Good Readers and Good Liberals

A False Dichotomy

Those looking for evidence of social irresponsibility in Nabokov will find plenty of fodder, not least in his suggestion that his opposition to the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Stalin was based primarily in aesthetic, rather than moral or political, considerations. This privileging of the aesthetic over the moral or political has made Nabokov a hero and villain to many, depending on their stance toward the notion of art for art’s sake. ⁸ To solve this problem—and save Nabokov’s novels from the slums of pure aestheticism—some politically minded readers have sought to divorce the moral and political teaching of Nabokov’s novels from his apolitical aesthetics, going as far as to consider the former an indictment of the latter. Most notable among these, particularly for a political science audience, is Rorty’s take on Nabokov in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Rorty writes, “Nabokov was unable to free himself entirely from the Kantian association of ‘art’ and the ‘aesthetic,’ and this helped to blind him to the possibility of liberal ironism” (Rorty’s italics). ⁹ At the conclusion of his chapter on Nabokov, he doubles down on this point, asserting, “Nabokov’s best novels are the ones that exhibit his inability to believe his own general ideas.” ¹⁰ Seeking the political teachings of his novels in contrast to his ostensibly anti-political aesthetics fails to account for both the complexity of Nabokov’s aesthetic thought and the degree to which his fiction is shot-through with it. ¹¹

Rorty rightly notes that the novels of Nabokov and Orwell share a deep concern for cruelty, but in rejecting what he perceives as Nabokov’s false dichotomy between the aesthete and the moralist, he has created a new, equally false, dichotomy:

Nabokov wrote about cruelty from the inside, helping us see the way in which the private pursuit of aesthetic bliss produces cruelty. Orwell, for the most part, wrote about cruelty from the outside, from the point of view of the victims. ¹²

That Nabokov depicted the cruel aesthete is true enough of the major English novels that occupy Rorty’s analysis (Lolita, Ada, and Pale Fire), but it cannot be affirmed as a generalization about his fiction if we recall Pnin, Invitation to a Beheading, or The Defense, all of which feature protagonists who are primarily the victims rather than perpetrators of cruelty. ¹³ As a justification for juxtaposing Nabokov’s later novels with those of Orwell, this is a fine enough distinction, but it does not hold water as a description of Nabokov’s novels generally.

Rorty’s disdain for Nabokov’s aesthetics leads him to ask a number of intemperate rhetorical questions of his lectures on Bleak House:

Why does Nabokov insist that there is some incompatibility, some antithetical relation, between Housmanian tingles and the kind of participative emotion which moved liberal statesmen, such as his own father, to agitate for the repeal of unjust laws? Why doesn’t he just say that these are two distinct, noncompetitive, goods? ¹⁴

While these seem like reasonable questions, he asks them without realizing that, like so many clever but impatient students, the answers would be evident if he had taken better notes earlier in the semester. In the essay “Good Readers and Good Writers,” which opens his Lectures on Literature (and served as his introductory lecture), Nabokov explains the method of reading and interpretation required to be a good reader of great books:

In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. ¹⁵

Nabokov passes over the political teachings of Bleak House and Madame Bovary not simply because he finds such interpretations generally boring, but primarily because he is convinced that such concerns are inappropriate for an introduction to the novel. He instructs his students to read every text multiple times because “a good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader,” but he was undoubtedly safe in assuming that they would not have sufficiently devoured the necessary details in order to graduate to any kind of level of generality. ¹⁶ In this context, his constant refrain in the Lectures that his students set aside political or sociological interpretations function as more of a pedagogical necessity than an absolute aesthetic demand. ¹⁷ As he explained years after retiring from teaching:

General ideas are of no importance. Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy’s attitude toward adultery, but in order to enjoy Tolstoy’s art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instances, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago. ¹⁸

Nabokov’s method for teaching literature is predicated upon the assumption that approaching a book with readymade “general ideas” about politics or society is not only incredibly easy but also offers the kind of immediate gratification his method lacks, and is therefore almost irresistibly attractive to most readers, especially inexperienced ones like his students. It is the favored mode of reading among philistines and their dreaded book clubs, as Nabokov repeatedly emphasizes in his essays, interviews, and lectures. ¹⁹ That he is fighting desperately against the ease and satisfaction of philistinism greatly informs his rhetoric: because his approach to reading neither comes naturally nor offers the most immediate rewards, he must be emphatic.

Nabokov also recognizes that political and aesthetic approaches to literature are far from being “noncompetitive,” as anyone familiar with Marxist literary criticism surely knows. Julian Connolly makes precisely this point, arguing that we should interpret Nabokov’s broadsides against political readings as “attempting to carve out for his work a space free from heavy-handed ideological readings” because “a reading that concentrates on the sociopolitical dimensions of the work might leave other aspects of the work . . . unnoticed or insufficiently appreciated.” ²⁰ General political or moral ideas will, once imposed upon a text, devour the details and the trifles, reducing everything in the text to signs and symbols in service of the message on the one hand, and useless, indulgent scenery on the other. This is not only because generalities are pleasing to careless readers, but also because political literature and political interpretations of literature come prepackaged with their own imperatives. Art for art’s sake, which has been decried as a tautological endorsement of uselessness, offers little in the way of argument against art for the sake of politics. ²¹ Political readings, on the other hand, satisfy the soft utilitarianism of modern American culture: a novel with a clear political teaching is clearly good for something. Nabokov thus loudly champions “useless” aesthetics, not against the sensitive and reasonable political interpretations of art, but against the nearly inescapable imperatives to be of some use.

Readers, he knows, will get to the general, the political, the social, and the moral eventually. They cannot be resisted. But if he can hold this irrepressible desire at bay long enough, he may coax a few good readers into learning how to appreciate a work of literature in its most profound glories. As noted above, other than his personal boredom with most political readings, Nabokov has no qualm with a truly sensitive reader whose political interpretation comes as the product of rich familiarity with the most intimate details of a work of art. This is why he can recommend Edmund Wilson’s account of “the sociological side” of Dickens in The Wound and the Bow as brilliant but uninteresting. Such an interpretation from a good reader—as he considered Wilson to be ²² —may bore Nabokov, but it does not offend him. It is the common reader, the reader all too eager to leap from the particular to the general before fully understanding the details, whose approach he abhors. He explains this in an interview, in which he was asked to describe his method of teaching literature, “I believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can take care of themselves.” ²³ Reading with your spine in order to seek out the tingle of aesthetic bliss does not preclude an eventual appreciation of heady generalities, but a reader who has begun from the level of general ideas will find it exceedingly difficult to work back down to the more subtle indicators of the nervous system. With this in mind, we may now turn to Invitation to a Beheading, which, if we let the details lead the way, will help to illuminate a political teaching that unifies Nabokov’s art and aesthetics.

Invitation to a Beheading and the Cruelty of Law

Invitation to a Beheading concerns the final weeks in the life of Cincinnatus C, who has been sentenced to death for “the most terrible of crimes, gnostical turpitude” and awaits the uncertain date of his beheading, all the while forced to endure the disingenuously obsequious overtures of prison officials and even a fellow prisoner who turns out not to be a prisoner at all, but rather his executioner. He struggles to compose a memoir, is treated to unpleasant visits from relatives, and is subjected to all manner of petty cruelties by prison officials, including a denial of any kind of privacy and a refusal to reveal his execution date. Beyond these essential details, the plot is of little concern for our purposes.

Cincinnatus appears to be living in a totalitarian regime of some sort and most readers have identified it as such. Dragunoiu, for example, persuasively reads the novel as “not only an attack against totalitarianism, but also a refutation of the key propositions that played such an important role in the establishment of Soviet Marxism,” particularly the materialist philosophy of Chernyshevski. ²⁴ Even Nabokov himself called Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister his “absolutely final indictments of Russian and German totalitarianism.” ²⁵ But a careful reader cannot help noticing that he has chosen a very peculiar way to go about crafting his indictment. If we approach Invitation to a Beheading with the assumption that it will present an indictment of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism, then our expectations will certainly be satisfied, but we will not have done justice to Nabokov’s art—we will have imposed a readymade generalization before “the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected.” As he advised his students:

We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection to the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge. ²⁶

Thus, to fully comprehend the political teaching of Invitation to a Beheading, we must begin by wiping away the assumption that we know the kind of state we find ourselves pulled into.

In Nabokov’s other indictment of totalitarianism, Bend Sinister, weare treated to the trappings familiar to most readers of novels about totalitarian states: a tyrant with his cult of personality (Paduk, aka the Toad); an explicit governing philosophy (Ekwilism); and the various institutional and sociological details that make the political atmosphere come alive. Invitation to a Beheading, on the other hand, provides few such social or political details to orient the reader in the political world of the novel. Instead, our scope is limited to the perspective of Cincinnatus, whose thoughts rarely wander into the realm of political exposition. Thus, we must—as Nabokov instructs all good readers to do—“fondle the details” and come to any general conclusions only as a result of careful analysis of these particulars.

The novel begins, “In accordance with the law the death sentence was announced to Cincinnatus C. in a whisper.” ²⁷ Within the space of these sixteen words, we learn a surprising amount about the world into which we have been thrust. Obviously, we learn the name of our hero and that it is his beheading to which we have been invited. The more significant details of this line—that the announcement was whispered and that the law requires whispering—introduce two curious elements of the state that has condemned our hero: its fealty to the rule of law and its fixation on decorum or manners. ²⁸ Even the whispered sentence, we learn later, is expressed in a monstrous euphemism—“with the gracious consent of the audience, you will be made to don the red tophat”—which we can only imagine is meant to somehow soften the blow. ²⁹ The first line is thus our primary indicator that we are dealing with a very unusual kind of totalitarian state. ³⁰ The nameless state that has condemned Cincinnatus certainly shares many of the features of familiar totalitarian regimes: it puts citizens to death for absurd crimes (gnostical turpitude), engages in surveillance of and interference in all aspects of private life, appears to revel in the cruel treatment of those deemed enemies of the state, and generally causes the citizens to live in fear of even the most minor transgressions. Yet alongside all of this we find the strange dedication to civil and bureaucratic procedure, to politeness and euphemism, to the comfort and dignity of the condemned, and—perhaps most puzzlingly—to the rule of law. Because of this unusual marriage of political traits, Nabokov is able to sustain a level of political ambiguity, ensuring the careful reader will hesitate to declare exactly what kind of state is depicted. This ambiguity allows Invitation to a Beheading to function as a simultaneous critique of cruelty perpetuated under both totalitarianism and liberalism without falling prey to the kinds of false equivalencies that tend to plague similar efforts.

The theme of politeness or decorum is emphasized throughout the novel, particularly in regard to the prison officials’ affectation of a kind of obsequious manner toward Cincinnatus—they express constant concern for his comfort and seek his praise for the work they have done, while completely ignoring his wishes, which are primarily to know the date of his execution and to be left alone. Eric Petrie calls this “the strangest feature of the novel” and argues that by crafting Cincinnatus’ tormentors in this way, Nabokov “transform[s] them into cultured philistines . . . [and] succeeds in indicting more than the police states of his primary attack.” ³¹ Along with its indictment of totalitarianism, Invitation to a Beheading thus highlights the capacity of even the most well-meaning and liberal polities to subject individuals to institutionalized cruelty.

Even more pointed in this regard is the behavior of M. Pierre, who enters the novel posing as Cincinnatus’s fellow prisoner, and is ultimately revealed to be his executioner. The absurd attempts of M. Pierre to gain the friendship and even consent of the man he is to behead seems not to have any analogue in the methods of execution preferred by twentieth-century totalitarians, but instead appears to indict the efforts of well-meaning liberals to devise more humane or dignified methods of institutionalized murder. M. Pierre is a compatriot not of the cruel executioners of the concentration camps or the Gulag, but of anyone who prefers lethal injection to the firing squad. Contemporary prison reform advocates who fret over the relative pain caused by various methods of execution would find themselves right at home among Cincinnatus’s jailers. M. Pierre’s speech explaining the reasons for concealing his identity and posing as a fellow prisoner in order to win the friendship of Cincinnatus exemplifies this theme nicely:

I need not explain how precious to the success of our common undertaking is that atmosphere of warm camaraderie which, with the help of patience and kindness, is gradually created between the sentenced and the executor of the sentence. It is difficult or even impossible to recall without a shudder the barbarity of the long-bygone days, when these two, not knowing each other at all, strangers to each other, but bound together by implacable law, met face to face only at the last instant before the sacrament itself. ³²

This is not the attitude of a concentration camp guard, but is instead a burlesque of liberal prison reform. ³³ Throughout the novel, the expressions of concern for Cincinnatus’s comfort suggest that somewhere along the line, the penal institutions were crafted with something like liberal intentions. Many of the practices and procedures we witness—cruel as they are to Cincinnatus—seem to be the outcome of a concern for decency, or at least the appearance of decency, toward those who are to be murdered by the state. That these ostensible attempts at kindness are experienced as torturous by Cincinnatus is but one of the tragic absurdities of the novel.

The nature of the crime itself, and the variety of attempts to gain Cincinnatus’s admission of guilt (perhaps even his consent to be punished) help to underline this theme. Dragunoiu persuasively interprets “gnostical turpitude” as being “related to the fact that he is not transparent to the gaze of others, and is grounded in his inability to participate fully in the collective modes of perception adopted by his peers.” ³⁴ She relates this crime to Rodrig’s assertion that repentance would involve admitting “that he is fond of the same things as you and I.” ³⁵ In this way, we see that the onus for transparency—and thus total conformity—is placed on the individual. This is never clearer than in the posted prison regulation that “the inmate should not have at all, or if he does, should immediately himself suppress nocturnal dreams whose content might be incompatible with the condition and status of the prisoner.” ³⁶ The expectation is that the prisoner will regulate himself in order to ensure that purely private matters are in accordance with public morals. ³⁷ This demand for an internalization of public ideals intersects with the frequent attempts to somehow gain Cincinnatus’s consent and even gratitude for his own mistreatment. ³⁸ This calls to mind the notion inherent in the liberal social contract tradition that all coercively enforced laws are nonetheless to be understood as ultimately self-imposed. The efforts to gain his active consent thus emerge as a parody of such institutions as tacit consent. We see that it is not so much that Cincinnatus lives in a surveillance state (of the sort we regularly call Orwellian), but that he lives in a state that demands openness and an embrace of its public values. Cincinnatus is capable of remaining private and to refusing to endorse the public values, but his choice to do so is rendered illicit. To choose to remain private and to refuse to consent to his own mistreatment is, in the eyes of this state, to be engaged in a quiet rebellion against the conformist political order.

As we witness officials dutifully following laws and regulations regardless of their effect or reception, all the while expecting Cincinnatus to express his consent, what emerges from Invitation to a Beheading, as presaged by the first line of the novel, is a critique of the rule of law itself. For it is not the will of a tyrant or even the mad passions of the crowd that is the source of the cruelty suffered by Cincinnatus, but instead the law. Everything he suffers, down to the minute details of his imprisonment, is in accordance with the law, as his jailers take pains to emphasize at every turn. They do so not in the manner of Eichmann seeking absolution for following orders, but proudly; they see the authority of the law as something to be celebrated in itself. Whether those subject to the law experience it as cruel is of little matter if the rule of law is its own imperative. Even general ideas of decorum—such as those celebrated by M. Pierre—become instruments of cruelty when fetishized and imposed on individuals without regard to their particularities. Insofar as every law must impose a general rule for all, it is unsuited to take into account the particular details of the unique case that is every individual. In other words, every law is a general idea. This kind of critique of the rule of law, which may not be terribly familiar, is far from unprecedented. ³⁹ Judith Shklar attributes to Montaigne precisely this kind of humanist skepticism of the rule of law: “[Montaigne] thought most laws useless, because general rules never really fit the actual diversity of individual cases and because most judicial procedures are so cruel that they terrify law-abiding citizens without achieving much else.” ⁴⁰ The critique of the rule of law in Invitation to a Beheading joins that of Montaigne, suggesting that just as Nabokov insists it is a disservice to a book to approach it armed with general ideas instead of starting with the details, so too do individuals suffer at the imposition of general ideas. ⁴¹

The Little-Noticed Reader

Against this backdrop of seemingly uniform fealty to the practices and principles of this profoundly bizarre state, a single figure sticks out as incongruous, and in whose person we see a potential answer to the problem of the rule of law. This figure is the prison librarian. The librarian is undoubtedly the kind of sunny trifle Nabokov would impress upon a good reader to collect, whose presence—or at least significance—may go unnoticed by the first-time reader, perhaps until the final pages, in which his incongruity with his surroundings indicates we should have been paying closer attention all along. ⁴² The librarian’s appearance in the novel is so unassuming that he is never even named. ⁴³ He appears four ⁴⁴ times in the novel, and is remarkable for being the only employee of the prison who seems not to take exquisite joy in his work. He is described as “a man of tremendous size but sickly appearance, pale, with shadows under his eyes” and “whose speech was distinguished by a kind of defiant laconicism.” ⁴⁵ The curious description—defiant laconicism—stands out, perhaps as a kind of synonym for passive resistance, and this suggestion of defiance is affirmed by his next appearance, in which he refuses to indulge M. Pierre in a card trick. ⁴⁶

The most lengthy and meaningful interaction between Cincinnatus and the librarian occurs immediately after the date of his execution is revealed. As his jailers and executioner exit, the librarian enters, at which point Cincinnatus observes, “with the book dust, a film of something remotely human had settled on the librarian.” ⁴⁷ Knowing Cincinnatus’s fate, the librarian offers to bring him “something about the gods,” but Cincinnatus refuses:

“No don’t bother. I don’t feel like reading that.”

“Some do,” said the librarian.

“Yes, I know, but really, it’s not worthwhile”

“For the last night,” the librarian finished his thought with difficulty. ⁴⁸

That he has difficulty explicitly speaking of Cincinnatus’s impending death suggests that unlike any of the other characters he encounters—with the notable exception of his mother, who is the only other character we see struggling to express herself—the librarian appreciates the gravity of the injustice to be visited upon Cincinnatus. This suggestion is affirmed in the final appearance of the librarian, in which we see him “doubled up, vomiting” at Cincinnatus’s execution. ⁴⁹

So what is it about the librarian that makes him uniquely sensitive to Cincinnatus’s plight? Oles helpfully observes that in light of his “profession, as well as the location of his work . . . he is the only other character in Invitation to a Beheading who surrounds himself with words, words that have been banished to prison.” ⁵⁰ He is, in other words, a reader. Indeed, apart from Cincinnatus, he is the only character we see reading: among the figures Cincinnatus notices on his way to the gallows is “the librarian, reading a newspaper.” ⁵¹ If we can interpret the librarian as a reader, we may begin to comprehend the source of his awareness and sensitivity.

We are accustomed to seeing artists and writers as Nabokov’s protagonists, but insofar as the one character who is distraught by the spectre of Cincinnatus’ execution is not a creator of books, but a consumer and collector, we see Nabokov celebrating not just the virtues of the writer, but of the reader. In the words of the author himself, “It is he—the good, the excellent reader—who has saved the artist again and again from being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs.” ⁵² Nabokov primarily meant this in the sense of the reader as savior from such ills as censorship rather than physical cruelty, but much is illuminated by blurring the distinction between reading as a purely aesthetic act and reading as a metaphor for virtuous political behavior.

Good Reading as Liberal Virtue

Nabokov frequently played with structure and narration in such a way as to engage the reader directly, but even within this context Invitation to a Beheading is a peculiar work. Unlike his later works in English, in which characters narrate with frequent direct addresses to the reader or the narrative perspective shifts unexpectedly, Invitation to a Beheading has a relatively unobtrusive omniscient narrator. ⁵³ Additionally, it seems to lack the kind of structural inventiveness (fictional forwards, texts-within-the-text, etc.) that later novels employ, but careful readers have keyed into a subtler form of structural invention at work in this novel. Dale Peterson has argued persuasively that the novel implicates the reader in the spectacle of execution: why indeed should any civilized person accept an invitation to a beheading? ⁵⁴

Even more insightful is Stephen Blackwell’s interpretation of the significance of the act of reading to the novel. ⁵⁵ He first emphasizes the role that reading plays in Cincinnatus’s experience, and then draws out to how the novel structures the experience of the reader so as to draw attention to the act of reading itself, arguing that the novel is structured in such a way as to make a first reading nearly incomprehensible, thereby necessitating rereading. In this way, the book itself functions as an imperative to be a good reader in the sense Nabokov intends. He argues to his students that “one cannot read a book: one can only reread it” because “the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation.” ⁵⁶ A book that makes the process of learning what it is about more difficult, therefore, further necessitates rereading. This is precisely what Invitation to a Beheading does, Blackwell argues, by way of various “devices designed to interrupt the reading process,” or what he calls “ruptures.” ⁵⁷ One such rupture that almost any reader of the book is likely to have noticed is the near impossibility of keeping Rodrig and Rodion straight. These two characters not only interact with Cincinnatus in similar ways and are obviously nearly identically named but at one point in the novel seem to either switch places without anyone having noticed or “subtly metamorphose into one another,” ⁵⁸ forcing the reader to flip back and forth trying to discern when and how Rodrig came to occupy the space where Rodion had been a moment before. ⁵⁹ Blackwell notes countless such examples that “taken together . . . produce a reading that is heavily textured and punctuated with interference.” ⁶⁰ These aspects of Invitation to a Beheading are of a piece with Brian Boyd’s account of the ways Nabokov’s prose incentivizes and rewards careful rereading by presenting “pattern[s] we can’t quite resolve” at first, but which urge readers to come back to them because “we are offered an immediate reward, and at the same time warned that some further reward has slipped by.” ⁶¹ Thus,the novelitself suggests certain behaviors that, as we have seen, are directly analogous to the ways Cincinnatus—and readers sensitive to his plight—would have liked for his fellow citizens to behave.

As for what exactly makes a good reader, in his afterword to Lolita,Nabokov describes the aesthetic bliss available to readers as the experience of being connected to “states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) are the norm.” ⁶² Although he does not explicitly label them as such, a number of interpreters have taken this list as a preliminary set of virtues of good readers. ⁶³ To be a reader that seeks out Nabokov’s ideal of aesthetic bliss is to find ecstasy in being curious, tender, and kind. Again, Boyd’s insights are helpful here. Drawing on the comparison to Nabokov’s sideline as a composer of chess problems, Boyd argues that Nabokov constructs his novels to bring about simultaneous aesthetic and moral revelations:

The thrill of finding an allusion, of locating the precise source of a teasing echo, of suddenly catching an obscure pun or seeing what should have been an obvious joke makes the reader alert, curious, eager to find new puzzles to solve. When the new and richest solutions are reached they may offer us an unexpected insight into the essence of a novel’s structure or the surprise of being forced to recognize our own errors of moral perception. ⁶⁴

In this way, the curious reader finds ecstasy in aesthetic discoveries that are matched with the moral force of the narrative, which inclines toward the kind and tender treatment of others. Good readers thus find a way to be simultaneously curious, kind, tender, and ecstatic.

Yet because kind souls and good readers are rare in Nabokov’s fiction, it is the reader of his novels who is in a position to recoil at the cruelties depicted and react with the kindness, curiosity, and tenderness that his characters so frequently fail to exhibit toward one another. Victims of the cruelty of bad reading can be found throughout Nabokov’s work, from Luzhin, to John Shade, whose poem and person are equally subjected to the hysterically bad readings of Kinbote, to Krug, whose son is murdered precisely because the authorities cannot be bothered to distinguish him from another similarly named boy. In his interpretation of Ada, Boyd argues that if as readers we find ourselves uncritically complicit with the cruel and callous behavior of Van and Ada, “we should realize how far we have fallen short of any true imaginative sensitivity to the needs of others.” ⁶⁵ The shock of complicity with Paduk or Van should lead the reader to flee from cruelty, and the pangs of empathy for Cincinnatus, Pnin, or Luzhin elicit a desire to be the kind of open, attentive, and careful readers that their tormentors refuse to be.

The virtues of a good reader are opposed in Nabokov’s fiction not only to bad readers, but also to morally irresponsible artists. From Humbert to Kinbote to Van, many of Nabokov’s most notorious villains are aesthetes who exercise a simulacrum of artistic tyranny on individuals (rather than on fictional creations) and thus presume to treat people as an author treats his characters rather than as a good reader treats books. Some interpreters fear that Nabokov himself might be guilty of exercising a kind of cruel tyranny over his characters, and perhaps his readers as well. Maurice Couturier, who describes what he calls the tyranny of the author, and Eric Naiman, who provocatively describes Nabokov as “an author who thinks the best readers allow themselves to be taken from behind,” suggest that Nabokov’s tendency to employ puzzles, obfuscation, and misdirection may indicate an attempt to exercise mastery over readers, demanding a degree of submission of the reader’s critical faculties to the author’s will. ⁶⁶ And Nabokov goes so far as to call himself “the perfect dictator” over his fictional worlds and asserts that his “characters are galley slaves.” ⁶⁷

Yet, although he uses the metaphor of a tyrant, a better analogue to the control he exercises is that of a god, and the power he exercises is only over the fictional world he creates. In the introduction to the English translation of Bend Sinister,for example, Nabokov refers to the appearance of “an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me.” ⁶⁸ This picture of the author as deity—rather than tyrant—is also reflected in his assertion that “the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world.” ⁶⁹ If we are willing to follow Nabokov down this path, then we see that his authorial tyranny is like God’s rather than Stalin’s, and it is in fact the latter’s presumption to imitate the divine politically—rather than artistically—that renders it such an affront. ⁷⁰ This is why it is so important to understand that it is not a good writer, but a good reader, that is the model for the good liberal. The writer may be tempted to treat human beings with the same tyrannical or godlike power that they exercise over their creations, but a reader is possessed of no such authority over other beings, whether fictional or not.

Even if his authorial practices could be considered tyrannical, Nabokov remained dedicated to the moral and aesthetic difference between being an author of novels and being a reader of them. In fact, his translation of Eugene Onegin was criticized for his excessive dedication to literalism and a refusal to employ his own considerable artistic gifts in the service of presenting Pushkin’s text. ⁷¹ Furthermore, Nabokov gives an example in an interview of how this readerly humility may be extended to the treatment of other people:

An eccentric is a person whose mind and senses are excited by things that the average citizen does not even notice. And, per contra, the average eccentric . . . is utterly baffled and bored by the adjacent tourist who boasts of his business connections. . . . I also know, as a good eccentric should, that the dreary old fellow who has been telling me all about the rise of mortgage interest rates may suddenly turn out to be the greatest living authority on springtails or tumblebugs. ⁷²

For all his broadsides against philistines, Nabokov here recognizes that he must remain humble when interacting with those whose inner lives he cannot hope to know with the intimacy he knows his own characters. Just as great novels offer rewards to readers willing to remain curious and open-minded, behind every philistine may very well be a quietly eccentric soul whose sunny trifles have not yet been lovingly collected.

The offenses against Cincinnatus committed by his jailers, his wife, and by society at large all involve refusing to pay close attention to what he says and who he is, and failing to recognize, or upon recognition rejecting, his particularity. The reader on the other hand—if they are a good reader in the sense that Nabokov outlines—appreciates what makes Cincinnatus uniquely unsuited to the laws of his land and feels the sting of injustice as he suffers at the hands of those unwilling or unable to do the same. In other words, Invitation to a Beheading suggests that we should treat our fellow citizens as a good reader would treat a good book, while simultaneously nudging us toward becoming good readers. Connolly succinctly demonstrates how both the novel and its author’s preferred approach to reading it contribute to this fusion of the ethical and the aesthetic. He emphasizes Nabokov’s insistence on Invitation to a Beheading not being confused for a mere allegory of contemporary totalitarianism, explaining that to do so “would be to subject the novel to the same kind of reductive treatment accorded Cincinnatus by the conformist beings who surround him.” ⁷³ Just as it is cruel to subject a book to general ideas before we have fully understood what is particular about it, so too does Nabokov suggest that subjecting a person to even the most well-meaning general laws can be experienced as cruelty if their particulars fail to cohere with the imposed generalities. Even worse, as we experience with Cincinnatus, is a society that makes a fetish of the well-meaning general idea, turning decorum and the rule of law into imperatives unto themselves. In this way, the rule of law overtaking the rule of man represents not a free republic but a political order that has become dehumanized.

The natural opponent to the sort of monstrous political order found in Invitation to a Beheading is not the social reformer, revolutionary, or benevolent tyrant, but rather the good reader. It is through the political exercise of the virtues of good reading that these evils may be recognized for what they are and coherently opposed.

Aesthetic Liberalism

What, then are we to make of Nabokov’s political teaching as suggested by Invitation to a Beheading? Nabokov characterized himself as an “old-fashioned liberal” and he described his own “political creed” in such a way as to dispel any sense of an innovative or radical intent:

It is classical to the point of triteness. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art. The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theatres. ⁷⁴

Nabokov is clearly a liberal of some sort, but his is a peculiar sort. Above all else, it is a liberalism founded on a profound skepticism of any kind of empowerment of “general ideas.” Because of his deep concern for those unique souls who are most likely to be unable to fit themselves within the confines of even the most well-meaning generalities, Nabokov emerges as a profound skeptic of the rule of law. Because his politics—like his aesthetics—is intently focused on the smallest details of particular individuals rather than the concerns of society generally, Nabokov’s vision of liberalism does not provide much in the way of a model for political organization. Indeed, Leland de la Durantaye argues that it is this simultaneously moral and aesthetic dedication to detail, which ultimately motivates Nabokov’s broadsides against any and all “founders of systems whose structures of interpretation strip the particular detail of its individual color and particular fire” like Marx, Freud, and even Darwin. ⁷⁵ It would certainly be impossible to institutionalize the practices of good readers in a coherent political system: instead of proving the rule, every exception would be an indictment of the whole process of rulemaking. ⁷⁶ In this way, Petrie is right to say that Nabokov “upholds an anti-political politics,” ⁷⁷ but this should not be mistaken as a lack of public-spiritedness. Instead, what we get from Nabokov is what we might call aesthetic liberalism: a political and ethical liberalism grounded in the principles of close reading. Nabokov’s aesthetic liberalism does not so much provide institutional solutions as a political ethic and basis for evaluation and critique of state institutions and actions. It is a way for individuals to protect other individuals from cruelty.

Although he develops it in idiosyncratic ways, Nabokov’s liberalism is not wholly without precedent or analogue in the history of political thought: he is, after all, an old-fashioned liberal. English-speaking readers of Nabokov have only recently been able to fully appreciate the degree to which his politics had been deeply influenced by the neo-idealist liberal tradition in pre-revolutionary Russia. Dragunoiu demonstrates that Nabokov’s work blossoms from and comments upon this tradition, of which his father was an important figure. Randall Poole’s translation of the seminal neo-idealist text The Problems of Idealism further confirms Nabokov’s debt to this tradition. Poole does not explicitly engage with Nabokov, but he describes the connection between neo-idealism and liberalism in terms that could very easily describe Nabokov’s own commitments:

This connection consisted, first of all, in the neo-idealist concept of the irreducibility of the self to naturalistic explanation, on the one hand, and in the special claims liberalism makes for the absolute value and dignity of the person, on the other. ⁷⁸

Nabokov’s debt to neo-idealist liberalism is undeniable, but it would, of course, be a mistake to imagine that the political significance of his work can be reduced to its tendency to reflect this unjustly neglected tradition. ⁷⁹

Nabokov’s aesthetic liberalism builds on this tradition, using it in the development of his own moral and political ideals, particularly his emphasis on the individual experience of cruelty, which suggests an intersection with another, more contemporary, vision of liberalism: Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear.” This is a kinship that was first noticed clearly by Rorty. ⁸⁰ Nabokov’s aesthetic liberalism may thus be understood as a contribution to the minimalist, skeptical tradition of liberalism that includes not only the Russian neo-idealists, but also Montaigne and Montesquieu. ⁸¹ The defining feature of the Liberalism of Fear is that it puts cruelty as the primary political vice, even though this creates difficulties for crafting conventional legal or institutional solutions to political problems. As Shklar notes, “to hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both religious and political conventions. It dooms one to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy. Putting cruelty first has therefore been tried only rarely, and it is not often discussed.” ⁸² Both the hatred of cruelty and the skepticism of institutions help to locate Nabokov’s politics within this tradition, and his aesthetic liberalism is a uniquely valuable contribution to it.

Nabokov has many things to offer this tradition, particularly in the way that his depictions of cruelty—both from the inside and the outside—motivate his skepticism of well-meaning legal and institutional reform. Shklar defines cruelty as “the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear,” ⁸³ but the picture that emerges in Invitation to a Beheading suggests a potentially more radical conception of cruelty. This emerges from the fact that he emphasizes the experience of cruelty from the perspective of Cincinnatus rather than from the perspective of those behaving cruelly. In this way, we see that Cincinnatus’s experience of cruelty is not necessarily the result of willful inflictions of pain (since in many cases, it is misunderstood attempts to be kind) nor is the pain necessarily physical (indeed, almost none of it is). Aesthetic liberalism forcefully empowers the skepticism of institutions by suggesting that there is no general idea so good as to necessarily justify imposing it on an individual who experiences that imposition as cruel. Readers sensitive to Cincinnatus’ plight must admit that even well meaning practices that do not involve the willful imposition of physical pain may nonetheless be experienced as cruel in a way that is politically problematic to an aesthetic liberal. Of course, the critique of the rule of law in Invitation to a Beheading should not lead us to conclude that Nabokov would be a critic of all laws, let alone an opponent of the rule of law itself. Instead, his aesthetic liberalism provides a basis upon which to critique applications of the rule of law that are experienced as cruel by individuals. In this way, he presents a method of moral analysis and critique, not a set of institutional arrangements or prescriptions.

Thus we see that Nabokov’s most significant contribution to the skeptical or minimalist liberal tradition is the model he provides for good liberal citizenship: the good reader. Nabokov teaches us not merely to be old-fashioned liberals who prefer such institutions of negative liberty as freedom of speech and freedom of art, but also to be aesthetic liberals, applying the principles and practices of aesthetic appreciation to our fellow citizens. The practices of good readers cannot easily be systematized into a set of laws or institutions, particularly as they involve treating each individual (which is to say, each text) as necessarily idiosyncratic and deserving of unique consideration of its most minute particulars. Just as Nabokov refuses to outline an authoritative set of rules for reading, but instead describes the practices of a good reader, so too does his liberalism involve only the barest institutional components and instead focus on the virtues of the good liberal citizen. Nabokov’s aesthetic principles provide a framework for practices of his ideal citizen, which comes through in his instruction to students, his critical works, and in characters such as the prison librarian, who are neither the agents nor victims of cruelty, but are instead observers with the potential to intervene. Nabokov thus urges us to treat each other as we should treat a good book, and to oppose any actions by states or by individuals that fail to live up to this ideal.

Aesthetic liberalism may not be much of a guide to making law or policy, but it can provide a basis upon which to judge the law: we must constantly seek to ensure that our fellow citizens are not being subjected to the moonshine of generalization in law and politics until after the sunny trifles of their person have been lovingly collected. Only then can we be certain that our laws are not the source of cruelty. Of course, by nature laws must be general and we must have laws; therefore, such certainty will be forever elusive. Furthermore, Nabokov knows as well as anyone that truly good readers are rare, and that in politics as well as literature, the philistines will always outnumber them. In this way, Nabokov’s aesthetic liberalism is both a vision of political virtue and a tragic ideal to which we might aspire, remaining vigilant against cruelty while always conscious of its inevitability.