In the latest issue of the magazine Kreschatik (http://www.kreschatik.nm.ru/31/29.htm) there is an essay devoted to VN and his attitude to Kafka and absurd. Its author insists that VN was familiar with Kafka’s works but that their notions of the absurd were very dissimilar.

Dmitry Bykov in his new biography of Boris Pasternak (in the ZhZL series, 2005) wrote insightfully that the world of INVITATION TO A BEHEADING “differs from Kafka’s gothic fantasies, so appropriate in the damp Meyrinkesque streets of Prague, by its very German rainbow color, its cloying treacly sweetness, its jolly trills of the harmonica in the background” (p. 68).

Sergey Karpukhin