The novel is often described as Kafkaesque, but Nabokov claimed that at the time he wrote the book, he was unfamiliar with German and "completely ignorant" of Franz Kafka's work.
[1] Nabokov interrupted his work on The Gift in order to write Invitation to a Beheading, describing the creation of the first draft as "one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration.
[5] The novel takes place in a prison and relates the final twenty days of Cincinnatus C., a citizen of a fictitious country, who is imprisoned and sentenced to death for "gnostical turpitude."
Taken to be executed, he refuses to believe in either death or his executioners, and as the axe falls the false existence dissolves around him as he joins the spirits of his fellow visionaries in "reality."
In the morning, Marthe arrives with her whole family, including another lover, but Cincinnatus cannot cross the cell, cluttered with temporary furniture for the guests, in time to speak with his wife before everyone is ushered out.
Politically, scholars have drawn parallels in Nabokov's work to other authors (George Orwell and Franz Kafka in particular) who have comprised characters often grappling with "individual will and totalitarian collectivity".
Still, scholars and readers alike have been hard-pressed to gloss over the uncanny political connotations to Nabokov's plight in escaping the Bolshevist regime just fifteen years prior.
In spite of his propensity to highlight anti-religious sentiments in many of his works, scholars have cited Invitation of a Beheading as the legitimate product of Nabokov's concern with the metaphysical, or "the beyond".
[7]: 190 This is evident in several respects, including the novel's epigraph, Nabokov's treatment of Gnostic ideology through his main character, Cincinnatus, and the overall construction of the setting in which such events take place.
[6]: 72 The construction of this offense is grounded in Nabokov's knowledge of Gnosticism, a religion prevalent at the crux of the Late Hellenistic and early Christianity periods.
Thus, the release of this inner man is commonly thought to be accomplished through death, which acts as a passageway between flesh and spirit and explains the confusion of events at the conclusion of Nabokov's novel.
Cincinnatus accomplishes just this transformation: "He stood up and...took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk...what was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air",[6]: 32 and again, "Through the headsman's still swinging hips the railing showed.
On the steps the pale librarian sat doubled up, vomiting...Cincinnatus slowly descended from the platform and walked off through the shifting debris".
[6]: 222 Other religious symbols include: Second only to Lolita in terms of critical receptions, Invitation to a Beheading has received positive reviews since its initial publication in Berlin, 1934.
[7]: 188 Many scholars believed Cincinnatus C. to be a rendition of Franz Kafka's main character, Joseph K. in his novel, The Trial, although Nabokov denied this.