Frozen In Time

Nabokov's Invitation is interesting. It isn't necessarily surreal, certainly not Kafkaesque. It merits attention at what N imagined as a logical extension of certain practices and traditions filtered through the madness of state socialism. As Solzhenitsyn (and Conquest, Applebaum etc) noted, the Russian prisons of 19th Century were remarkably humane evn though Aleksandr notes his surpise in Volume 1 of the GA that they library at Lubyanka was well-stocked, one wouldn't imagine dressing gowns in the gulag, which is nearly the image Nabokov paints.