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From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were -- but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm.

...

Gradually Cincinnatus stopped watching himself altogether, and one day, at some open meeting in the city park there was a sudden wave of alarm and someone said in a loud voice, "Citizens, there is among us a ----------" Here followed a strange, almost forgotten word, and the wind swished through the locust trees, and Cincinnatus found nothing better than to get up and walk away, absent-mindedly picking leaves from bushes bordering the path. And ten days later he was arrested.

Invitation to a Beheading pp. 24 - 32

My impulse is to connect Cincinnatus' experience with my own; to think Nabokov is talking about the dread that I have felt at the gulf between myself and the people around me, who do not themselves seem to have such an abyss separating them. My readings and experiences to date have led me to believe this dread to be a common (if not universal) experience, its frequency and intensity varying from individual to individual.

But Nabokov's statement in the preface, that "The question whether or not my seeing both [Nazism and Bolshevism] in terms of one dull beastly farce had any effect on this book, should concern the good reader as little as it does me," is a bit of a double-edged sword. Taken at face value, it would support my impression that the torments Nabokov is writing about are those of people in general, that he is writing about something I may know about. But he has as part of his life story the experience of abandoning his homeland out of fear of the Bolsheviks, something utterly outside my realm of familiarity. Though he says this is not what he is writing about, I have to think it made an impression on him that would forever affect how he related to his world.