Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and the Russian Radical Tradition

There has been much speculation concerning the origins and inspiration of Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn' [1938]), a novel for which its author declared a special fondness, observing in a 1966 interview that he held it in "the greatest esteem." ² The circumstances in which it was written are unique in the Nabokov corpus: while drafting his protagonist's, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's, biography of Nikolai Chernyshevski, which constitutes Chapter 4 in his novel The Gift (Dar [1952]), Nabokov interrupted his work on The Gift and wrote the first draft of Invitation to a Beheading "in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration." ³

It has become a critical truism that Invitation to a Beheading was somehow occasioned and inspired by Nabokov's work on the Chernyshevski chapter in The Gift, and Brian Boyd and Alexander Dolinin have convincingly argued that the central plot of a prisoner awaiting his execution in Invitation has its origins in Chernyshevski's unhappy history. ⁴ In addition to this larger connection, however, a series of more historically-specific links between the two works suggests that the idiosyncratic world of Invitation is grounded in a fictive exploration of the philosophical ideas of some of Russia's most influential thinkers of the radical left. The aim of Fyodor's biography of Chernyshevski, the nineteenth-century Russian radical utilitarian social critic, was not only to record the tragic fate of the well-intentioned martyr, but also to offer a critique of materialism, which Chernyshevski helped establish as the official ideology of Russia's radical left. Nabokov engaged deeply with the philosophical tradition informing Chernyshevski's life and thought, as is demonstrated by his frequent references to or quotations from figures who greatly influenced Chernyshevski (Hegel, Feuerbach) and from thinkers who, by echoing and extending his ideas, helped establish the Soviet State (Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin).

An examination of some of the most influential works of Russia's radical tradition suggests that Nabokov's close contact during his research for Fyodor's biography with the writings of three revolutionary theorists—Chernyshevski, Alexandr Bogdanov, and Vladimir Lenin—jolted him into writing Invitation to a Beheading. More specifically, the baffling narrative style adopted by the anonymous narrator of Invitation seems deliberately to parody Chernyshevski's similarly idiosyncratic narrative techniques, and the primary conceit upon which Invitation's society is founded draws its inspiration from the utopian epistemology advanced by Bogdanov. Other significant motifs, such as the amorphous nonnons, eyes, and vision, offer a critique of the naïve realism advanced by Chernyshevski and Lenin as the only legitimate theory of knowledge of the new revolutionary consciousness. The novel's larger commitment is to refute the metaphysically materialist and epistemologically realist world view which became the official ideology of the Soviet State, and to ally itself instead with the idealist systems championed by Russia's liberal philosophers. To this end, Nabokov explores in a speculative fashion the nature of human interaction in a world in which the traditional Cartesian dualism of mind and matter has given way to a materialist monism in which the soul is reduced to a material substance. Additionally, the mind-independence of external reality posited by Chernyshevski and Lenin seems to have posed a real problem for Nabokov during his work on Fyodor's biography in The Gift, one which called for the more detailed scrutiny he could afford it in Invitation to a Beheading.

In a 1938 letter to Altagracia de Jannelli, Nabokov suggested that the thematic links between The Gift and Invitation were grounded in his own reflections on contemporary history: "in my novels 'Invit.' and my last one the 'Gift' I have in my own way reflected things and moods which are in direct connection with the times we live in." ⁵ These times were some of the most turbulent in twentieth-century history. A...