Vladimir Nabokov - Invitation to a Beheading

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
Nabokovs 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 Igors Campaign (Anon.)
Eugene Onegin (Alexander Pushkin)

LETTERS
Dear Bunny, Dear Volodya:
The Nabokov-Wilson Letters, 19401971
Vladimir Nabokov: Selected Letters, 19401977

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. Putnams 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, 18991977.
[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
891.7342dc20 89-40148

Cover art by Yentus & Booher
Cover photograph by Alison Gootee

v3.1

To Vra

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 golov (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 migr magazine, the Sovremennya Zapiski, appearing in Paris, and later, in 1938, was published in that city by the Dom Knigi. Emigr 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 Kafkas 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 connectionthe 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, ones 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 ones author comes first, no matter how bizarre the result. Vive le pdant, 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 nave and vulgar spreein the suburbs of Moscow for instanceand Shakespeare is again reduced to play the kings ghost).

My favorite author (17681849) once said of a novel now utterly forgotten Il a tout pour tous. Il fait rire lenfant et frissonner la femme. Il donne lhomme du monde un vertige salutaire et fait rver ceux qui ne rvent 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

C OMME UN FOU SE CROIT D IEU ,