Invitation to a Beheading.

NABOKOV, Vladimir.

$750.00

Item Number: 140003

New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1957.

First edition of this “wonderful tour de force” (Gilbert Highet). Octavo, original half cloth, red topstain. Signed by the translator Dmitri Nabokov on the title page. Dmitri Nabokov was the only  child of  Vladimir Nabokov and his wife Vera; they emigrated to the United States from France in 1940. In his later years, Nabokov translated many of his father’s works into other languages, and served as the executor of his father’s literary estate. Fine in a very good dust jacket. Translated by Dmitri Nabokov. Rare and desirable signed.

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.