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 his text. In his handling of this textual layer, Nabokov's presentation (like Andrei Bely's in Petersburg) oscillates between magical and ludic threads. As with Dostoevsky and Bely, Doppelgänger phenomena become a crucial semantic structure; again as with Dostoevsky and Bely, the deceptive character of the sign and the semiotic process, belonging to the author's sphere of responsibility, tends to unsettle attempts to find meaning in the text. Given that Sergei Davydov has already worked through the Gnostic subtext in the works of Nabokov,² the aim of the following study is not to cite new Gnostic sources that would confirm or add more precision to Davidov's reading—something it does not require. Rather, I hope to shed light on Nabokov's ambivalent handling of the Gnostic world model. I will therefore restrict myself to an early novel, Priglashenie na kazn' (Invitation to a Beheading),³ and indeed to one particular aspect, namely, its play with letters of the alphabet.

With his letter games, Nabokov enters the syncretic realm of a hermetic, Gnostic, Cabbalistic, and alchemical tradition whose individual elements he transposes into new combinations. In so doing, he adopts not only the doctrine of an absent, other-worldly God, and of a cosmos created by an evil demiurge, but also of man who is conceived as having fallen (or more accurately, having been thrown) into the cosmos. Knowing that his precosmic state is still intact, man attempts to regain it by reversing the direction of his fall, through Gnosis. The basic dualism or split state of things, a constant motif in all variations on this doctrine of salvation, can be reconstructed in Invitation to a Beheading in the polarization of body (hylē) and spirit (pneuma). Likewise, it is possible to identify in the corresponding narrative and semantic organization of the text such implicit Gnostic submotifs as the rejection of the body as a prison house of the soul, the devalorization of the cosmos as a hegemonic system aimed at subjugating man estranged from salvation, and the belief in both the return of a cleansed pneuma to a precosmic original principle and the final collapse of the material world.

It seems as if Nabokov—like Hans Jonas, the scholar of Gnosticism—recognized the artificial character of Gnosis as a “secondary, derivative mythology.”⁴ As is well known, Gnosis takes early, naive myths from Iranian, Egyptian, and Greek contexts, together with philosophical elements from Neoplatonism and Jewish intellectual traditions, and uses them as a kind of prefabricated material for its own mythology. In his novel, it is as if Nabokov takes the liberty of exaggerating the artificiality of Gnosis in creating a ludic effect. Yet such playfulness also has its roots in a figure of thought that is fundamental to the Gnostic or Cabbalistic tradition, namely, a system of correspondences permeating the entire cosmos. Nabokov's aesthetics stressing the play with letters exploits both the idea that the visible can be combined with the invisible, as implied by this model of correspondence, and the complicated mechanism of representation of signs by other signs that also underlies this idea. Irrespective of whether Nabokov employs these signs iconically or magically, he strips them of their primary representational task and assigns them an eccentric function aimed at building up a surplus of meaning that lies outside controllable semiotic relations.

To questions concerning the basis and origin of Gnostic traces in modern literature, there are two possible answers: either they concern a conscious, aesthetically motivated recourse to Gnostic texts, or else they concern the culturally conditioned continuation of a heretical and unofficial tradition of meaning. Assuming that the first case applies to Nabokov, the issue of Gnostic traces in modern literature must be further refined. On the one hand, they indicate an affirmative participation in Gnostic myth that is staged in a mise-en-scène of the basic elements of Gnosticism, whereas, on the other hand, they give us an eclectic game combining Gnostic elements to form new figures of meaning. Both of these variants are relevant to Nabokov's novel, and together they constitute its functional ambivalence of “magic” and parody. It is this double function that enables us to interpret the Gnostic myth as an aesthetic one. In other words, this function enables the mise-en-scène of the myth to be read both as a literary representation and as a Gnostic and aesthetic textual act, something that is thematized in the text as writing against death. Invitation to a Beheading is a Gnostic roman à thèse that continually creates the impression that it is parodically undermining its own theses.

The book reads like a cryptographic game that sets the reader after the trace of myth. This trace is perhaps false, but at the same time it demands an exegesis of its double meaning—an exegesis in which the other, absent sign is read along with the manifest one. During one's reading, the illusory world of superficial meaning is partly dissolved: every offer of meaning is refused because the reader senses another meaning hidden behind it.

The novel tells two stories: the (manifest) story of a condemned man preparing himself for death by beheading, and the (cryptic) story of the man's salvation from the cosmic prison by means of a purifying process. The signs pointing to this second story are elements of the textual structure; at the same time, however, they refer to an absent system of meaning that can be made legible if we reconstruct the hermetic or Gnostic subtext. The double encoding achieved by this cryptoreferential semiotic configuration more or less demands a second reading, one that would concentrate on the deciphering of semantic anagrams.

The reconstruction of the various elements involved in the Gnostic myth clearly demonstrates that in the thematic framework of Invitation to a Beheading this myth is interpreted as a “modernization” of the fundamental concept of Gnosticism. In his recourse to prefabricated Gnostic forms, Nabokov sketches out a mythopoeia with a single subject matter: writing. The main character of the novel, Cincinnatus, must endure the dualism of Gnosis and the suffering caused by the split state of things. As a hylic or material being, hence filled with the fear of death, he accepts the invitation to his beheading, while at the same time his pneumatic or spiritual Doppelgänger lifts his head from the chopping block and crosses over into another world. The overcoming of the trap of self-deceit, or the earthly context of blindness⁵ that he achieves through this gesture, is followed by the collapse of negative creation. Everything that can be seen, experienced, or perceived appears to Cincinnatus as a parody of the otherworldly realm; through his attempt at writing, he prepares himself for entrance into that realm.

Nabokov's version of dualism can be read so as to suggest that the bourgeois, hylic Cincinnatus and the artistic, pneumatic Cincinnatus split apart in the process of writing. Writing itself can be interpreted as an act bringing salvation, an act directed against death; Nabokov stages this act using all the elements associated with writing. The time that is written off—as depicted by the continually shrinking pencil—is the time elapsing until the pending execution. As its last word, the pencil stub writes “death” and then crosses it out. The text, which denies its own end, becomes a Doppelgänger of the writer. It guarantees his immortality and reverses the symbol of the writing utensil: the more it recedes in its capacity as utensil, as hylē, the more the pneuma of the writer increases in the trace of crossing out.

This mythopoeic utopia of writing, which is undoubtedly the core of Nabokov's novel, is disturbed by a counterutopia holding out the promise of another medium: the camera. The confrontation between two kinds of mimetic activities—a confrontation that Nabokov also treats in a number of his later novels—unfolds in Invitation to a Beheading as a conflict between an authentic and an inauthentic kind of reproduction. This is ultimately a new way to take charge of the ambivalence present in the Platonic conception of mimesis: on the one hand, we have mimesis as a positive participation in an original image, and, on the other, we have mimesis as a negative falling away of the image from this original. Traces of this ambivalence are visible in the Gnostic doctrine of the cosmos as a false image⁶ and, in Nabokov's imitation of the world, as parody. In the novel, the writer Cincinnatus, the positive imitator and thus a valorized demiurge, is persecuted by a picture-taking negative demiurge—his executioner and inverted Doppelgänger. The evil demiurge is a forger. His photographs, which he says are parts of a photographic horoscope, are pictorial manipulations depicting young living people as old, dead ones. How should we understand this opposition between one writer using light and another using letters, or between the element of light (phos) and letter (gramma), between camera and pencil stub? The illusionism of writing with light—“the parody on the work of time” (parodiya na rabotu vremeni)—allows for no participation, as the (false, manipulated) copy of the future ends on the deathbed. Writing with letters, by contrast, guarantees participation in that which has been spelled out, as the writer's drafts promise a “nonend.” Cincinnatus's writing means the suspension of death; it is thus a Gnostic act of salvation. Once more, this interpretation confirms the utopian dimension of Nabokov's mythopoeia. The Gnostic cult act is interpreted as aesthetic, and Gnosis appears as poetic creativity.

The aesthetic act is itself present in the text, as a linguistic act or, more precisely, as an alphabetical one. This act employs various forms of play, of which the most frequent are recurrences, palindromes, anagrams, alphabetic iconography, and alphabetic onomastics. For Nabokov, play means the uncovering of a hidden system of rules and the application of a second, absent grammar⁷—the grammar of verbal magic. The latter refers to Cabbalistic tradition and is founded in a myth of correspondences that appears to hold the key to the entire cosmos. This linguistic playfulness can therefore be interpreted, on the one hand, as clowning and, on the other, as something sacred that refers to a hidden system of meaning (namely, myth).

Thus Nabokov's text oscillates between a myth legitimizing magical play and the parody of this myth. The myth of a readable world,⁸ which Nabokov stages in his alphabetic games, corresponds to a private myth of his own. According to the latter, writing is the attempt to create a world that has not yet been named, and the process of writing is posited as the extension of that world. His text, in short, demonstrates a correspondence between a poetic and a prepoetic myth. Nabokov actually structures the alphabetical magic of his work in a very precise fashion. In order to inscribe myth in his text, he uses a host of means ranging from an individual sign to a series of signs and their reversals, from cyclic formations, palindromes, and anagrams to the repetition of syllables and words. This practice poses a crucial question: is the inscription of the myth (which assumes prior knowledge of that myth) itself a magical writing, or is magic suspended in the process of writing? At first, Nabokov does everything he can to free letters from their status as communicative transparency and to make them opaque. In other words, he tries to subvert their communicative role by assigning them a symbolic role, one in which the spelled-out words entrapped in the communicative chain of everyday usage are linked up with other systems. The ars combinatoria,⁹ which interprets the letters, runs its course underneath narrative art, while the latter, for its part, inscribes the pattern indebted to the ars combinatoria. Because it follows a law of the letter that has not been made quite explicit in the text itself, the narration is cryptographic. Every narrative, in other words, is one of the potential versions of an alphabet capable of unfolding its truth across the cosmos; each narrative is determined by the act of scrambling letters—by anagram. It is a question of recognizing the anagram. The creator or creative writer casts the alphabet out like a net in which the world, previously recorded in it, is now captured.

In each of his novels, Nabokov explicitly places the metaphor of the readable world in the mouth of his protagonists, who are always writers. Each protagonist cites the metaphor in a different version. One such passage, from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), is particularly detailed:

The answer to all questions of life and death, “the absolute solution,” was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language. … Thus the traveller spells out the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters.¹⁰

Nabokov, however, also works with a version that makes this metaphor even stronger: the myth of a second creation of the world, that is, of an artificial world obeying the laws of the game. In Ada or Ardor, Nabokov has his incestuous lovers play the parlor game of Scrabble, and the Anglo-Russians call it “Flavita” (the Russian word for alphabet being alfavit). But no matter how ironic the relation of Scrabble to a mythically legitimated alphabet magic may appear, the belief persists that the alphabet is a matrix under the writer's control. Such a writer, like the Cabbalistic Creator-God and inventor of script, unfolds the world and folds it back up. At the end of Invitation to a Beheading, the world is packed up like a puppet theater, a movement repeating the folding together and rolling up of the scroll of the world.¹¹ The comical theatrics used by Nabokov to describe the preparations for the beheading affect the myth that can be recognized in the metaphorical analogy of the theatrum mundi. This metaphor is developed ingeniously: prison and environment now represent an absurd theater. The executioner is a clown who, having performed a handstand on a chair, leaves his false teeth behind on the armrest; the prison warden is in fact a circus director; the moon is a prop, as is the large spider, which, although fed daily, is in the end shown to be hanging on a rubber thread; the spectators at the public beheading are made of cardboard; the visible world is made to disappear like one gigantic prop, like butaforiya (stage magic). The metaphor of the theater is interpreted in two ways: not only does the world as theater collapse, but also the theater in the world. Only one person, the pneumatic Doppelgänger, can escape this world theater: he leaves his physical, hylic form backstage and, immersed in Gnostic contemplation, he enters the other world. The circus-like theatrics, however, also appear as a masquerade (maskarad) taking place in the brain (compare the cerebral game, mozgovaya igra, in Andrei Bely's Petersburg) or, to remain with the metaphor of writing, as an encephalogram. These theatrics indicate the domination of the writer or creator over the product that he builds up and destroys. The metaphor of the theatrum mundi,¹² which culminates in the collapse of the world, acquires a further dimension through the mise-en-scène of alphabetical games, “dramatically” linking cosmos and alphabet: according to Cabbalistic teachings, the cosmos will end when all possible combinations of letters have been tried out. Such play with words and letters employs grotesquely comical ideas that compete with the flow of the notes taken by the Gnostic hero as he writes down his pneumatic experiences. This competition between superficial entertainment and “deep meaning” repeats the double semantic pattern of the serious and the parodic, mentioned above. Such a pattern also applies to the letter-scrambling operations themselves, which refer back to two seemingly contradictory traditions: that of the lusus verborum (which also encompasses the littera, the letter) and that of alphabetical magic. The fact that playfulness (especially the baroque variety) justifies its aesthetic quality through a magical one plays a central role here.¹³Lusus and magic participate in the myth of a world that must be read and then spelled out again. Lusus illuminates the magic on which it is based. Thus the mise-en-scène of letters brings to the fore a ludic symbolism that reveals magic and again releases the arbitrariness of the alphabet (and, analogously, that of language), an arbitrariness bound together by magic. The interrelations between lusus and magic include those between game and countergame, between calculation and incantation. It is precisely this aspect of the sudden switch from “ludic meaning” to “magical meaning” that interests Nabokov. Again and again, he portrays the word-author and writer as the sole figure capable of reviving the lost, concealed magic with his artistry. By making use of various elements of the ramified and indeed proliferating myth, Nabokov produces a kind of syncretism that will hardly allow the construction of a unified mythical logic.

In all of its individual techniques, Nabokov's playful aesthetics demonstrates an orientation toward both the Symbolist and Futurist conceptions of language. With the introduction of the theme of writing—that is, the formal description of letters, writing utensils, and various phases of the writing process—another possibility is broached: the phonic qualities produced by repetitions and inversions of sounds, by assonance and alliteration, can be grasped in terms of their graphic form. According to Davydov, the actual author of the text is a provozvestnik (herald) who dictates the first sentences of the book to Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus only gradually becomes a writer, and his first attempts at writing produce ungrammatical sentences; here Nabokov follows the topos of aphasia found in Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Bely. There are particular problems in the first sentences written by Cincinnatus: “In spite of everything I am comparatively. After all I had premonitions, had premonitions of this finale.”¹⁴ In these sentences, Nabokov not only develops this topos of aphasia but also provides a variation on the final sentence from Dostoevsky's The Double. In The Double, where the characteristics of aphasia are notably exploited, the sentence (which appears in the form of indirect speech) is admittedly not defective: “Alas! For a long while he had been haunted by a presentiment of this.”¹⁵ Thus the final sentence of the earlier novel, which also indicates the infantilization of the character at stake (Golyadkin is taken off to the madhouse), is transformed in the later novel into the opening sentence of a text that demonstrates the slow process by which its main character is himself turned into writing (rather than just becoming infantilized). Golyadkin [in Dostoevsky's The Double], and beyond him Akaky Akakievitch [in Gogol's The Overcoat], are not delivered from their aphasia, whereas Cincinnatus matures into the writer of his own book of life. In myth, this function is reserved for the divine writers who record human fates. Franz Dornseiff mentions the Babylonian writer Nebo, who shortened or extended lives by determining people's fortunes with his “stylus of fate.”¹⁶ The unmotivated appearance of writing utensils on the prison table, which can be interpreted as the gift of an extraterrestrial messenger, opens up a semantic realm that can be taken as the central isotope of the text.¹⁷ A host of elements reaches a point of convergence in the theme of writing: the pencil (sharpened or chewed) slowly shrinks (like the life of a person); the paper with its whiteness; the pages, covered with writing or blank; all derivations of writing and drawing; the connection between the letter and ornamentation; the reference to different scripts, to mirror writing, to incomprehensible signs (having an oriental character); and the comparison of the pencil to the index finger. Of particular significance among such elements are the crossing out of the word “death” and passages that have naming, describing, and letters as their sole subject.

It is clear from the following passage that Nabokov is attempting to interpret a myth of writing:

Those around him understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or a catapult with wondrous consequences. … That which does not have a name does not exist. Unfortunately everything had a name.¹⁸

“That which does not have a name does not exist” sounds like a quotation from Cabbalistic doctrine, but in reverse form. In the Cabbalah, the whole of creation is continually engaged in creating names for God; everything in existence is the expression of His language. The revolt of the poetical demiurge, the one who writes, begins with this admission that “unfortunately everything had a name.” The act of naming calls the unexpected into existence. Using new names, one must write against everything that has been named and is therefore existent—even if one will be punished for doing so. “I will punish writers,” says Nabokov's prison director. Giving names or naming also means combining letters in the right way. The letters participate in the right name that guarantees existence. In the process, Nabokov refers to a complex of naming, existence, and letters that Gershom Scholem explains as follows:

All things exist only by virtue of their degree of participation in the great name of God … the letters of the spiritual language are the elements both of the most fundamental spiritual reality and the profoundest understanding and knowledge.¹⁹

In the mystical tradition of Judaism, the Torah (which in its totality spells out the secret name of God) suffers from a lack; that is, it suffers from a false or missing letter. When the missing or appropriate letter is rediscovered, the perfect Torah will be re-created—and, with it, God's name and the cosmic order.²⁰ Nabokov also interprets this tradition in the passage quoted above. The secret order, which is covered over by the tendency of everyday language to say everything beforehand, can be uncovered or redescribed by restituting the lost final letter of the Old Church Slavonic alphabet, izhitsa. In its two variants, the archaic letter becomes a sling, prashcha (the Greek letter γ), and a bird, ptitsa (the Greek letter v). Here Nabokov makes use of an alphabetic iconism, which, when understood as the explication of letter forms, refers to practices of alphabetical magic in Gnosticism, Cabbalah, and Greek mysticism.²¹ As far as ptitsa [bird] is concerned, this iconism can also be traced back to myths about the invention of writing. One of the inventors of script is thought to have been Hermes who supposedly derived the form of letters from the flight of cranes. In the case of Palamedes, the myth (as related by Lucan and Martial) becomes still more concrete—in the flight of cranes, he is thought to have seen a lamda or upsilon.²² When we consider the variants of the letter izhitsa, it would appear that Nabokov patterned his exegesis on this version of the myth. That he knew the myth of the cranes is clear from his poem “An Evening on Russian Poetry,” where one finds the line, “the Greek, as you remember, fashioned his alphabet from cranes in flight.”²³

But izhitsa is not just the last letter of the Old Church Slavonic alphabet; together with az, which appears near the end of the novel, it is the alpha and omega encompassing the entire description of the world. As the Old Church Slavonic version of the Greek upsilon, it also acquires a further nuance in the tradition of meditation on the alphabet:

“Y” is the gramma philosophon par excellence. … In countless instances it is considered an illustration of the parable of the two paths represented by virtue and vice, a comparison which, since Hesiod, has been very popular in Greek, Jewish, and Christian moral teachings. Pythagoras himself is supposed to have pointed out this meaning of upsilon.²⁴

According to Pythagoras, the gramma philosophon stands for all stoicheia or letters. Its three arms represent the vowels, the voiced consonants, and the voiceless consonants. What is particularly interesting in this is the multiple loading of a single sign—a dualism fitting in with Gnosis. The idea of one letter containing all others recapitulates the figure of thought concerning the correspondence between micro and macro, inclusion, summa, and the matrix. According to a pattern leading to increasing numbers of myths, the metaphor of the migrating birds²⁵ is associated with still further elements: Thot, the inventor of script (whom the Greeks identified with Hermes), is represented in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics with the pictograph “ibis head”; in his function as the god of death and chronicler of death who assigns people their lives, he is also iconographically depicted as an anthropomorphic figure with the head of an ibis. Thot organized language and named the unnameable. This association with Egyptian material leads to yet another association that is significant for Nabokov: in the light of his theme of writing, which forms a mirror image of the theme of death, the reference to the bird can be taken to mean the rayskaya ptitsa sirin (the bird of paradise, Sirin). Sirin (siren), a bird's body with a human head (a well-known figure in Russian mythology), can be compared with the Egyptian bird of the soul, Ba, which is depicted hieroglyphically and iconographically in this way, and which, incidentally, like the Sirin character in Nabokov's novels, is a Doppelgänger figure.²⁶ “Sirin” is also the pseudonym of the young Nabokov (and the name of the publishing house responsible for Bely's Petersburg). Thus the author is present—very indirectly—as a scribe, as a textual demiurge: Sirin stands for the pneumatic principle, for the true creator. Among Nabokov's predecessors, it is Velimir Khlebnikov who employs this kind of mythic syncretism, involving Russian folk mythology and Egyptian material. Recourse to this literary myth can take on multiple encodings, syncretic forms, and growth.

In another instance of such a technique, Cincinnatus complains not only about the missing letter, but also about his inability to write:

Nichego ne poluchitsya iz togo, chto khochu raskazat', a lish' ostanutsya chernye trupy udavlennykh slov, kak visel'niki … vechernie ocherki glagoley, voronie.

Or will nothing come of what I am trying to tell, its only vestiges being the corpses of strangled words, like hanged men … evening silhouettes of gammas and gerunds, gallow crows.

(96/90)

Here alphabetic iconism is already assumed as a pattern, for in place of the letter gamma (the Russian glagol') the reader must imagine the capital form of the fourth letter of the Old Church Slavonic alphabet (G). The play with glagol'—both the name for a letter and a word meaning “gallows”—also takes on an iconic meaning. This wordplay is extended by a further one between glagol'/glagol (the latter meaning “word” in Old Church Slavonic). Cincinnatus's statement that he prefers “the hangman's noose” (verevka) to the “axe” (topor) underscores the parallels: it places verbal corpses on the gallows and the writer underneath the guillotine.

The following iconic letter, which has already been interpreted by D. Barton Johnson, presents yet another elucidation of Nabokov's technique in terms of its polysemic effect:

Tupoe “tut,” podpertoe i zapertoe chetoyu “tverdo,” temnaya tyur'ma, v kotoruyu zakluchen neuemno voyushchy uzhas, derzhit menya i tesnit.

The horrible “here,” the dark dungeon, in which a relentlessly howling heart is incarcerated, this “here” holds and constricts me.

(98-99/93)

With the word tut (here)—offering a concept of the hylic, evil world, the cosmic prison—this semantic complex is unfolded by means of alphabetic iconism and onomastics. This Tut is a kind of ideogram depicting a prisoner (the letter U) surrounded by two prison guards (two instances of the letter t: T—T). Moreover, T can be interpreted by the typographical name of the Old Slavonic Church alphabet tverdo, leading naturally to associations with tverd' and tverdinya (stronghold) as well as temnitsa, an archaic word for prison. Furthermore, totska (longing, desire), which occurs frequently in the text, is also evoked by T. The U can also stand for uzhas (horror), as Barton Johnson suggests, and at the same time for Andrei Bely's uuu, which in his novel Petersburg vocalizes revolutionary ferment. The letter U, however, is to be read more graphically than phonetically—that is, as an attempt to visualize Bely's phonetics. In the case of T, the older iconic reading of the Greek tau as stavros (cross) persists as a result of the semantics of letters' names and the symbolic exegesis carried out graphically and phonetically (compare the Egyptian ankh, the hieroglyph of immortality: [UNK]). The association between stavros and Stavrogin [in Dostoevsky's The Devils], made possible by the shift from crucifixion to hanging, refers to yet another way of dying than crucifixion, namely, beheading. Each time, with the ideogram tut Nabokov replays the kind of alphabetical exegesis of the alphabet that Dornseiff documents for the Babylonian Talmud, for instance.²⁷

Nabokov's text provides another example. At a public spectacle, during which the hangman and his victim are presented together to the public and the initials of their names (Pierre and Cincinnatus) appear as a luminous script²⁸ in the sky, the false Doppelgänger relationship is revealed. The capital pi (π) almost looks like an upside-down T, but not quite. The small hook “[UNK]” [at the bottom of the Russian letter T] makes all the difference: it makes the mirror symmetry imperfect. Here, too, there are pre-texts for this kind of play in the mystical tradition of the alphabet. Dornseiff refers us to the notion contained in some Cabbalistic teachings according to which tails and dots are regarded as specific signs containing holiness and thus calling for veneration. Cincinnatus's pneumatics lies in the hook of his letter ([UNK]); this hook represents the point to which he can reduce everything, himself included, in the process of freeing himself, layer by layer, from his corporeal shell. In his monologue on writing, Cincinnatus depicts this process as one of personal disembodiment: “I am taking off layer after layer.” Slowly undressing, Cincinnatus says, “I reach the final, indivisible, firm, radiant point, and this point says: I am! like a pearl ring embedded in a shark's gory fat.”²⁹ This one point,³⁰ which can be interpreted as the single letter, represents pneumatic essence.

Nabokov's passage is saturated with Gnostic elements. One of its subtexts is the myth of the pearl, symbolizing the soul, that is found again in a shark.³¹ And an impressive passage from The Real Life of Sebastian Knight could be added to the myth of the hook, point, and letter discussed above: “The intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters.”³² Here the concern lies less with hook and point than with the single letter. According to a concept developed in the Cabbalah, this one letter means “God” or, rather, represents the sign Yah, which stands for “Yahweh.” In Nabokov's system of hybridizing language, it is quite conceivable that Yah also means the Russian word for “I” (ya) and that in the English text this meaning is conveyed by the homonym “eye” (eye—I). The “inner eye,” in other words, is readable as a reply to the ya esm' (I am) of the Russian.

Even strategies that belong more in the realm of phonic playfulness are dominated by alphabetism. Phonic, syllabic, and verbal repetitions, of the type “kisti-li krutogo kolorista,”³³ which refer to Bely's style, and even onomatopoeic sequences like mrik, mrak, turup, turup, tok, tok, tok, syp', syp', syp, and so forth, have a graphically literal meaning. In this connection, Dornseiff interprets alliteration and phonic repetitions as the alphabetic repetition of letters: “One often has the impression that it was most important for the magician that these magical signs were written rather than spoken.”³⁴

In Nabokov's texts, verbal repetitions are for the most part strongly invested with meaning and employed to compress thematic complexes:

O blizosti Tamarinykh sadov. … Tam, kogda Marfin'ka byla nevestoy. … Tam, gde byvalo, kogda vse stanovilos'. … Zelenoe, muravchatoe Tam, tamoshnie kholmy tomlenie prudov, tamtatam dalekogo orkestra.

Tam, tam—original tekh sadov, gde my tut brodili.

A wave of fragrance would come from Tamara Gardens. … There, where Marthe, when she was a bride. … There, whenever life seemed unbearable. … That green turfy tamarack park, the languor of its ponds, the tum-tum-tum of a distant band.

There, there are the originals of those gardens where we used to roam.³⁵

Through the frequent repetition of tam and tut, the dualistic structure of the Gnostic theme is reduced to the smallest graphic denominator: this world as tut, the extracosmic one as tam.³⁶ Nabokov describes Gnostic ecstasy as follows:

[Cincinnatus] stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air.

(Invitation, 32)

This description not only produces a rhythmical effect reminiscent of Bely's style; in addition, “skullcap,” “slippers,” and “dressing gown”—the clothing worn by Nikolai Apollonovich in Petersburg—all refer to Bely. But above all, this description records the process of stripping off the corporeal shell in a graphic figure reproducing the pattern of a movement. This movement develops into a cyclical structure:

Ohsibkoy propal ya syuda—ne imenno v temnitsu—a voobshche v etot strashny, polosaty mir, poryadochny obrazec kustarnogo iskusstva, no v sushchnosti—beda, uzhas, bezumie, oshibka.

I am here through an error—not in this prison, specifically—but in this whole terrible, striped world; a world which seems not a bad example of amateur craftsmanship, but is in reality calamity, horror, madness, error.

(96/91)

Metatextual concepts such as obrazets, uzor, and obrazchik (all meaning “pattern”) refer to a figurative structure. The cyclical element is, for its part, a Gnostic figure of thought: the circle and the snake biting its own tail appear against the parameters of teleological, linear temporality. Verbal repetition is not magical in terms of sound; rather, it is literally the written-down pattern of this concept of time, as the text notes: “There time takes shape according to one's pleasure, like a figured rug whose folds can be gathered in such a way that two designs will meet” (94).

Moreover, the text always offers the “translation” of alphabetic practice into concepts. Davydov already pointed out the cyclical and spiral structure of Nabokov's novels as a whole. He discovered a Moebius strip in Dar (The Gift);³⁷ the book's inner side folds over into the outer side. Both circle and spiral connote “infinity.” The Gift comments on Fedor Godunov-Cherdyncev's biography of Nikolai Chernyshevsky:

[It was Fedor's idea to compose] his biography in the shape of a ring, closed with the clasp of an apocryphal sonnet (so that the result would not be the form of a book, which by its finiteness is opposed to the circular nature of everything in existence, but continuously curving, and thus infinite).³⁸

Whereas the form of the book is finite—that is, teleological—the chain of letters, which forms circles and spirals, converts the idea of infinity into a graphic figure. Nabokov is fascinated both by the idea of a fixed system of combinations and by the impossibility of expending the supply of signs. “One should constantly bear in mind that all men consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed,” we read in Sebastian Knight. This sentence, a variant of the Cabbalistic doctrine, mentioned above, according to which the world will end only after all combinations of letters have been tried out, is invalidated by the pathos of infinitude marking the end of The Gift. There, in a sonnet that is written in the style of Pushkin but that is concealed in prose, it is pointed out that there is actually no conclusion: “The shadows of my world extend beyond the skyline of the page, blue as tomorrow's morning haze—nor does this terminate the phrase.”³⁹

Alphabetic combination—“twenty-five letters variously mixed”—determines the game that Nabokov plays with his own name. Through alphabetical permutations always differing in form, he makes his name appear in his novels: Vivian Darkbloom, Vivian Bloodmark, Vivian Badlook, Adam von Libikov, Blavdak Vinomori, Baron Klim Avidov, and so on. This anagrammatic play with names parodies the Cabbalistic notion that the name of God is hidden in all combinations of letters. The fact that the anagram is bound up with letters (as opposed to Ferdinand de Saussure's privileging of phonetics) is also relevant to the palindrome: “Voz'mi-ka slovo ropot,—govoril Cincinnatu ego surin, ostryik,—i prochti obratno. A? Smeshno poluchaetsya”; “‘Take the word ropot [grumbling], Cincinnatus's brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. ‘Now read it backward. Eh? Comes out funny, doesn't it [topor, axe]?’”⁴⁰

The process of reading backward results in Cincinnatus's “getting the axe.” Topor (axe) appears to be the result of “grumbling.” The type of alphabetical permutation that Dornseiff calls anakyklesis, anagrammatismos, or revolutio⁴¹ includes the Cabbalistic exegesis of what has been mixed up, which is called ziruph or gilgul and means “melting together.” The following passage from Invitation documents Nabokov's knowledge of this technique and his attempt to interpret it for his poetics:

Ne umeya pisat', no prestupnym chut'em dogadyvayas' o tom, kak skladyvayut slova, kak dolzhno postupit', chtoby slovo obyknovennoe ozhivalo, chtoby ono zaimstvovalo u svoego soseda ego blesk, zhar, ten', samo otrazhayas' v nem i ego tozhe obnovlyaya etim otrazheniem—tak chto vsya stroka—zhivoy pereliv.

Not knowing how to write, but sensing with my criminal intuition how words are combined, what one must do for a commonplace word to come alive and to share its neighbor's sheen, heat, shadow, while reflecting itself in its neighbor and renewing the neighboring word in the process, so that the whole line is live iridescence.

(98-99/93)

This is a program of poetics that refers both to the theory and practice of language in Russian Symbolism and to a Cabbalistic concept: pereliv (iridescence) means among other things the recasting or melting down of metals, something that evokes the realm of linguistic alchemy. The magic of melting down metals is supplemented by the doctrine of correspondences, a doctrine that in turn underlies the metaphor of the readable world.⁴²

Two doctrines developing this program, involving the universal sympathy and iconicity of things, produce in addition forms of play in which magical and ludic functions overlap. In this overlap, the world-as-text appears as an alphabetical series, which means that the series stands against the text, that the sequence forming figures (circle or spiral) stands against the text's patterns of intertwining, and that each element in the series generates other series—or, in other words, proliferates. It might even be the case that the very concept of the text as a system of signs is dissolved by such a proliferation of corresponding series. In short, the alphabetical operation disrupts textuality.

With circles and spirals, gallows and birds, Nabokov links up with the tradition of the paignia, the forms of play with ornamental icons of correspondence. This tradition uses letters to form hearts, wings, and grapes—a technique that the aesthetics of klimata and carmina figurata inherited from magic.⁴³

However, just as the ornamental and the magical diverge⁴⁴ while at the same time commenting on one another, so, too, do the relations between alphabet and narration represent instances of ludic and magical correspondences. The prayer to the divine egg, which is itself written on an egg, conveys the magician's suggestion that the world is not only to be read, but also to be inscribed with corresponding signs. For Nabokov, sympathetically metonymic and iconic relations do not only apply to the blank piece of paper and the world, the body and the letter: “I am so frozen that it seems to me that the abstract concept of ‘cold’ must have as its concrete form the shape of my body” (Invitation, 192). They also apply to the pencil and the writer, whose magic act of writing consists of the erasure of the word “death,” which, having been erased, remains behind as the sole word on a blank sheet of paper:

“But now, when I am hardened, when I am almost fearless of. …”

Here the page ended, and Cincinnatus realized that he was out of paper. However he managed to dig up one more sheet:

“… death,” he wrote on it, continuing his sentence, but he immediately crossed out that word.

(205-6)

The crossing out of the word “death” signifies the identification of the word's body and its meaning; it refers to the repetition of a linguistic activity rooted in myth. Crossing out is an act of rendering something powerless, like the magical act of reading a curse backward.⁴⁵ The word itself is not erased; because the name of God is hidden in all words, it is forbidden to erase completely what has been written; compare Sebastian Knight's habit of letting rejected sentences stand. The writer crosses out his own death with a writing utensil that represents his own life span. It is no accident that Nabokov—again very indirectly—allows letters and writing to coincide, to take each other's place through metonymy. As the projection of the sun's height (or of the already completed part of a planetary body's orbit), the Greek word for letter, stoicheion,⁴⁶ refers not only to a unit of measurement but also to the smallest unit, the atom. Thus it is a complicated coincidence of material element, planetary body, and letter that would seem to confirm the magicians' search for correspondences. In Invitation to a Beheading, this coincidence is manifested through the gradually shrinking pencil that can be interpreted as a unit for measuring life and thus stands for the writer. The pencil marks the confluence of measuring unit—that which is to be measured—and measurer (a subdiscipline of alphabetical mysticism is gnomonics). But Nabokov's concern in his novels is to suspend the unit of measurement as such; his is the immeasurable hubris of writing against death.

In Invitation to a Beheading, the empty theatricality of the cosmos is opposed to a sign system based on cryptic correspondences. The semiotic system allows for meanings that are to be interpreted soteriologically. In alphabetic play as a simultaneously magical and calculated procedure, concepts of a heretical worldview mesh with aesthetic concepts of the avant-garde. There still remains an ambivalence between literature as a conventional element of official culture and Gnostic myth, the latter signaling the further existence of an unofficial cultural tradition that employs the medium of literature. This ambivalence remains even when one assumes that the elements that produce or bind meanings in Nabokov's novel stem from his knowledge of a plethora of overlapping and mutually substitutive myths in Cabbalah, Gnosis, rituals of alphabetical magic, and the widely ramifying writings that succeed them (as in Plotinus, Raymond Lull, Athanasius Kircher, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the Romantics). Such an ambivalence remains even when one assumes that Nabokov reverses, inverts, and revalues historically documented mythical motifs, interpreting them sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously. The ambivalence subsists because, beside and against these myths, there stands the writing of a myth of the scribe—a writing in which the auctor takes the place of God. A latter-day descendant of Gnostic and Cabbalistic tradition, this simultaneously secularized and poeticized myth—this aesthetic contrafactum—permits a new reading of that tradition. The readability of the world becomes the readability of the myth.

The auctor does not copy the world letter for letter; rather, he spells it out in a new way. The world, moreover, is not a text that he reads. Rather, his text writes a world that the reader must once again spell out. In what is perhaps a reversal of the tradition, writing suspends parody as a mythical act. Writing does not allow itself to be deceived. In the process of writing as undoing and dismembering, and then in the process of writing as reassembling and putting back together, the author repeats the primal gesture of the scribe.

Notes

1. Derrida, L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 114; “that being is a Grammar; and that the world in all its parts a cryptogram to be reconstituted or reconstituted through poetic inscription or deciphering,” in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 76.

2. See Davydov, “Teksty-Matreshki” Vladimira Nabokova [The “text-matrioshkas” of Vladimir Nabokov] (Munich: Sagner, 1982).

3. Nabokov, Priglashenie na kazn', 1938 (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1979); Invitation to a Beheading, trans. Dmitri Nabokov and Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Capricorn, 1959). [Where both the Russian and English editions are quoted in the text, page numbers will be added parenthetically, first to the Russian and then to the English Trans.]

4. Hans Jonas, “Typologische und historische Abgrenzung des Phänomens der Gnosis” [A typological and historical delimitation of the phenomenon of Gnosis], in Gnosis und Gnostizismus, ed. K. Rudolph (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), 640. See also Sasagu Arai, “Zur Definition der Gnosis in Rücksicht auf die Frage nach ihrem Ursprung” [On the definition of Gnosis with regard to the question of its origin], in Gnosis und Gnostizismus, 646-53; as well as Gnosticisme et monde hellénistique [Gnosticism and the Hellenistic world], ed. J. Ries (Louvain-La-Neuve: Piol, 1982).

5. For a discussion of the Gnostic implications of Theodor Adorno's concept of “blindness” [Verblendungszusammenhang], see Norbert Bolz, “Erlösung als ob: Über einige gnostische Motive der Kritischen Theorie” [Redemption as if: On some Gnostic themes in critical theory], in Gnosis und Politik, ed. Jakob Taubes (Paderborn: Schoeningh, 1984), 264-89.

6. For more on the concept of the cosmos as forgery and imitation, see Jonas, “Typologische und historische Abgrenzung,” 635.

7. Roman Jakobson has analyzed this hidden grammar in Velimir Khlebnikov's poetry. See his “Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry,” in Studies in General and Oriental Linguistics, ed. Jakobson and Shigeo Kawamoto (Tokyo: Tec, 1970), 302-8. For more on this aspect, see chap. II.4(b), above.

8. See Hans Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt [The readability of the world] (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1981).

9. For more on this concept, see Gustav R. Hocke, Manierismus in der deutschen Literatur: Sprachalchemie und esoterische Kombinationskunst [Mannerism in German literature: Linguistic alchemy and the esoteric arts of combination] (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1959).

10. Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1959), 178-79.

11. See Blumenberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt, 19, 24-25; Ernst R. Curtius, “The Book as Symbol,” in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. William R. Trask (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 302-47.

12. The metaphor of the theater encompasses further aspects: the prison guards wearing dog masks (for which there is again a Gnostic subtext); Cincinnatus himself, who before his “gnoseologicheskaya gnusnost'” [“gnostic turpitude”] (80/72) was a puppetmaker; the word vertep (puppet theater); the course of a summer storm (razigralas' letnyaya groza); and the coalescing figures of Rodion, Rodrig, and Roman, who are played by two actors.

13. See Hocke, Manierismus, for an account of Athanasius Kircher's influence on Quirinus Kuhlmann. According to Hocke, the relation between the magical and the aesthetic also applies to poets such as Novalis and Stéphane Mallarmé. See his chapter “Der magische Buchstabe” [The magical letter], 7-67.

14. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 12-13.

15. Dostoevsky, The Double, in The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, trans. C. Garnett (New York: Dial Press, 1945), 615.

16. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie [The alphabet in mysticism and magic] (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat, 1922), 2.

17. For example, “the pencil started to roll, one book began sliding upon another” (28); “the large black books on the table” (32); “on the table glistened a clean sheet of paper and distinctly outlined against this whiteness” (12); “the pencil glistened on the table” (20); “Cincinnatus was as light as a leaf” (13); “there are some who sharpen a pencil toward themselves, as if they were peeling a potato, and there are others who slice away from themselves, as though whittling a stick” (89). Compare also in this regard the semantics of chinit' pero [sharpening a quill pen] in Dostoevsky's Bednye lyudi [Poor folk], Dvoynik [The double] and “Slaboe serdtse” [A faint heart]. Cincinnatus observes how a drop falls to one side: “Through the drop several letters turned from brevior into pica, having swollen as if a reading glass were lying over them” (88). The prison librarian, a pneumatic—and the only “positive” figure in the novel—is depicted as being sewn into a tight skin, indicating a variation of the Gnostic myth of the body as a prison (the skin being the visible border that cordons off the cosmos). He brings Cincinnatus books, among them ones that the latter cannot read because they are written in a foreign script. What script is being suggested here? The reference to orientalism would seem to suggest Arabic, Persian, or Aramaic—that is, the scripts or languages in which Gnostic texts were written.

18. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 26; emphasis in original.

19. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1983), 133.

20. See Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Schocken, 1969), 81.

21. See D. Barton Johnson, “The Alpha and Omega of Nabokov's Prison-House of Language: Alphabetic Iconism in Invitation to a Beheading,” Russian Literature 4.6 (1978), 347-64. Barton Johnson defines alphabetic iconism as follows: “The iconic letters, a device of indisputable ingenuity but necessarily of limited application, represent a vain attempt to loosen the fetters of the prison-house of language, for in their visual aspect they reach beyond the conventional lexical level of language toward a mystical, ideal tongue in which words mime what they mean, an artistic language of perfect clarity in which the correspondence between perception and percept and between percept and word is absolute” (362). This definition, however, encompasses neither playfulness nor the parodic gesture that calls mysticism into question.

22. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, 8; see Lucan, The Civil War 5.716 and Martial, Epigrams 13.75. See also Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 343. Curtius also cites an example from the seventeenth century: Góngora, Soledad primera (l. 609-10), where cranes are mentioned as forming winged letters on the translucent paper of the heavens. Curtius comments that Góngora is renewing a classical concepto whose last trace he sees in Claudian's De bello Gildonico 1 (= 15).477; there, the flying cranes form a Greek lambda. In Osip Mandelstam's poem “Bessonitsa” [Sleeplessness], the wedge-shaped flight of cranes evokes Goethe's cranes in Faust Part 2 and Dante's cranes from the Divina Commedia. See chap. IV.5, above.

23. [Nabokov, Poems and Problems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 158. Trans.]

24. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, 24.

25. Compare the bird metaphor in the semantics of writing: Pushkin's ornithomorphic signature, his self-portraits drawn with a “quill” (feather); the bird metaphors in Dostoevsky (Poor Folk); Mandelstam's comparison of Dante's feather with the flesh of birds, in “Conversation about Dante,” Sobranie sochineny, vol. 2: 407; The Complete Critical Prose, 437.

26. On Ba, see Erik Hornung, Der Eine und die Vielen [The one and the many] (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971).

27. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, 23.

28. As regards writing with light as heavenly writing, note the parodic use of the concept of correspondences: the letters appear as planets. Dornseiff (Das Alphabet, 89-90) points out that stars were considered to be heavenly writing by the Babylonians. The letters form people or, at least, represent them in the heavens, as in the Greek choreography of letters (20) and the Grammato-tragoedia by Callias (67).

29. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 90.

30. Note also the frequent use of the word “point” in Bely's Petersburg.

31. See Ruth Kühner, “Pearl,” in Gnosticisme et monde hellénistique, ed. J. Ries, 189-99.

32. Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 179.

33. Nabokov, Priglashenie, 27. Compare the following instances:

    “Kartina li kisti krutogo kolorista” (27); “Tupik tutoshnei zhizni” (200); “Kakaya toska, Cincinnat, kakaya toska, kakaya kamennaya toska” (57); “Spolzali po skalistym skatam” (139-40); “Simpatichnyi smertnik” (39); “Ot rokovogo rokota golosov” (45); “Po doroge potoki, potopy” (131); “Khlopot polon rot” (76).

    See also the sequences with pust, stup, krug, and stuk: “Stupeni … prostupiv … perestupil … stupeni … sputalsya, ostupivshis' … spuskalas' … soputstvuemye … nastupaya” (53); “i vot, vykhodya iz mraka, podavaya drug drugu ruki, smykalis' v krug osveshchennye figury—i, slegka napiraya vbok … nachinali—sperva tugoe, vlachashcheesya—krugovoe dvizhenie” (156); “krugom kriki … na krutigrudo—serebryanom korable … puteshestvovala mnogorukaya lyustra” (182); “Stuk, stuk … vdrug stalo. Tok, tok” (82).

34. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, 61.

35. Priglashenie, 32, 99; Invitation to a Beheading, 19, 94; emphasis in original. The English “there” corresponds to the Russian tam.

36. Compare Bely's dualism of roy (swarm) and stroy (system, formation) in his novel Kotik Letaev. Nabokov's tam reminds us of the chapter using this term in Petersburg, whereas the name “Tamara” points to Mikhail Lermontov's epic poem Demon. Nabokov's response to Bely's novel is presented with particular force at such points.

37. Nabokov, Dar (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1975); The Gift (New York: Capricorn, 1970), trans. M. Scammel with the collaboration of Nabokov.

38. Nabokov, The Gift, 216.

39. Ibid., 378.

40. [This is a literal rendering. Compare the Russian (Priglashenie, 108) with the free English translation in Invitation to a Beheading, 103: “‘Take the word “anxiety,”’ Cincinnatus' brother-in-law, the wit, was saying to him. ‘Now take away the word “tiny.” Eh? Comes out funny, doesn't it?’” Trans.]

41. Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, 136.

42. For more on this idea, see Aage Hansen-Löve, “Die Entfaltung des ‘Welt-Text’—Paradigmas in der Poesie V. Chlebnikovs” [The development of the paradigm of the world as a text in the poetry of Khlebnikov], in Velimir Chlebnikov: A Stockholm Symposium, ed. N. A. Nilsson (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1985), 27-87.

43. The double functions of the visual and the acoustic in the Greek carmina figurata (wing, cluster, heart) are analyzed by John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975). Hollander, however, is concerned more with the dominance of the visual.

44. See Dornseiff, Das Alphabet, 66-67.

45. Compare the palindrome ropot/topor. The written sequence of letters was considered magical, the palindromic reading rendered the magic harmless, and precisely this was called anagrammatizomena (a connotation that not been considered in modern theories of the anagram). See also Bely's half-Persian, half-French devil figure called Shishnarfne/Enfranshish, in Petersburg. Dornseiff (Das Alphabet, 76f.) sees a development from the magical or apotropaic use of ornamentation to the symbolic. The ornamentally employed letter always overlays its communicative function. As an example, Dornseiff refers here to Pythagoras (81).

46. Ibid., 15.