 Cover of the first edition | |
| Author | Vladimir Nabokov |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Dystopian fiction |
| Publisher | Henry Holt and Company |
Publication date | 1947 |
Bend Sinister is a dystopian novel written by Vladimir Nabokov during the years 1945 and 1946, and published by Henry Holt and Company in 1947. It was Nabokov's eleventh novel and his second written in English.
In heraldry, a standard "bend" is a diagonal band from the upper dexter to the lower sinister (that is, from the upper right of the coat of arms' bearer to his lower left) and a "bend sinister" is its left-handed reverse. To a viewer facing the shield the appearances will be reversed, \ and / respectively. In a 1963 edition of the book, Nabokov explains that "this choice of a title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life." In the novel, Nabokov often uses word-play concerning leftward (or "sinister") movements.
This book takes place in a fictitious European city known as Padukgrad, where a government arises following the rise of a philosophy known as "Ekwilism", which discourages the idea of anyone being different from anyone else, and promotes the state as the prominent good in society. The story begins with the protagonist, Adam Krug, who had just lost his wife to an unsuccessful surgery. He is quickly asked to sign and deliver a speech to the leader of the new government by the head of the university and his colleagues, but he refuses. This government is led by a man named Paduk and his "Party of the Average Man". As it happens, the world-renowned philosopher Adam Krug was, in his youth, a classmate of Paduk, at which period he had bullied him and referred to him disparagingly as "the Toad". Paduk arrests many of the people close to Krug and those against his Ekwilist philosophy, and attempts to get the influential Professor Krug to promote the state philosophy to help stomp out dissent and increase his personal prestige.
Paduk tries to entice Krug with various offers, but Krug always refuses, even after his friends and acquaintances, like Ember, are incarcerated. Finally, Paduk orders the kidnapping of Krug's young son, David, for a ransom. After Krug capitulates and is prepared to promote the Ekwilist philosophy, Paduk promises David's safe return. However, when David is to be returned to him, Krug is horrified to find that the child he is presented is not his son. There has been a mix-up, and David has been sent to an orphanage that doubles as a violent prisoner rehabilitation clinic where he was killed when offered as a "release" to the prisoners.
Paduk makes an offer to allow Krug to personally kill those responsible, but he swears at the officials and is locked in a large prison cell. Another offer is made to Krug to free 24 opponents of Ekwilism, including many of his friends, in exchange for doing so. Krug refuses and begins to charge at Paduk and is killed by a pair of bullets from the dictator's henchmen. At this point, Nabokov feels such pity for Krug that he actually intervenes and emphasizes that Bend Sinister was, thankfully, a fictional story and that Adam Krug never existed. [1]
Adam Krug – University philosopher and protagonist. Krug is the foremost writer and thinker of Padukgrad. His cooperation with and endorsement of the Party of the Average Man is crucial to the regime's international relations.
Olga Krug – Adam's late wife, who dies right before the novel begins.
David Krug – Adam's son, who is killed by Padukgrad criminals in a mix-up.
Paduk – Nicknamed "The Toad", he is the dictator of Padukgrad, former schoolmate of Krug and founder of Ekwilism.
Ember – A Padukgrad intellectual who studies Shakespeare and is Adam's best friend.
Mariette – The Krugs' housemaid, sent by Paduk to spy on Adam and David. She flirts with the elder Krug often and manages to seduce him.
Nabokov, who was teaching at Wellesley College at the time, first began writing Bend Sinister in 1942 while the greater part was composed in the winter and spring of 1945–1946, soon after the completion of World War II. [2] The novel's title was quite volatile, as Nabokov originally titled it The Person from Porlock before soon electing for Game to Gunm. [3] It would undergo further changes, to Solus Rex, before finally settling on the current name. [4] The manuscript was sent to Allen Tate, at the time an editor at Henry Holt, in the early summer of 1947 and published shortly after, on June 12, 1947. [5]
During the war against the Axis powers and after their downfall, a new wave of pro-USSR sentiment swept America, as the Soviet Armed Forces had played a large role in the Allied victory, which deeply disturbed Nabokov, a fierce opponent of Communism. Brian Boyd writes that Nabokov wrote the novel in "an attempt to show that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia represented fundamentally the same brutish vulgarity inimical to everything most vulnerable and most valuable in human life". [6] In February 1943, Nabokov would give an impassioned speech at a panel discussion at Wellesley, extolling the virtues of democracy while denouncing totalitarian states in the process:
Democracy is humanity at its best, not because we happen to think that a republic is better than a king and a king is better than nothing and nothing is better than a dictator, but because it is the natural condition of every man ever since the human mind became conscious not only of the world but of itself. Morally, democracy is invincible. Physically, that side will win which has the better guns. Of faith and pride, both sides have plenty. That our faith and our pride are of a totally different order cannot concern an enemy who believes in shedding blood and is proud of its own. [7]
Such influences aside, Nabokov was insistent on his aestheticism, disclaiming any interest in the "literature of social comment" and denying "automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations and Orwell's clichés". [8]
Of the reviews it did garner, reactions were generally mixed, perhaps best exemplified by The New Republic 's comments which called it "at once impressive, powerful and oddly exasperating." [9]
The novel did receive a glowing review from The New York Times: "It will be too bad if this book fails to find an audience because the armed battle with tyrant states has ended. The war goes on, and the problem, the struggle of free thought against the totalitarian state, is still with us. No one [who] reads Bend Sinister can blink it away." [10] Furthermore, the editor Nabokov sent the original manuscript to, Allen Tate, deeply admired the work, calling it "the only first rate piece of literature that I have had the privilege of reading as an editor". Tate admired the work so much that he wrote the blurb for the novel, concluding in it that the "mastery of English prose exhibited [in Bend Sinister] has not been surpassed by any writer of our generation who was born to English". [11]
Brian Boyd, writing in his book Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, praises the "jarring self-consciousness" and "inventiveness and challenge of particular passages" in the novel; but he concludes that Bend Sinister "does not reward us enough as we read to justify all its difficulties and disruptions". [12]
However, it has received retrospective praise from a number of contemporary critics. The Forward wrote "Bend Sinister, for all its shortcomings, evinces an unnerving prescience that reminds us of our proximity to a darker past, but also our ability to overcome it. It is one of Nabokov's finest statements on the fight to reclaim freedom and individualism against the pressures of mass culture and victimization." [13]
A black and white German television adaptation was made in West Germany in 1970. It was directed by Herbert Vesely and starred Helmut Käutner as Adam Krug and Heinrich Schweiger as Paduk. [14]
Pale Fire is a 1962 novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The novel is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote. Together these elements form a narrative in which both fictional authors are central characters. Nabokov wrote Pale Fire in 1960–61, after the success of Lolita had made him financially independent, allowing him to retire from teaching and return to Europe. It was commenced in Nice and completed in Montreux, Switzerland.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was an expatriate Russian and Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.
Charles Kinbote is the unreliable narrator in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire.
Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, better known by the pen name Andrei Bely or Biely, was a Russian novelist, Symbolist poet, theorist and literary critic. He was a committed anthroposophist and follower of Rudolf Steiner. His novel Petersburg (1913/1922) was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as the third-greatest masterpiece of modernist literature. The Andrei Bely Prize, one of the most important prizes in Russian literature, was named after him. His poems were set to music and performed by Russian singer-songwriters.
Pnin is Vladimir Nabokov's 13th novel and his fourth written in English; it was published in 1957. The success of Pnin in the United States launched Nabokov's career into literary prominence. Its eponymous protagonist, Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, is a Russian-born assistant professor in his 50s living in the United States, whose character is believed to be based partially on the life of both Nabokov's colleague Marc Szeftel as well as on Nabokov himself. Exiled by the Russian Revolution and what he calls the "Hitler war", Pnin teaches Russian at the fictional Waindell College, loosely inspired by Cornell University and Wellesley College—places where Nabokov himself taught.
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1969.
Nabokov's Congeries was a collection of work by Vladimir Nabokov published in 1968 and reprinted in 1971 as The Portable Nabokov. Because Nabokov supervised its production less than a decade before he died, it is useful in attempting to identify which works Nabokov considered to be his best, especially among his short stories.
The Gift is Vladimir Nabokov's final Russian novel, and is considered to be his farewell to the world he was leaving behind. Nabokov wrote it between 1935 and 1937 while living in Berlin, and it was published in serial form under his pen name, Vladimir Sirin.
The Original of Laura is an incomplete novel by Vladimir Nabokov, which he was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It was published by Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov in 2009, despite the author's request that the work be destroyed upon his death.
Brian David Boyd is a professor of literature known primarily as an expert on the life and works of author Vladimir Nabokov and on literature and evolution. He is a University Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
Novel with Cocaine,, is a novel first published in 1934 in a Russian émigré literary magazine Chisla (Numbers) under a pen name M. Ageyev. The English translation of the title fails to convey the double meaning of the Russian "Роман," meaning both "novel" and "romance".
Despair is the seventh novel by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in Russian, serially in the politicized literary journal Sovremennye zapiski during 1934. It was then published as a book in 1936, and translated to English by the author in 1937. Most copies of the 1937 English edition were destroyed by German bombs during World War II; only a few copies remain. Nabokov published a second English translation in 1965; this is now the only English translation in print.
Bend Sinister is the ninth studio album by English post-punk band the Fall. It was released in September 1986 by record label Beggars Banquet.
Mary is the debut novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first published under the pen name V. Sirin in 1926 by Russian-language publisher "Slovo".
"Signs and Symbols" is a short story by Vladimir Nabokov, written in English and first published, May 15, 1948 in The New Yorker and then in Nabokov's Dozen.
Ash Wednesday is a long poem written by T. S. Eliot during his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, the poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
This is a list of works by writer Vladimir Nabokov.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old "nymphet", Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish nickname for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was a Russian literary and social critic, journalist, novelist, democrat, and socialist philosopher, often identified as a utopian socialist and leading theoretician of Russian nihilism and Narodniks. He was the dominant intellectual figure of the 1860s revolutionary democratic movement in Russia, despite spending much of his later life in exile to Siberia, and was later highly praised by Karl Marx, Georgi Plekhanov, and Vladimir Lenin.
Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian poet and pedagogue. He died in a Nazi concentration camp located in Neuengamme. He was brother to Vladimir Nabokov.
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