The Dream of Cincinnatus C.

INVITATION TO A BEHEADING (223 pp.) --Vladimir Nabokov--Pufnam ($3.95).

The cell is bare except for the customary simple furniture, the hopeless messages from past prisoners scrawled on the walls and an overhead light that (perhaps like reason or the world itself) is naggingly off-center. The prisoner's name is Cincinnatus C., and he is under sentence of death for a misdeed that is not described; he only suspects that his crime is "opacity"--that stubborn, unknowing refusal to bare his soul which has always enraged a man's neighbors and masters. If the literary shades of other prisoners seem to be sharing the cell in the old prison-fortress --for instance, Joseph K. of Franz Kafka's The Trial--they are quickly evicted with the first entry of the jailer. He is a redhaired, comic-opera functionary who promptly asks the prisoner for a waltz. As they whirl off down the corridor, it becomes plain what Author Nabokov is up to; he is writing a fantasy-satire whose imagery is surrealist, whose logic is the logic of the dream.

Crocodile Tears. First published as a book in 1938, and the first of Nabokov's Russian-language novels to be translated into English (by his 25-year-old son Dmitri), Invitation to a Beheading will offer innumerable meanings to readers--or no meaning at all. But the 20th century being what it is, the political interpretation comes first to mind. No period is stated; the prisoner's name carries echoes of Roman civic virtue, the jailers' names are Russian, and the executioner is known (in an echo of the French Revolution?) as M'sieur Pierre. The prison itself is timeless, universal, born of an idea turned into phantasm. Its antic rules ("the management shall in no case be responsible for the loss of property or for the inmate himself"), the handless clock on which a watchman hourly paints in the hands, and, above all, the jailers' constant and somehow insane concern for the prisoner's welfare--all add up to a caricature of prisons everywhere. The fussy, pedantic, sentimental jailers are so many congealed crocodile tears; what a naughty boy the prisoner really is, they appear to be saying, not eating his splendid meals, and depressing them (who try to do their best for him) with his gloomy moods and incessant questions as to the hour of his doom.

Gradually the prison assumes the aspect of the world--a world in conspiracy to mock the prisoner's hopes and humble his humanity. The prison director's daughter, a kind of pre-Lolita of coquettish innocence, promises to lead him to freedom but never does; the jailers themselves stage an elaborate comedy only to laugh at his false hopes for escape. His past life emerges as a base and saddening farce--his bastard birth, his sluttish wife, his crippled, oafish children who are not really his. And always there is the maddening Alice-in-Wonderland logic by which it is not he who is victimized but they--his family, his jailers--their regular lives cruelly upset by his tasteless act in getting himself condemned to death.

Nabokov's ultimate and realistic irony is to make the executioner, who is at first passed off as just another fellow prisoner, into a garrulous, sentimental clown. As the axman prattles on about being not some "unfamiliar terrible somebody, but a tender friend," Author Nabokov develops the memorable conceit that the rite of execution is both a public festival and a black sacrament, in which victim and executioner are as intimately linked as bride and groom.

Time fof Chop-Chop. A million candles etch the initials P. and C. against the night sky of Cincinnatus' home town. On the ride to the scaffold, bouquets of flowers pelt P.'s and C.'s open car. The whole vulgar holiday is surrounded by rules and rituals of elaborate illogic. Finally, the moment nears "to do chop-chop," as M'sieur Pierre puts it childishly; and childishly, too, the prisoner seeks to save his last shred of self-respect as he mutters: "By myself, by myself." Author Nabokov saves a climactic surprise for the chopping block itself, where the novel ends.

Somehow, despite the dazzling dream dance of ironies, despite the poignant musings of the prisoner, the book is disappointing. Compared with the author's superior novels, it is only a kind of detour de force. It may be that, unlike Kafka, Nabokov sacrificed horror to hallucination --or that the young Nabokov did not really know what he was trying to say. Whether Cincinnatus was condemned by wicked masters, or whether he was self-condemned by his own conscience, the ending is both enigmatic and unsatisfactory; for, Nabokov appears to be saying, Cincinnatus can banish the carnival of evil around him simply by coming to his senses. And that seems too easy.

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