Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading

What would you do if you knew you were about to die?

What would you do if you were in prison and you knew you were going to die — but you didn’t know when?

Those are some of the central questions in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, a novel I saw a blonde girl engrossed with on the bus the other day. I imagine the book was for class, because I’m not sure whether Beheading is a novel someone would choose for light summer reading.

Beheading recounts the final days of Cincinnatus C., a prisoner from a fictitious country who is sentenced to death for “gnostical turpitude.” The term vaguely means Cincinnatus has a depraved disregard for matter — flashbacks reveal that as a child he could levitate or perform other tricks that indicated this disregard. Put simply, Cincinnatus is put to death because he is different. His presence makes others feel uncomfortable.

One of the central problems of Beheading, however, is that Cincinnatus has no idea when he is going to die. In the twenty days that the novel spans, Cincinnatus tries in vain to discover his expiration date, but to no avail. His jailer and fellow prisoners try to get him to interact with them, to play games, eat and joke around. All Cincinnatus wants to do is figure out when he will die.

The prisoner’s other desire is to write a piece of work expressing himself, “in defiance of all the world’s muteness.” But because he’s not sure how long he has to finish it, he feels like he can’t write it at all.

According to at least one interpretation of the novel, Nabokov’s work explores the theme of conformity. Cincinnatus is condemned because he operates on the fringes of society, and others look down on him because he will not participate in social norms. He doesn’t want to dance, joke or play with the other prisoners. He only wants to know when he will die.

Nabokov is best known for Lolita, his disturbing tale about a man’s sexual obsession with his 12-year old stepdaughter. The prolific Russian-American author wrote Beheading in Russian before it was translated by his son, Dmitri.

“Generally speaking, I am a slow writer, a snail carrying its house at the rate of two hundred pages of final copy per year (one spectacular exception was the Russian original of Invitation to a Beheading, the first draft of which I wrote in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration),” he said in an interview with Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature in the spring of 1967.

The acclaimed novelist was born in 1899 in St. Petersburg and grew up in a wealthy, multi-lingual family. They moved frequently, especially later in the author’s life, due to the political turmoil in Russia and the onset of World War II. Eventually, Nabokov found himself in the United States, with his wife and son, working at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Before long he was introduced to the American editors that would lead him to worldwide recognition.

Nabokov died in 1977, and the incomplete manuscript of his last novel has been sitting in a Swiss bank vault ever since. His son, Dmitri announced in April 2008 that he would publish the novel, against his father's wishes.

The 240-page Beheading is available in paperback on Amazon for less than $10.50.