428
PARTISAN REVIEW
states offered only two heroic possibilities: escape or death.) The trouble
with setting a fictional hero against the totalitarian state is that one has
given him an inhuman nightmare for an opponent; the hero is under–
standable as a human being, but to
be
worthy of a tragic conflict the
villain must also be understandable. One must have those sudden and
frightening sympathies with him, as with Milton's Satan, a secret
desire for the evil the conscious mind condemns. For that reason the
only people who could find our anti-Nazi art entirely convincing are
those who have a submerged area of corresponding brutality which in–
forms them that these wild and savage acts are credible; to anyone else
the stories, in spite of the dreadful fact that they are a close approxima–
tion of the truth, go too far and seem fabricated, another bad Hollywood
dream. (Here I mean to talk only about fictions. In life the political
motivation of dictatorship and the practical meanings of its terror and
murder are all too real.) Perhaps later generations, with their right to
falsify historical truth, can succeed in making the conflict between a
lonely, free intellect and the ruthless state, if not an equal contest, at least
a thoroughly human drama.
Nabokov's plot, though his use of it is entirely different, is very
much like a movie .scenario ·in which these modern horror devices-the
knock of the police, the leer of the government representative, the de-
- mand for identification papers- are our present equivalent of trap
doors, mustache disguises and ghostly voices from the wings. The hero,
Adam Krug, is an internationally famous philosopher who must be made
to support the dictatorship in order to give it prestige abroad. The
government's "seduction" scenes are often close to farce. Krug's friends
are arrested, in a wonderful Chaplinesque interview he is offered the
presidency of the university in exchange for a friendly public statement,
a sexy nurse is sent to tempt him; none of these is successful and it be–
comes necessary to torture and murder Krug's son. The state finally
gets its great philosopher, but only after it has driven him insane.
Nabokov uses this material in a highly original way.
If
I understand
correctly the complicated presentation of the book, he is saying that
political terror is so cheaply theatrical the artist can present it only as
a fantasy. In his book we see the novelist inventing the story, standing
aside from it from time to time, wondering if a certain scene has been
overdone, occasionally questioning the incredible melodrama he has
produced. The incidents are offered as a deliberate fictionalization, but
the reader's knowledge of recent history adds that they are also a fact.
This final irony gives the book its real strength.
The foregoing outline of
Bend Sinister
suggests very little of its
literary quality, which is in many ways extraordinary. Nabokov's style
is not wholly felicitous for fiction and at times his descriptive passages
are, to quote James, "a succession of forced assaults upon the impreg- '
nable stronghold of painting." On the other hand he has the linguistic fa-
