"Invitation to a Beheading" was written by Nabokov in Russian in Berlin in 1934. The novel was published in Paris in 1938. It was not until 1959 that it was published in English in New York, and by the early 1960s, the book was available in the respective local languages in Paris, Milan, Oslo, and Copenhagen. It was published in Germany in 1970. It is difficult not to interpret this novel politically. However, Nabokov himself forbids it: "I wrote the Russian original fifteen years after my escape from the Bolshevik regime and shortly before the acclaim of the Nazi regime reached its full volume. The question of whether the fact that I perceive both as a single dreary, bestial farce influenced this book or not should concern the good reader as little as it concerns me.".