Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

NOJ / НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I / 2007 

Alexander Moudrov 

NABOKOV’S INVITATION TO PLATO’S BEHEADING 

______________________________________________________ 

“I could never understand why every book of mine 

invariably sends reviewers scurrying in search of more 

or less celebrated names for the purpose of passionate 

comparison.” 

Nabokov’s Foreword to Invitation to a 

Beheading 

V 

ladimir Nabokov was always reluctant to acknowledge his affinity with 

other writers even though his works often betrayed some indebtedness to 

his illustrious predecessors whom he appreciated at different points of his 

life—Gogol, Proust, Baudelaire, Poe, and Pushkin. A more intriguing subject, however, 

is his intellectual relationship with those whom he claimed to have utterly despised, 

particularly Freud and Plato. It took awhile for scholars to ignore Nabokov’s pronounced 

antipathy toward Freud and examine the complexity of his attitude toward his intellectual 

nemesis with whom he in fact shared many interests. 1 Plato’s presence in Nabokov’s 

1 There are two main works on the subject, Geoffrey Green’s Freud and Nabokov (University of 

Nebraska Press, 1988) and Jenefer Shute’s dissertation “Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power” (UCLA, 

1983), a portion of which appeared in an article under the same title in Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984): 

637-650.

A. Moudrov. “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading” 

works, however, is still largely unexamined in spite of the apparent affinities between the 

two writers and the critical interest in the metaphysical aspect of Nabokov’s prose. 

Nabokov, for his part, seemed to discourage this line of inquiry. When an 

interviewer mentioned that “Pale Fire appears to some readers to be in part a gloss of 

Plato’s myth [which] suggests a conscious Platonism,” Nabokov curtly responded that he 

was not “particularly fond of Plato” (Strong Opinions 70). He was unmistakably clear in 

his letter to Edmund Wilson, when he simply stated: “I detest Plato. I loathe Lacedaemon 

and all Perfect States” (Nabokov-Wilson 159), referring to Plato’s utopian vision of the 

perfect political system which Nabokov carelessly confused with fascism or communism. 

In spite of such an unequivocal stance, however, what was endlessly fascinating about 

Nabokov is that he had an amazing habit of standing very close to those whom he 

despised and parodied. In his desire to demonstrate his artistic superiority over his 

intellectual opponents, Nabokov often adopted and subverted their techniques, borrowed 

themes from their works, and even imitated their style, so that it often becomes easy to 

confuse his stance with those of his opponents. Despair, for example, appears to be at 

once a parody and a tribute to Dostoyevsky’s style. In Lolita, Humbert Humbert’s 

confession adapts and playfully uses psychoanalytic literature, which demonstrates 

Nabokov’s elaborate technique of incorporating and subverting the techniques of others. 

In The Gift and Despair he mimics his critics so well that their views almost seamlessly 

merge with what one assumes to be Nabokov’s own. Is it possible, therefore, that 

Nabokov’s admission that he was “afraid to get mixed up with Plato” (Strong Opinions 

69) was his invitation to explore the artistry of his subtle parody of Plato—Nabokov’s 

invitation to Plato’s beheading?


The case in point is Invitation to a Beheading, a short novel which, in spite of 

Nabokov’s avowed disdain for “literature of ideas” and Plato, is laced with Platonic 

references and what Vladimir E. Alexandrov once called “Nabokov’s ‘Neoplatonic’ 

beliefs” (88). It recounts the last days of Cincinnatus C., an extraordinary man sentenced 

to death for some unmentionable crime that scandalized an entire town. Confined in a 

shadowy prison, Cincinnatus spends his last days in contemplation of a better world and 

the afterlife that nonetheless constantly escape his imaginative efforts. Whether the theme 

of the novel was influenced by the subject of Plato’s works becomes too tempting to 

ignore. The atmosphere of the novel, for example, immediately evokes Plato’s famous 

Allegory of the Cave, a vision of everyday reality as a shadowy realm whose inhabitants 

are barely aware of the artificiality of their existence. Only few of them dream of the 

other, perfectly original world, let alone actually reach it. Those who do escape, if only in 

their imagination, become persecuted upon their return by their fellow cavemen who do 

not share their awareness of what is real. 2 Nabokov’s Cincinnatus finds himself in the 

same predicament. Cincinnatus’ experiences apparently echo those of Socrates, the 

philosopher whose trial, imprisonment and subsequent execution are depicted in Plato’s 

in Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, a philosophical interplay of a doomed man’s hopes and 

fears. Many other Platonic references in the novel are equally suggestive. Pierre, 

Cincinnatus’ executioner, repeatedly demands sympathy from Cincinnatus, which recalls 

Socrates’ sympathy for his own executioner (Phaedo, 117a-b). Cincinnatus’ unexpected 

meeting with Cecilia, his mysterious mother who arrives to reveal the mysteries of his 

birth, corresponds with Socrates’ dream of “a beautiful, graceful woman” who tells him 

2 Plato’s Republic, Book VIII (514b-517e).


the day of his death (Crito, 44a-b). 3 Later on Nabokov makes a jocular reference to “the 

new comic opera Socrates Must Decrease” (220) which was performed right on the day 

of Cincinnatus’ execution. Finally, as if evoking Socrates’ beliefs in the afterlife, 

Cincinnatus apparently reaches the realm beyond after his execution. 

Nabokov’s persistent but notably inconsistent adaptation of Platonic references 

appears to symbolize the writer’s conflicted attitude toward the philosopher. At times, 

Nabokov clearly satirizes Plato—often simplifying and actually misreading his ideas the 

way he did it with Freud. At other times, however, in this novel and elsewhere, we can 

discern clear signs of “a conscious Platonism” in this and other works, particularly when 

in one of his essays he compared an artist to “the enchanter in his cave,” both partaking 

“in the same sacred danger” (“Art of Literature” 372). Such an inconsistency of Platonic 

references bespeaks some fundamental and yet unexplained tensions in Nabokov’s prose 

which this essay attempts to unravel. In contrast to the efforts of other commentators who 

occasionally pointed out Platonic elements in his writing, 4 my goal in this essay is to 

explain the Platonic theme of Invitation to a Beheading precisely in terms of the 

conflictedness and tension between Nabokov’s artistic sensibilities and his interpretation 

of Plato—a great example of a Modernist writer in conflict with Antiquity. 

3 Plato’s texts are quoted from the following translations: Crito, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Last 

Days of Socrates (New York: Penguin, 1993). Phaedo, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett 

Publishing, 1977). Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992). Timaeus, trans. 

Benjamin Jowett, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961: 

pp.1151-1211). 

4 Vladimir Alexandrov explored the “metaphysical” and, to a lesser extent, “Neoplatonic” aspects of 

Nabokov’s prose in Nabokov’s Other World. Dieter E. Zimmer’s notes to the German edition of Invitation 

to a Beheading (Reinbeck be Hamburg: Rohwohlt, 1990) briefly discuss a few Platonic references as well.


Nabokov’s antipathy toward Plato grew out of his distinctly modernist 

sensibilities as well as personal experiences. Overall, he might have felt some 

dissatisfaction with the philosopher’s lasting authority in such questions as metaphysics, 

the nature of art, and the relation of art to politics, all of which came under intense 

scrutiny during the social cataclysms of the twentieth century. It seems that the kind of 

experiences which Nabokov went through, and which many of his contemporaries 

shared, had pushed Plato out of favor. A refugee from the Soviet Russia and Fascist 

Germany, Nabokov must have been quite suspicious of the kind of political ideas which 

one can discern, mistakenly or not, in Plato’s Republic and some other dialogs. Plato’s 

famous vision of the perfect state, in which everything, including art, is subjugated by the 

state’s interests, was more real than Nabokov and his contemporaries really wanted. He 

was not alone in reacting against it. 5 

Nabokov also held in contempt the notion that art is an inferior and even 

dangerous intellectual endeavor. Socrates, who is generally (even if naively) seen as a 

stand-in for Plato, often emphasized the intellectual inferiority of art. He usually 

contrasted artistic endeavors with high aspirations of philosophy which aim at the 

knowledge in its highest form (Republic 595a-608a). At one point, he famously declared 

that an artist “produces work that is inferior with respect to truth and that appeals to a part 

of the soul that is similarly inferior rather than top the best part” (605a). This led him to 

conclude that poets should be excluded from the perfect state. Nabokov, a refugee from 

the “perfect” states, could easily relate his experience to that of an exiled poet, and he 

5 Many twentieth-century readers of Plato could not ignore what appears to be Plato’s totalitarian 

streak. Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) is a perfect example of a reader’s dismay at 

Plato’s fascination with the ideal states. Other classics of anti-Platonism include Warner Fite’s Platonic 

Legend (1934) and R.H.S. Crossman’s Plato Today (1937).


obviously felt no appreciation for the theories expressed in Republic. Neither could he 

appreciate Plato’s apparent view of art as merely a vehicle for expressing abstract ideas 

or serving the welfare of the state. There is a certain anti-Platonic sentiment in Nabokov’s 

praise of “the supremacy of the detail over general” (“Art of Literature” 373). In all 

likelihood, it was Plato’s suspicion of the “irrational” which Nabokov had in mind when 

he stated that art is a deceptive game in which its “irrational standards” favorably 

compliment “the precision of poetry and the intuition of science” (“Good Reader” 6). 

Another point of contention, at once personal and philosophical, was the subject 

of death. In part because of their personal experiences, both writers made it an 

unavoidable theme in nearly all of their works. In his dialogues Plato for his part 

repeatedly paid tribute to the trial and execution of Socrates, whom he considered a 

friend and mentor. His preoccupation with afterlife, which was inspired by these 

experiences, was also incorporated into his numerous discussions of metaphysics, thus 

making the subject of death virtually unavoidable in all of his works. Nabokov was 

equally preoccupied with the subject, largely because of his own experiences. The 

assassination of his father in 1922, when the writer was just twenty three years-old, had 

an undeniable impact on his life and artistic development. As a result, many of his works 

can be read as artistic contemplations of the mystery of death. Ultimately this subject 

acquired, for both Plato and Nabokov, a symbolic meaning that, Nabokov believed, 

reflected two essentially different sensibilities. Considering the thematic proximity of 

their works, Nabokov’s conflict with Plato’s lasting influence was therefore inevitable, 

and it focused precisely on the subject of death.


What can assume that what Nabokov disliked about Plato’s treatment of this 

theme was, in part, that the philosopher turned Socrates’ tragic fate into what might be 

perceived as a rigid tale that demands the reader’s compassion for its crudely constructed 

heroic character. On the verge of his death, Plato’s Socrates unselfishly insists on sharing 

his wisdom with his grieving followers. He turns down their offers of helping him escape 

the prison, and heroically (almost histrionically) embraces death. His subsequent 

execution takes place amidst a serious discussion on the immortality of the soul, which he 

continues to examine even as the poison administered by his executioner takes effect. It 

may seem that Plato, like Jacques-Louis David’s portrayal of the Death of Socrates 

(1783), went too far by turning this event into what strikes at least some readers as a 

dramatic farce which turns the complexity of this tragedy into a simple depiction of 

martyrdom. 

Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Socrates (1783). 

Nabokov’s disdain for such trite and overdramatic material is well-known. It is 

particularly evident in his novel The Gift (1937-8), which targets Nikolai Chernishevsky,


an admired nineteenth-century Russian philosopher and a hero of socialist movement 

whose intellectual life and persecution by the authorities made him an icon of public 

reverence. To the dismay of his own admirers, Nabokov mercilessly turned that 

respectable philosopher into a symbol of intellectual and artistic failure. It was while 

working on The Gift when Nabokov suddenly decided to put that long project aside in 

order to write a short novel titled Invitation to a Beheading. It was his tribute to the 

subject of a dying hero and, at the same time, a stab at Plato’s treatment of the same 

theme. 

The character of Nabokov’s response to Plato’s works can be understood better if 

we take a closer look at Plato’s way of writing about death. In Apology and Phaedo, Plato 

advanced his argument about the immortality of the soul. During his trial, Socrates 

expressed his faith that, if executed, he would go on living after death. He imagined that 

his immortal soul would join the company of other remarkable people: “the soul that has 

led a pure life and moderate life finds fellow-travellers and gods to guide it, and each of 

them dwells in a place suited to it“ (Apology 108c). To the Athenian jury, who had just 

produced a verdict putting him to death, Socrates convincingly declared that he was 

better off than any living being: “what would any of you not give to talk to Orpheus and 

Museus, Hesiod and Homer” whom Socrates would supposedly meet in his afterlife 

(Apology 41a). Later on, even closer to the moment of his death, he actually declares that 

a practitioner of philosophy can actually gain the company of not only heroes but even 

the gods (Phaedo 82b). Nabokov, for his part, had the doomed Cincinnatus imagine an 

equally alluring place where “the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested” (94), 

which he would probably reach following his decapitation, joining the company of the


“beings akin to him” (223). The parallels between these passages, which suggests 

Nabokov’s conscious use of Platonic imagery, makes even more sense when we recall 

that John Shade, the great poet of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, imagined his afterlife in terms of 

“the talks / With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks” (41). 

In spite of the apparent optimism about afterlife which pervades Plato’s works, 

one can nonetheless perceive an undeniable lack of certainty in his discussion of death. 

Although Socrates often appears to be assured of his chances of surviving his execution, 

at other times his optimism in immortality is countered with unsettling thoughts which 

many readers of his works tend to ignore. What if the afterlife is just a dream, a 

comforting way to cope with death? For Socrates (and, as we will see later, for 

Cincinnatus as well) the prospect of surviving his deaths is not assured at all. He has 

many doubts that his discussion about afterlife appears to be notably speculative. For 

example, his hope for encountering Homer in afterlife starts to dissipate when he adds: 

“I’d be willing to die many times, if it were truth” (Apology 41a, my emphasis), “[If] it 

were true,” he continues this thought on another occasion, “there is good hope that on 

arriving where I am going, if anywhere, I shall acquire what has been our chief 

preoccupation in our past life, so that the journey that is now ordered for me is full of 

good hope, as it is also for any other man who believes that his mind has been prepared 

and, as it were, purified” (Phaedo 67b-c, my emphasis). Plato makes it unavoidably clear 

that Socrates’ view of immortality relies not so much on indisputable knowledge but on 

“good hope” and belief, which are not always convincing, even to Socrates. 

On several occasions Plato actually gives the impression that Socrates constructs 

his theory of immortality merely as a way to give a special meaning to his impeding


death. He declares that “any man who faces death with confidence is foolish unless he 

can prove that the soul is altogether immortal” (Phaedo 88b). Considering the context of 

this statement (Socrates awaits his execution) the argument about immortality becomes a 

personal rather than a strictly philosophical endeavor. Socrates in fact admits this later 

on: “I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this 

[argument].” He compares himself to those who deceive themselves and 

give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only 

eager that those present will accept the position they have set forth. I differ 

from them only to this extent: I shall not be eager to get the agreement of 

those present that what I say is true, except incidentally, but I shall be very 

eager that I should myself be thoroughly convinced that things are so. 

(Phaedo 91a, my emphasis) 

It is as if the circumstances oblige Socrates to construct an argument of his immortality, 

but no matter how elaborate his argument may seem, it does not have the power to 

convince himself. Even more unconvinced are his interlocutors who sometimes appear to 

agree with Socrates in part out of consideration for his situation (Phaedo 84c-e, among 

other places). The real tragedy of Socrates’ execution, which Plato depicts with an 

undeniable literary skill, is that Socrates is ultimately facing death without a comfortable 

sense of certainty about his future. What is admirably heroic about Socrates, and what is 

really painful to witness as a reader of Phaedo, is that he creates a reassuring theory 

about afterlife and immortality while remaining strong enough not to dismiss that 

unsettling feeling that there is no immortality at all, resisting the natural temptation to 

cling to a comfortable vision of afterlife in the days before his death.


It may well be, however, that Socrates’ doubts about afterlife reflect our own 

uncertainties about ways of reading Phaedo. Plato seems to have succeeded in creating a 

sense of indeterminacy about Socrates’ prospects of surviving his death, which translated 

into the work’s interpretive possibilities. Even a brief survey of Plato’s scholarship would 

show how diverse interpretations of Plato’s theory of afterlife can be. 

How did Nabokov read Phaedo? Did he recognize its literary complexity, or did 

he read it as a pseudo-literary philosophical work in which the death of Socrates is 

nothing more than an occasion to express Plato’s seemingly simple notion of 

immortality? The answer to this question would help us understand whether Invitation to 

a Beheading was a parody of what he thought was the simplicity of Plato’s Phaedo, or an 

unintentional tribute to its complexity. 

It appears that Nabokov made the readers of his novel as conflicted about ways of 

reading his work as Plato made his. It is a strange coincidence (if it is a coincidence) that 

the readers of the Invitation to a Beheading seem to follow the same interpretive paths as 

the readers of Phaedo. The novel can easily be read as a sterile allegory of artistic 

creation, in which an artist transcends the limits of his existence with his imagination. In 

an alternative reading, however, we encounter a doomed man in doubt about the 

existence of the afterlife which remains nothing more than a comforting illusion. It is 

doubtful, I think, that Nabokov would make his novel prone to a reductive interpretation 

according to which Cincinnatus’ hopes and imaginative powers are simply rewarded at 

the end. The mysterious indeterminacy of death is a recognizable trait of Nabokov’s way 

of writing about it, the subject which Nabokov forces us to examine without any promise 

of certainty. This is what we encounter not only in Invitation to a Beheading but many of


his other works, particularly Pale Fire, Lolita, The Eye, and the 1923 play Death. As if 

addressing the readers, Humbert tells Quilty at gunpoint: “I want you to concentrate. The 

hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity” (Lolita 297). It 

may well be. 

In what reminds us of Socrates’ attempts to dispel his reservations about 

immortality, the central conflict in Invitation to a Beheading appears to be not between 

Cincinnatus and the prison-world in which he is entrapped, but between him and his 

sense of reality. His doubts, not his jailers, seem to keep him in prison. His many flights 

of imagination, which are his way of escaping, are soon or later undercut by a doubt. 

Thus in the first scene of the novel, in which Cincinnatus learns about his death sentence, 

he is compared to “a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water,” which would 

create an optimistic image if it was not undercut by “a sudden doubt: but is it possible?” 

(11). Cincinnatus asks himself the same question throughout the novel, and the answer is 

not always affirmative. Even when he seems convinced, his belief still lacks a convincing 

ring. “It exists, my dream world,” Cincinnatus says in his soliloquy, “it must exist,” he 

repeats as if in doubt. And like Socrates before him, he feels that he has to prove its 

existence to himself: “surely there must be an original of the clumsy copy,” he says in 

what actually sounds an echo of Socrates’ famous argument (93). 6 They are, 

consequently, torn between their optimism about afterlife and a realization that they are 

mortal. This explains why there appear to be two Cincinnatus’, one confident and 

rebellious while the other complacent and fearful (15, 25, 29, 40, 69, and 222-3). This 

6 The idea that this world is a copy of another reverberates throughout Plato’s works, and can be 

exemplified with Timaeus’ words: “the world has been framed in the likeness of that which is apprehended 

by reason and mind and is unchangeable, and must therefore of necessity, if this is admitted, be a copy of 

something” (Timaeus 27c-29d).


distinction between two different characteristics of the same person also evokes Plato’s 

portrayal of Socrates who sometimes appears confident in his reasoning about 

immortality while at other times is notably ridden by doubts. 7 

What torments Cincinnatus and Socrates, who found themselves in the same 

situation, is the question of how real that place where their reasoning and imagination 

often take them is. Strangely, most commentators do not share their doubts, discussing 

Cincinnatus’ immortality as something certain. Brian Boyd, in his reading of the novel, 

commented on Cincinnatus’ situation: “Only beyond death can a mind so alive find its 

true scope” (413), which can remind us of equally optimistic readings of Socrates’ death. 

At the execution Cincinnatus does not die, Boyd wrote, but “tears a hole in his world to 

reach his likes beyond” (415). 8 Cincinnatus’ fate, however, is more uncertain than this. 

Nabokov, perhaps unintentionally echoing Plato’s way of writing about Socrates’ 

wavering hopes for immortality, gave us many reasons to believe that Cincinnatus 

survived his execution, while at the same time hinting that he did not. 

7 We can also distinguish two distinct images of Socrates in the context of Socratic literature in 

general. Xenophon portrays Socrates as a philosopher who is completely assured of his immortality and 

intentionally defies the jury during his trial in anticipation of his death (or afterlife). Plato, in contrast, 

creates image of Socrates as a less confident man. 

8 Likewise, Socrates suggests at one point that death is the final step toward satisfying a philosopher’s 

desire for wisdom, arguing that “when we are dead, [we] attain that which we desire and of which we claim 

to be lovers, namely, wisdom” (Phaedo 66e). Many critical responses to the novel are equally optimistic 

about Cincinnatus’ survival. Gavriel Shapiro, by comparing Cincinnatus to Christ, argued that Christian 

allusions “enable to interpret the novel’s close as the resurrection of its hero” (124). Vladimir Alexandrov, 

in his examination of the novel’s Gnostic motives, was equally optimistic when he concluded that 

Cincinnatus “appears to transcend his mortal being following his decapitation” (86) so that his soul is 

allowed to escape the confines of his body and “return to the spiritual homeland to which he had been 

attached throughout his life” (87). Julian W. Connolly, for his part, wrote that the “end of the novel depicts 

Cincinnatus picking himself up from the ruble of the world disintegrating around him and heading off 

toward a new realm of kindred spirits” (183). Countering such an incorrigible tradition of interpretive 

optimism, Dale Peterson wrote in his admirably elaborate “Literature as Execution” that although “critics 

[often] assumed that Nabokov invites his readers to believe that imagination can rise above everything and 

anything, redeeming mundane hurts and losses,” it is doubtful that Nabokov “can actually be irresponsible 

enough to advocate imaginative escapism as an adequate response to police states” (70).


On the one hand, there are indeed many promising signs. Numerous passages 

emphasize Cincinnatus’ dual nature, so that it appears that his soul, simply put, will 

survive the destruction of his body. Thus at one point Cincinnatus is depicted enjoying 

himself after he casts off his material self. He “took off his head like a toupee, took off 

his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his 

hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What 

was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air” (32). Since something still 

continues to exist apart from a heap of body parts on the floor suggests that Cincinnatus 

somehow survives his beheading as well. There are hints that the novel is narrated by 

none other than Cincinnatus’ own ghost who continues to exist at least as long as it takes 

to tell the readers about the events leading to Cincinnatus’ execution. This is what 

explains the mysterious exclamations “O horrible!” (12-3), which appear throughout 

Chapter One and are probably meant to evoke the speech of the King Hamlet’s ghost. As 

the latter describes the circumstances of his death to young Hamlet, he interrupts his 

monologue with a chilling “O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” (I.5.80). The 

narrative of Invitation to a Beheading, like the monologue of King Hamlet’s ghost, 

sounds like a bodiless voice which survived the death of its body. In yet another hopeful 

sign, the novel mentions that on the way to the place of the execution, Cincinnatus 

notices “the odor of warm nettles” and “a dozen geese” (214), undoubtedly a reference to 

Andersen’s “Wild Swan,” a fairy-tale about a princess who is condemned to death for 

witchcraft. As she awaits her execution, she weaves a nettle-shirt for each of her twelve 

brothers to undo the spell of an evil witch that turned them into swans (or, as some 

Russian translations have it, geese). She continues her work even on the way to her


execution and completes it moments before what would be her execution which she 

narrowly avoids by breaking the spell. At the end of the story, we see twelve swans turn 

into young man and the princess, who grew ugly in her labors, regains her beauty. 

Nabokov’s reference to this fairy-tale, which culminates in a triumphant transformation 

of an innocent criminal who is reunited with her brothers, encourages us to think that 

Cincinnatus also survived his execution. 

Even more suggestive of Cincinnatus’ immortality is the optimistic epigraph by a 

certain Delalande which opens the novel: “Comme un fou se croit Dieu, nous nous 

croyons mortels” (“As madman believes himself to be a God, we believe ourselves to be 

immortal”). In The Gift, where we encounter Delalande for the first time, he echoes 

Socrates when he declares that death is “the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of 

flesh and our transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously 

see in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the world 

accompanied by our inner participation” (310). Delalande’s statement clearly echoes 

Socrates’ argument that “when we are dead, [we] attain that which we desire and of 

which we claim to be lovers, namely, wisdom [. . .]; for it is impossible to attain any pure 

knowledge with the body [. . .]: either we can never attain knowledge or we can do so 

after death. [. . .] In this way we shall escape the contamination of the body’s folly; we 

shall be likely to be in the company of people of the same kind” (66e-67a). 

But to trust Delalande, whom Nabokov invented, is as misleading as accepting 

fictitious John Ray Jr. as an authority on Lolita. No matter how attractive and captivating 

Delalande’s epigraph may seem to us, Cincinnatus, for his part, cannot shake off the 

suspicion that we might be mad to think that we are immortal. In spite of all these


optimistic signs and reassurances, which all but state with certainty that Cincinnatus 

embraces immortality at the moment of his execution, it would be wrong take them at 

their face value. 

Nabokov, like Plato before him, constantly suggests that hope for immortality is 

no more than a dream which, in the cases of Cincinnatus and Socrates, always slips away. 

No matter how promising, such hope invariably casts a shadow of pessimism. Just a few 

moments after he arrives at a realization that his dream world must exist (93), 

Cincinnatus’ hope bursts: “I think I have caught my prey. . . but it is only a fleeting 

apparition of my prey!” (94). He is consequently compared to “a man grieving because 

he has recently lost in his dreams some thing that he had never found in reality, or hoping 

that tomorrow he would dream that he had found it again” (205). It is “the dead end of 

this life” (205), the narrator says, and crossing out the word “death,” which some 

commentators interpreted as a triumphant conquest of death, is in fact a dubious gesture 

of hope and despair. It seems that the best Cincinnatus might do while contemplating his 

afterlife is to adopt a playful (but hardly hopeful) attitude toward his doubts about 

immortality which John Shade, Nabokov’s poet in Pale Fire, calls the “grand potato,” a 

pun on the grand peut-être, the big if (52). The afterlife, Nabokov’s characters and 

Socrates know, can be easily turned into an object of wild and uncontrollable speculation 

which for Nabokov and Plato had very little to do with the orderliness of imagination. 

One cannot, therefore, reduce Nabokov’s tribute to this themes to a manageable 

subject of a discussion. We are warned against concluding that Cincinnatus’ ghost, 

whatever it may be, survived his execution. Strange as Nabokov’s world is, we can find a 

ghost, but no immortality. The ghost can tell us a story of his life, but nothing about


death. Nabokov’s readers are habitually cheated of a chance to glimpse at afterlife the 

way his dead characters, no matter how imaginative they may be, are cheated of 

immortality altogether. As it happens to Edmund, a hero of Nabokov’s play Death, an 

imaginative person can tell us something about death only by imagining himself dead. 9 

This may be as far as Nabokov and Plato could possibly take us when writing about 

death. 

Such affinities between the two writers suggest that Invitation’s reference points 

are more diverse than previously thought. Apart from creating recognizable parallels 

between Cincinnatus and, for example, Jesus, John the Baptist, and the Gnostics, 

Nabokov’s novel intentionally evokes such works of antiquity as Plato’s Phaedo, and 

possibly (a subject for another essay) Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. 10 Such 

conclusion, however, does not make it easy for us to understand Nabokov’s motive 

behind the Platonic theme in his novel. If Nabokov introduced Platonic references merely 

as a joke, an example of a writer who failed to grasp the mystery of death, then we can 

conclude that Nabokov misread Plato’s highly literary works treat the subject of afterlife 

in a way as complex as Nabokov’s own approach. Arguably, he underestimated Plato’s 

appreciation of art which is cleverly hidden in the numerous and misleading expressions 

of the philosopher’s disregard for art. Plato has to be appreciated not only as a 

philosopher but also a literary figure—the way Nabokov can be admired for his artistry as 

well philosophic insight. We can recall Nabokov’s words that a great novel unites “the 

9 Nabokov’s Smert’ is one of his earliest works, a nearly forgotten play written in Russian, in verse. 

Still untranslated into English, the play’s short summary is available in Brian Boyd’s Vladimir Nabokov: 

The Russian Years (204). 

10 Boethius (480-524 AD) was a philosopher and statesmen who was unjustly persecuted and executed 

for conspiracy against King Theodoric. While awaiting his execution, he wrote a work titled Consolation of 

Philosophy which, in Platonic fashion, combines philosophical and artistic pursuits.


precision of poetry and the intuition of science” (“Good Readers” 6) to find it comparable 

to the spirit of Plato’s works which merge philosophical pursuits with artistic endeavors. 

On the day of Socrates’ execution, a friend caught him writing poetry. One cannot 

imagine Socrates writing in the first place, let alone writing poetry. Socrates responds by 

saying that he “tried to find out the meaning of certain dreams and to satisfy my 

conscience in case it was this kind of art they were frequently bidding me to practice. The 

dreams were something like this: the same dream often came to me in the past, now in 

one shape now in another, but saying the same thing: ‘Socrates,” it said, ‘practice and 

cultivate the arts’” (60e-61a), the message which Nabokov, if only he had noticed it, 

would have been inclined to accept at least privately—but deny it in print.


REFERENCES 

Alexandrov, Vladimir E. Nabokov’s Other World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. 

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. 

Connolly, Julian W. Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other. Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1992. 

Nabokov, Vladimir. Einladung zur Enthauptung. Trans. And Commentary by Dieter E. Zimmer, 

Reinbeck be Hamburg: Rohwohlt, 1990. 

_______. The Gift. New York: Vintage International, 1991. 

_______. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. New York: Vintage International, 

1989. 

_______. Pale Fire. New York: Vintage International, 1989. 

Nabokov, Vladimir, and Edmund Wilson. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters: 1940-1971. Ed. Simon 

Karlinsky. New York: Harper Colophon, 1979. 

Peterson, Dale. “Literature as Execution.” Nabokov: Modern Critical Views. Ed. Harold Bloom. 

New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 

Plato. Phaedo. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1977. 

_______. Republic. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1992. 

_______. Timaeus. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington 

Cairns. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, 1151-1211. 

Shapiro, Gavriel. Ed. Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov's "Invitation to a 

Beheading.” New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1998. 

Shute, Jenefer. “Nabokov and Freud: The Play of Power.” Diss. UCLA, 1983.

Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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