Having just finished rereading Bend Sinister and reading Nabokov’s foreword (online, because my edition is quite an old second hand one with no foreword and a rich odour) it seems I cannot escape the conlusion: as much as I admire Nabokov as a writer, I somewhat dislike him as a human being.
While slightly annoying, it’s not that he wrote a novel only he could fully comprehend (making allusions to immigration by using a phrase from an American immigration test? Really?): it’s a self indulgent failure of communication (a failure he at least implicitly acknowledges by spending so much of the foreword explaining himself), but one I’m occasionally guilty of and, quite frankly, if an author doesn’t indulge himself who should he indulge? Fine.
I do start to rankle with the insistence that he has no interest in the outside world and that his novel shouldn’t be taken as social comment. As if writing a political novel isn’t a political act. To dismiss the notion of characters carrying an idea and then proclaim his own characters as mirages - I’m really not sure how the implied superiority is supposed to work there.
It gets worse as he berates anybody daring to compare his dystopian novel to other dystopian novels, as if such a natural act is the work of a hopelessly illiterate mind. (Such a comparison would reveal more differences than similarities, but that wouldn’t make it worthless.) And to top it off he casually dismisses Orwell as a “mediocre” writer, presumably for writing novels which consciously deliver a payload of ideas in a deliberately transparent style.
“Elitism” is not once mentioned in the book or foreword, and yet it’s a dominant theme that screams from every chapter. The oppressive Ekwilist [enforced averageness] government is despised by Krug because the are idiots who won’t leave him alone. The impotent anti-Ekwilist movement are despised by Krug because they are idiots who won’t leave him alone. Krug is a self-confessed (and entirely unrepentant) bully, a self absorbed idiot and short-sighted moral coward, whose self-satisfied sense of superiority cuts him off from the rest of the world.
But the book never condemns Krug, Nabakov’s own assessment of the book’s theme’s focus on the end of the book, painting Krug as hero and victim and glossing over his dismal attitude to anyone save his own family and failure to act at any point where he might have had a positive impact but chose instead to score points and show off how superior he was to everyone. It took me the second reading to realise this odious protagonist was actually intended as the hero.
My admiration for the beauty of the prose still stands, but so does my initial reading of Bend Sinister as a deeply social novel, despite the authors intent. Nabokov clearly poured himself into the book, something which I approve of, but if the foetid elitism running through is really representative of him, and not another element of social comment, then I appreciate it in a way that isn’t especially flattering to him.
