''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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same time it is exposed in its utter absurdity. All
the premises on which it is based, namely that the
human mind is some sort of substance which can be dis-
posed of and distributed at will; that man's greatest
joy consists in his being indistinguishable from others,
and interchangeable; its reliance on a cartoon as a
model of an ideal way of life: all this amounts to a.
complete refutation of generally accepted values and
is clearly relegated to the realm of comedy which, as
Potts says, deals with the "abnormal".
11
The same ap-
plies of course to the state and the system in Invita-
tion to a Beheading which resemble those of Bend
Sinister so closely.
In the light of Nabokov's insistence on the inde-
pendence of each individual mind, which must under no
circumstances yield to laws inflicted on it from out-
side, and in the light of his own life, the idea sug-
gests itself to read the two novels as based on, and
to a certain extent reflecting, his own experiences
in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, in fact, to read
them as bitter satires on these two states. Parallels
between the two actual states and the imaginary states
of the two novels have been traced and named.
himself later refers to both novels as "absolutely
final indictments of Russian and German totalitarian-
12
Nabokov
ism... "13 and to Invitation to a Beheading as a novel
"that deals with the incarceration of a rebel by the
buffoons and bullies of a Communazist state"14, and he
grants in connection with Blend Sinister that
No doubt... without those infamous models
before me I could not have interlarded