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Invitation to a Beheading

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Invitation to a Beheading

By: Vladimir Nabokov
Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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About this listen

Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his cell. 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.

©1935 Vladimir Nabokov (P)2010 Audible, Inc. Absurdist Classics Dystopian Fiction Literary Fiction Literary History & Criticism Russian & Soviet Science Fiction

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

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