Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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A. Moudrov. “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading” 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.
NOJ / НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I / 2007 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
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Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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