How to Leave the Theater without Getting Beheaded (original) (raw)

2020, There Is No Society? Individuals and Community in Pandemic Times:

"The show is a scam, and the props are cheap."-Holly Wood, private conversation, January 2021 Vladimir Nabokov's novel Invitation to a Beheading (1935) tells the story of a thirty-year-old teacher sentenced to death for the crime of "gnostical turpitude," or non-transparency to otherness. At first, everything reads in the vein of other dystopian novels from Yevgeny Zamyatin to George Orwell, but it ends on a surprisingly optimistic note: instead of punishment and death, the execution becomes the teacher's liberation. He discovers that the world around him is just a poorly made theater set. The props collapse one after another. The stage buckles, backdrops fall, and the figures of terrible tyrants prove to be no more than cardboard cutouts. As soon as the protagonist realizes the surrounding reality is all artifice, he becomes free.

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