Revisiting the Execution of Marinus van der Lubbe in the Context of Invitation to a Beheading: What Did Nabokov Know?

Abstract

This note (zametka) presents information from the periodic press about the trial and execution of Marinus van der Lubbe for his role in the Reichstag fire of February 1933 that could have come to Nabokov’s attention—and then been reflected in his description of the poshlost’ of aestheticized violence—as he was working on the novel Priglashenie na kazn’. Especially noteworthy is the dress and ritualized behavior in the case of van der Lubbe’s executioner and the fact that in the Russian emigré press of the time the description of the condemned man’s death involved beheading by an axe and not (as in the actual execution) beheading by guillotine.