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

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this fantasy with bits of Lenin's speeches,
and a chunk of the Soviet const1tution, and
gobs of Nazi pseudo-efficiency.
On the other hand he half denies the importance these
models may have had and cautions the reader by insist-
ing
that
Politics and economics, atomic bombs, primitive
and abstract art forms, the entire
Orient, symptoms of "thaw" in Soviet Russia,
the Future of Mankind,
so on, leave me
lgnd
supremely indifferent.
And in the Foreword to Invitation to a Beheading he
declares
that
The question whether or not my seeing both
[the Bolshevist regime and the Nazi regime]
in terms of one dull beastly farce had any
effect on this book, should concern the
good reader as little as it does me. 17
To insist, then, on interpreting the novels exclus-
ively along narrow political lines would be contradict-
ing the author's own evidence, and misinterpreting
them. One should take his hints and refrain from tracing
all the allusions and references that offer themselves.
To reduce the books to no more than allegories and
satirical denunciations of just one or two hateful
states would impoverish their rich implications.
The political aspect cannot be left out altogether,
but rather than taking the novels as direct attacks
aimed at two specific states and their systems, one
might see the states they describe as "ideal model[s]
of totalitarian possibilities"18 and as denunciations
of any totalitarian state, of the past, of the present,
and of the future. This element is more prominent in
Bend Sinister than in Invitation to a Beheading.
In both novels, but more obviously in Invitation to