For some reason, I’ve kept a copy of Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister for decades and only now have gotten around to reading it. My copy is a 1964 Time Reading Program Special Edition, which I think came to my parents’ house as part of some book club my mother signed up for back in the 1960s.
Given that I’ve exhausted my recent to-read list, and given the sinister bent of the current administration in Washington, I thought it was finally time to read the book and get acquainted with the mind of Vladimir Nabokov. And, of course, I’m glad I did.
As you may know, Bend Sinister is a dystopian novel focused on Adam Krug, a highly respected professor of philosophy at a well-regarded university in a fictional European nation that has recently taken a sharp political turn (a sinister bend?) to some sort of mix of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. The domineering new leader is a former elementary school classmate of Krug’s named Paduk (nicknamed Toad in school), whom Krug admits bullying back in their schooldays. At the start of the novel, Krug’s wife dies in the hospital, and Krug’s mourning and bitterness keep him distant from the political fray. His university is at risk of being repurposed to serve the needs of the state, which is to say Paduk’s desires. Krug’s colleagues hope Krug can intervene on their behalf, but he has no interest in compromising his position or kissing up to Paduk. Even as people start to disappear around him, Krug thinks his reputation will protect him or that he can escape whenever he wants, but it clearly won’t and he clearly can’t. After he refuses to accept Paduk’s invitation to become the state-appointed leader of the university, serving up appropriate praise and propaganda, Krug’s world falls apart. Before he can escape the country, he and his young son are taken into custody, where ineptness and brutality reign with predictably horrible results.
This is an Orwellian world. A Kafkaesque world. This is a world that felt all too real in the late 1940s after Nazi Germany had wreaked its immense havoc and death. This is the world Nabokov feared was rising again in a different form in post-war Russia. This is the world evident in numerous autocratic nations today, where free-thinking intellectuals and artists are jailed or killed, where religious beliefs are dictated and gender roles assigned, where the press is state-run, where education is indoctrination, and where justice isn’t even an illusion.
For American readers today, it’s hard not to see parallels between the world of Bend Sinister and the behavior of the current U.S. administration. This is not to suggest that our current U.S. president is Paduk. But there are stark links, the prime one being a combination of deep self-absorption coupled with immense power — this autocratic cocktail that our system of government is, in theory, designed to check. In both cases, there’s also clear and disturbing indifference to the common good and basic human morality. In both cases, truth takes a back seat to ideology and the personal whims of the leaders. The only voice that matters in such worlds is the one holding the specially designed autocratic microphone or Twitter account. In such worlds leaders rule by defying and reshaping laws, twisting and breaking arms with impunity, generating fear, sowing division, pinning every societal problem on the opposition, attacking the press, steering funding toward cronies, and marketing multiple daily portions of self-serving lies.
For me, however, the most disturbing aspect of the novel (and of the current American society — and of every autocratic society) is the willingness of people to serve a leader who is clearly taking their nation down the wrong path. In America, this path leads us further from our essential democratic tenets, grows increasingly narrow and rocky, and dead-ends in ruin. Out of either fear or the desire for personal gain, there are enough people in the world of Bend Sinister who enable Paduk to dictate at will. In the last chapter, we get a glimpse of how vulnerable Paduk really is. Without his sycophantic support, he cannot easily sustain his cruel leadership. Of course, in pure dystopian novel fashion, someone with guns comes to the dictator’s undeserved rescue. This is the cautionary part of the tale. When the current president was elected, I hoped the Republican Party would realize it had lost its way and begin rebuilding itself in some sort of fiscally conservative yet moral fashion. In Washington today, however, the lineup of sycophants seems to stretch for miles on end. When someone questions the president, he or she is replaced and reviled. In this way, the president creates his grotesque world of worker ants doing his bidding without hesitation or question. It would be one thing if these “ants” didn’t know better. But they do. The reward for their loyalty may be a temporary thimble full of power, but at what long-term cost for the nation? And for the self-proclaimed Christians in the group, what kind of afterlife?
I don’t mean to reduce Bend Sinister to commentary on American politics in this terrible year of a terrible pandemic, a broken economy, continuing racial injustice (and, as of this writing, the eruption of nationwide protests), and self-absorbed leadership with Ahab-inspired, autocratic instincts. The novel is an interesting work of art on numerous levels. But it did keep me up late at night thinking about our growing dystopian society in a growing dystopian world.
Here’s my 3 a.m. wish: With apologies to actual toads, starting today, we’ll collectively resist all autocrats who prioritizes their needs over the nation’s. By summer’s end, we’ll get a vaccine and, come November, a new president. Then we can start rebuilding this nation — once more aiming to meet the democratic goals so clearly outlined in our founding documents. In my late-night reverie, I imagine all of us taking stock of our sense of the common good, recalibrating our moral compasses, thinking more deeply about peace, justice (especially racial justice), and both economic and environmental sustainability — and then we’ll get to work building the nation and world we need.
It’s all within reach, I think. And God knows, things shouldn’t be the way they are.