What do you think?
Rate this book
庶出的标志
小说的背景置于一个荒诞不经的警察国家，人们信奉埃克利斯主义，追求整齐划一的埃特盟（普通人）式生活，浑噩无知又胡作非为是国民的通性。主人公克鲁格是该国的精英知识分子，享誉海外，为了让他为新政权背书，独裁领导人巴图克百般尝试却不得法，最后挟持了克鲁格幼小的儿子，通过这一小小的“爱的杠杆”，撬动了固执的哲学家。小说的主题是克鲁格那颗充满爱意的心的跳动，在妻子病逝、儿子被挟持后，他强烈、温柔的情感饱受折磨。
《庶出的标志》是一部越读越有味的作品。正如纳博科夫所言，“一旦我真的再次浏览我的作品，带给我最大愉悦的是那些隐藏着的主题在路边发出的细声细语。” 因此，一千个读者可以从这部小说中发现一千个亮点。
纳博科夫本人在前言中说明：“庶出的标志”（bend sinister）一词指的是从盾徽右上方到左下方的对角斜纹（通常，但是不很准确，有表示私生子的含义）。选择这个标题是想暗示一种被折射破坏的线型轮廓，一幅镜中的扭曲图像，一次生活的错误转向，一个怪诞邪恶的世界。……就像我的另一部小说《斩首之邀》——与现在这部小说倒是有着明显的关联——一样，把《庶出的标志》和卡夫卡的作品或者是奥威尔的陈词滥调不加分析、不动脑子地比较只会证明，做这种比较的人既没有读过那位伟大的德语作家，也不可能读过那位二流的英国作家。
《庶出的标志》是一部越读越有味的作品。正如纳博科夫所言，“一旦我真的再次浏览我的作品，带给我最大愉悦的是那些隐藏着的主题在路边发出的细声细语。” 因此，一千个读者可以从这部小说中发现一千个亮点。
纳博科夫本人在前言中说明：“庶出的标志”（bend sinister）一词指的是从盾徽右上方到左下方的对角斜纹（通常，但是不很准确，有表示私生子的含义）。选择这个标题是想暗示一种被折射破坏的线型轮廓，一幅镜中的扭曲图像，一次生活的错误转向，一个怪诞邪恶的世界。……就像我的另一部小说《斩首之邀》——与现在这部小说倒是有着明显的关联——一样，把《庶出的标志》和卡夫卡的作品或者是奥威尔的陈词滥调不加分析、不动脑子地比较只会证明，做这种比较的人既没有读过那位伟大的德语作家，也不可能读过那位二流的英国作家。
233 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
244 people are currently reading
6735 people want to read
About the author
Vladimir Nabokov
890 books14.9k followersVladimir Nabokov (Russian: Владимир Набоков) was a writer defined by a life of forced movement and extraordinary linguistic transformation. Born into a wealthy, liberal aristocratic family in St. Petersburg, Russia, he grew up trilingual, speaking Russian, English, and French in a household that nurtured his intellectual curiosities, including a lifelong passion for butterflies. This seemingly idyllic, privileged existence was abruptly shattered by the Bolshevik Revolution, which forced the family into permanent exile in 1919. This early, profound experience of displacement and the loss of a homeland became a central, enduring theme in his subsequent work, fueling his exploration of memory, nostalgia, and the irretrievable past.
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to
The first phase of his literary life began in Europe, primarily in Berlin, where he established himself as a leading voice among the Russian émigré community under the pseudonym "Vladimir Sirin". During this prolific period, he penned nine novels in his native tongue, showcasing a precocious talent for intricate plotting and character study. Works like The Defense explored obsession through the extended metaphor of chess, while Invitation to a Beheading served as a potent, surreal critique of totalitarian absurdity. In 1925, he married Véra Slonim, an intellectual force in her own right, who would become his indispensable partner, editor, translator, and lifelong anchor.
The escalating shadow of Nazism necessitated another, urgent relocation in 1940, this time to the United States. It was here that Nabokov undertook an extraordinary linguistic metamorphosis, making the challenging yet resolute shift from Russian to English as his primary language of expression. He became a U.S. citizen in 1945, solidifying his new life in North America. To support his family, he took on academic positions, first founding the Russian department at Wellesley College, and later serving as a highly regarded professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University from 1948 to 1959.
During this academic tenure, he also dedicated significant time to his other great passion: lepidoptery. He worked as an unpaid curator of butterflies at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology. His scientific work was far from amateurish; he developed novel taxonomic methods and a groundbreaking, highly debated theory on the migration patterns and phylogeny of the Polyommatus blue butterflies, a hypothesis that modern DNA analysis confirmed decades later.
Nabokov achieved widespread international fame and financial independence with the publication of Lolita in 1955, a novel that was initially met with controversy and censorship battles due to its provocative subject matter concerning a middle-aged literature professor and his obsession with a twelve-year-old girl. The novel's critical and commercial success finally allowed him to leave teaching and academia behind. In 1959, he and Véra moved permanently to the quiet luxury of the Montreux Palace Hotel in Switzerland, where he focused solely on writing, translating his earlier Russian works into meticulous English, and studying local butterflies.
His later English novels, such as Pale Fire (1962), a complex, postmodern narrative structured around a 999-line poem and its delusional commentator, cemented his reputation as a master stylist and a technical genius. His literary style is characterized by intricate wordplay, a profound use of allusion, structural complexity, and an insistence on the artist's total, almost tyrannical, control over their created world. Nabokov often expressed disdain for what he termed "topical trash" and the simplistic interpretations of Freudian psychoanalysis, preferring instead to focus on the power of individual consciousness, the mechanics of memory, and the intricate, often deceptive, interplay between art and perceived "reality". His unique body of work, straddling multiple cultures and languages, continues to
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 457 reviews
March 29, 2017
This novel is an early work by Nabokov, published in 1947, eight years before Lolita. It was published at a time when, the Editor’s Preface tells us, Nabokov was acquiring a reputation among “discerning readers.” The title comes from heraldry meaning a leftward tilting band on a coat of arms (tilted like the backslash in an http address).
The action takes place in a vaguely East European country that has elected a dictator. Twice the author uses the analogy of a snowball rolling downhill without anyone really noticing as a metaphor for how the dictator came to power. Hmmm…
There is not a lot of plot. The main character is a celebrity philosophy professor with a worldwide reputation; apparently the most renowned professor in this small nation. He has just lost his wife and he chooses not to tell his eight-year-son that she has died. The dictator comes to power and his university colleagues learn that the professor and the dictator were chums in school. They want to persuade the professor to use his influence to gain access to the dictator and bring them benefits. The professor will have none of it of course. He tells them his only recollection is that he used to sit on the dictator’s face at recess. “1,000 sittings” he recalls. As the evil begins, and “The Party of the Average Man” turns out to be a combination of Orwell and Kafka, good friends tell the professor that he needs to leave the county with his son while he still can. The good philosophy professor is clueless at even imagining the evil that the dictator will bring to him and to the country.
The author wrote a detailed introduction to the work, post-Lolita, in 1963. But the editor warns us in the preface, don’t take it seriously. Nabokov loved to spoof. The author tells us it’s not about politics or dictatorship but about the relationship between the father and the son. That reminds me of Bob Dylan talking about the symbology of “Like a Rolling Stone” and saying, “well, you know, it’s a song about a stone rolling downhill…”
As always with Nabokov, you need your dictionary at hand. For example, a few I needed to look up were spatulate, triskelions, aquarelle, ope, gammadion, gaberloon, amorandola, anapaestic, scansion, mnemogenic. There are others.
We have great writing, of course. A few samples:
“On other nights it used to be a line of lights with a certain lilt, a metrical incandescence with every foot rescanned and prolonged by reflections in the black snaky water.”
“Old Azureus’s manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release their hold, a blank expression replace the fervent light of his pale fragile face, and he would leave you as if he had made a mistake…”
“O yes – the lighting is poor and one’s field of vision is oddly narrowed as if the memory of closed eyelids persisted intrinsically within the sepia shading of the dream, and the orchestra of the senses is limited to a few native instruments…”
We see samples of Nabokov’s synesthesia: “…Krug mentioned once that the word ‘loyalty’ phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk…”
It’s a good read; thought provoking, but not up to Lolita.
Photo of the Berlin Wall from formerdays.com
The action takes place in a vaguely East European country that has elected a dictator. Twice the author uses the analogy of a snowball rolling downhill without anyone really noticing as a metaphor for how the dictator came to power. Hmmm…
There is not a lot of plot. The main character is a celebrity philosophy professor with a worldwide reputation; apparently the most renowned professor in this small nation. He has just lost his wife and he chooses not to tell his eight-year-son that she has died. The dictator comes to power and his university colleagues learn that the professor and the dictator were chums in school. They want to persuade the professor to use his influence to gain access to the dictator and bring them benefits. The professor will have none of it of course. He tells them his only recollection is that he used to sit on the dictator’s face at recess. “1,000 sittings” he recalls. As the evil begins, and “The Party of the Average Man” turns out to be a combination of Orwell and Kafka, good friends tell the professor that he needs to leave the county with his son while he still can. The good philosophy professor is clueless at even imagining the evil that the dictator will bring to him and to the country.
The author wrote a detailed introduction to the work, post-Lolita, in 1963. But the editor warns us in the preface, don’t take it seriously. Nabokov loved to spoof. The author tells us it’s not about politics or dictatorship but about the relationship between the father and the son. That reminds me of Bob Dylan talking about the symbology of “Like a Rolling Stone” and saying, “well, you know, it’s a song about a stone rolling downhill…”
As always with Nabokov, you need your dictionary at hand. For example, a few I needed to look up were spatulate, triskelions, aquarelle, ope, gammadion, gaberloon, amorandola, anapaestic, scansion, mnemogenic. There are others.
We have great writing, of course. A few samples:
“On other nights it used to be a line of lights with a certain lilt, a metrical incandescence with every foot rescanned and prolonged by reflections in the black snaky water.”
“Old Azureus’s manner of welcoming people was a silent rhapsody. Ecstatically beaming, slowly, tenderly, he would take your hand between his soft palms, hold it thus as if it were a long sought treasure or a sparrow all fluff and heart, in moist silence, peering at you the while with his beaming wrinkles rather than with his eyes, and then, very slowly, the silvery smile would start to dissolve, the tender old hands would gradually release their hold, a blank expression replace the fervent light of his pale fragile face, and he would leave you as if he had made a mistake…”
“O yes – the lighting is poor and one’s field of vision is oddly narrowed as if the memory of closed eyelids persisted intrinsically within the sepia shading of the dream, and the orchestra of the senses is limited to a few native instruments…”
We see samples of Nabokov’s synesthesia: “…Krug mentioned once that the word ‘loyalty’ phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk…”
It’s a good read; thought provoking, but not up to Lolita.
Photo of the Berlin Wall from formerdays.com
September 20, 2010
It's interesting to compare Bend Sinister with 1984. (Nabokov didn't much like Orwell, and thought he was a hack). Orwell's take on totalitarianism, is, roughly, that it's evil. Nabokov's is more that it's terminally stupid. Even when the rulers of the State would actually prefer to get things right, they've fucked up their minds with nonsensical ideology to the point where they're no longer capable of coherent thought. I wonder whether Nabokov wasn't closer to the truth. In the end, the Soviet Union's collapse seems to be have been, more than anything, due to the simple fact that nothing worked any more.
Nabokov suggests that the process starts with dishonesty about artistic choices. There's a very funny passage near the beginning of this book, describing a politically correct version of Hamlet in which things have been reorganized so that Fortinbras is the hero. It's a nice metaphor for what's wrong with the whole system. The scene where Adam is trying to cross the bridge is also a fine piece of black humor. But things rapidly stop being so amusing, and the ending is very tragic indeed.
I recall a quote from Viktor Korchnoi that I've always liked. He's trying to explain why chess was so popular in the Soviet Union, and says it's because, try as they would, no one was ever able to define what a bourgeois chess move might be. Think about that for a moment.
Nabokov suggests that the process starts with dishonesty about artistic choices. There's a very funny passage near the beginning of this book, describing a politically correct version of Hamlet in which things have been reorganized so that Fortinbras is the hero. It's a nice metaphor for what's wrong with the whole system. The scene where Adam is trying to cross the bridge is also a fine piece of black humor. But things rapidly stop being so amusing, and the ending is very tragic indeed.
I recall a quote from Viktor Korchnoi that I've always liked. He's trying to explain why chess was so popular in the Soviet Union, and says it's because, try as they would, no one was ever able to define what a bourgeois chess move might be. Think about that for a moment.
November 22, 2025
Bend Sinister is a dystopian novel that follows a philosopher, Adam Krug, as he grapples with a totalitarian regime after the death of his wife. The writing is rich and often clever, but the plot can feel disjointed and emotionally distant. Nabokov’s wordplay and style are impressive, though at times they overshadow the story itself.
August 25, 2016
The more Nabokov I read, the more I feel that he wrote a set of three very good novels that make sense as novels -- Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada -- and that everything outside that central trilogy consists of more unformed, less intelligible versions of the same material he used in the trilogy, awaiting a context that would make sense of it.
If you read the trilogy first, then reading more Nabokov is a very strange experience. The trilogy flaunts its unreliable narrators and appears, transparently, to be "about" things like bad taste, or the interaction between aesthetics and ethics, or self-absorption. This allows many of Nabokov's typical quirks to be pinned on the narrators or the "themes," which makes sense of them in a normal literary context and allows one to imagine that Nabokov is behaving something like a ordinary author, deliberately choosing his material for effect. But in his other fiction the very same quirks simply float freely about, with no justifying pretext and no illuminating context.
Bend Sinister is a particularly prickly example of this phenomenon. Most of Nabokov's quirks are here. The extraordinarily fussy selection of details, which in the trilogy often seems to be intended ironically (self-absorbed narrators writing encomia to the curvature of their fiddles as Rome burns), is given free rein in Bend Sinister without any apparent thematic weight. To me it was often pretty annoying, as was the way he compulsively, as if scratching an itch, disrupts the natural flow of novelistic narration, not really for any purpose except a general sense that banality must be avoided at all costs. There are sentences in here that are mature works of art, and then there are sentences that feel like they've just gotten crazy haircuts to shock their moms.
In other words, it's a very mixed bag. And a bag where it's hard to see how the particular mixture we're getting has any artistic intent behind it. There are emotionally resonant passages here right next to sneering and coldly distant ones; there are spot-on parodies of bureaucracy alongside episodes that make it seem like Nabokov's problem with totalitarianism is that it is the brainchild of men who were once weird scrawny little playground victims, and not healthy virile bullies like our protagonist.
There are passages of hazy, metaphor-clogged philosophizing about time and space and death, just like in Speak, Memory and Ada. There are, as in virtually everything by Nabokov, screeds against the idea of "social relevance" in art that take the stage unexpectedly and without any apparent connection to the surrounding action. There is -- did you really think there wouldn't be? -- a seemingly pointless subplot involving sexual tension between the adult protagonist and an underage girl. I don't know why Nabokov insisted on putting that kind of thing in so many of his stories, but the more I read the less comfortable I am with theories that it all somehow makes sense in context, that the creepiness can be beaten back into the darkness with the sword of interpretation. None of these weird fixations make sense in every context N puts them in. He just puts them wherever he feels like. Sometimes it works, for a non-Nabokovian value of the word "works," and sometimes it doesn't. His worst moments feel like parodies of his best moments; the level of quality is inverted yet the subject matter remains the same.
I can't resist one example. Coming home on the subway while drunk, I pulled out Bend Sinister and, after a few rocky but essentially manageable paragraphs, was confronted with the following sentence:
"This must just seem this way because I'm drunk," I thought, and closed the book. But the next morning the sentence was still there, just as baffling. It's not just that it's long and tangled and difficult to make sense of -- there are writers who write that way all the time, and at least with them you know what you're getting. Nabokov, on the other hand, just throws something like this at you with no warning, in the midst of much more intelligible stuff.
One often hears Nabokov described as some sort of master or virtuoso. But to me, reading books like this, what stands out is an apparent lack of control. You never know what you'll get in the next page or paragraph, and ultimately the book has to be taken as a set of individual moments, varying greatly in quality, rather than a unified whole. (The question that remains is: when Nabokov does come together, as he does in the trilogy, is that deliberate, or is it just the blindly thrown dart hitting the bullseye a few times by sheer chance?)
This has been a much more negative review than I set out to write, because ultimately this is a very enjoyable book, full of beautiful and hilarious moments, albeit also full of creepy or irritating or just plain ineffectual ones. As a story it is striving for dreamlike horror and the diversity of its contents does feel, in a funny way, much like a dream, and in the end I guess that makes the book work more than it feels like it should.
If you read the trilogy first, then reading more Nabokov is a very strange experience. The trilogy flaunts its unreliable narrators and appears, transparently, to be "about" things like bad taste, or the interaction between aesthetics and ethics, or self-absorption. This allows many of Nabokov's typical quirks to be pinned on the narrators or the "themes," which makes sense of them in a normal literary context and allows one to imagine that Nabokov is behaving something like a ordinary author, deliberately choosing his material for effect. But in his other fiction the very same quirks simply float freely about, with no justifying pretext and no illuminating context.
Bend Sinister is a particularly prickly example of this phenomenon. Most of Nabokov's quirks are here. The extraordinarily fussy selection of details, which in the trilogy often seems to be intended ironically (self-absorbed narrators writing encomia to the curvature of their fiddles as Rome burns), is given free rein in Bend Sinister without any apparent thematic weight. To me it was often pretty annoying, as was the way he compulsively, as if scratching an itch, disrupts the natural flow of novelistic narration, not really for any purpose except a general sense that banality must be avoided at all costs. There are sentences in here that are mature works of art, and then there are sentences that feel like they've just gotten crazy haircuts to shock their moms.
In other words, it's a very mixed bag. And a bag where it's hard to see how the particular mixture we're getting has any artistic intent behind it. There are emotionally resonant passages here right next to sneering and coldly distant ones; there are spot-on parodies of bureaucracy alongside episodes that make it seem like Nabokov's problem with totalitarianism is that it is the brainchild of men who were once weird scrawny little playground victims, and not healthy virile bullies like our protagonist.
There are passages of hazy, metaphor-clogged philosophizing about time and space and death, just like in Speak, Memory and Ada. There are, as in virtually everything by Nabokov, screeds against the idea of "social relevance" in art that take the stage unexpectedly and without any apparent connection to the surrounding action. There is -- did you really think there wouldn't be? -- a seemingly pointless subplot involving sexual tension between the adult protagonist and an underage girl. I don't know why Nabokov insisted on putting that kind of thing in so many of his stories, but the more I read the less comfortable I am with theories that it all somehow makes sense in context, that the creepiness can be beaten back into the darkness with the sword of interpretation. None of these weird fixations make sense in every context N puts them in. He just puts them wherever he feels like. Sometimes it works, for a non-Nabokovian value of the word "works," and sometimes it doesn't. His worst moments feel like parodies of his best moments; the level of quality is inverted yet the subject matter remains the same.
I can't resist one example. Coming home on the subway while drunk, I pulled out Bend Sinister and, after a few rocky but essentially manageable paragraphs, was confronted with the following sentence:
They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellation — Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies — those mirrors of infinite space qui m’effrayent, Blaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop — hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat’s amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom — heaving more than her smile suggests — and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands.
"This must just seem this way because I'm drunk," I thought, and closed the book. But the next morning the sentence was still there, just as baffling. It's not just that it's long and tangled and difficult to make sense of -- there are writers who write that way all the time, and at least with them you know what you're getting. Nabokov, on the other hand, just throws something like this at you with no warning, in the midst of much more intelligible stuff.
One often hears Nabokov described as some sort of master or virtuoso. But to me, reading books like this, what stands out is an apparent lack of control. You never know what you'll get in the next page or paragraph, and ultimately the book has to be taken as a set of individual moments, varying greatly in quality, rather than a unified whole. (The question that remains is: when Nabokov does come together, as he does in the trilogy, is that deliberate, or is it just the blindly thrown dart hitting the bullseye a few times by sheer chance?)
This has been a much more negative review than I set out to write, because ultimately this is a very enjoyable book, full of beautiful and hilarious moments, albeit also full of creepy or irritating or just plain ineffectual ones. As a story it is striving for dreamlike horror and the diversity of its contents does feel, in a funny way, much like a dream, and in the end I guess that makes the book work more than it feels like it should.
May 14, 2023
It remains unclear to the very end of the novel what it is - horrible reality surounding the main character, half reality half insanity in which the main character's consciousness finds itself after the tragedy or the whole story, a nightmare, only exists in Krug's head as he is unable to come to terms with his beloved wife's death.
One way or another, 'Bend Sinister' is Nabokov's anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian statement and his warning to us, his readers. It is a story about one man's attempt to resist the system, the power of the mediocre, the stupid, the vulgar and the cruel. And what (always) happens in the end.
It is not one of the best Nabokov's novels and still it is important as a political statement of the person who had always tried to stay away from politics.
'There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes undistinguished: but somehow or other these dull components formed a wonderfully comfortable and harmonious whole. No subtlety of thought tainted his honesty, he was as reliable as iron and oak, and when Krug mentioned once that the word 'loyalty' phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary denotation. Common sense with him was saved from smug vulgarity by a delicate emotional undercurrent, and the somewhat bare and birdless symmetry of his branching principles was ever so slightly disturbed by a moist wind blowing from regions which he naïvely thought did not exist. The misfortunes of others worried him more than did his own troubles, and had he been an old sea captain, he would have dutifully gone down with his ship rather than plump apologetically into the last lifeboat.'
One way or another, 'Bend Sinister' is Nabokov's anti-fascist and anti-totalitarian statement and his warning to us, his readers. It is a story about one man's attempt to resist the system, the power of the mediocre, the stupid, the vulgar and the cruel. And what (always) happens in the end.
It is not one of the best Nabokov's novels and still it is important as a political statement of the person who had always tried to stay away from politics.
'There are friendships like circuses, waterfalls, libraries; there are others comparable to old dressing gowns. You found nothing especially attractive about Maximov's mind if you took it apart: his ideas were conservative, his tastes undistinguished: but somehow or other these dull components formed a wonderfully comfortable and harmonious whole. No subtlety of thought tainted his honesty, he was as reliable as iron and oak, and when Krug mentioned once that the word 'loyalty' phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary denotation. Common sense with him was saved from smug vulgarity by a delicate emotional undercurrent, and the somewhat bare and birdless symmetry of his branching principles was ever so slightly disturbed by a moist wind blowing from regions which he naïvely thought did not exist. The misfortunes of others worried him more than did his own troubles, and had he been an old sea captain, he would have dutifully gone down with his ship rather than plump apologetically into the last lifeboat.'
April 1, 2022
Sinistral Jest
Several GR reviews call this novel a mess. I think this is an understatement: I’d go as far as to call it a quagmire. It takes just 200 pages to bog the reader down, although the process starts and succeeds much earlier than that. As Nabokov said of James Joyce’s "Finnegan’s Wake", it’s "formless and dull", "a frightful bore", "a cold pudding of a book", and "a tragic failure". This is second rate Nabokov. Even masters have their off days.
Paradoxically, Nabokov alludes to "Finnegan’s Wake", both in the novel (as "Winnepeg Lake") and in the Introduction he published in the 1964 edition, where he describes Joyce as the "other rivermaid’s father".
The Introduction seems to be a vain attempt to resurrect the status of Nabokov’s novel, which in his words made "a dull thud" on its original publication in 1947. Yet, even Nabokov questions whether it’s worth drawing attention to his own (post-) modernist gimmicks and sophistication:
The Anthropomorphic Deity of Post-Modernism
You could ask whether Nabokov needed to expressly alert us to his metafiction in chapter 5, where the self-conscious narrator says:
In the Introduction, Nabokov confesses that the genius is "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me." Ah! The wonders of metafiction!
Paronomasia
Strangely, Nabokov also attacks his own punning and wordplay, one of the features the novel shares with "Finnegan’s Wake":
A Discussion of General Ideas
Of course, to the extent that the novel is regarded as dystopian fiction about totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Nabokov questions how it might be achieved aesthetically:
He then asserts:
"The story in 'Bend Sinister' is not really about life and death in a grotesque police state", even if someone uses this classic line:
The opponents of the protagonist, Adam Krug, are "only absurd mirages, illusions oppressive to Krug during his brief spell of being, but harmlessly fading away when I dismiss the cast."
The novel (and the imagination in general) are, nevertheless, perhaps a defence against totalitarianism, against "letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State."
The Allusions of a Pottering Dotard
So let’s have a quick squizling at the role of allusion and appropriation in the novel.
Nabokov doesn’t just allude to "Finnegan’s Wake", but he reveals that he alludes to Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" (he turns Polonius into "a pottering dotard in a padded robe") and Mallarme’s poem "The Afternoon of a Faun".
The Hamlet allusions seem to be disingenuous. Nabokov himself says:
Is this Nabokov damning himself with faint praise? The influence of Mallarme can be found in the references to shade and shadows in the first page and chapter 17 (and elsewhere):
Nabokov tells us that Adam Krug is "haunted" by the poem, and who are we to doubt it!
The Sinistral Detail of a Monstrous Joke
No doubt, the alert reader will find many such "delicate markers" in the novel, if they’re prepared to search. Though Nabokov warns us against the waste of effort:
And later:
And earlier:
Too right!
Some Leisurely Book
Nabokov writes in the body of the novel:
For the moment, I can only respond "No!" and, as Nabokov said of Krug:
Him, but not necessarily the novel. ("In due time what intelligence I have left will be dovetailed into some leisurely book.")
Some Fatuous Hoax
Krug himself at one point asks "if this is not some fatuous hoax?" And readers might well join him.
In the tradition of "Finnegan’s Wake", the novel begins and ends in the same (oblong) puddle. (Or did he mean "muddle"?) (Krug, after all, being the Russian word for “circle”.) So the novel is, apparently, structured as a Vico-esque never-ending circle surrounding an oblong puddle/muddle, a circumference built around a rectangle.
SOUNDTRACK:
Several GR reviews call this novel a mess. I think this is an understatement: I’d go as far as to call it a quagmire. It takes just 200 pages to bog the reader down, although the process starts and succeeds much earlier than that. As Nabokov said of James Joyce’s "Finnegan’s Wake", it’s "formless and dull", "a frightful bore", "a cold pudding of a book", and "a tragic failure". This is second rate Nabokov. Even masters have their off days.
Paradoxically, Nabokov alludes to "Finnegan’s Wake", both in the novel (as "Winnepeg Lake") and in the Introduction he published in the 1964 edition, where he describes Joyce as the "other rivermaid’s father".
The Introduction seems to be a vain attempt to resurrect the status of Nabokov’s novel, which in his words made "a dull thud" on its original publication in 1947. Yet, even Nabokov questions whether it’s worth drawing attention to his own (post-) modernist gimmicks and sophistication:
"It may be asked if it is really worth an author’s while to devise and distribute these delicate markers whose very nature requires that they be not too conspicuous."
The Anthropomorphic Deity of Post-Modernism
You could ask whether Nabokov needed to expressly alert us to his metafiction in chapter 5, where the self-conscious narrator says:
"But among the producers or stagehands responsible for the setting there has been one...it is hard to express it...a nameless, mysterious genius who took advantage of the dream to convey his own peculiar code message."
In the Introduction, Nabokov confesses that the genius is "an anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me." Ah! The wonders of metafiction!
Paronomasia
Strangely, Nabokov also attacks his own punning and wordplay, one of the features the novel shares with "Finnegan’s Wake":
"Paronomasia is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of words…"
A Discussion of General Ideas
Of course, to the extent that the novel is regarded as dystopian fiction about totalitarian states like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, Nabokov questions how it might be achieved aesthetically:
"There exist few things more tedious than a discussion of general ideas inflicted by author or reader upon a work of fiction."
He then asserts:
"The story in 'Bend Sinister' is not really about life and death in a grotesque police state", even if someone uses this classic line:
"You are not the police and so cannot bribe me."
The opponents of the protagonist, Adam Krug, are "only absurd mirages, illusions oppressive to Krug during his brief spell of being, but harmlessly fading away when I dismiss the cast."
The novel (and the imagination in general) are, nevertheless, perhaps a defence against totalitarianism, against "letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State."
The Allusions of a Pottering Dotard
So let’s have a quick squizling at the role of allusion and appropriation in the novel.
Nabokov doesn’t just allude to "Finnegan’s Wake", but he reveals that he alludes to Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" (he turns Polonius into "a pottering dotard in a padded robe") and Mallarme’s poem "The Afternoon of a Faun".
The Hamlet allusions seem to be disingenuous. Nabokov himself says:
"In this crazy-mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter."
Is this Nabokov damning himself with faint praise? The influence of Mallarme can be found in the references to shade and shadows in the first page and chapter 17 (and elsewhere):
"I wait the shade that you became."
Nabokov tells us that Adam Krug is "haunted" by the poem, and who are we to doubt it!
The Sinistral Detail of a Monstrous Joke
No doubt, the alert reader will find many such "delicate markers" in the novel, if they’re prepared to search. Though Nabokov warns us against the waste of effort:
"My own tribulations, all those petty theatrical intrigues I have just described, will, I am afraid, seem as trivial to you as they now seem to me."
And later:
"Note the sinistral detail (Why? Ah, that is the question!)"
And earlier:
“The good doctors distributed the sheets with the celerity that a conjuror and his assistant display when passing around for inspection articles which should not be examined too closely...”
"It bristled with farcical anachronisms."
Too right!
Some Leisurely Book
Nabokov writes in the body of the novel:
"...the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man’s genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by...the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every new wile in the warp…?"
For the moment, I can only respond "No!" and, as Nabokov said of Krug:
"A rush of second-rate inspiration and somewhat precious imagery kept him going nicely."
Him, but not necessarily the novel. ("In due time what intelligence I have left will be dovetailed into some leisurely book.")
Some Fatuous Hoax
Krug himself at one point asks "if this is not some fatuous hoax?" And readers might well join him.
In the tradition of "Finnegan’s Wake", the novel begins and ends in the same (oblong) puddle. (Or did he mean "muddle"?) (Krug, after all, being the Russian word for “circle”.) So the novel is, apparently, structured as a Vico-esque never-ending circle surrounding an oblong puddle/muddle, a circumference built around a rectangle.
SOUNDTRACK:
July 26, 2023
Written during 1945 and 1946, this is Vladimir Nabokov's eleventh novel, his second written in English and his first written in the U.S.
We are told in the introduction, which is also written by Nabokov, that the tale is to be seen as a spoof. It is however not a funny book. It is a dystopian novel. This gives readers a better clue of that which awaits them. The story is dark. It is clearly written to relay a message. As stated, it was written at the conclusion of the Second World War. I strongly believe the horrors of the war influenced the author’s writing of this book.
Consider the title. A “bend sinister” is a wrong turn taken in life.
The story is set in a fictional European city named Padukgrad. It is the central city in a police state. Individualism in any manner or form is not merely frowned upon. it is squashed. We observe what happens when opposition arises. We ask what makes a person speak out and what makes them give in.
The story told is surreal. It is chockful of fanciful ideas and bizarre happenings. Nabokov, as he always does, plays with both ideas and words. He mixes English with German and French and Russian. He invents concepts and words. Nabokov IS brilliant and a wonderfully creative writer. There is no denying this.
In the final analysis, although readers must hang on to every word to make sense of where the story is taking them, ultimately you will understand. I did. You will too. The message relayed is important. The wordplays are not out of reach, but they do keep you on your toes. They make you alternately laugh, feel proud of yourself when you understand them and marvel at Nabokov’s brilliance. I cannot say I enjoyed the story but to give it anything less than three stars is simply not possible. What we have here is art with a dark message. Although not enjoyable, the book is definitely worth reading. I am glad I read it.
The audiobook is read by Robert Blumenfeld. Narrating a book such as this is no easy task—different languages, invented words, abrupt topic changes. All of this must be read so the reader comprehends. Blumfeld’s voice is clear and strong. He knows when to pause. Four stars for the audio narration. He does a very good job.
Here are questions to think about. How do you see individualism? Do you value it, and how much?
**************
*Lolita 5 stars
*Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 5 stars
*Speak, Memory 5 stars
*Mary 4 stars
*Laughter in the Dark 4 stars
*Glory 4 stars
*The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 4 stars
*The Gift 3 stars
*King, Queen, Knave 3 stars
*Bend Sinister 3 stars
*Pale Fire 2 stars
*Pnin 1 star
*Despair 1 star
*Transparent Things 1 star
*Invitation to a Beheading TBR
We are told in the introduction, which is also written by Nabokov, that the tale is to be seen as a spoof. It is however not a funny book. It is a dystopian novel. This gives readers a better clue of that which awaits them. The story is dark. It is clearly written to relay a message. As stated, it was written at the conclusion of the Second World War. I strongly believe the horrors of the war influenced the author’s writing of this book.
Consider the title. A “bend sinister” is a wrong turn taken in life.
The story is set in a fictional European city named Padukgrad. It is the central city in a police state. Individualism in any manner or form is not merely frowned upon. it is squashed. We observe what happens when opposition arises. We ask what makes a person speak out and what makes them give in.
The story told is surreal. It is chockful of fanciful ideas and bizarre happenings. Nabokov, as he always does, plays with both ideas and words. He mixes English with German and French and Russian. He invents concepts and words. Nabokov IS brilliant and a wonderfully creative writer. There is no denying this.
In the final analysis, although readers must hang on to every word to make sense of where the story is taking them, ultimately you will understand. I did. You will too. The message relayed is important. The wordplays are not out of reach, but they do keep you on your toes. They make you alternately laugh, feel proud of yourself when you understand them and marvel at Nabokov’s brilliance. I cannot say I enjoyed the story but to give it anything less than three stars is simply not possible. What we have here is art with a dark message. Although not enjoyable, the book is definitely worth reading. I am glad I read it.
The audiobook is read by Robert Blumenfeld. Narrating a book such as this is no easy task—different languages, invented words, abrupt topic changes. All of this must be read so the reader comprehends. Blumfeld’s voice is clear and strong. He knows when to pause. Four stars for the audio narration. He does a very good job.
Here are questions to think about. How do you see individualism? Do you value it, and how much?
**************
*Lolita 5 stars
*Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 5 stars
*Speak, Memory 5 stars
*Mary 4 stars
*Laughter in the Dark 4 stars
*Glory 4 stars
*The Real Life of Sebastian Knight 4 stars
*The Gift 3 stars
*King, Queen, Knave 3 stars
*Bend Sinister 3 stars
*Pale Fire 2 stars
*Pnin 1 star
*Despair 1 star
*Transparent Things 1 star
*Invitation to a Beheading TBR
February 22, 2023
The title in English: Bend Sinister.
If Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov were as much known as 1984 by Orwell, it would have also been banned nowadays. The book explores the beginning of a totalitarian regime (any totalitarian regime) when prosecutors and victims act in darkness, unaware of where they are heading. The inhabitants of Orwell's world have already been stripped of a family, lacking the vulnerability the circle of relatives provides. Unless one falls in love, he/she is safe from heartbreak. The slow agony of watching their loved ones die evades them. In Bend Sinister, people's hearts still beat, and compassion is stealthily exchanged while fear, servility, and plain profit conquer the souls of the weak. Adam Krug represents everything the new regime, impersonated by Adam Krug's ex-classmate, Paduk, hates: freethinking and unconditional love; a firmness of a giant bull that, even in the arena, relays on its strength. There is a deliberate irony on the author's part to endow his main character - an ungainly, bulky man in his forties - with courage, not demonstrated by the book's younger generation, willingly endorsing the new rules. Adam is the opposite of a typical hero. He alone sees the danger of small cowardly steps like signing a congratulatory paper here or paying lip service to the regime there. Yet, despite his status as a celebrity in philosophy, he can't grasp the whole magnitude of social changes. The book shows how, step-by-step, the regime tries to break Adam until Paduk finds the perfect lever, which was used multiple times in history - family. At the last moment, the author breaks the fourth wall, unable to watch Adam's suffering no more.
Bend Sinister is Nabokov's first book written in America. Nabokov fluently spoke several languages and, after writing his books in English, translated them/participated in the translation into Russian, adding new wordplays and references to the world literature to every edition. The prose takes a lot of work to get into. The book begins as a flow of consciousness (inclusion of the hero's world with its tiny things into the broader context of eternal time and space); the whole first chapter is dedicated to a puddle's description - and through it, the death of Adam Krug's wife. When you are in the story, you can't stop. Orwell's 1984 didn't make me cry, Bend Sinister did.
The blurb on my Russian edition says:
According to Nabokov's words, "the story is not about the life and death in a grotesque police state... The main topic... is Krug's loving heart's beating, the pain of a pinned tenderness torturing him - and this book was written for the sake of the pages dedicated to David and his father; it should be read for them.
When you choose the book's edition, please ensure it contains a prologue (introduction) by the author. It's the key to understanding the complex text with its references and wordplays.
If Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov were as much known as 1984 by Orwell, it would have also been banned nowadays. The book explores the beginning of a totalitarian regime (any totalitarian regime) when prosecutors and victims act in darkness, unaware of where they are heading. The inhabitants of Orwell's world have already been stripped of a family, lacking the vulnerability the circle of relatives provides. Unless one falls in love, he/she is safe from heartbreak. The slow agony of watching their loved ones die evades them. In Bend Sinister, people's hearts still beat, and compassion is stealthily exchanged while fear, servility, and plain profit conquer the souls of the weak. Adam Krug represents everything the new regime, impersonated by Adam Krug's ex-classmate, Paduk, hates: freethinking and unconditional love; a firmness of a giant bull that, even in the arena, relays on its strength. There is a deliberate irony on the author's part to endow his main character - an ungainly, bulky man in his forties - with courage, not demonstrated by the book's younger generation, willingly endorsing the new rules. Adam is the opposite of a typical hero. He alone sees the danger of small cowardly steps like signing a congratulatory paper here or paying lip service to the regime there. Yet, despite his status as a celebrity in philosophy, he can't grasp the whole magnitude of social changes. The book shows how, step-by-step, the regime tries to break Adam until Paduk finds the perfect lever, which was used multiple times in history - family. At the last moment, the author breaks the fourth wall, unable to watch Adam's suffering no more.
Bend Sinister is Nabokov's first book written in America. Nabokov fluently spoke several languages and, after writing his books in English, translated them/participated in the translation into Russian, adding new wordplays and references to the world literature to every edition. The prose takes a lot of work to get into. The book begins as a flow of consciousness (inclusion of the hero's world with its tiny things into the broader context of eternal time and space); the whole first chapter is dedicated to a puddle's description - and through it, the death of Adam Krug's wife. When you are in the story, you can't stop. Orwell's 1984 didn't make me cry, Bend Sinister did.
The blurb on my Russian edition says:
According to Nabokov's words, "the story is not about the life and death in a grotesque police state... The main topic... is Krug's loving heart's beating, the pain of a pinned tenderness torturing him - and this book was written for the sake of the pages dedicated to David and his father; it should be read for them.
When you choose the book's edition, please ensure it contains a prologue (introduction) by the author. It's the key to understanding the complex text with its references and wordplays.
May 18, 2011
Yeah, I don't have any idea what to say here. So much beautiful writing that time and again I wanted to freeze the moment and savor against the lengthening shadows the sublime and playful wit that infuses this silky, slinky prose, the arch elegance drawn taut and set to run with the wind. The man had a gift, an effortless, supple skill with the pen that is a pleasure to behold; too pleasurable perhaps—for as another reviewer astutely points out, it is written so beautifully as to be distracting. The tragicomedy unfolding within the words is a polished pearl—but the way that the words themselves continually dance and entwine with and about each other, explode in frisky chase or shiver and leap in gay abandon across a prismatic play of light, tend to draw the reader away from the story and hold him in thrall to the magic of the moment; thus one star slips away into evanescence, leaving four to proclaim its exceptionality.
One thing: Krug is Gurk spelled backwards; hence do I posit that the bridge truly sets the stage—idealogue Hamlet aside—for this voyage of the Ship of Fools.
One thing: Krug is Gurk spelled backwards; hence do I posit that the bridge truly sets the stage—idealogue Hamlet aside—for this voyage of the Ship of Fools.
January 12, 2019
Senryu Review:
Dystopian farce
wrapped in arcane allusive
ramblings of splendour.
Dystopian farce
wrapped in arcane allusive
ramblings of splendour.
September 10, 2014
And here's Nabokov's stab at the dystopian novel. Not a fan of Orwell's portrayal of oppressive regimes (although this could be some eventual jealousy on Vlad's part since his book came out two years prior and was not instantly hailed a prophetic classic like 1984), Nabokov goes for broke showing these tinkertoy political powers as nothing more than bilious mixtures of pettiness, stupidity and brute nature. Nabokov swears (lies) in the amusingly/annoyingly arrogant forward of the 1961 edition that this, his second novel written in English, has nothing to do with actual human experience or political allegory, but instead exists as a blank slate for the writer (Nabokov himself, natch) to masterfully masturbate to his own prowess. The novel concerns Dr. Adam Krug –an important and world renown philosopher—and his stance against his country’s brand-spanking-new fascist regime which is lorded over by Paduk a.k.a. The Toad, a nasty and effeminate bully who Krug himself bullied back in their schoolmate youths. Krug has little interest in playing the role of subversive freedom fighter as most of his thoughts are troubled with the recent and tragic loss of his wife and also with his responsibilities to his only son, a young, sweet-hearted boy named David. Bend Sinister is a wonderfully snarky farce, full of language games, self-referential hijinks, and inventive narrative tricks. Nabokov plays mean-spirited god over his characters, pushing them about the page towards their awful fates; but in spite of all of his authorial bravado, a fraying blanket of tenderness swaddles the narrative, adding extra heft to the banal madness of the truly terrible final fifty pages.
January 1, 2022
"Bend Sinister" in heraldry, where there is a meaning for the color and location of any detail, is a ribbon that crosses the coat of arms from the upper right corner to the lower left, meaning an illegitimate offspring. The bastard. And although Nabokov said: "The flaw of the title is that it encourages the reader who is looking for "general ideas" in the book to look for them in this novel," - to refuse the opportunity to interpret the title, which the author for some reason made exactly like that, would mean abandoning the attempt to comprehend. In my understanding - "under the power of bastards."
Now about the content. The world-renowned scientist Adam Krug is raising his eight-year-old son David alone after the death of his beloved wife Olga. A revolution has recently taken place in his country, as a result of which a former classmate of Krug, Paduk, came to power. The established system of Equilism proclaims general equality, denying qualitative differences between people. The capital was renamed Padukgrad (does it remind you of anything?).
Paduk, who was mocked by a bright gifted popular Circle at school, nicknamed a Toad, now intends to use his authority and influence to morally justify his ideology. Dictatorships at all times have widely used this technique. Adam, however, refuses, he is not ready to take the Toad seriously at all, and very wrongly. At first, he is deprived of the opportunity to work. Then they arrest all friends and associates. After that, a maid, an agent of GB (gymnasium brigades, a kind of Hitler Youth), a nymphet Marietta, is introduced into his house, who unsuccessfully tries to seduce the owner.
Bend Sinister
И все же самый последний бег в его жизни был полон счастья, и он получил доказательства того, что смерть – это всего лишь вопрос стиля.
На самом деле, ничто не вопрос стиля. Изначально все хаос и боль от захлестывающих тебя нитей чужих судеб. Перепутанных сетей, где бьешься оглушенной рыбой, пока не является проводник мировой гармонии. И все освещается: видишь яснее, можешь дышать, имеешь силы идти. Их много, таких людей-маяков, они разные. Для кого-то Боэций и Кьеркегор, для другого Зеланд и Свияш, а кому Кафка и Набоков.
"Под знаком незаконнорожденных" в конгениальном со всем, кроме заглавия, переводе - это Bend Sinister, второй английский и самый кафкианский роман Набокова. Невыносимой горечи смысл, облеченный божественной прозой. Книга, которая отчаянно нуждается в том, чтобы кто-то рассказал о ней, хотя бы вполовину, хоть на десятую, сотую часть так хорошо, как она того заслуживает. Я постараюсь и начну с названия.
"Bend Sinister" в геральдике, где для цвета и расположения любой детали есть свое значение - это лента, которая пересекает герб из верхнего правого угла в нижний левый, означая незаконнорожденного отпрыска. Бастарда. И хотя Набоков говорил: "Изъян названия в том, что оно побуждает читателя, ищущего в книге "общие идеи", отыскивать их и в этом романе», - отказаться от возможности интерпретировать заглавие, которое автор зачем-то же сделал именно таким, значило бы отказ от попытки осмыслить. В моем понимании - "под властью ублюдков".
Теперь о содержании. Ученый с мировым именем Адам Круг один воспитывает восьмилетнего сына Давида после смерти любимой жены Ольги. В его стране недавно произошла революция, в результате которой к власти пришел бывший одноклассник Круга, Падук. Установившийся строй Эквилизм провозглашает общее равенство, отрицая качественные различия между людьми ( а - приставка отмены, quality - качество). Столица переименована в Падукград (ничего не напоминает?).
Падук, над которым яркий одаренный популярный Круг в школе насмехался, прозвав Жабой, намерен теперь поставить его авторитет и влияние для морального оправдания своей идеологии. Диктатуры во все времена широко пользовались этим приемом. Адам, однако, отказывается, он вообще не готов воспринимать Жабу всерьез, и очень зря. Сначала его лишают возможности работать. Потом арестовывают всех друзей и единомышленников. После внедряют в его дом служанку, агента ГБ (гимназических бригад, род гитлерюгенда) нимфетку Мариэтту, которая безрезультатно пытается соблазнить хозяина.
И в тот самый момент, когда Круг, ненавидящий ухватки развязной девицы, готов уступить разожженной ее натиском похоти, собственно - уступает, в дом врываются юнцы из ГБ, Круга увозят, а Давид остается дома под их надзором. Это последняя треть романа, время, когда набоковская витиеватость и словесная избыточность сменяются экономной емкой, невыносимо больной прозой. А дальше совершенный кошмар, от которого задыхаешься.
В обмен на гарантии безопасности для Давида, Круг соглашается на роль буревестника революции и рупора системы, однако ребенка, отдают на растерзание самым отъявленным мерзавцам из числа уголовников (а вот не обзывай диктатора жабой, умник). Под запись на кинопленку. Которую после демонстрируют отцу, с извинениями - ошибочка, мол, вышла. Бывает: лес рубят - щепки летят. Но мы устроим вашему мальчику пышные похороны и поставим дорогой памятник, а виновных ГБ-шников вы можете уничтожить собственными руками. Круг сходит с ума и застрелен при попытке убить Падука.
Это все. Окончание разрывает душу в клочья, при том, что первые две трети изысканная словесная эквилибристика, которую лучше бы не браться читать неподготовленному человеку. Проза той степени смысловой насыщенности и стилистической изощренности, какая ментально- недостаточным читателем воспринимается как личное оскорбление. И нет, это не для того, чтобы обидеть, но за тем, чтобы дать представление о мире, в котором обитали Круг и Ольга, частью которого должен был стать Давид. Как бы понятнее - таком, в котором у радуги не семь, а семьдесят оттенков.
И, наконец, о русском переводе романа. Сергей Борисович Ильин был гениальным переводчиком, возможно единственным, достойным переводить Набокова, и с Bend Sinister в очередной раз блестяще это доказал.
Now about the content. The world-renowned scientist Adam Krug is raising his eight-year-old son David alone after the death of his beloved wife Olga. A revolution has recently taken place in his country, as a result of which a former classmate of Krug, Paduk, came to power. The established system of Equilism proclaims general equality, denying qualitative differences between people. The capital was renamed Padukgrad (does it remind you of anything?).
Paduk, who was mocked by a bright gifted popular Circle at school, nicknamed a Toad, now intends to use his authority and influence to morally justify his ideology. Dictatorships at all times have widely used this technique. Adam, however, refuses, he is not ready to take the Toad seriously at all, and very wrongly. At first, he is deprived of the opportunity to work. Then they arrest all friends and associates. After that, a maid, an agent of GB (gymnasium brigades, a kind of Hitler Youth), a nymphet Marietta, is introduced into his house, who unsuccessfully tries to seduce the owner.
Bend Sinister
И все же самый последний бег в его жизни был полон счастья, и он получил доказательства того, что смерть – это всего лишь вопрос стиля.
На самом деле, ничто не вопрос стиля. Изначально все хаос и боль от захлестывающих тебя нитей чужих судеб. Перепутанных сетей, где бьешься оглушенной рыбой, пока не является проводник мировой гармонии. И все освещается: видишь яснее, можешь дышать, имеешь силы идти. Их много, таких людей-маяков, они разные. Для кого-то Боэций и Кьеркегор, для другого Зеланд и Свияш, а кому Кафка и Набоков.
"Под знаком незаконнорожденных" в конгениальном со всем, кроме заглавия, переводе - это Bend Sinister, второй английский и самый кафкианский роман Набокова. Невыносимой горечи смысл, облеченный божественной прозой. Книга, которая отчаянно нуждается в том, чтобы кто-то рассказал о ней, хотя бы вполовину, хоть на десятую, сотую часть так хорошо, как она того заслуживает. Я постараюсь и начну с названия.
"Bend Sinister" в геральдике, где для цвета и расположения любой детали есть свое значение - это лента, которая пересекает герб из верхнего правого угла в нижний левый, означая незаконнорожденного отпрыска. Бастарда. И хотя Набоков говорил: "Изъян названия в том, что оно побуждает читателя, ищущего в книге "общие идеи", отыскивать их и в этом романе», - отказаться от возможности интерпретировать заглавие, которое автор зачем-то же сделал именно таким, значило бы отказ от попытки осмыслить. В моем понимании - "под властью ублюдков".
Теперь о содержании. Ученый с мировым именем Адам Круг один воспитывает восьмилетнего сына Давида после смерти любимой жены Ольги. В его стране недавно произошла революция, в результате которой к власти пришел бывший одноклассник Круга, Падук. Установившийся строй Эквилизм провозглашает общее равенство, отрицая качественные различия между людьми ( а - приставка отмены, quality - качество). Столица переименована в Падукград (ничего не напоминает?).
Падук, над которым яркий одаренный популярный Круг в школе насмехался, прозвав Жабой, намерен теперь поставить его авторитет и влияние для морального оправдания своей идеологии. Диктатуры во все времена широко пользовались этим приемом. Адам, однако, отказывается, он вообще не готов воспринимать Жабу всерьез, и очень зря. Сначала его лишают возможности работать. Потом арестовывают всех друзей и единомышленников. После внедряют в его дом служанку, агента ГБ (гимназических бригад, род гитлерюгенда) нимфетку Мариэтту, которая безрезультатно пытается соблазнить хозяина.
И в тот самый момент, когда Круг, ненавидящий ухватки развязной девицы, готов уступить разожженной ее натиском похоти, собственно - уступает, в дом врываются юнцы из ГБ, Круга увозят, а Давид остается дома под их надзором. Это последняя треть романа, время, когда набоковская витиеватость и словесная избыточность сменяются экономной емкой, невыносимо больной прозой. А дальше совершенный кошмар, от которого задыхаешься.
В обмен на гарантии безопасности для Давида, Круг соглашается на роль буревестника революции и рупора системы, однако ребенка, отдают на растерзание самым отъявленным мерзавцам из числа уголовников (а вот не обзывай диктатора жабой, умник). Под запись на кинопленку. Которую после демонстрируют отцу, с извинениями - ошибочка, мол, вышла. Бывает: лес рубят - щепки летят. Но мы устроим вашему мальчику пышные похороны и поставим дорогой памятник, а виновных ГБ-шников вы можете уничтожить собственными руками. Круг сходит с ума и застрелен при попытке убить Падука.
Это все. Окончание разрывает душу в клочья, при том, что первые две трети изысканная словесная эквилибристика, которую лучше бы не браться читать неподготовленному человеку. Проза той степени смысловой насыщенности и стилистической изощренности, какая ментально- недостаточным читателем воспринимается как личное оскорбление. И нет, это не для того, чтобы обидеть, но за тем, чтобы дать представление о мире, в котором обитали Круг и Ольга, частью которого должен был стать Давид. Как бы понятнее - таком, в котором у радуги не семь, а семьдесят оттенков.
И, наконец, о русском переводе романа. Сергей Борисович Ильин был гениальным переводчиком, возможно единственным, достойным переводить Набокова, и с Bend Sinister в очередной раз блестяще это доказал.
February 20, 2021
I am not sure if it’s because I’ve ready too many classics lately but I really struggled to focus while reading this one. Interesting premise, I may have to revisit it
July 2, 2013
On the face of it, Bend Sinister is an unusual novel. Nabokov, a self-proclaimed politically apathetic writer, writes a novel about the rise of newly formed dictatorship in a fictitious country. Yet, despite this, Bend Sinister is fundamentally not a political book, or even a book about politics per se, but is more a book about love, or in this case, paternal love, and just as the object of that paternal love dies and is removed from the novel, so the narrator himself, in a miracle of involution, realises that the real tyrant is not the petty tyrant Paduk, but the author of the novel which Adam is trapped in, the unseen narrator who follows Adam wherever he goes, who Adam constantly catches brief glimpses of in various parts of the novel, such as on the bridge, the author who famously referred to his characters as "galley slaves" and who controls all of the characters in the novel. Adam's realisation of his own fictionality spirals into a descent into insanity and the end of the novel.
What are the other themes of the Bend Sinister, aside from Adam's relationship and love for his son? Namely, the miracle of conciousness and of each individual persons contemplation and experience of life. The novel is set just after the a coup d'etat in which a political party 'The Party of the Average Man' influenced by a philosophy called Ekwilism, which disparages individuality and seeks to convert all of its citizens into parts of the all encompassing "state". However, in seeking to deny us our individuality, the state also denies to us all that makes us human, and our appreciation of the world around us vanishes as it rests purely on each individuals observations of the world around them.
Unlike certain political novels about totalitarian regimes, Nabokov does not seek to make the state in his novel all powerful, or even half competent. The leader is a grotesque figure who was bullied by Adam at school and whose party leaders are leftovers of the freaks and grotesques of society. The petty bureaucrats and party members who were encounter in the novel are constantly seen as being incompetent, consistently bumbling or engaging in bawdy jokes or mindless fawning, indeed so idiotic is the state that it fails to realise that the key to gaining Adam's cooperation is not via capturing his friends, but by capturing his son, the sole thing Adam loves in the world, though, paradoxically the states inability to process emotions such as love mean it is unable to grasp this until Adam informs a secret agent of it. The novel is full of dark humour, there is a scene when secret agents of the state are attempting to capture a friend of Adam's and decide to send two organ grinders incognito to spy on them, unaware of the ridiculousness of having two such conspicuous individual in a covert mission or the nanny sent to spy on Adam and his son who makes it so obvious that she is a secret agent that is borders to the point of parody. Indeed, parody is a key element of the novel, as Nabokov himself stated "parody is a game, satire a lesson", the state itself is a parody of the many Soviet-esque autocracies that were springing about the world (and also a parody of any autocracy of any sort) and the ridiculous nature of the dialogue between the state officials, including several ribaldrous conversations between lustful (which also functions as an anagram of slutful, an apt description of certain characters) point to the black humour which dominates the novel, a black humour which is soon undermined by the tragic death of Adam's son, who is tortured the death due to a bureaucratic mix up. It is only then that we see that the incompetent members of the state, whose action perpetually descend into farce, are also people who wield power and the cruelty and tyranny behind their power.
What are the other themes of the Bend Sinister, aside from Adam's relationship and love for his son? Namely, the miracle of conciousness and of each individual persons contemplation and experience of life. The novel is set just after the a coup d'etat in which a political party 'The Party of the Average Man' influenced by a philosophy called Ekwilism, which disparages individuality and seeks to convert all of its citizens into parts of the all encompassing "state". However, in seeking to deny us our individuality, the state also denies to us all that makes us human, and our appreciation of the world around us vanishes as it rests purely on each individuals observations of the world around them.
Unlike certain political novels about totalitarian regimes, Nabokov does not seek to make the state in his novel all powerful, or even half competent. The leader is a grotesque figure who was bullied by Adam at school and whose party leaders are leftovers of the freaks and grotesques of society. The petty bureaucrats and party members who were encounter in the novel are constantly seen as being incompetent, consistently bumbling or engaging in bawdy jokes or mindless fawning, indeed so idiotic is the state that it fails to realise that the key to gaining Adam's cooperation is not via capturing his friends, but by capturing his son, the sole thing Adam loves in the world, though, paradoxically the states inability to process emotions such as love mean it is unable to grasp this until Adam informs a secret agent of it. The novel is full of dark humour, there is a scene when secret agents of the state are attempting to capture a friend of Adam's and decide to send two organ grinders incognito to spy on them, unaware of the ridiculousness of having two such conspicuous individual in a covert mission or the nanny sent to spy on Adam and his son who makes it so obvious that she is a secret agent that is borders to the point of parody. Indeed, parody is a key element of the novel, as Nabokov himself stated "parody is a game, satire a lesson", the state itself is a parody of the many Soviet-esque autocracies that were springing about the world (and also a parody of any autocracy of any sort) and the ridiculous nature of the dialogue between the state officials, including several ribaldrous conversations between lustful (which also functions as an anagram of slutful, an apt description of certain characters) point to the black humour which dominates the novel, a black humour which is soon undermined by the tragic death of Adam's son, who is tortured the death due to a bureaucratic mix up. It is only then that we see that the incompetent members of the state, whose action perpetually descend into farce, are also people who wield power and the cruelty and tyranny behind their power.
April 25, 2016
“Nothing on earth really matters, there is nothing to fear, and death is but a question of style, a mere literary device, a musical resolution.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
My bookshelf is growing bigger every day with new fantastic fairytales of fascism, dynamic doggerels of dystopia. Of course there is Orwell's seminal 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. There are also (move aside high-school dystopias) Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and almost all of Kafka's well-kooked, absurd oeuvre (The Trial, The Castle, etc). Keep looking, yes right there, you almost missed another fantastic novel by Nabokov - Invitation to a Beheading. I love them all. They all hurt. They all confuse. They are belligerent in their sadness and show exactly how absurd bureaucracy and government and modernity are. Oh, and they all owe a helluva lot of DNA (at least from the angle I'm sitting and the mirror I'm looking at) to their slanted father Dostoevsky.
There is madness in all the punished and stupidity in all the enforcers. Bureaucracy's worst enemy is itself, but we are all its casualties. All of these books are works of genius and all capture a part of the dark river. Taken together, however, they seem to contain much of the anger, fear and reality of the modern state. So, it isn't just Orwell that nailed our dystopian reality, our reality seems to weep out of all these works into pools that really do reflect the closed, confused and soul-tearing aspect of modern government.
I can't stop thinking of Krug walking back and forth on a bridge, trapped between the guards on both sides of the bridge. One side can't read, and refuses to sign his travel documents. The other side won't accept his documents without signatures. There exists a banality of evil, like Hannah Arendt pointed out years ago in Eichmann in Jerusalem , but there is more often just an incompetence of evil, a stupidity of power that seems to baffle me every day as I read the news about police in NM doing anal probes because a man appeared to clench his butt or a man being arrested in OH for having a secret compartment in his car (nothing illegal in it, just something that could contain something bad. A blank page that could have Slander written on it, or could be set on fire). Left unchecked, there is nothing stupidity+power can't F-up. Good morning AmeriKa!
― Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
My bookshelf is growing bigger every day with new fantastic fairytales of fascism, dynamic doggerels of dystopia. Of course there is Orwell's seminal 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. There are also (move aside high-school dystopias) Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and almost all of Kafka's well-kooked, absurd oeuvre (The Trial, The Castle, etc). Keep looking, yes right there, you almost missed another fantastic novel by Nabokov - Invitation to a Beheading. I love them all. They all hurt. They all confuse. They are belligerent in their sadness and show exactly how absurd bureaucracy and government and modernity are. Oh, and they all owe a helluva lot of DNA (at least from the angle I'm sitting and the mirror I'm looking at) to their slanted father Dostoevsky.
There is madness in all the punished and stupidity in all the enforcers. Bureaucracy's worst enemy is itself, but we are all its casualties. All of these books are works of genius and all capture a part of the dark river. Taken together, however, they seem to contain much of the anger, fear and reality of the modern state. So, it isn't just Orwell that nailed our dystopian reality, our reality seems to weep out of all these works into pools that really do reflect the closed, confused and soul-tearing aspect of modern government.
I can't stop thinking of Krug walking back and forth on a bridge, trapped between the guards on both sides of the bridge. One side can't read, and refuses to sign his travel documents. The other side won't accept his documents without signatures. There exists a banality of evil, like Hannah Arendt pointed out years ago in Eichmann in Jerusalem , but there is more often just an incompetence of evil, a stupidity of power that seems to baffle me every day as I read the news about police in NM doing anal probes because a man appeared to clench his butt or a man being arrested in OH for having a secret compartment in his car (nothing illegal in it, just something that could contain something bad. A blank page that could have Slander written on it, or could be set on fire). Left unchecked, there is nothing stupidity+power can't F-up. Good morning AmeriKa!
November 17, 2011
Let me get this out of the way first: I have a lot of respect for 1984. It's a good book. It's a great book, in fact. George Orwell was a master at his craft.
But Bend Sinister is so amazing, so delicious and so emotionally deep that as good as 1984 is, Bend Sinister still manages to feel like "1984 done right."
Nabokov uses the full force of his incredibly nuanced, unique command of language to paint a picture of a totalitarian regime. His images are beautiful and stunning, and the story at the book's heart is disturbing and relevant to our time.
I think this is one of his best works, right up there with Lolita, and it deserves to be read, particularly by fans of dystopian fiction and by aspiring writers. There is no one better to study than Vladimir Nabokov, who could pack so much imagery and complexity of emotion and character into a slim little novel like Bend Sinister.
This one has a rare permanent place on my book shelf.
But Bend Sinister is so amazing, so delicious and so emotionally deep that as good as 1984 is, Bend Sinister still manages to feel like "1984 done right."
Nabokov uses the full force of his incredibly nuanced, unique command of language to paint a picture of a totalitarian regime. His images are beautiful and stunning, and the story at the book's heart is disturbing and relevant to our time.
I think this is one of his best works, right up there with Lolita, and it deserves to be read, particularly by fans of dystopian fiction and by aspiring writers. There is no one better to study than Vladimir Nabokov, who could pack so much imagery and complexity of emotion and character into a slim little novel like Bend Sinister.
This one has a rare permanent place on my book shelf.
April 10, 2017
Another reviewer here has described Bend Sinister as “a hot mess”, which so perfectly and economically encapsulates the matter that I am tempted to just leave it there. What follows is largely an attempt to restate this in somewhat more refined terms, and to shroud myself in protective caveats and disclaimers, so as to guard against accusations of boorishness for failing to award at least four stars to a work of the great master.
Therefore I present the following as evidence in my defense: I am a lover of the works of Nabokov - Lolita and Pale Fire are among my favorite books (Exhibit A), and all other of his works which I have read, I have enjoyed. While some people dislike his style, I am generally a fan. Bend Sinister, however, is not a very good book. There is a fractal nature to the problems of this book: the closer one looks, the more of them are revealed.
Firstly, the writing. The language in Lolita is wonderful - the words burst forth, smooth and pure, sonorous and elegant and frictionless as water cascading gently over smooth pebbles. I will concede that there are times in Bend Sinister where Nabokov does demonstrate a similar mastery - in fact these occasions are not infrequent- but just so much of the book is characterized by what can only be described as clunky and unwieldy writing - overwrought description, unbelievable dialogue, entire paragraphs poorly and clumsily phrased. At times I felt like I was reading an early draft.
The biggest problem with the writing - more so than the style itself - is the fact that at every opportunity it simply gets in the way. It's often said that a great writer can make himself disappear; to become transparent and immerse the reader in the narrative. Instead, here, Nabokov's presence is felt on every page, at every turn. The flow is constantly interrupted for some whim or other. There is the sensation that Nabokov himself is right there, bodily, in the room with the other characters, interjecting, making silly faces, and competing with them for your attention. In the rare moments when the author deigns to step aside and allow the narrative to flow, the actual story is good! It's interesting and compelling, but you can be assured that it will only be a matter of moments before Mr Nabokov has reinserted himself into the frame, sporting a self-important grin, like a bonehead in a news broadcast.
But above all, Bend Sinister is a hot mess because it completely lacks any sort of artistic unity of vision. It feels like a hodgepodge of partial anecdotes, half fleshed-out ideas, hasty plot machinations and poor characterization. I am convinced that Nabokov had a notebook filled with assorted unfinished ideas and simply tried to stitch them together into a single novel. And while there are many outstanding and worthwhile moments (of course there are - I don't mean to give the impression that this book is completely without merit), as a singular work of literature it simply falls apart.
Therefore I present the following as evidence in my defense: I am a lover of the works of Nabokov - Lolita and Pale Fire are among my favorite books (Exhibit A), and all other of his works which I have read, I have enjoyed. While some people dislike his style, I am generally a fan. Bend Sinister, however, is not a very good book. There is a fractal nature to the problems of this book: the closer one looks, the more of them are revealed.
Firstly, the writing. The language in Lolita is wonderful - the words burst forth, smooth and pure, sonorous and elegant and frictionless as water cascading gently over smooth pebbles. I will concede that there are times in Bend Sinister where Nabokov does demonstrate a similar mastery - in fact these occasions are not infrequent- but just so much of the book is characterized by what can only be described as clunky and unwieldy writing - overwrought description, unbelievable dialogue, entire paragraphs poorly and clumsily phrased. At times I felt like I was reading an early draft.
The biggest problem with the writing - more so than the style itself - is the fact that at every opportunity it simply gets in the way. It's often said that a great writer can make himself disappear; to become transparent and immerse the reader in the narrative. Instead, here, Nabokov's presence is felt on every page, at every turn. The flow is constantly interrupted for some whim or other. There is the sensation that Nabokov himself is right there, bodily, in the room with the other characters, interjecting, making silly faces, and competing with them for your attention. In the rare moments when the author deigns to step aside and allow the narrative to flow, the actual story is good! It's interesting and compelling, but you can be assured that it will only be a matter of moments before Mr Nabokov has reinserted himself into the frame, sporting a self-important grin, like a bonehead in a news broadcast.
But above all, Bend Sinister is a hot mess because it completely lacks any sort of artistic unity of vision. It feels like a hodgepodge of partial anecdotes, half fleshed-out ideas, hasty plot machinations and poor characterization. I am convinced that Nabokov had a notebook filled with assorted unfinished ideas and simply tried to stitch them together into a single novel. And while there are many outstanding and worthwhile moments (of course there are - I don't mean to give the impression that this book is completely without merit), as a singular work of literature it simply falls apart.
July 8, 2024
As with other Nabokov books I've read, I was a bit lost until near the end of this book, when I finally caught its rhythm. And then it became so extraordinary, so scary, so sad, that it literally took my breath away (I stopped breathing and was instead gasping and nearly screaming). The only thing I can compare the ending to is the movie Salò by Pasolini. Yes, it's that rough.
I had misunderstood this book as a farce about fascism until halfway through, thrown off by the delightfulness of VN's language games, as always. But I should have been alerted by the first stark motif of grief that this was not going to be a walk in the park.
So I'm re-reading it now, and this time it's falling together. The sense was there all the time, but in a form that was too dense for me to grasp. The introduction, which read almost like pure nonsense the first time around, made perfect sense the second time (it was obviously intentional to have the introduction be meaningless until one has read the book). So all I can say is that (with the possible exception of Lolita), Nabokov's books are designed to be read at least twice, probably three times, before they can be properly understood and appreciated.
It's a really good book. As always, Nabokov's dazzling technique, wonderful metaphors, and immersive and amusing writing is not there merely for show (as it is, alas, in many other modern books), but to circle around a theme until it all beautifully coheres, like life itself. And just as we rarely understand a situation until it's over, we can rarely understand VN's books until they're over. So, we read them again and again, and each time they take on new form and color, like a photograph in a developing tray.
Here's another thing: I know many people are troubled by Nabokov's recurrent motif of children being sexually groomed and molested. I was perplexed by this as well until I read Bend Sinister, and now I am 100% positive that VN's use of children was highly moral. The corruption of innocence was a theme he returned to again and again, and I believe now that it refers to his own loss of innocence in being ripped from childhood and his native Russia by the horrors of the Russian Revolution.
I had misunderstood this book as a farce about fascism until halfway through, thrown off by the delightfulness of VN's language games, as always. But I should have been alerted by the first stark motif of grief that this was not going to be a walk in the park.
So I'm re-reading it now, and this time it's falling together. The sense was there all the time, but in a form that was too dense for me to grasp. The introduction, which read almost like pure nonsense the first time around, made perfect sense the second time (it was obviously intentional to have the introduction be meaningless until one has read the book). So all I can say is that (with the possible exception of Lolita), Nabokov's books are designed to be read at least twice, probably three times, before they can be properly understood and appreciated.
It's a really good book. As always, Nabokov's dazzling technique, wonderful metaphors, and immersive and amusing writing is not there merely for show (as it is, alas, in many other modern books), but to circle around a theme until it all beautifully coheres, like life itself. And just as we rarely understand a situation until it's over, we can rarely understand VN's books until they're over. So, we read them again and again, and each time they take on new form and color, like a photograph in a developing tray.
Here's another thing: I know many people are troubled by Nabokov's recurrent motif of children being sexually groomed and molested. I was perplexed by this as well until I read Bend Sinister, and now I am 100% positive that VN's use of children was highly moral. The corruption of innocence was a theme he returned to again and again, and I believe now that it refers to his own loss of innocence in being ripped from childhood and his native Russia by the horrors of the Russian Revolution.
March 27, 2021
(Love this photo of VN holding a butterfly in 1947, the year Bend Sinister was published.
Nabokov‘s first American novel pokes tragic fun at the Soviet Union and the surreal experience of arbitrary terror and constant warping of reality. It‘s a bit difficult, as he plays games with different languages, obscure English words and syntaxes. And I had trouble getting going. I felt for a while I was just hacking through trying to find some direction. There is a sense here of attack on the English language, and it might be intentional.
But ultimately the plot is clear enough. A philosopher and half-brother of a dictator suffers under this regime of terror both literally and psychologically. And, unwilling to serve and wanting to basically hide, slowly begins to lose his protection and immunity.
The book relishes in surreal absurdities. In his intro VN says, “automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations or Orwell's clichés would go merely to prove that the automaton could not have read either the great German writer or the mediocre English one.” But these two references go a long way to explaining the atmosphere of the novel and its dark humor. Nabokov works the tension of situations especially by mixing an irreverent dryer humor with dreadful happenings. That could be said for most of his novels, although he might go a little darker here. Certainly nothing was sacred in fiction for this author. (Bring on Lolita!)
-----------------------------------------------
10. Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
published: 1947
format: 185-page kindle ebook
acquired: February 28
read: Feb 28 – Mar 20
time reading: 10 hr 6 min, 3.4 min/page
rating: 4
locations: fictional autocratic state
about the author: 1899 – 1977. Russia born, educated at Trinity College in Cambridge, 1922. Lived in Berlin (1922-1937), Paris, the US (1941-1961) and Montreux, Switzerland (1961-1977).
April 20, 2015
"Знак за незаконорденост" е 5-та книга на Набоков, която чета и най-накрая разбрах главната причина този тип да ми е сред любимите писатели. Набоков уважава читателя си страшно много и се е постарал това да си личи във всяка дума и изречение от писмото му. Наясно бях, че неговото писане е най-съвършеното от това, което съм чел досега. Обвинявах перфекционизма му, но неговото е май повече от перфекционизъм. Той не иска читателите му да го възприемата като "пефекционист", а като писател, който ги уважава и който няма да им изгуби времето.
"Знак за незаконороденост" е анитутопия, която ме накара да съжалявам, че съм си прахосал времето с малоумни глупости като "Игри на глада". И понеже почнах със сравненията, в един момент започнах съвсем съзнателно да асоциирам "Знак за незаконороденост" с анимацията на Дриймуъркс, която излезе преди няколко седмици "У дома" - в добрия смисъл. А това ме накара да помисля, че не е фатално, когато децата не четат, защото те имат много повече източници на умствен стимул в днешно време, отколкото е било преди. Поне според моето мнение дали под формата на кино, книга или нещо друго - важно е съдържанието, а не формата. Това, че направих паралел между съдържанието на Знак за незаконороденост с анимация на Дриймуъркс наистина ми променя много мнението за това доколко е реален проблемът, че децата не чели книги.
Както и да е. Друго, което ми нарави впечатление е, че макар и без да са свързани нито с герои, нито с общи теми, другите книги на Набоков, които съм чел - "Защита Лужин", "Покана за екзекуция" ми се струваха като част от вселената, в която се случва "Знак за незаконороденост". Осъзнаваш какво означава един писател да има стил, и изобщо понятието стил придобива съвсем практически измерения и вече внимаваш повече, когато го използваш.
Като за финал ще кажа, че ченето на тази книга ме накара да си почина от всички писатели, които се занимават с общи въпроси; посочват колко е лош комунизма, какъв меч с две остриета е свободата, карат те да сравняваш действителността с някакви си 200-300 страници и по все същия подобен начин ти казват какви са нещата от живота... абе ясно ви е. Този начин на писане, какъвто демонстрират съвременните величия в литературата ми идва в повече и Набоков май е перфектният антидот.
Дано доживеем да преведат цялото му творчество на български.
"Знак за незаконороденост" е анитутопия, която ме накара да съжалявам, че съм си прахосал времето с малоумни глупости като "Игри на глада". И понеже почнах със сравненията, в един момент започнах съвсем съзнателно да асоциирам "Знак за незаконороденост" с анимацията на Дриймуъркс, която излезе преди няколко седмици "У дома" - в добрия смисъл. А това ме накара да помисля, че не е фатално, когато децата не четат, защото те имат много повече източници на умствен стимул в днешно време, отколкото е било преди. Поне според моето мнение дали под формата на кино, книга или нещо друго - важно е съдържанието, а не формата. Това, че направих паралел между съдържанието на Знак за незаконороденост с анимация на Дриймуъркс наистина ми променя много мнението за това доколко е реален проблемът, че децата не чели книги.
Както и да е. Друго, което ми нарави впечатление е, че макар и без да са свързани нито с герои, нито с общи теми, другите книги на Набоков, които съм чел - "Защита Лужин", "Покана за екзекуция" ми се струваха като част от вселената, в която се случва "Знак за незаконороденост". Осъзнаваш какво означава един писател да има стил, и изобщо понятието стил придобива съвсем практически измерения и вече внимаваш повече, когато го използваш.
Като за финал ще кажа, че ченето на тази книга ме накара да си почина от всички писатели, които се занимават с общи въпроси; посочват колко е лош комунизма, какъв меч с две остриета е свободата, карат те да сравняваш действителността с някакви си 200-300 страници и по все същия подобен начин ти казват какви са нещата от живота... абе ясно ви е. Този начин на писане, какъвто демонстрират съвременните величия в литературата ми идва в повече и Набоков май е перфектният антидот.
Дано доживеем да преведат цялото му творчество на български.
April 9, 2021
I in no way consider this to be second-rate Nabokov. In fact, I like it better than Lolita (but not quite as much as Pale Fire). It's been said that the intricate prose distracts from the story, but I think this book is intended to be more like a labyrinth than a conventional narrative. The story itself is extremely simple. Nabokov's writing is often accused of being distant and over-intellectual, but I found quite a bit of haunting beauty in both the imagery and the text.
(This is my second reading, but the first time I've read Nabokov's introduction. The reader is highly rewarded for returning to the text on several occasions, in whole or in part.)
(This is my second reading, but the first time I've read Nabokov's introduction. The reader is highly rewarded for returning to the text on several occasions, in whole or in part.)
March 26, 2020
Mi ero dimenticato di quanto fosse difficile e psichedelico e bello e divertente e complicato e faticoso e soddisfacente leggere Nabokov.
September 23, 2025
Often Incomprehensible
A review of the Audible Studios audiobook (2010) narrated by Robert Blumenfeld of the Henry Holt & Company hardcover original (1947), also with reference to the eBook.
Unfortunately this one earns a postcard from Outlier Island 🏝️📨📬as well as an Unsatisfactory Ending Alert™.
This is a small world dystopian novel which was one of the first that Nabokov wrote in English after immigrating to the U.S. It tells the story of a philosopher named Krug who is living in a city dictatorship ruled over by a past schoolboy acquaintance named Paduk, whose "Party of the Average Man" has assumed power.
The widower Krug is subjected to increasing torments, the arrests of his fellow professors and colleagues, the kidnapping of his son, etc. in efforts to have him declare his subservience to Paduk's authority. Eventually he goes mad and the author finally takes pity on him and breaks the fourth wall at the end to tell the reader it is all a fiction.
It is all meant as a parody of Stalin's Communist Russia and the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" but the effect is considerably less than in books such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924) or George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
There is a lack of focus which seems to be a combination of Nabokov wanting to show off his English language capabilities with very bizarre tangents. The oddest one was a discourse on Shakespeare's Hamlet that tried to make a case for Fortinbras being the main subject of the play. That went on for several pages. Interspersed throughout was the use of transcribed Russian, usually followed by an English translation. Other phrases used were in French and German, but those were left untranslated. Anyway, the cumulative effect was of an author showing off but leaving the reader completely detached.
I started this as an audiobook through an Audible Deal of the Day. I found it so hard to follow on audio that I ended up reading an eBook in parallel. Neither were satisfactory in the end. Your result may differ as the average rating for the book is a 3.8 star on GR.
Random Estonian reference
"A certain anaemic Esthonian housemaid" is mentioned roughly halfway in the book.
A surprising polite euphemism
About 10% into the book, a polite phrasing is made of a rather notoriously crude Russian expression, also often expressed in English as a single word.
"The two soldiers (both, oddly enough, had pockmarked faces) were asking, Krug understood, for his (Krug’s) papers. While he was fumbling for the pass they bade him hurry and mentioned a brief love affair they had had, or would have, or invited him to have with his mother."
A review of the Audible Studios audiobook (2010) narrated by Robert Blumenfeld of the Henry Holt & Company hardcover original (1947), also with reference to the eBook.
Unfortunately this one earns a postcard from Outlier Island 🏝️📨📬as well as an Unsatisfactory Ending Alert™.
This is a small world dystopian novel which was one of the first that Nabokov wrote in English after immigrating to the U.S. It tells the story of a philosopher named Krug who is living in a city dictatorship ruled over by a past schoolboy acquaintance named Paduk, whose "Party of the Average Man" has assumed power.
The widower Krug is subjected to increasing torments, the arrests of his fellow professors and colleagues, the kidnapping of his son, etc. in efforts to have him declare his subservience to Paduk's authority. Eventually he goes mad and the author finally takes pity on him and breaks the fourth wall at the end to tell the reader it is all a fiction.
It is all meant as a parody of Stalin's Communist Russia and the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" but the effect is considerably less than in books such as Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924) or George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
There is a lack of focus which seems to be a combination of Nabokov wanting to show off his English language capabilities with very bizarre tangents. The oddest one was a discourse on Shakespeare's Hamlet that tried to make a case for Fortinbras being the main subject of the play. That went on for several pages. Interspersed throughout was the use of transcribed Russian, usually followed by an English translation. Other phrases used were in French and German, but those were left untranslated. Anyway, the cumulative effect was of an author showing off but leaving the reader completely detached.
I started this as an audiobook through an Audible Deal of the Day. I found it so hard to follow on audio that I ended up reading an eBook in parallel. Neither were satisfactory in the end. Your result may differ as the average rating for the book is a 3.8 star on GR.
Random Estonian reference
"A certain anaemic Esthonian housemaid" is mentioned roughly halfway in the book.
A surprising polite euphemism
About 10% into the book, a polite phrasing is made of a rather notoriously crude Russian expression, also often expressed in English as a single word.
"The two soldiers (both, oddly enough, had pockmarked faces) were asking, Krug understood, for his (Krug’s) papers. While he was fumbling for the pass they bade him hurry and mentioned a brief love affair they had had, or would have, or invited him to have with his mother."
May 17, 2023
„[...] und sehen betroffen / Den Vorhang zu und alle Fragen offen."
Der bislang für mich erratischste Roman Nabokovs. Ich werde ihn wohl noch einige Male lesen.
Der bislang für mich erratischste Roman Nabokovs. Ich werde ihn wohl noch einige Male lesen.
May 11, 2022
The most obvious book to compare Bend Sinister to is George Orwell’s 1984, since both weave their plots around soul-crushing totalitarian regimes. For me, though, it also made me think of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, in that both books introduce protagonists at the mercy of nitwits, comical in their cowardice and sense of self-importance. Then there is a shift of focus, and the antagonists become no less stupid, but add homicidal incompetence to their other traits. Both books end in very dark places.
The book’s plot is minimal, a scaffolding on which to hang Nabokov's famous prose stylings. In a fictional, vaguely Eastern European country, lives a famous philosopher. As the book opens his wife has just died, and an imbecilic Party of the Average Man has been voted into office and proceeds to impose totalitarian control. The philosopher’s colleagues at the university realize that he knew the leader of the new regime when they were both schoolboys. They want to use him to get favors from the new government, which in turn wants to use his international prestige to burnish their reputation. The philosopher is uninterested in doing any of this and remembers the new dictator only as The Toad, a loathsome child whom he bullied during their years at school. His only remaining concern is for his deeply loved eight year old son, to whom he remains devoted as the regime intensifies its pressure to get the philosopher to cooperate, slowly engulfing his colleagues and friends. Eventually the dictator realizes that the way to get to the philosopher is through his son, but the government is incapable of doing anything competently.
Since this is Nabokov, strange things happen. Not strange plot twists, but strange games the author plays with the reader. At times he uses his talents to turn ordinary images into something mysterious and memorable, as with “An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”
At other times he uses his characters to philosophize, as when the plot takes a sharp turn and the philosopher thinks of himself as a character in a novel, a puppet at the mercy of an author whose only interest is writing a book, regardless of the tragedies that befall those in it. It is, of course, a metaphor for our lives in general, and reminded me of the old saying that, “In the end, the gods screw all of us.”
And Nabokov loved words, so keeping a dictionary handy is a good idea if you want to follow along. I kept a list of the ones I had to look up: megrim, pogromystic, bombinate, triskelion, gammadion, divagation, ruelle, and salix, none of which my spellchecker recognized, all of them obscure (Nabokov would probably have said ‘acroamatic’ instead of ‘obscure’); ruelle, for instance, is the space between a bed and a wall. Try working that into a conversation.
The book is early among Nabokov’s literary works, and in places he seems to be trying out ideas which he will reintroduce later in his more mature books. Sometimes they work, and very well, because this is Nabokov after all, one of the great prose stylists of the century, but sometimes they fall flat or meander off. I suspect he knew exactly how he wanted the plot to play out but could not decide what other ideas he wanted to stuff inside.
My favorite parts of the book were when Nabokov was describing in ludicrous detail the blundering new regime. Even as I could see the tragedy that was coming I could not help laughing at the absurdities of The Toad and his gang of idiots. It made me think of Winston Churchill’s comments on socialism, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries,” and “There are two places only where socialism will work; in heaven where it is not needed, and in hell where they already have it.”
So, this book is uneven in execution, and probably not a good introduction for someone new to Nabokov. It has its moments of brilliance, but it also wanders off inexplicably, and I repeatedly found myself wondering where the author was going with one idea or another. The writing is sometimes memorable but is not a book that I am likely to re-read.
The book’s plot is minimal, a scaffolding on which to hang Nabokov's famous prose stylings. In a fictional, vaguely Eastern European country, lives a famous philosopher. As the book opens his wife has just died, and an imbecilic Party of the Average Man has been voted into office and proceeds to impose totalitarian control. The philosopher’s colleagues at the university realize that he knew the leader of the new regime when they were both schoolboys. They want to use him to get favors from the new government, which in turn wants to use his international prestige to burnish their reputation. The philosopher is uninterested in doing any of this and remembers the new dictator only as The Toad, a loathsome child whom he bullied during their years at school. His only remaining concern is for his deeply loved eight year old son, to whom he remains devoted as the regime intensifies its pressure to get the philosopher to cooperate, slowly engulfing his colleagues and friends. Eventually the dictator realizes that the way to get to the philosopher is through his son, but the government is incapable of doing anything competently.
Since this is Nabokov, strange things happen. Not strange plot twists, but strange games the author plays with the reader. At times he uses his talents to turn ordinary images into something mysterious and memorable, as with “An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.”
At other times he uses his characters to philosophize, as when the plot takes a sharp turn and the philosopher thinks of himself as a character in a novel, a puppet at the mercy of an author whose only interest is writing a book, regardless of the tragedies that befall those in it. It is, of course, a metaphor for our lives in general, and reminded me of the old saying that, “In the end, the gods screw all of us.”
And Nabokov loved words, so keeping a dictionary handy is a good idea if you want to follow along. I kept a list of the ones I had to look up: megrim, pogromystic, bombinate, triskelion, gammadion, divagation, ruelle, and salix, none of which my spellchecker recognized, all of them obscure (Nabokov would probably have said ‘acroamatic’ instead of ‘obscure’); ruelle, for instance, is the space between a bed and a wall. Try working that into a conversation.
The book is early among Nabokov’s literary works, and in places he seems to be trying out ideas which he will reintroduce later in his more mature books. Sometimes they work, and very well, because this is Nabokov after all, one of the great prose stylists of the century, but sometimes they fall flat or meander off. I suspect he knew exactly how he wanted the plot to play out but could not decide what other ideas he wanted to stuff inside.
My favorite parts of the book were when Nabokov was describing in ludicrous detail the blundering new regime. Even as I could see the tragedy that was coming I could not help laughing at the absurdities of The Toad and his gang of idiots. It made me think of Winston Churchill’s comments on socialism, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries,” and “There are two places only where socialism will work; in heaven where it is not needed, and in hell where they already have it.”
So, this book is uneven in execution, and probably not a good introduction for someone new to Nabokov. It has its moments of brilliance, but it also wanders off inexplicably, and I repeatedly found myself wondering where the author was going with one idea or another. The writing is sometimes memorable but is not a book that I am likely to re-read.
January 19, 2025
Pretty fun and enjoyable. There’s a level to this that I haven’t quite grasped yet. Why the occasional slips from 3rd person POV into 1st? Who is the narrator? It’s a piece of classic Nabokovian narratorial play. But here I didn’t feel so driven to figure everything out, turn over every stone. This is not, perhaps, as tightly pruned a piece of topiary as Nabokov’s best novels.
August 19, 2021
Dystopian novel set in an unnamed country in the city of Padukgrad, protagonist Adam Krug is a well-known philosopher with an eight-year-old son. His wife died but he cannot bring himself to tell his son. The Ekwilist movement, the “Party of the Average Man,” is run by dictator Paduk, a former schoolmate. Krug is asked to support the party, but refuses. Published in 1947, the Ekwilist party is obviously based on a totalitarian regime.
The preface to this book indicates it should be read as a spoof, however, it did not read as humorous to me. The writing is erudite. I enjoyed the relationship between Krug and his son, whom he obviously loves dearly.
“And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”
The ending is horrifying. I do not want to spoil it, but if you are easily disturbed by what you read, I would give this one a pass.
2.5 (based on personal enjoyment, not literary merit)
The preface to this book indicates it should be read as a spoof, however, it did not read as humorous to me. The writing is erudite. I enjoyed the relationship between Krug and his son, whom he obviously loves dearly.
“And what agony, thought Krug the thinker, to love so madly a little creature, formed in some mysterious fashion (even more mysterious to us than it had been to the very first thinkers in their pale olive gloves) by the fusion of two mysteries, or rather two sets of a trillion of mysteries each; formed by a fusion which is, at the same time, a matter of choice and a matter of chance and a matter of pure enchantment; thus formed and then permitted to accumulate trillions of its own mysteries; the whole suffused with consciousness, which is the only real thing in the world and the greatest mystery of all.”
The ending is horrifying. I do not want to spoil it, but if you are easily disturbed by what you read, I would give this one a pass.
2.5 (based on personal enjoyment, not literary merit)
September 20, 2010
This read much like a pretentious version of a dystopia, like Orwell if he were trying to please a collegiate, indie rock crowd. But, then again, Nabokov is never afraid to shy away from writing something that would prove exactly how brilliant he was. And he was smart; his capacity for learning and using language is impressive to say the least. He's a brilliant writer, too. There's just this semi-bearable attitude of condescension that works sometimes and really frustrates at others. There are some really funny moments, there are some startlingly great images, but it's not as pressing or important as it seems. Maybe that's just because I've never lived in Eastern Europe around World War Two. In fact, that's probably it. But, that said, the emotional relationships did provide enough to enjoy the book as a whole. One particular note: the revelation of the wife as a child walking back into the field with a moth in her hands was heart-breaking, brilliant, leaving the last paragraph that much more striking.
August 8, 2023
I found this Nabokov quite hard to get into and, along with Invitation to a Beheading, another political leaning novel, it's my least favourite. The last third was strong, but that gorgeous prose from other novels just didn't hit the heights here for me. The dystopian elements and evocative Orwellian tones, along with Krug - who was at least a memorable character - struggling against rising levels of mental mediocrity in this fictional tyrannical country, was interesting if a little bewildering - likely just too super intelligent for me to fully grasp (either that or I'm simply too mentally exhausted after a crazy busy week), and to my surprise the novel was actually funnier than I thought it would be. I won't be remembering this like I remember the likes of Pale Fire, Lolita, Laughter in the Dark or Despair, because it was a bit of grind to get through and not the smooth and flowing narrative of those, my Nabokov faves, but I will say that even as my least favourite it probably still beats 99% of the 'so called' best novels from the last few years.
July 10, 2019
A very muddled affair indeed. The story itself is interesting (the rehabilitation center for criminals was a highlight and I did enjoy the ending) but we are often distracted by self-conscious tangents that ramble on for pages at a time. It totally disrupts the flow of the story and we're treated to unrelated diversions (the Shakespeare passage amongst others) While I enjoy a diverse vocabulary Nabokov seems to go out of his way to stuff as many words and adjectives as possible. I feel pretentiousness from this work. It's like he started writing the story then loses interest and goes off on whatever stream of consciousness he's on and then drifts back to the narrative and unfortunately losing the reader (the protagonist also has issues concentrating on his own writing ironically enough). His other book I've read (Invitation Toa Beheading) was more structured and the stream of consciousness was more appropriate given the context. Sorry Vlad but I won't be revisiting you any time soon.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 457 reviews