Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

Like Kafkas The Castle Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for gnostical turpitude an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days in an absurd jail where he is visited by chimerical jailers an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner and by his inlaws who lug their furniture with them into his cell. When Cincinnatus is led ou