Nabokov's most dazzling Russian novel. Invitation to a Beheading is perhaps Nabokov's baldest examination of a theme which followed him throughout all his life and all his novels. This theme is the idea of the citizen who aspires to be different, the person who fails to assimilate, and the ways in which society either forces that divergent voice to join in lockstep, or extinguishes it. Beheading’s plot is simple, and it is the imagination and empathy with which Nabokov invests this work that makes it worth returning to again and again. Cincinnatus C., denizen of a fictitious Eurasian nation, has been sentenced to execution for “gnostical turpitude”. Nabokov traces Cincinnatus’s life for nineteen days in prison, with Cincinnatus not knowing the day he will die, and on the twentieth day Cincinnatus is beheaded.
