To all appearances, Vladimir Nabokov is as unlikely a student of classical literature as one might imagine. A fierce modernist, possessed of even less knowledge of Greek and Latin than Shakespeare, and steeped in a profound hatred for Plato, how could he possibly have written a virtual roman a clef based on a consistent set of intertextual allusions to a classical author in any of his works of fiction? But this is precisely what we have in Invitation to a Beheading, one of Nabokov’s earliest novels (first published in Russian in 1935-6 and later translated into English in 1959). Invitation’s protagonist Cincinnatus finds himself in prison awaiting his execution. His crime: “gnoseological turpitude,” evidently a crime against reality itself. From the beginning, his identity slowly stands revealed in all its spelaean clarity, while he just as slowly detaches himself from the metaphysical distortions of the fictional universe that would shape his world. The novel is many things. But it is above all a reflection on the philosophical constraints of fiction itself, and a vivid object lesson in the uses of classical reception in literature.
Similar content being viewed by others
Works Cited
Alter, Robert. 1970. “Invitation to a Beheading: Nabokov and the Art of Politics.” TriQuarterly. vol. 17 (Winter): 41-59.
—————. 1975. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Baudry, Jean-Louis. 1970. “Cinéma: Effets idéologiques produits par l’appareil de base.” Cinethique. vol. 7/8: 1-8.
Beckett, Samuel. 1965. Three Novels: Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable. New York: Grove Press.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1965. “Le rire des dieux.” La Nouvelle revue francaise. vol. 151 (July): 91–105.
Boyd, Brian. 1990. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
—————. 2008. “Cynthia Vane: A Source in Propertius, Elegies 4:7.” The Nabokovian. vol. 60: 31-38.
Clark, Beverly Lyon. 1986. Reflections of Fantasy: The Mirror-worlds of Carroll, Nabokov, and Pynchon. New York: Peter Lang.
Connolly, Julian W. 2005. The Cambridge Companion to Nabokov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—————. ed. 1997. Nabokov’s “Invitation to a Beheading”: A Critical Companion. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Cornford, F. M., ed. 1942. The Republic of Plato. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
—————. ed. 1957. Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato. New York: The Liberal Arts Press.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1969. Logique du sens. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gill, Mary Louise. 1987. “Matter and Flux in Plato’s “Timaeus”.” Phronesis. vol. 32, no. 1: 34-53.
Gregor, Mary J., ed. 1999. Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1st edn. 1996.)
Guthrie, W. K. C. 1971. Socrates. London: Cambridge University Press.
Hamilton, Edith and Huntington Cairns, eds. 1961. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
Hinds, Stephen. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hintikka, Jaako. 1965. “Cogito Ergo Sum: Inference or Performance?” In Alexander Sesonske and B. N. Fleming, eds. Meta-meditations: Studies in Descartes. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Pub. Co. 50-76.
Hollander, John. 1981. The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Hughes, Robert P. 1970. “Notes on the Translation of Invitation to a Beheading.” TriQuarterly. vol. 17 (Winter): 284–92.
Johnson, D. Barton. 1978. “The Alpha and Omega of Nabokov’s Prison-House of Language: Alphabetic Iconicism in Invitation to a Beheading.” Russian Literature. vol. 6: 347-64.
Judovitz, Dalia. 1987. “Philosophy and Poetry: The Difference between Them in Plato and Descartes.” In Anthony J. Cascardi, ed. Literature and the Question of Philosophy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 24-51.
—————. 1988. Subjectivity and Representation in Descartes: The Origins of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kafka, Franz. 1970. Samtliche Erzahlungen. Edited by Paul Raabe. Frankfurt am Mein: Fischer.
Karlinsky, Simon, ed. 2001. The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 1940-1971. Rev. and expanded edn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Kozlova, Svetlana. 2001. “The Utopia of Truth and the Gnoseology of the Severed Head in Invitation to a Beheading.” Russian Studies in Literature. vol. 37, no. 3: 6–17.
Langen, Timothy. 2004. “The Ins and Outs of Invitation to a Beheading.” Nabokov Studies. vol. 8: 59-70.
Mills, K. W. 1968. “Some Aspects of Plato’s Theory of Forms: Timaeus 49c ff.” Phronesis. vol. 13, no. 2: 145-170.
Moudrov, Alexander. 2007. “Nabokov’s Invitation to Plato’s Beheading.” In NOJ/НОЖ: Nabokov Online Journal. Accessed September 1, 2009. <http://etc.dal.ca/noj/articles/volume1/MOUDROV_Plato’s_Beheading.pdf>.
Moynahan, Julian. 1967. “A Russian Preface for Nabokov’s Beheading.” Novel. vol. 1: 12-18.
Nabokov, Vladimir. 1944. Nikolai Gogol. Norfolk, CT: New Directions Books.
—————. 1965. Invitation to a Beheading. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov, in collaboration with the author. New York: Capricorn Books.
—————. 1966. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Rev. edn. New York: Putnam.
—————. 1970. The Annotated Lolita. Edited by Alfred Appel. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.
—————. 1973. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill.
—————. 1990. Gesammelte Werke, Band 4: Einladung zur Enthauptung. Edited and translated by Dieter E. Zimmer. 1st edn. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy, and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. 1986. Friedrich Nietzsche. Samtliche Briefe. Kritische Studienausgabe in 8 Einzelbanden. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 8 vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
—————. 1988. Friedrich Nietzsche. Samtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbanden. Edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. 15 vols. 2nd edn. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Porter, James I. 2000. The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on “The Birth of Tragedy”. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
—————. 2006. “Nietzsche and ‘The Problem of Socrates’.” In Rachana Kachtemkar and Sara Rappe, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Socrates. London: Blackwell. 406-425.
Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich. 1991. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse. rev. edn. 2 vols. Translated by Vladimir Nabokov. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ricks, Christopher B. 2002. Allusion to the Poets. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1959-1995. OEuvres completes. Edited by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. 5 vols. Paris: Gallimard.
Shapiro, Gavriel. 1996. “The Salome Motif in Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.” Nabokov Studies. vol. 3: 101-22.
—————. 1998. Delicate Markers: Subtexts in Vladimir Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Middlebury Studies in Russian Language and Literature, vol. 19. New York: Peter Lang.
Turner, John D. and Ruth Dorothy Majercik, eds. 2000. Gnosticism and Later Platonism: Themes, Figures, and Texts. Society of Biblical Literature Symposium Series, no. 12. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.
Vlastos, Gregory. 1971. “The Paradox of Socrates.” In Gregory Vlastos, ed. The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. 1-21.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
A shorter version of this essay, bearing the same title, was presented at the Ancients/Moderns session of the annual conference of the Philological Association of the Pacific Coast (PAPC) in Fall of 1985. The essay thereafter lay dormant until I had the chance to revisit it more recently. (Oddly, the situation in Nabokov studies has remained virtually unchanged in the interim.) I wish to acknowledge the following from UC Berkeley for comments on the shorter and longer versions at the time: Robert Alter, Eric Downing, John Kopper, Alain Renoir†, and Thomas Rosenmeyer†. Thanks now also go to Wolfgang Haase for his generous, detailed, and rapid-fire comments, which have been tremendously helpful, both in saving me from innumerable betises in the final version and in larger questions of presentation.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Porter, J.I. The Death Masque of Socrates: Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading . Int class trad 17, 389–422 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-010-0202-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-010-0202-7