Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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