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    Invitation to a Beheading

    Part of Vintage International

    Author Vladimir Nabokov
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    Paperback
    $17.00 US
    Knopf | Vintage
    On sale Sep 19, 1989 | 240 Pages | 9780679725312
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    Invitation to a Beheading embodies the vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defines definition. Cincinnatus spends his final days in a jail where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner, and by his in-laws. 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.
    Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. View titles by Vladimir Nabokov
    "A tour de force of striking originality, written with brilliance and full of bizarre comedy."
    —The New York Times

    "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically."
    —John Updike

    About

    Invitation to a Beheading embodies the vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude," an imaginary crime that defines definition. Cincinnatus spends his final days in a jail where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner, and by his in-laws. 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.

    Author

    Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. View titles by Vladimir Nabokov

    Praise

    "A tour de force of striking originality, written with brilliance and full of bizarre comedy."
    —The New York Times

    "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically."
    —John Updike

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