Word: nabokovs
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...instance, Joseph K. of Franz Kafka's The Trial-they are quickly evicted with the first entry of the jailer. He is a redhaired, comic-opera functionary who promptly asks the prisoner for a waltz. As they whirl off down the corridor, it becomes plain what Author Nabokov is up to; he is writing a fantasy-satire whose imagery is surrealist, whose logic is the logic of the dream...
Crocodile Tears. First published as a book in 1938, and the first of Nabokov's Russian-language novels to be translated into English (by his 25-year-old son Dmitri), Invitation to a Beheading will offer innumerable meanings to readers-or no meaning at all. But the 20th century being what it is, the political interpretation comes first to mind. No period is stated; the prisoner's name carries echoes of Roman civic virtue, the jailers' names are Russian, and the executioner is known (in an echo of the French Revolution?) as M'sieur Pierre...
...Nabokov's ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom...
...vulgar holiday is surrounded by rules and rituals of elaborate illogic. Finally, the moment nears "to do chop-chop," as M'sieur Pierre puts it childishly; and childishly, too, the prisoner seeks to save his last shred of self-respect as he mutters: "By myself, by myself." Author Nabokov saves a climactic surprise for the chopping block itself, where the novel ends...
Somehow, despite the dazzling dream dance of ironies, despite the poignant musings of the prisoner, the book is disappointing. Compared with the author's superior novels, it is only a kind of detour de force. It may be that, unlike Kafka, Nabokov sacrificed horror to hallucination -or that the young Nabokov did not really know what he was trying to say. Whether Cincinnatus was condemned by wicked masters, or whether he was self-condemned by his own conscience, the ending is both enigmatic and unsatisfactory; for, Nabokov appears to be saying, Cincinnatus can banish the carnival of evil around...