The Informing of the Soul (Invitation to a Beheading)* by Gennady Barabtarlo

...Inclusas animas superumque ad lumen ituras Lustrabat studio recolens.

Recurrent motifs in Nabokov's fiction not only point in the creator's direction and thus to the realm beyond specific fiction, but they sometimes serve to set and mark local temporal and spatial conditions within the artificially created universe. Invitation to a Beheading is probably the most convincing case in point. The novel's dimensions are defined almost exclusively through a thematic network, and even much of its plot formation is driven by periodic devices. Many of them are interlinked and all are retroactive, if only because each serial occurrence must refer to its antecedent in order to keep the thematic circuit closed. Cincinnatus C., the novel's only persona, is sentenced to die by decollation for the crime of being animate among the merely animated mannequins whose heads are detachable and interchangeable. He enters the fortress as its sole prisoner at the beginning of the novel and leaves it only at its close (not counting the occasional outings on which his memory takes him during his stay in the cell) to be executed on the block. His various jailers, and the headsman himself, drag Cincinnatus through the maze of ever more elaborate psychological tortures, in a legally prescribed attempt to make him accept the execution as a cooperative act crowning a solemn public ceremony. The first sentence of the book is, quite literally, a death sentence that is not carried out until the penultimate page. Cincinnatus does not know which day will be his last. This ignorance is complicated by certain coruscating spoon-baits of hope that his tormentors deftly dap, only to jolt them up one after another as soon as Cincinnatus becomes sufficiently attracted. The fatal day meanwhile draws nearer, as unknown as ever and even more terror-breathing, and this dreadful cycle is Cincinnatus's most crushing torture. We learn that we are "nearing the end <...> a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and -- O horrible!" (12). The slightly baffled first-time reader thumbs the "right-hand, still untasted part of the novel" (12), hardly knowing more of the end thus foreglimpsed than does Cincinnatus, and perhaps knowing less when the book is closed. On learning to see in the dark with each successive reading, the reader notices certain fluorescent signs and dots here and there; he reckons and connects them and then, from an upraised vantage point, observes the novel's landscape and its thematic lines running lengthwise. The higher the elevation, the more of the layout becomes visible. At any given point the re-

reader knows what will happen next and is therefore free to break, or even reverse, the illusory chain reaction of cause and effect in which Cincinnatus is enwebbed and study instead aetiology of a higher order, where some plain-looking objects and events turn out to be markers concurring to call one's attention to this or that detail in the master plan and, hence, to the master's invisible presence everywhere in the book.1 One such marker in Invitation to a Beheading is the pencil, that hour hand of sorts pointing to the book's end; another is the spider, whose diet is in mysterious but definite relation to Cincinnatus's sufferings. The two tracks converge on the last day when, just before he is invited to the beheading, Cincinnatus sees his pencil dwindle to a barely holdable stub with which he strikes out a certain word of grave significance, the last one he is ever to jot down, while the spider's prize treat, the beautiful moth, eludes it and later emblematically shows the reader which way Cincinnatus will take to leave the novel: through the window hacked out in its firmament. I shall assemble and line up these thematic series and to comment, however cursorily, on the idealism and semantics of the moth metaphor that blazons the book's exit.2

Cincinnatus's pencil is a much more reliable chronometer than the clearly time-serving chimes of the fortress clock. Cincinnatus spends nineteen days in prison, a chapter a day, each chapter beginning a new day, except for the last day which spans chapters Nineteen and Twenty, the latter technically openended.3 At the beginning of the book, the pencil is "beautifully sharpened <...> long as the life of any man except Cincinnatus" (12). As a matter of fact it is exactly as long as whatever is left of Cincinnatus's life in the book, indeed, as long as the book itself. Perhaps nowhere in the world's vast fiction literature on decapitation does the obvious and jejune pun on the Latin for "chapter" (caput) present itself so naturally and in such meaningful fashion as in Invitation to a Beheading. Cincinnatus's last days are literally numbered by the chapter's increments, a day per capita, and his confinement in the novel ends when, in the final chapter, he climbs the block to be beheaded. The hero and the book are "decapitated" simultaneously.4 The pencil is the novel's time-measuring rod, for its length decreases in direct proportion to the steadily shrinking number of pages remaining.5 Each time the pencil is sharpened and ready anew to be used by the doomed diarist, it naturally gets

shorter, and so does his life in prison.6 Chapter Eight opens as Cincinnatus observes Rodion whittling the pencil for him. "Today is the eighth day, wrote Cincinnatus with the pencil that had lost more than a third of its length" (actually, exactly twofifths on that particular morning. 89). In the next-to-last chapter, just before the formal invitation to execution is extended, Cincinnatus hastily pencils a flurry of his most far-reaching thoughts when he realizes that he has run out of paper. He then finds a fresh leaf, the very last one, writes on top of it one word, and immediately crosses it out as maddeningly imprecise (206). The word is death,7 and he deletes it with his already much "stunted" pencil, by now awkward to hold between fingers, let alone resharpen. Nor has he time to sharpen it. One interesting extension of the pencil metaphor is that sharpening never reduces a pencil quite to naught; a stub always remains. One will recall, in this connection, the theme of Pencil Pedigree in Transparent Things, as well as Nabokov's often repeated aphorism that the eraser tips of his pencils go sooner than the lead. The observant re-reader thus finds what the ingenious author has hidden. His creature, however, must not discover it, for, if Cincinnatus had found this simple method of monitoring the quickly approaching end of the book, he "could" have stopped using his pencil, eo ipso ending the narration at once, since much of it is actually written with this very tool.8 Thus, the pencil is both a local time reference gauge and a means, if not a source, of the novel's existence, the unavoidable dwindling of which nears the inevitable end of the narrated world. The theme of the Spider is another cleverly installed recurrent prompt unheeded by Cincinnatus. Whenever the arachnid receives its food from Rodion's hands, the plot moves another scheduled step towards the ulitmate decapitation, because each feeding marks a fresh torture of false hope for Cincinnatus. In other words, there is a regular fairy-tale connection between the daily routine of the spider's nourishment and Cincinnatus's ensuing miseries; some cruel trick inescapably follows the treat. This "official friend of the jailed" greeting Cincinnatus in his cell at the outset of the narration which is rapidly "nearing the end" is more than just the "youngest member of the circus family" (115), of which M'sieur Pierre is Head and Punch. The feeding ritual, and an occasional pantomime that accompanies it, is a dumbshow whose meaning Cincinnatus cannot and should not grasp. Each time it is put on (which he dutifully registers), Cincinnatus suffers yet another, increasingly more painful and devastating, setback at the hands of his tormentors. On Day Four, Rodion feeds the spider during Emmie's visit; afterwards, Cincinnatus discovers a series of her drawings that seem to suggest an escape plan; this will, however, turn into one of the most horrible blows dealt to him. On Day Five, the furry arthropod perches on Rodion's finger as Cincinnatus prepares to receive his wife, only to see his fervent hope rudely abused. On Day Six, when his initially promising meanderings have brought him back to his cell, Cincinnatus notices that the spider has a brand-new, "impeccably correct," web "which had been created, it was clear, just a moment before" (78). On the seventh day,

the jailer lets in, instead of his wife Marthe, Cincinnatus's executioner who is an "official friend of the jailed" in his own right and who will spend a fortnight in the same fortress preparing Cincinnatus for a solemnly farcical wedding on the block. (By the way, I do not believe anybody has mentioned the striking resemblance that M'sieur Pierre's manners, his treatment of Cincinnatus, and in general his role in the novel bear to those of Mr. Goliadkin "Junior," the fiendish double of Dostoevski's juvenile and overwritten parody of Gogol that Nabokov, inexplicably, considered the best thing Dostoevski ever wrote). On Day Ten, while the spider performs "a simple trick above his web," M'sieur Pierre stands on his hands, and his "upside-down eyes <...> looked like the eyes of an octopus" (115). Their Punch-Punchinello relation is thus reinforced. Day Eleven marks the beginning of the second half of Cincinnatus's stay in prison, and the "well-nourished" (119) spider moves, cobweb and all, to another location, the corner of the sloping window recess. At this important juncture, the two themes hitherto cruising parallel cross for an instant. When Cincinnatus pokes his pencil (at this point it has shrunk to half of its original length) at the creature, the spider backs off "without taking its eyes off it. It was most eager, however, to take a fly, or a moth from the large fingers of Rodion -- and now, for example, in the southwest part of the web there hung a butterfly's orphaned wing, cherry-red, with a silky shading, and with blue lozenges along its crenelated edge" (119).9 Later that day Rodion brings the spider another butterfly (124), an unmistakable portent of a new trap set up for Cincinnatus. He wakes up past midnight and listens to the digging and scratching sounds coming from under the wall. For several nights on end, he will hear this tantalizing noise, nursing the mad, ephemeral hope. When the underground passage is complete, the cad and his apprentice emerge from it and invite Cincinnatus to crawl through it into the adjacent cell. One will notice that Cincinnatus, drunk on his heady miseries, overlooks the fact that, while he was in M'sieur Pierre's cell, his tormentors allowed him to glimpse not only the axe that would sever his head from the body but also the coveted date of the event, "a crimson numeral" (161) on the wall calendar -- the very calendar at which the prison director once let Cincinnatus cast an eye: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, the thing you dream of will become a reality [a triple take here: He means the arrival of the executioner, Cincinnatus expects his wife to come, the narrator has more panoramic schemes in view.] <...> It's a cute calendar, isn't it? A work of art. No, this isn't for you" (70-71). This seemingly idle chatter may be dismissed as annoying rubbish (Cincinnatus's attitude) or, if reflected like a nonnon in the crooked mirror of the author's plan, it may yield one of several possible explications of the story's ontology (the retrospective reader's expected attitude): Life is a dream; one cannot die in one's dream; one's suffering is real even in a dream. Cincinnatus also misses another warning. On his way back to his cell, his temples still throbbing from the shock of seeing his best hope shattered, he suddenly finds himself outside the fortress, apparently free to flee, when he meets the furtive, ticklish Emmie who leads him back to her father's apartment in the fortress for the evening tea with M'sieur Pierre. But the re-reader makes out that, even as Cincinnatus was crawling back into the tunnel, his executioner "yelled something after him about tea" (163), clearly expecting Cincinnatus to attend the party and doubtless having arranged for this sidetrip en route. In fact, the reticent Emmie sketched that detour for Cincinnatus in a simple and pellucid pantomime at the end of Chapter Five. As Rodion was talking to the spider enthroned on his finger, Cincinnatus pretended to be asleep. His cell door was ajar, and

something stirred there <...> for an instant the twining tips of pale curls drooped, and then disappeared <...> then, silently and not very fast, a red-and-blue ball rolled in through the door, followed one leg of a right triangle straight under the cot, disappeared for an instant, thumped against the chamber pot, and rolled out along the other cathetus -- that is, toward Rodion, who all without noticing it, happened to kick it as he took a step; then, following the hypotenuse, the ball departed into the same chink through which it had entered (66). Ten days thereafter Cincinnatus was led back to his chamber following this vicious triangle.

The morning after the collapse of the secret passage hope, Cincinnatus notices that "the spider had sucked dry a small downy moth with marbled forewings and three houseflies, but was still hungry and kept glancing at the door" (169). This lavish prey count tracks a fairly accurate record of Cincinnatus's misfortunes of the day, including two mock jailbreak opportunities. The moth that the spider has "sucked dry" seems to advert to Emmie who has the marbled calves of a ballerina and a back "evenly covered with a blond down" (148). This is Day Sixteen, three days before the "crimson numeral," and all the preliminary tricks appear to have been drained out. Rodion shows the spider his empty palm, muttering "Enough, you've had enough <...> I don't have anything for you" (171). That afternoon, M'sieur Pierre introduces himself officially and announces the day of the beheading. When that day comes, however, the spider is fed again (194), and Cincinnatus has to go round yet another whorl of faint hope, desperation, and fright. The execution is "indefinitely" postponed, and Marthe visits him at long last, and her visit brings him nothing but heartwrenching disappointment, of course. But even this discharge of cruelty does not quite exhaust the spinner's supply. The main treat is still in store for it -- a large, beautiful moth. Judging by the brief but precise description, one can assume that the insect is a female of the Emperor Moth, Saturnia pavonia Linnaeus, the largest European moth, whose cocoon, most curiously, has an "exit-only" trapdoor that allows passage for the emerging moth but does not let parasites in.10 "The beast was already puffing himself up, sensing the prey, but something went wrong" (203). The moth frees itself from Rodion's clumsy clutch, frightening him to death, and alights beside Cincinnatus's cot, unnoticed by the jailer. When minutes later Cincinnatus leaves his cell, which has already begun to crumble, he quickly reflects that come night the moth will fly away through the window that Rodion has shoved out, grating and all, with his broomstick. Lepidoptera have often served observant man's imagination as a perfectly fitting emblem of soul's transcendency, the soul thus likened to an instar ascending to a higher mode of existence. No one has ordered this metaphor to brighter words than Dante: O superbi cristian, miseri lassi, che, della vista della mente infermi, fidanza avete ne' retrosi passi, non v'accorgete voi che noi siam vermi nati a formar l'angelica farfalla, che vola alla giustizia sanza schermi? Di che l'animo vostro in alto galla, poi siete quasi entomata in difetto, s come vermo in cui formazion falla?

(O arrogant Christians, sluggish wretches, whose mind's eye is infirm and who put faith in backward steps, do you not perceive that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly that soars to judgement without defense? Why does your soul reach so high if you are as it were imperfect insects, like a worm in its undeveloped stage? Purgatorio, X, 121-129). In Russian, the string of four semantically related words -- lik, litso, lichina, and lichinka (image, face, mask, larva) -- brings close the zoological and ontological. The moth, in its imago stage, has emerged awing after an astonishing holometabolical transformation from larva to chrysalis, the shell of which it has transcended. The Latin imago is what the Greeks called eikon [lik, obraz], essentially related to the Platonic idea, an essence given to us as a perceivable symbol, an incomplete correspondence. "But to me your daytime is dark, why did you disturb my slumber?" complains the nocturnal insect (204). In Nabokov's early short story, "Christmas" (1925), a butterfly, its slumber disturbed by the warmth of human grief, scrambles out of its pupa in the middle of a Russian winter as a sign that, perhaps, the desperate father's "darling somewhere is alive."11 Vasilii Rozanov takes up this point in two or three different chapters of his Apocalypse of Our Time (1918), his last, and by far best, work. His thoughts were set forth by Pavel Florenski's remark that Aristotle's difficult notion of entelechy could be best understood by the example of the butterfly transformation: Then, going back to my friends who had come to visit, Kapterev and Florenski, the naturalist and the priest, I asked them: "Gentlemen, which of the three contains the 'I' -- the caterpillar, the pupa, or the butterfly?" I meant, the "I" as one letter, so to speak, one radiance, one ray. "I" as both a "dot" and a "naught." Kapterev kept silent, but Florenski said, upon reflection: "Surely, a butterfly is the entelechy of the caterpillar and the pupa."12 In Invitation to a Beheading, the only persona, litso, Cincinnatus C., is surrounded by masks, the lichiny, who wear false faces, false teeth, dummy beards, interchangeable heads, the head of a Borzoi, wigs, and so forth. The novel's cast carefully avoids using the word man or people, preferring the social security of such faceless terms as the public and citizens. The Main Masque, M'sieur Pierre the Punch, the Pierrot of the troupe,13 stripped of his disguise, undergoes the reverse metamorphosis from pupa to larva, from the lichina to the lichinka,14 which in the end, when "everything falls into place," or apart, is swiftly borne off the stage by a "woman in a black shawl" (223). The Spider theme terminates when the "youngest member of the circus family" turns into a "crudely but cleverly made" gadget that Roman, a lawyer turned into a roust-about, bounces by a long elastic attached to it. Here "M'sieur Pierre cast a sidelong cold glance at the toy and Roman, raising his eyebrows, hastily pocketed it" (210). This scene reaches back, perhaps, to the crucial episode in Chapter Nine, "The Family Reunion," in which one of Cincinnatus's brothers-in-law, the singer, begins softly his "Mali trano t'amesti" ("Death is sweet; this is a secret," in scrambled Russian15), when he is stopped short by his brother the punster, "who made terrible eyes at him" (103) as if he had let out a secret pregnant with meaning. Cincinnatus perseveres. Cincinnatus gropes for a simple ultimate solution of the riddle of his outlandish existence. "I know something, I know something, I know something," he repeats in a hopeful spell, and this treble incantation reminds one of the thrice repeated "I drugoe, drugoe, drugoe" (something else) from Nabokov's arcane poem "Fame" (1942): something -a secret -- about which he "must not be over-explicit" (a tochnee skazat' ia ne vprave).16 On the penultimate page of his diary Cincinnatus hurriedly writes, "I've discovered the little crack in life, where it broke off, where it had been once soldered to something else,

something genuinely alive, important and vast" (205, my emphasis). This crack (dyrochka, a little hole, in the original Russian) must be similar in nature to the "chink" in Look at the Harlequins!, through which the transcendental chill of the other world (also imaginary) is leaking in, a draft from beyond the book whose hardbound covers limn Cincinnatus's real and truly inescapable jail. Cincinnatus writes in his final entry that he has reached "the dead end of this life" and that he "should not have sought salvation within its confines" (205). Humbert Humbert turns this very thought to a figure: "That's the dead end (the mirror you break your nose against)."17 Until his soul parts with its warm, familiar cocoon, Cincinnatus cannot see that it is a preposterous notion to believe that he may be mortal -- yet any good reader should know as much even before he opens the book. "A ved' on oshibaetsia," "and yet he is wrong," says a stranger to an anonym early in the novel (19), as Cincinnatus passes by in one of his clairvoyant swoons. He is indeed wrong, and he vaguely senses it when he cancels the last word in his diary, death, as grossly meaningless under the circumstances. An early creature of Nabokov, the desperate hero of his 1924 story "Christmas," utters the same unattached word, unable to recognize in the newly-born Attacus moth a telling sign that his son "somewhere is alive": "It's Christmas tomorrow," came the abrupt reminder, "ans I'm going to die. Of course. It's so simple. This very night..." He pulled out a handkerchief and dried his eyes, his beard, his cheeks. Dark streaks remained on the handkerchief. "...death," Sleptsov said softly, as if concluding a long sentence. The clock ticked. Frost patterns overlapped on the blue glass of the window. The open notebook shone radiantly on the table <...> At that instant there was a sudden snap...18 Cincinnatus names imagination as his possible savior (114), and he does it almost in a trance, as if at a prompt from someone in the know.

Icons, Imagines, the "ideas" of deity impersonated by the author, are designed as channels for his creative spirit, or else as windows giving on the hereafter, and it is through one of those windows that the moth will flutter out of the book when Cincinnatus steps out of it and hears the voices of "beings akin to him"19 -- strictly speaking, the personae of another Nabokov's novel that envelops Invitation to a Beheading, for it is Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev who "translates" this fantasy by an "old French sage" (Pierre Delalande) into Russian, between his Nikolay Chernyshevski and his next book, The Gift.20 Which clearly means that Invitation to a Beheading is, just as Cincinnatus suspects, a dream within a dream, "when you dream you have awakened,"21 a doubly hermetic formation with the most curious internal passage linking two concentric globes.

Dante says, in Convito, that "we have a continual experience of our immortality in the divination of our dreams, and these would not be possible unless something in us were immortal." This is precisely the idea that drives Invitation to a Beheading, from its Delalande epigraph to the terminating phrase.