Dmitrienko, Olga. Francisco Goya’s Caprichos as an Intermedial Source of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. 2019

The essay examines intertextual and intermedial layers of the novel. Intermediality is the translation from one language of art into another within one culture, or integration of different elements of art in monomedial or multimedial text. According to Dmitrienko’s hypothesis, the series of Goya’s Caprichos etchings produced significant intermedial referents to Invitation to a Beheading. Goya’s etchings came into the limelight of Russian literature in the 1910s, and the Nabokovs’ home library in St. Petersburg had an album of his works. Nabokov himself mentions the artist’s name in one of his letters to his wife, Vera Nabokov.