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Sep 19, 1989 | ISBN 9780679725312 Buy
Feb 16, 2011 | ISBN 9780307787354 Buy
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Sep 19, 1989 | ISBN 9780679725312
Feb 16, 2011 | ISBN 9780307787354
Like Kafka’s The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for “gnostical turpitude,” an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led out to be executed, he simply wills his executioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the whole world they inhabit.
Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957),… More about Vladimir Nabokov
"Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." — John Updike
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