Abstract:
Vladimir Nabokov's 1947 novel Bend Sinister has long been considered problematic and over-ambitious. This thesis attempts to resolve some of those perceived difficulties through an intense consideration of its detail and structure.
On the surface, Bend Sinister is predominantly a critique of totalitarianism, but the novel's great surprise is the intervention of its author in the final chapter, driving his creature Adam Krug insane but rescuing him from a world of pain. Krug had previously probed the nature of the afterlife, formulating the possibility of a human spirit (specifically his wife Olga) continuing beyond death as "infinite consciousness;" its alternative as "infinite nothingness." When Krug's creator reduces him to the level of a "mere whim," this seems to favour the latter option, but throughout the novel certain details point towards a secondary Presence beyond Adam's world.
In facto, Nabokov has carefully balanced the supernatural dimension of the work associated with the god-like author with another supernatural dimension, inhabited by Olga. By appearing in the form of a hawkmoth in the world of her husband's author, however, Olga seems to have trumped her creator, and subtly manipulates the author into inadvertently answering in the affirmative krug's question about survival beyond death.
This "solution" to the novel is itself problematic and paradoxical, as the author-figure that appears in the final scene is clearly intended to represent Valadimir Nabokov, the actual author, and is thus unlikely to have been duped by a figment of his own imagination. On closer inspection, however, the figure of Nabokov presented within the novel is not entirely consistent with his original. Although establishing this schism allows space for Olga to work her particular magic, it fails to tip up several of the novel's loose ends.
It is my contention that Nabokov employs the crackpot theories of Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, a proponent of the theory that Francis Bacon composed the works of William Shakespeare, as an outlandish tool for reconciling the novel's contradictions, a makeshift mechanism for incorporating the deistic narrator, ghostly Olga and Vladimir Nabokov, the true author, into a metaphor for an otherworld that, Nabokov insisted, was unimaginable.