SOURCE: “Myth or Parody: The Play of the Letter in Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading,” in Memory and Literature: Intertexuality in Russian Modernism, translated by Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 283-97.

In the following essay, Lachmann analyzes the signification of “alphabet games” in Invitation to a Beheading.

L'être est une Grammaire; et le monde de part en part un cryptogramme à constituer et à reconstituer par inscription ou déchiffrement poétique.

—Jacques Derrida¹

In Vladimir Nabokov's novels, the main question concerns not the dismantling of the writer as father figure or the confrontation with pre-texts, but, rather, the concept of the good demiurge who construes writing as a deliverance from death. In developing this theme, Nabokov employs a foreign textual layer—one that is repressed and does not belong to the literary canon. This foreign presence constitutes the specific character of intertextuality in...