Receive Bend Sinister Executed By Vladimir Nabokov Disseminated As Electronic Format

in Nabakov's usual mannered, arch style this felt to me to be overwhelmed by the style over the content.
I found this a hard book to read and to finish, I in no way consider this to be secondrate 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 overintellectual, 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.


The title in English: Bend Sinister,

If Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov were as much known as 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 exclassmate, 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 Bend Sinister'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, stepbystep, 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 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 Bend Sinister'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, Mi ero dimenticato di quanto fosse difficile e psichedelico e bello e divertente e complicato e faticoso e soddisfacente leggere Nabokov.
On the face of it, Bend Sinister is an unusual novel, Nabokov, a selfproclaimed 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 Sovietesque 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.

.