INVITATION TO A BEHEADING

First UK edition. Original black cloth lettered in silver to the spine, in the Eric Ayers designed dustwrapper. Upper edge coloured red. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Diagonal crease to the lower edge of the half title. In the dustwrapper, the front panel rippled, the spine with loss to the upper edge cutting into the lettering of the title. Not price-clipped (15s net to the front flap).

Translated from the Russian by Dimitri Nabokov in collaboration with the author. 'Invitation to a Beheading' was written in Russian in 1934 in what the author later described as "one fortnight of wonderful excitement and sustained inspiration". Asked in 1967 if there was one novel "towards which you feel the most affection, which you esteem over all others?", Nabokov responded that he felt "the most affection [for] Lolita, the greatest esteem [for] 'Priglashenie na Kazn' [Invitation to a Beheading]." Set in prison in a fictitious country, the novel relates the final twenty days of Cincinnatus C., imprisoned and sentenced to death for "gnostical turpitude". In his preface for this first English edition, the author describes the book as "a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures. No clubwoman will thrill. The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of little Lolita, and the disciples of the Viennese witch-doctor [Freud] will snigger over it in their grotesque world of communal guilt and progressivnoe education. But [...]: I know a few readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair." (Interview, Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, Spring 1967; Field 0759)