The Informing of the Soul (Invitation to a Beheading)
by Gennady Barabtarlo
(page two of three)

The theme of the Spider is another cleverly installed recurrent prompt unheeded by Cincinnatus. Whenever the arachnid receives its food from Rodion's hands, the plot moves another scheduled step towards the ulitmate decapitation, because each feeding marks a fresh torture of false hope for Cincinnatus. In other words, there is a regular fairy-tale connection between the daily routine of the spider's nourishment and Cincinnatus's ensuing miseries; some cruel trick inescapably follows the treat. This "official friend of the jailed" greeting Cincinnatus in his cell at the outset of the narration which is rapidly "nearing the end" is more than just the "youngest member of the circus family" (115), of which M'sieur Pierre is Head and Punch. The feeding ritual, and an occasional pantomime that accompanies it, is a dumb-show whose meaning Cincinnatus cannot and should not grasp. Each time it is put on (which he dutifully registers), Cincinnatus suffers yet another, increasingly more painful and devastating, setback at the hands of his tormentors.

On Day Four, Rodion feeds the spider during Emmie's visit; afterwards, Cincinnatus discovers a series of her drawings that seem to suggest an escape plan; this will, however, turn into one of the most horrible blows dealt to him. On Day Five, the furry arthropod perches on Rodion's finger as Cincinnatus prepares to receive his wife, only to see his fervent hope rudely abused. On Day Six, when his initially promising meanderings have brought him back to his cell, Cincinnatus notices that the spider has a brand-new, "impeccably correct," web "which had been created, it was clear, just a moment before" (78). On the seventh day, the jailer lets in, instead of his wife Marthe, Cincinnatus's executioner who is an "official friend of the jailed" in his own right and who will spend a fortnight in the same fortress preparing Cincinnatus for a solemnly farcical wedding on the block. (By the way, I do not believe anybody has mentioned the striking resemblance that M'sieur Pierre's manners, his treatment of Cincinnatus, and in general his role in the novel bear to those of Mr. Goliadkin "Junior," the fiendish double of Dostoevski's juvenile and overwritten parody of Gogol that Nabokov, inexplicably, considered the best thing Dostoevski ever wrote).

On Day Ten, while the spider performs "a simple trick above his web," M'sieur Pierre stands on his hands, and his "upside-down eyes <...> looked like the eyes of an octopus" (115). Their Punch-Punchinello relation is thus reinforced.

Day Eleven marks the beginning of the second half of Cincinnatus's stay in prison, and the "well-nourished" (119) spider moves, cobweb and all, to another location, the corner of the sloping window recess. At this important juncture, the two themes hitherto cruising parallel cross for an instant. When Cincinnatus pokes his pencil (at this point it has shrunk to half of its original length) at the creature, the spider backs off "without taking its eyes off it. It was most eager, however, to take a fly, or a moth from the large fingers of Rodion -- and now, for example, in the southwest part of the web there hung a butterfly's orphaned wing, cherry-red, with a silky shading, and with blue lozenges along its crenelated edge" (119).9 Later that day Rodion brings the spider another butterfly (124), an unmistakable portent of a new trap set up for Cincinnatus. He wakes up past midnight and listens to the digging and scratching sounds coming from under the wall. For several nights on end, he will hear this tantalizing noise, nursing the mad, ephemeral hope. When the underground passage is complete, the cad and his apprentice emerge from it and invite Cincinnatus to crawl through it into the adjacent cell.

One will notice that Cincinnatus, drunk on his heady miseries, overlooks the fact that, while he was in M'sieur Pierre's cell, his tormentors allowed him to glimpse not only the axe that would sever his head from the body but also the coveted date of the event, "a crimson numeral" (161) on the wall calendar -- the very calendar at which the prison director once let Cincinnatus cast an eye: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, the thing you dream of will become a reality [a triple take here: He means the arrival of the executioner, Cincinnatus expects his wife to come, the narrator has more panoramic schemes in view.] <...> It's a cute calendar, isn't it? A work of art. No, this isn't for you" (70-71). This seemingly idle chatter may be dismissed as annoying rubbish (Cincinnatus's attitude) or, if reflected like a nonnon in the crooked mirror of the author's plan, it may yield one of several possible explications of the story's ontology (the retrospective reader's expected attitude): Life is a dream; one cannot die in one's dream; one's suffering is real even in a dream.

Cincinnatus also misses another warning. On his way back to his cell, his temples still throbbing from the shock of seeing his best hope shattered, he suddenly finds himself outside the fortress, apparently free to flee, when he meets the furtive, ticklish Emmie who leads him back to her father's apartment in the fortress for the evening tea with M'sieur Pierre. But the re-reader makes out that, even as Cincinnatus was crawling back into the tunnel, his executioner "yelled something after him about tea" (163), clearly expecting Cincinnatus to attend the party and doubtless having arranged for this sidetrip en route. In fact, the reticent Emmie sketched that detour for Cincinnatus in a simple and pellucid pantomime at the end of Chapter Five. As Rodion was talking to the spider enthroned on his finger, Cincinnatus pretended to be asleep. His cell door was ajar, and

something stirred there <...> for an instant the twining tips of pale curls drooped, and then disappeared <...> then, silently and not very fast, a red-and-blue ball rolled in through the door, followed one leg of a right triangle straight under the cot, disappeared for an instant, thumped against the chamber pot, and rolled out along the other cathetus -- that is, toward Rodion, who all without noticing it, happened to kick it as he took a step; then, following the hypotenuse, the ball departed into the same chink through which it had entered (66).

The morning after the collapse of the secret passage hope, Cincinnatus notices that "the spider had sucked dry a small downy moth with marbled forewings and three houseflies, but was still hungry and kept glancing at the door" (169). This lavish prey count tracks a fairly accurate record of Cincinnatus's misfortunes of the day, including two mock jailbreak opportunities. The moth that the spider has "sucked dry" seems to advert to Emmie who has the marbled calves of a ballerina and a back "evenly covered with a blond down" (148).

This is Day Sixteen, three days before the "crimson numeral," and all the preliminary tricks appear to have been drained out. Rodion shows the spider his empty palm, muttering "Enough, you've had enough <...> I don't have anything for you" (171). That afternoon, M'sieur Pierre introduces himself officially and announces the day of the beheading. When that day comes, however, the spider is fed again (194), and Cincinnatus has to go round yet another whorl of faint hope, desperation, and fright. The execution is "indefinitely" postponed, and Marthe visits him at long last, and her visit brings him nothing but heart-wrenching disappointment, of course.

But even this discharge of cruelty does not quite exhaust the spinner's supply. The main treat is still in store for it -- a large, beautiful moth. Judging by the brief but precise description, one can assume that the insect is a female of the Emperor Moth, Saturnia pavonia Linnaeus, the largest European moth, whose cocoon, most curiously, has an "exit-only" trapdoor that allows passage for the emerging moth but does not let parasites in.10 "The beast was already puffing himself up, sensing the prey, but something went wrong" (203). The moth frees itself from Rodion's clumsy clutch, frightening him to death, and alights beside Cincinnatus's cot, unnoticed by the jailer. When minutes later Cincinnatus leaves his cell, which has already begun to crumble, he quickly reflects that come night the moth will fly away through the window that Rodion has shoved out, grating and all, with his broomstick.

Lepidoptera have often served observant man's imagination as a perfectly fitting emblem of soul's transcendency, the soul thus likened to an instar ascending to a higher mode of existence. No one has ordered this metaphor to brighter words than Dante:

O superbi cristian, miseri lassi,
che, della vista della mente infermi,
fidanza avete ne' retrosi passi,
non v'accorgete voi che noi siam vermi
nati a formar l'angelica farfalla,
che vola alla giustizia sanza schermi?
Di che l'animo vostro in alto galla,
poi siete quasi entomata in difetto,
sì come vermo in cui formazion falla?

(O arrogant Christians, sluggish wretches, whose mind's eye is infirm and who put faith in backward steps, do you not perceive that we are worms born to form the angelic butterfly that soars to judgement without defense? Why does your soul reach so high if you are as it were imperfect insects, like a worm in its undeveloped stage? Purgatorio, X, 121-129).

9. Joann Karges, in Nabokov's Lepidoptera: Genres and Genera (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), identifies this as the hind wing of the Large Tortoiseshell (Nymphalis polychloros Linnaeus) and suggests that, since this species "occurs primarily in southern and central Europe" and since "the wing is in the southwest corner of the web," this bit of entomological description locates the novel somewhere in the area (the Pyrenees?)" (p. 30). I do not find this reasoning very convincing. Besides, in an interview with Lee Belser of the Los Angeles Evening Mirror News (31 July 1959), Nabokov said that the book (the English version of which had just appeared) was a "story about Russia in the year 3000."

10. Not only do insects often appear at critical turns of Nabokov's fiction (as does, for example, a race of mosquitoes in Ada or a swallowtail in Glory), but sometimes they escort the main character as he exits the book. A Red Admirable butterfly flutters round Shade moments before his death; a green ephemeral trichopteron describes trapezoids over Pnin's bald head at the very end of the synoptic chapters of the book; a hawkmoth convoys Krug out of the novel: "And as Olga's soul, emblemized already in an earlier chapter [Nine], bombinates in the damp dark at the bright window of my room, comfortably Krug returns unto the bosom of his maker" (Bend Sinister [New York: Time, Inc., 1964], p. xviii).