nabokov, 

 

Dmitri Nabokov (Translator )

 

Nabokov’s Cave

In his allegory of the Cave, Plato suggests a limit on human knowledge: that we see only shadows of reality. Immanuel Kant went Plato one better two millennia later and claimed that we can’t even apprehend the shadows properly, that even these in their ‘true selves’ are beyond comprehension. 

Invitation to a Beheading offers an alternative to these classical philosophical, and inherently dismal and nihilistic, views. For Nabokov the world is not hidden beyond an epistemological veil. On the contrary, reality is so much in one’s face, “a tumult of truth,” so rampantly and fecundly ‘there,’ that it is effectively infinite. It is not erroneous perception that we experience but an abundance of perception that is too great to adequately describe.

Nabokov’s equivalent of Plato’s Cave is a prison cell in a fortress, at some indeterminate time in the future. But this is no ordinary prison; nor does it contain an ordinary prisoner. The prison provides three squares a day and a good roof over the head of Cincinnatus, the condemned protagonist. This is only as to be expected. But Cincinnatus’s cell is described as ‘deluxe’; his food is the same quality as the director’s. And the prison houses an outstanding library of which he makes intensive use. The staff are kindly folk who look after his every physical need from entertainment to regular bathing. 

One could get attached to such a prison. Nabokov hints at the opinion that most do when he writes about “his [Cincinnatus’s] jailers, who in fact were everyone.”


But Cincinnatus is nevertheless stressed. Not because of his death sentence, but because he can’t get a confirmation for the date on which it is to be executed. This he finds intolerable: 

“... the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned. However, I am being left in that ignorance which is tolerable only to those living at liberty.”

In short: Cincinnatus’s predicament is universal.

Nevertheless his imprisonment and pending execution provide a sort of focused freedom for Cincinnatus. Among other things, it gives him time to dream, to recollect, and to write about his life. He can “see things clearly through the prison walls” that were previously invisible. And he feels driven to express them, “I have the feeling of boiling and rising, a tickling, which may drive you mad if you do not express it somehow.”

But there is too much to express. Not just of his life, but of the life he has suppressed and the dreams, which is also part of his experiential reality, much of which he has forced himself to forget. Facing death, he feels nonetheless, “I am the one among you who is alive”. But his life is overwhelming in its detail and complexity. It is infinite. Even the biography of an oak tree obtained from the library consists of more than 3000 pages; and it is still incomplete. Therefore, “I have lived an agonizing life, and I would like to describe that agony to you – but I am obsessed by the fear that there will not be time enough,” he informs the reader. 

Cincinnatus’s justifiable conviction is for the crime of “gnostical turpitude.” The offense is not one of moral depravity nor a lack of discernment of good and evil. It is his persistent inability to appreciate conventional reality. Driven by either an inherent artistic muse or perhaps guilt on account of his previous attempts to conform, he must write, and write, and write, before it is too late - even though his writing must remain incomplete, composed of merely fragmentary descriptions from his imagination.

The problem that Cincinnatus discovers as he pursues the expression of his perceptual overload is that the world is entirely mad. And not just mad, but evangelistically so. Everyone in it tries to convince him to be reasonable and submit to reality. In conversation, his warden is enticing. He might be reprieved. 

But Cincinnatus 

“does not understand that if he were now honestly to admit the error of his ways... honestly admit that he is fond of the same things as you and I,... if he were honestly to admit and repent –yes, repent –that is my point –then he could have some remote – I do not want to say hope, but nevertheless...” 

When he refuses he is rebuked with an apt biblical reference, “You offer him kingdoms, and he sulks.”

Cincinnatus has no Freudian Death Wish. Quite the opposite. His fear of death overwhelms even his drive to write. Ultimately it is the conquering of this fear that gives him some sort of freedom. This is unlikely to be a pleasing ending for “the disciples of the Viennese witch-doctor [and] their grotesque world of communal guilt and progressive education.” Nor is it likely to be satisfying for those philosophers who contend that the world is alien to perceptive human beings.