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There has been much speculation concerning the origins and inspiration of Vladimir Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn' [1938]), a novel for which its author declared a special fondness, observing in a 1966 interview that he held it in "the greatest esteem."2 The circumstances in which it was written are unique in the Nabokov corpus: while drafting his protagonist's, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev's, biography of Nikolai Chernyshevski, which constitutes Chapter 4 in his novel The Gift (Dar [1952]), Nabokov interrupted his work on The Gift and wrote the first draft of Invitation to a Beheading "in one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration."3
It has become a critical truism that Invitation to a Beheading was somehow occasioned and inspired by Nabokov's work on the Chernyshevski chapter in The Gift, and Brian Boyd and Alexander Dolinin have convincingly argued that the central plot of a prisoner awaiting his execution in Invitation has its origins in Chernyshevski's unhappy history.4 In addition to this larger connection, however, a series of more historically-specific links between the two works suggests that the idiosyncratic world of Invitation is grounded in a fictive exploration of the philosophical ideas of some of Russia's most influential thinkers of the radical left. The aim of Fyodor's biography of Chernyshevski, the nineteenth-century Russian radical utilitarian social critic, was not only to record the tragic fate of the well-intentioned martyr, but also to offer a critique of materialism, which Chernyshevski helped establish as the official ideology of Russia's radical left. Nabokov engaged deeply with the philosophical tradition informing Chernyshevski's life and thought, as is demonstrated by his frequent references to or quotations from figures who greatly influenced Chernyshevski (Hegel, Feuerbach) and from thinkers who, by echoing and extending his ideas, helped establish the Soviet State (Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, Lenin).
An examination of some of the most influential works of Russia's radical tradition suggests that Nabokov's close contact during his research for Fyodor's biography with the writings of three revolutionary theorists - Chernyshevski, Alexandr Bogdanov, and Vladimir Lenin -jolted him into writing Invitation to a Beheading. More specifically, the baffling narrative style adopted by the anonymous narrator of Invitation seems deliberately to parody Chernyshevski's similarly idiosyncratic narrative techniques, and the primary conceit upon which Invitation's society is...