Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

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