Invitation To A Beheading
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Tanning and foxing , price clipped
Markings: No markings
A masterwork of literary surrealism and political allegory, Invitation to a Beheading chronicles the final days of Cincinnatus C., a man condemned to death in a grotesque, totalitarian society for the crime of being opaque — of possessing an inner life his transparent fellow citizens cannot penetrate. Nabokov constructs a dreamlike prison world of absurdist bureaucracy, theatrical cruelty, and darkly comic pageantry, where jailers perform kindness and executioners offer friendship in a suffocating charade of civility. Written in Russian in 1935 and later translated into English by Nabokov and his son Dmitri, the novel argues with fierce poetic intensity that the authentic self is the ultimate act of rebellion against a world that demands conformity and performance. The prose is luminous and defiant, oscillating between nightmare and farce as Cincinnatus clings to his imagination and his art as the only true freedoms available to him. A precursor in spirit to Kafka and a companion piece to Nabokov's own Bend Sinister, this is a profound and haunting meditation on consciousness, tyranny, and the indestructibility of the individual soul.
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Format: Hardback
Published: 1960, Weidenfeld and Nicolson
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Tanning and foxing , price clipped
Markings: No markings
A masterwork of literary surrealism and political allegory, Invitation to a Beheading chronicles the final days of Cincinnatus C., a man condemned to death in a grotesque, totalitarian society for the crime of being opaque — of possessing an inner life his transparent fellow citizens cannot penetrate. Nabokov constructs a dreamlike prison world of absurdist bureaucracy, theatrical cruelty, and darkly comic pageantry, where jailers perform kindness and executioners offer friendship in a suffocating charade of civility. Written in Russian in 1935 and later translated into English by Nabokov and his son Dmitri, the novel argues with fierce poetic intensity that the authentic self is the ultimate act of rebellion against a world that demands conformity and performance. The prose is luminous and defiant, oscillating between nightmare and farce as Cincinnatus clings to his imagination and his art as the only true freedoms available to him. A precursor in spirit to Kafka and a companion piece to Nabokov's own Bend Sinister, this is a profound and haunting meditation on consciousness, tyranny, and the indestructibility of the individual soul.