''Vladimir Nabokov's Comic Quest for Reality' - Nottingham eTheses

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BENDSINISTER
INVITATIONTOABEHEADING
Bend Sinister1 and Invitation to a Beheading2 are
often quoted together, for they have much in common,
although several years lie between the respective
3
dates of their composition and publication.
Both
look very much like political novels, dealing as they
do with the suffering of individuals in perverse and
cruel totalitarian states whose systems are "opposed
to the life of the Mind"4 and whose supreme aim is
"the destruction of the individual. "5
The protagonist of Bend Sinister is Adam Krug, a
professor of philosophy, whose wife has just died. He
lives and suffers in a country that has just been
taken over by the Ekwilists, a revolutionary party
under the leadership of one Paduk, preaching and
demanding the absolute equality of all people. Paduk,
otherwise "the Toad"6, is a former schoolmate of
Krug's and used to be Krug's victim in the schoolyard.
Krug bullied him and "every blessed day for about
five school years" (BS, 45) sat upon his face. Now
their roles are reversed. The philosopher is helpless
in his dealings with the dictator. The only person
who dares openly oppose him by being faithful to his
own private and individual convictions, he sees first
his friends disappear one by one, and as that does
not induce him to submit, his little son is brutally
taken from him, is sent to an Institute for Abnormal
Children, where he becomes the victim of a hideous