Bend Sinister

The state has been recently taken over and is being run by the tyrannical and philistine 'Average Man' party. Under the slogans of equality and happiness for all, it has done away with individualism and freedom of thought. Only John Krug, a brilliant philosopher, stands up to the regime. His antagonist, the leader of the new party, is his old school enemy, Paduk - known as the 'Toad'. Grieving over his wife's recent death, Krug is at first dismissive of Paduk's activities and sees no threat in them. But the sinister machine which Paduk has set in motion may prove stronger than the individual, stronger even than the grotesque 'Toad' himself.

These letters outline the mutual affection and closeness of the two writers, but also reveal the slow crescendo of mutual resentment, mistrust and rejection."--BOOK JACKET.

Vladimir Nabokov was always a controversial writer. Long before the publication of Lolita, controversy raged over the virtues of his work. His detractors insisted that he had forsaken the humanistic concerns of the Russian literary tradition, while his supporters claimed that his work actually extended and enriched that tradition. David Rampton faces these apparent contradictions head on and tries to reach a more balanced, integrated view of the novelist's achievement.

Table of contents

This book argues that the apparent evasion of history in Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction conceals a profound engagement with social, and therefore political, temporalities. While Nabokov scholarship has long assumed the same position as Nabokov himself — that his works exist in a state of historical exceptionalism — this study restores the content, context, and commentary to Nabokovian time by reading his American work alongside the violent upheavals of twentieth-century ideological conflicts in Europe and the United States. This approach explores how the author’s characteristic temporal manipulations and distortions function as a defensive dialectic against history, an attempt to salvage fiction for autonomous aesthetics. Tracing Nabokov’s understanding of the relationship between history and aesthetics from nineteenth-century Russia through European modernism to the postwar American academy, the book offers detailed contextualized readings of Nabokov’s major writings, exploring the tensions, fissures, and failures in Nabokov’s attempts to assert aesthetic control over historical time. In reading his response to the rise of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and Cold War, Norman redresses the commonly-expressed admiration for Nabokov’s heroic resistance to history by suggesting the ethical, aesthetic, and political costs of reading and writing in its denial. This book offers a rethinking of Nabokov’s location in literary history, the ideological impulses which inform his fiction, and the importance of temporal aesthetics in negotiating the matrices of modernism.

This collection of original essays is concerned with one of the most important writers of the twentieth century: Vladimir Nabokov. The book features contributions from both well-established and new scholars, and represents the latest developments in research. The essays all address the possibility of reading Nabokov's works as operating between categories of various kinds - whether linguistic, formal, historical or national. In doing so, they explore exciting new paradigms for approaching Nabokov's oeuvre. The volume brings together a diverse range of critical voices from around the world, to respond to some of the most urgent questions raised about Nabokov's work. Topics covered include the relationship between his artistic and scientific work, his influences on contemporary fiction, and the development of his aesthetics over his career. Drawing variously on archive research, alternative readings of key texts, and fresh theoretical approaches, this book injects new impetus into Nabokov studies as it continues to evolve as a discipline.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archival material, this study offers a comprehensive assessment of the importance of theatrical performance in Vladimir Nabokov's thinking and writing. Siggy Frank provides fresh insights into Nabokov's wider aesthetics and arrives at new readings of his narrative fiction. As well as emphasising the importance of theatrical performance to our understanding of Nabokov's texts, she demonstrates that the theme of theatricality runs through the central concerns of Nabokov's art and life: the nature of fiction, the relationship between the author and his fictional world, textual origin and derivation, authorial control and textual property, literary appropriations and adaptations, and finally the transformation of the writer himself from the Russian émigré writer Sirin to the American novelist Nabokov.