Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov

First published: 1947

Type of plot: Surrealistic tragicomedy

Time of work: Sometime during the first half of the twentieth century

Locale: An unnamed European country where the people speak a language that blends Slavic and Germanic elements

Principal Characters:

• Adam Krug, the protagonist, an internationally known philosopher
• David Krug, his young son
• Paduk, the leader of the Party of the Average Man, which is in control of the government

The Novel

Bend Sinister is the story of a philosopher who tries to keep himself remote from the politics of his country by reasoning that he is too well-known a figure to be hurt. He watches his friends disappear and seems to have little concern for what happens to them. Finally, government forces remove Krug and his son from their apartment and separate father and son. Only now does Krug realize that he will do or say anything to save his son. Unfortunately, the son is mistakenly, pointlessly killed, and Krug takes refuge in madness to remove himself from a world become absurd.

A simple summary of the plot of the novel, however, misses most of its thematic and structural complexities and its creation of a surreal, fictional realm where cosmic tragedy and comedy mesh (Vladimir Nabokov once said that the trouble with the “cosmic” was that it was always threatening to lose its “s”) and where protagonist and narrator/author are reflections of each other in a drama in which the terror of dreams intertwines with nightmarish reality.

The novel begins and ends with images reflected in a rain puddle situated in the middle of an asphalt road. Krug sees the puddle first at the beginning of the novel as he looks into the street from the window of a hospital, where his wife has just died unexpectedly. The narrator/author sees the same puddle at the end of the novel as he wonders whether people leave an imprint in the texture of space similar to the imprint made by the depression in the ground that is filled with rainwater. Nabokov himself, in a 1963 introduction to the novel, points out how the puddle reappears in various guises throughout the book. The puddle becomes an ink blot in chapter 4, an ink stain in chapter 5, spilled milk in chapter 11, a ciliated thought in chapter 12, and a footprint in chapter 18.

Such recurring images are representative of the many rhetorical devices that Nabokov uses in the course of the novel to provide the intricate patterning and stylistic play with words that are the basis of his style and the essence of his perennial theme—that it is not reality that matters but what one makes of it. The emphasis on artifice with its concomitant factors—imagination and memory—provides the rationale for Nabokov’s characteristic use of point of view, which allows an omniscient author to show himself through certain tears in the narrative fabric in ways peculiar to Nabokov’s fiction.

In Bend Sinister, an omniscient narrator begins to reveal his presence in the first chapter, where a reader must wonder about the identity of the “I” who reports what is seen and felt. Soon the “I” becomes a character whose wife has died, changing brightly dappled surfaces into dull, liquid-white traversed by dead-black and then becoming inky black. In chapter 2, the first person changes to the third person, and the “I” becomes Krug, but a Krug with a shadow-double—the throbbing one and the one who looked on, “the last stronghold of the dualism he abhorred,” Krug thinks. “The square root of I is I.” In every mask that he tries on, Krug believes, there are slits for his shadow’s eyes. In chapter 5, an omniscient narrator separates himself from Krug again and appears as “a nameless, mysterious genius,” author of a “dream-code” which permeates the entire novel.

The dreamlike experience on the bridge, where Krug finds himself doomed, he believes, to walk back and forth with neither bank attainable, is a microcosm encapsulating every event of the novel, each of which is a replay of the first. References to stage plays and motion pictures intertwine with Krug’s dreams to provide a network of images at the interstices of which creator and created are revealed as one. Thus it comes as no surprise to a reader when the author/narrator emerges at last in his own person to remove Krug from the action the instant before he is to be killed; thus, the artist dismantles the props that he has created.

The Characters

Adam Krug is a supreme individualist. The name “Adam” suggests the archetypal individuation that occurred in the Garden of Eden with the naming of the first humans. “Krug” is Russian for “circle,” suggesting a whole, a unity that circles back upon itself. Yet with Krug’s wife, Olga, dead, the Garden is under attack; evil has entered and must be confronted. This Krug refuses to do, believing that he cannot be hurt by anyone in government, feeling arrogantly secure in his international reputation. The nether side of Krug, his mirror image (“bend sinister” is a term from heraldry, denoting a diagonal band that divides a shield from upper left to lower right), is Gurk, “Krug” spelled backward. Gurk is an Ekwilist soldier who wants his share of the brutalizing fun. Yet Gurk and all the soldiers, like all the citizens of Padukgrad, are, Nabokov says, merely anagrams of everybody else. Thus, the leader Paduk is simply a slightly brighter Gurk and, at the same time, the inverse side of Krug, the brutalizing side, the selfish side. In their youth, Krug had tormented Paduk. “I was something of a bully,” Krug says, “and I used to trip him up and sit upon his face . . . every blessed day for about five school years.”

As a philosopher, Krug works with words, attempting to come to rational conclusions about the nature of the universe, but, although he has been successful in demolishing the theories of other philosophers, he has not posited one of his own. In the end, he is unable to comprehend the stupidly excessive and senselessly brutal behavior of the Ekwilists. Madness is an appropriate response to the all too literal nightmare of history. Madness allows escape from the prison of space and time.

Paduk, known to Krug as “Toad,” is pictured, like all of Nabokov’s tyrants, as stupid, coarse, brutal, unhealthy, sadistic, grotesque, and mechanical. Within the Party of the Average Man, all Ekwilists, as replicas of one another, are the lowest common denominator of human potential. The concluding scenes, in which Ekwilists foolishly kill the wrong child and then show Krug motion pictures of what happens to captured children, are an absurd foreshadowing of the grotesque “shoot ’em up” conclusion, which seems a nightmarish replay of the obligatory showdown in Westerns and crime and spy films, raised to preposterous and bizarre proportions.

Krug’s son David plays a small role in the novel. He is an object of love, as his mother was, and he is a throwaway in the society, the tick of a clock already moved ahead, as Olga is, present only in memory, and then only as long as Krug is rational and lives (or Bend Sinister stays in print).

Critical Context

Bend Sinister was Nabokov’s second novel written in English, the first being The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Before publishing books in the English language, Nabokov published ten others in his native Russian. It was not until the publication of his best-selling Lolita (1955), however, that Nabokov began to receive worldwide attention and acclaim as one of the most important literary figures of the century. Major novels following Lolita are Pnin (1957), Pale Fire, and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Besides novels, Nabokov published short stories, poems, essays, memoirs, and critical works.

Often called the last of the great modernists, the peer of such masters as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, Nabokov has just as often been hailed as one of the pioneers of metafiction, the father of such postmodernists as John Fowles, Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and Gabriel García Márquez. Nabokov’s work has been the subject of numerous books and articles, which have been increasing in number steadily since his death.

Bibliography

Appel, Alfred, Jr., and Charles Newman, eds. Nabokov: Criticism, Reminiscences, Translations, Tributes. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970. A good introduction to Nabokov’s writing, including a varied sampling of material about the man, about the writer, and about his several unique works. Perhaps a hodgepodge, but an early collection that contrasts dramatically with later criticism, which suggested that Nabokov was a humanist if also a kind of verbal magician.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. Essays on Nabokov’s handling of time, illusion and reality, and art. There are separate essays on each of his major novels, as well as an introduction, chronology, and bibliography.

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990. The first volume of the definitive biography, fully researched and written with the cooperation of Nabokov’s family. Boyd has an extraordinary command of the origins of Nabokov’s art. This volume includes a discussion of Nabokov’s years in Europe after he left Russia.

Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Boyd concludes his masterful biography. As with volume 1, his work is copiously illustrated with detailed notes and an invaluable index.

Field, Andrew. Nabokov, His Life in Part. New York: Viking Press, 1977. An intimate portrait written by an author who was often very close to Nabokov during the latter part of Nabokov’s life. The book may also suggest to would-be biographers some of the difficulties of writing a biography while enjoying an intimate relationship with the subject. Follows Field’s critical work, Nabokov, His Life in Art: A Critical Narrative (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967).

Field, Andrew. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Crown, 1986. Not as definitive as Boyd, but still a very important biographical/critical study of Nabokov. Field has been called the “father of Nabokovian studies.” Includes illustrations, detailed notes, and index. The best one-volume biography of Nabokov.

Foster, John Burt. Nabokov’s Art of Memory and European Modernism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Burt divides his study into three parts: Nabokov’s early years in Russia, his period in Europe, and his prolonged period in America. This is a more specialized study for advanced students.

Pifer, Ellen. Nabokov and the Novel. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Uses as an epigraph Flannery O’Connor’s “All novelists are fundamentally seekers and describers of the real, but the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality” to develop a critical dialogue about Nabokov’s technique, not surprisingly including realism. Ends in a discussion on Nabokov’s humanism. Robert Alter called this book “poised and precise,” and it is excellent for serious, critical readers of Nabokov.