A Study Of "Beheading" In Multi - Dimensional Field Of Vision

Vladimir Nabokov(�'ладимир Набоков,1899—1977) is one of the master writers of the 20 th century in the literary world. He was born in Russia, exiled in Europe in his youth, and later emigrated to the US. His rough life experiences throughout the years helps created the art form of "Nabokov style" novels. The novel "Invitation to a Beheading" is one of the writer’s masterpiece in Russian while he was exiling in Western Europe; it is also one of the controversial works from this author. Translation for this work in our country has already been completed, but the lacking of relevant research work is still significant. This paper attempts to conduct a comprehensive analysis and interpretation on this work from multiple perspectives, which also includes research results and especially the academic point of views from Russia.The author’s unique life experiences and the Western Europe style of family education since the childhood together created his dual cultural identity, which makes the marking of Western European cultural and Russian culture imprinted coexist in his novels. As one of the Nabokov’s early Russian novels, "Invitation to a Beheading" not only displays the charm of Russian language by itself in full, but also includes a lot of elements of Russian culture, customs and classic Russian literature fragments within the scenes and in the storyline.The traditional image, classical poems, and novels which are symbols of Western Europe culture were also been used cleverly in this work. This makes his work breaks the ethnic boundaries and to form its own unique color texture.The novel was written in 1934, the literary world at this time were in a transition phase between the traditional and the new fashion. Prosperous development of realism, modernism, and many other genres has formed a diversified pattern in literature. Even Nabokov, who pursued freedom and individuality and did not want to be bounded with specific genres, inevitably affected by some of trends in literature and philosophy.From the novel "Invitation to a Beheading" we can not only see the figure of traditional romanticism literature, but also can see the art style from modernist literature and even from post-modernist literature.Large number of applications from symbolism, metaphor, stream of consciousness, and other elements of the absurd not only get rid of the shackles of the traditional single-mode literature from this work; but also unleash it to the limte in terms of the form, the language, and the idea. As one of the hidden clues throughout many Nabokov’s novels, the Gnosticism thought was always an important religious theory which support his "the other side" view of the world. "Invitation to a Beheading" is the most comprehensive and completed expression work of this mystical religious among novels from Nabokov. The seemingly absurd plot and character arrangements in the novel can be reasonable interpreted based on the Gnostic doctrine and mythology.Based on the theory of this ancient religious, this article will open the mystery that shrouded on the surface of this work, and to show the hidden ideological themes and content of this novel as well as the true, under the mask image of the characters.From the multidimensional analysis perspective, we can see that the novel "Invitation to a Beheading" is not just a mere dystopian political novel that opposes autocracy. The flowery language, vagaries of expression, nicely arranged fine structure, and incisive ideological content amply demonstrated the artistical appreciation and literature value of this masterpiece.