Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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