Bend Sinister and the Time Nabokov Gives to Grief
Spoilers: This essay discusses David’s death and the ending of the novel.
David has made a train out of three chairs. He asks his father to board it for a minute, and Adam Krug refuses. The child’s complaint is ordinary enough to hurt: nobody wants to travel with him. In the next breath Krug’s mind opens onto the entire future he wants for David, a succession of bicycles, swimming pools, shops, and a college campus. The scale of the father’s imagining makes his failure to give the boy that minute more painful. Later, when Krug feels able to write again, he also declines the bedtime travel story. Soon the authorities will take David away. There will be no later evening in which to finish it.
This is Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister at its most searching. Krug’s love appears through an action he fails to take, and through a mental journey the child cannot join. The passage also exposes a difficulty that runs through the novel: its command of language can render a person’s attachment minutely, then leave that attachment behind for a display whose duration and tone belong to another book. The shifts sometimes enact Krug’s inability to remain with grief. At other times I feel the novel moving away just as its people need time together.
What a mind repeats
During a trip to the country, David briefly disappears from the cart outside a police station. Krug multiplies in his own mind into a succession of searchers, pleading, attacking, finding a tortured child or a small skeleton. The boy is only watching another child spin a top down a lane. Once Krug finds him, his hand still shakes. Nabokov lets the imagined possibilities race ahead of the actual search, so that a few minutes of separation contain a father’s knowledge of what could happen. The later catastrophe will make this rehearsal almost unbearable to remember.
With Olga, memory itself becomes a way of spending time. In a passage addressed to her, Krug imagines the girl she was before they met, carrying a hawk moth through her aunt’s house. He requests the scene again and then has her retrace her steps in reverse. Each repetition adds a bodily detail or changes the light. His wish to see more meets a limit: during that summer he was elsewhere, a young man reading across the river, and even a figure glimpsed near an orchard cannot be identified with certainty as Olga. The shifting directions of the remembered scene make absence exact. He can prolong his attention, yet no amount of looking will give him those five years with her.
The novel also knows that cultivated talk can be a form of grief. When Krug visits his friend Ember after Olga’s death, neither man can bring himself to speak of her. Ember turns to the state theater’s grotesque reworking of Hamlet, and the discussion runs on. Nabokov explicitly places Olga’s absence beside the literary conversation; Ember’s tears eventually break through it, and Krug reaches for another story to ease them both. A close account of these alternations between pain and diversion is persuasive here: the change of subject registers what the friends cannot manage directly.¹ The detour earns its place because we have witnessed the need for it.
That success makes the novel’s unevenness harder to dismiss. The political language parodies, dream fragments, philosophical speculation, childish nonsense, and literary allusions have different tempos. The state’s theatrical Hamlet exposes the stupidity with which power rewrites art; the men’s difficulty speaking keeps the comic invention attached to a loss. The invented regime’s slogans and institutions sometimes resemble a familiar caricature of twentieth-century power, and the elaboration elsewhere claims our attention for longer than the relationship it interrupts. I miss the pressure that makes a particular flourish necessary at that particular moment.
A meeting rehearsed twice
Krug’s relation to the dictator Paduk concentrates this problem. They were schoolboys together, and Krug took part in humiliating him. The history prevents Krug from becoming a spotless opposite to the regime. Nonetheless, their adult meeting offers the possibility of a confrontation in which that old cruelty and Paduk’s new power might put pressure on one another.
At first Nabokov supplies a striking exchange. Krug and Paduk trade barbs across the desk; a parrot wanders in; Paduk speaks of the state as a body in which nobody may be alone. Krug demands news of his arrested friends. Then the narrator stops the scene: “No, it did not go on quite like that.” The actual interview is quieter, with much less speech from Paduk. He proposes a university presidency, new editions of Krug’s work, and a public address drafted for him. Krug reads enough of the speech to hear his ideas mangled into the government’s slogans, and refuses it. The state wants his name and voice more than his reasoning.
The correction is an intelligent formal act. It lets us feel how easily a novelist can supply his hero with the eloquence a dictator’s victim might never have in the room. In the quieter version, Paduk also asks after Olga’s relatives, a bureaucratic question made menacing by what will happen to Krug’s family. But the withdrawn exchange has briefly let school history become adult drama. Its replacement retains Krug’s refusal and some sharp satire; it gives much less time to the two men’s shared past. Paduk’s smallness as a schoolboy and his power as a ruler remain adjacent facts more often than a fully realized encounter. The novel returns to the schoolyard near the end, with Krug’s assault taking on the shape of an old game. Their shared history has become a pattern of images, short of the adult exchange the earlier version promised.
Krug himself cannot bear the simple emblematic burden of “the thinker against the tyrant.” His earlier bullying has weight, and the novel later places his reputation as a great philosopher inside his own skeptical thought. He wonders who made him eminent, distrusts the polished descriptions of his work, and feels his mind losing its former power. Nabokov even compares the unproved claim of greatness to novels that call a character an artist without offering a sample of the art. The self-doubt has bite. We see enough of Krug’s resistance to understand why Paduk wants his endorsement and why he refuses it; we are given a much less settled account of what his philosophy positively offers the threatened world. That gap can be honest characterization and still leave the intended opposition thin.
The mercy of an ending
The novel’s harshest experiment with tone comes after David is taken. The authorities present a film of the child at an institution as a grotesque entertainment, complete with jaunty intertitles. For an instant David looks toward Krug without recognizing him: the camera catches his overcoat, bare legs, and bedroom slippers before his face enlarges and disappears against the narrator’s own presence. At the bedside, makeup and a turban have been arranged over the dead child; a creature that looks like a toy dog proves alive and snaps at Krug’s hand. The film’s playful labels and the institution’s staging persist even when Krug arrives. Their comic tone is sickening because it belongs to the people who have done this.
Yet that sequence also pushes beyond what the father can take in. Krug’s thought and the narrative language break apart. In prison he dreams of himself and Olga bending to kiss David, the three of them briefly joined by the small hands that reach up from the bed. It is one of the novel’s most tender images, and its timing matters: Krug loses consciousness before he can fully grapple with his grief. When he wakes, the narrator intervenes to make him mad before the knowledge of David’s death can return. Soon Krug dies trying to reach Paduk, and the author withdraws the scene like a slide, returning to his lamp, tablets, and a moth at the window.
There is real care in the refusal to force Krug to suffer lucidly for the reader’s benefit. There is also an extraordinary privilege in being able to remove the mind that must bear the loss. Nabokov gives the narrator his own objection: he calls the immortality offered to Krug a “slippery sophism.” The admission is too candid to treat the ending as an unwitting mistake. Still, knowing that a consolation is made of words does not restore the time taken from the father and son. The dream allows them a last touch; the author’s rescue ends the possibility of a waking reckoning.
I return to David’s train because that earlier turndown needs no rescue and no spotless father. Krug loves the child enough to picture a whole life for him, and remains impatient with a boy asking for one minute now. Nabokov’s ability to hold those measures of time together is what makes the novel hurt. Its finest movements trust the unfinished minute, the repeated memory, the missed word between friends. When the narrator closes over Krug’s loss, the novel acknowledges the cost of its own power. Such acknowledgment deepens the ending, while leaving us with the minute the father never gave.
Sources
Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1947), especially chapters 6–7, 9, 11, 14, and 16–18. The English text used here has no verified imprint or pagination; references are to chapters. Publisher’s bibliographic record.
¹ Leona Toker, “Bend Sinister: The ‘Inner’ Problem,” in Nabokov: The Mystery of Literary Structures (Cornell University Press, 1989), 177–197. Toker relates changes in texture and the unequal space given to grotesque intrusions and feeling to Krug’s grief and its diversions. Her account makes Ember’s visit persuasive; the retracted interview and final rescue put that defense under further pressure here. Read the chapter.
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