Nabokov's Invitation to Plato's Beheading

NOJ / НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal, Vol. I / 2007
“beings akin to him” (223). The parallels between these passages, which suggests
Nabokov’s conscious use of Platonic imagery, makes even more sense when we recall
that John Shade, the great poet of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, imagined his afterlife in terms of
“the talks / With Socrates and Proust in cypress walks” (41).
In spite of the apparent optimism about afterlife which pervades Plato’s works,
one can nonetheless perceive an undeniable lack of certainty in his discussion of death.
Although Socrates often appears to be assured of his chances of surviving his execution,
at other times his optimism in immortality is countered with unsettling thoughts which
many readers of his works tend to ignore. What if the afterlife is just a dream, a
comforting way to cope with death? For Socrates (and, as we will see later, for
Cincinnatus as well) the prospect of surviving his deaths is not assured at all. He has
many doubts that his discussion about afterlife appears to be notably speculative. For
example, his hope for encountering Homer in afterlife starts to dissipate when he adds:
“I’d be willing to die many times, if it were truth” (Apology 41a, my emphasis), “[If] it
were true,” he continues this thought on another occasion, “there is good hope that on
arriving where I am going, if anywhere, I shall acquire what has been our chief
preoccupation in our past life, so that the journey that is now ordered for me is full of
good hope, as it is also for any other man who believes that his mind has been prepared
and, as it were, purified” (Phaedo 67b-c, my emphasis). Plato makes it unavoidably clear
that Socrates’ view of immortality relies not so much on indisputable knowledge but on
“good hope” and belief, which are not always convincing, even to Socrates.
On several occasions Plato actually gives the impression that Socrates constructs
his theory of immortality merely as a way to give a special meaning to his impeding