Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

A. Moudrov. “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading”
an admired nineteenth-century Russian philosopher and a hero of socialist movement
whose intellectual life and persecution by the authorities made him an icon of public
reverence. To the dismay of his own admirers, Nabokov mercilessly turned that
respectable philosopher into a symbol of intellectual and artistic failure. It was while
working on The Gift when Nabokov suddenly decided to put that long project aside in
order to write a short novel titled Invitation to a Beheading. It was his tribute to the
subject of a dying hero and, at the same time, a stab at Plato’s treatment of the same
theme.
The character of Nabokov’s response to Plato’s works can be understood better if
we take a closer look at Plato’s way of writing about death. In Apology and Phaedo, Plato
advanced his argument about the immortality of the soul. During his trial, Socrates
expressed his faith that, if executed, he would go on living after death. He imagined that
his immortal soul would join the company of other remarkable people: “the soul that has
led a pure life and moderate life finds fellow-travellers and gods to guide it, and each of
them dwells in a place suited to it“ (Apology 108c). To the Athenian jury, who had just
produced a verdict putting him to death, Socrates convincingly declared that he was
better off than any living being: “what would any of you not give to talk to Orpheus and
Museus, Hesiod and Homer” whom Socrates would supposedly meet in his afterlife
(Apology 41a). Later on, even closer to the moment of his death, he actually declares that
a practitioner of philosophy can actually gain the company of not only heroes but even
the gods (Phaedo 82b). Nabokov, for his part, had the doomed Cincinnatus imagine an
equally alluring place where “the freaks that are tortured here walk unmolested” (94),
which he would probably reach following his decapitation, joining the company of the