Invitation to a Beheading Read online

  BOOKS BY Vladimir Nabokov

  NOVELS

  Mary

  King, Queen, Knave

  The Defense

  The Eye

  Glory

  Laughter in the Dark

  Despair

  Invitation to a Beheading

  The Gift

  The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

  Bend Sinister

  Lolita

  Pnin

  Pale Fire

  Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

  Transparent Things

  Look at the Harlequins!

  SHORT FICTION

  Nabokov’s Dozen

  A Russian Beauty and Other Stories

  Tyrants Destroyed and Other Stories

  Details of a Sunset and Other Stories

  The Enchanter

  The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov

  DRAMA

  The Waltz Invention

  Lolita: A Screenplay

  The Man from the USSR and Other Plays

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS

  Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited

  Strong Opinions

  BIOGRAPHY AND CRITICISM

  Nikolai Gogol

  Lectures on Literature

  Lectures on Russian Literature

  Lectures on Don Quixote

  TRANSLATIONS

  Three Russian Poets: Translations of Pushkin,

  Lermontov, and Tiutchev

  A Hero of Our Time (Mikhail Lermontov)

  The Song of Igor’s Campaign (Anon.)

  Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

  LETTERS

  Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:

  The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940–1971

  Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 1940–1977

  MISCELLANEOUS

  Poems and Problems

  The Annotated Lolita

  First Vintage International Edition, September 1989

  Copyright © 1959 by Vladimir Nabokov

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published, in hardcover, by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1959. This edition is published by arrangement with the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Nabokov, Vladimir, 1899–1977.

  [Priglashenie na kazn′. English]

  Invitation to a beheading / Vladimir Nabokov; translated by Dmitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. — 1st Vintage international ed.

  p. cm.

  Translation of: Priglashenie na kazn′.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-78735-4

  I. Title.

  PG3476.N3P73 1989

  891.73′42—dc20 89-40148

  Cover art by Yentus & Booher

  Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

  v3.1

  To Véra

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  About the Author

  Books by Vladimir Nabokov

  Foreword

  The Russian original of this novel is entitled Priglashenie na kazn′. Notwithstanding the unpleasant duplication of the suffix, I would have suggested rendering it as Invitation to an Execution; but, on the other hand, Priglashenie na otsechenie golovï (“Invitation to a Decapitation”) was what I really would have said in my mother tongue, had I not been stopped by a similar stutter.

  I composed the Russian original exactly a quarter of a century ago in Berlin, some fifteen years after escaping from the Bolshevist regime, and just before the Nazi regime reached its full volume of welcome. The question whether or not my seeing both in terms of one dull beastly farce had any effect on this book, should concern the good reader as little as it does me.

  Priglashenie na kazn′ came out serially in a Russian émigré magazine, the Sovremennïya Zapiski, appearing in Paris, and later, in 1938, was published in that city by the Dom Knigi. Emigré reviewers, who were puzzled but liked it, thought they distinguished in it a “Kafkaesque” strain, not knowing that I had no German, was completely ignorant of modern German literature, and had not yet read any French or English translations of Kafka’s works. No doubt, there do exist certain stylistic links between this book and, say, my earlier stories (or my later Bend Sinister); but there are none between it and Le chateau or The Trial. Spiritual affinities have no place in my concept of literary criticism, but if I did have to choose a kindred soul, it would certainly be that great artist rather than G. H. Orwell or other popular purveyors of illustrated ideas and publicistic fiction. Incidentally, I could never understand why every book of mine invariably sends reviewers scurrying in search of more or less celebrated names for the purpose of passionate comparison. During the last three decades they have hurled at me (to list but a few of these harmless missiles) Gogol, Tolstoevski, Joyce, Voltaire, Sade, Stendhal, Balzac, Byron, Bierbohm, Proust, Kleist, Makar Marinski, Mary McCarthy, Meredith (!), Cervantes, Charlie Chaplin, Baroness Murasaki, Pushkin, Ruskin, and even Sebastian Knight. One author, however, has never been mentioned in this connection—the only author whom I must gratefully recognize as an influence upon me at the time of writing this book; namely, the melancholy, extravagant, wise, witty, magical, and altogether delightful Pierre Delalande, whom I invented.

  If some day I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be “To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered, for the sake of belated improvement, one’s own writings in translation.” Generally speaking the urge to do this grows in proportion to the length of time separating the model from the mimic; but when my son gave me to check the translation of this book and when I, after many years, had to reread the Russian original, I found with relief that there was no devil of creative emendation for me to fight. My Russian idiom, in 1935, had embodied a certain vision in the precise terms that fitted it, and the only corrections which its transformation into English could profit by were routine ones, for the sake of that clarity which in English seems to require less elaborate electric fixtures than in Russian. My son proved to be a marvelously congenial translator, and it was settled between us that fidelity to one’s author comes first, no matter how bizarre the result. Vive le pédant, and down with the simpletons who think that all is well if the “spirit” is rendered (while the words go away by themselves on a naïve and vulgar spree—in the suburbs of Moscow for instance—and Shakespeare is again reduced to play the king’s ghost).

  My favorite author (1768–1849) once said of a novel now utterly forgotten “Il a tout pour tous. Il fait rire l’enfant et frissonner la femme. Il donne à l’homme du monde un vertige salutaire et fait rêver ceux qui ne rêvent jamais.” Invitation to a Beheading can claim nothing of the kind. It is a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures.
No clubwoman will thrill. The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita, and the disciples of the Viennese witch-doctor will snigger over it in their grotesque world of communal guilt and progresivnoe education. But (as the author of Discours sur les ombres said in reference to another lamplight): I know (je connais) a few (quelques) readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair.

  Oak Creek Canyon, Arizona

  June 25, 1959

  COMME UN FOU SE CROIT DIEU,

  NOUS NOUS CROYONS MORTELS.

  —Delaland: Discours sur les ombres

  One

  In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper. All rose, exchanging smiles. The hoary judge put his mouth close to his ear, panted for a moment, made the announcement and slowly moved away, as though ungluing himself. Thereupon Cincinnatus was taken back to the fortress. The road wound around its rocky base and disappeared under the gate like a snake in a crevice. He was calm; however, he had to be supported during the journey through the long corridors, since he planted his feet unsteadily, like a child who has just learned to walk, or as if he were about to fall through like a man who has dreamt that he is walking on water only to have a sudden doubt: but is this possible? Rodion, the jailer, took a long time to unlock the door of Cincinnatus’ cell—it was the wrong key—and there was the usual fuss. At last the door yielded. Inside, the lawyer was already waiting. He sat on the cot, shoulder-deep in thought, without his dress coat (which had been forgotten on a chair in the courtroom—it was a hot day, a day that was blue all through); he jumped impatiently when the prisoner was brought in. But Cincinnatus was in no mood for talking. Even if the alternative was solitude in this cell, with its peephole like a leak in a boat—he did not care, and asked to be left alone; they all bowed to him and left.

  So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there were still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and—O horrible! The heap of cherries, whose mass had seemed to us of such a ruddy and glossy black, had suddenly become discrete drupes: the one over there with the scar is a little rotten, and this one has shriveled and dried up around its stone (and the very last one is inevitably hard and unripe) O horrible! Cincinnatus took off his silk jerkin, put on his dressing gown and, stamping his feet a little to stop the shivering, began walking around the cell. On the table glistened a clean sheet of paper and, distinctly outlined against this whiteness, lay a beautifully sharpened pencil, as long as the life of any man except Cincinnatus, and with an ebony gleam to each of its six facets. An enlightened descendant of the index finger. Cincinnatus wrote: “In spite of everything I am comparatively. After all I had premonitions, had premonitions of this finale.” Rodion was standing on the other side of the door and peering with a skipper’s stern attention through the peephole. Cincinnatus felt a chill on the back of his head. He crossed out what he had written and began shading gently; an embryonic embellishment appeared gradually and curled into a ram’s horn. O horrible! Rodion gazed through the blue porthole at the horizon, now rising, now falling. Who was becoming seasick? Cincinnatus. He broke out in a sweat, everything grew dark, and he could feel the rootlet of every hair. A clock struck—four or five times—with the vibrations and re-vibrations, and reverberations proper to a prison. Feet working, a spider—official friend of the jailed—lowered itself on a thread from the ceiling. No one, however, knocked on the wall, since Cincinnatus was as yet the sole prisoner (in such an enormous fortress!).

  Sometime later Rodion the jailer came in and offered to dance a waltz with him. Cincinnatus agreed. They began to whirl. The keys on Rodion’s leather belt jangled; he smelled of sweat, tobacco and garlic; he hummed, puffing into his red beard; and his rusty joints creaked (he was not what he used to be, alas—now he was fat and short of breath). The dance carried them into the corridor. Cincinnatus was much smaller than his partner. Cincinnatus was light as a leaf. The wind of the waltz made the tips of his long but thin mustache flutter, and his big limpid eyes looked askance, as is always the case with timorous dancers. He was indeed very small for a full-grown man. Marthe used to say that his shoes were too tight for her. At the bend in the corridor stood another guard, nameless, with a rifle and wearing a doglike mask with a gauze mouthpiece. They described a circle near him and glided back into the cell, and now Cincinnatus regretted that the swoon’s friendly embrace had been so brief.

  With banal dreariness the clock struck again. Time was advancing in arithmetical progression: it was now eight. The ugly little window proved accessible to the sunset; a fiery parallelogram appeared on the side wall. The cell was filled to the ceiling with the oils of twilight, containing extraordinary pigments. Thus one would wonder, is that some reckless colorist’s painting there to the right of the door, or another window, an ornate one of a kind that already no longer exists? (Actually it was a parchment sheet hanging on the wall with two columns of detailed “rules for prisoners”; the bent corner, the red letters of the heading, the vignettes, the ancient seal of the city—namely, a furnace with wings—provided the necessary materials for the evening illumination.) The cell’s quota of furniture consisted of a table, a chair and the cot. Dinner (those condemned to death were entitled to get the same meals as the wardens) had already been standing and growing cold on its zinc tray for a long time. It grew quite dark. Suddenly the place was filled with golden, highly-concentrated electric light.

  Cincinnatus lowered his feet from the cot. A bowling ball rolled through his head, diagonally from nape to temple; it paused and started back. Meanwhile the door opened and the prison director entered.

  He was dressed as always in a frock coat and held himself exquisitely straight, chest out, one hand in his bosom, the other behind his back. A perfect toupee, black as pitch, and with a waxy parting, smoothly covered his head. His face, selected without love, with its thick sallow cheeks and somewhat obsolete system of wrinkles, was enlivened in a sense by two, and only by two, bulging eyes. Moving his legs evenly in his columnar trousers, he strode from the wall to the table, almost to the cot—but, in spite of his majestic solidity, he calmly vanished, dissolving into the air. A minute later, however, the door opened once again, this time with the familiar grating sound, and, dressed as always in a frock coat, his chest out, in came the same person.

  “Having learned from trustworthy sources that your fate has been sort of sealed,” he began in a fruity bass, “I have deemed it my duty, dear sir …”

  Cincinnatus said: “Kind. You. Very.” (This still had to be arranged.)

  “You are very kind,” said an additional Cincinnatus, having cleared his throat.

  “Mercy,” exclaimed the director, unmindful of the tactlessness of that word. “Mercy! Think nothing. Duty. I always. But why, may I be so bold as to ask, have you not touched your food?”

  The director removed the cover and raised to his sensitive nose the bowl of coagulated stew. He took a potato with two fingers and began to chew powerfully, already picking out with an eyebrow something on another dish.

  “I do not know what better food you could want,” he said with displeasure, and, shooting out his cuffs, sat down at the table so as to be more comfortable while eating the rice pudding.

  Cincinnatus said: “I should like to know if it will be long now.”

  “Excellent sabayon! Should still like to know if it will be long now. Unfortunately I myself do not know. I am always informed at the last moment; I have complained many times and can show you all the correspondence on the subject if you are interested.”

  “So it may be tomorrow morning?” asked Cincinnatus.

  “If you are interested,” said the director, “… Yes, downright delicious and most satisfying, that is what I’ll tell you. And no
w, pour la digestion, allow me to offer you a cigarette. Have no fear, at most this is only the one before last,” he added wittily.

  “It is not out of curiosity that I ask,” said Cincinnatus. “It is true that cowards are always inquisitive. But I assure you … Even if I can’t control my chills and so forth—that does not mean anything. A rider is not responsible for the shivering of his horse. I want to know why for this reason: the compensation for a death sentence is knowledge of the exact hour when one is to die. A great luxury, but one that is well earned. However, I am being left in that ignorance which is tolerable only to those living at liberty. And furthermore, I have in my head many projects that were begun and interrupted at various times … I simply shall not pursue them if the time remaining before my execution is not sufficient for their orderly conclusion. This is why …”

  “Oh, will you please stop mumbling,” the director said irritably. “In the first place, it is against the rules, and in the second—I am telling you in plain Russian and for the second time—I do not know. All I can tell you is that your fate-mate is expected to arrive any day now; and when he does arrive, and has rested, and got used to the surroundings, he will still have to test the instrument, if, of course, he has not brought his own, which is altogether likely. How’s the tobacco? Not too strong?”

  “No,” answered Cincinnatus, after looking absent-mindedly at his cigarette. “Only it seems to me that according to the law … not you, perhaps, but the administrator of the city … is supposed to …”