Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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