Superior Amusement

BEND SINISTER (242 pp.) -- Vladimir Nabokov--Holt ($2.75).

This novel, like Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the Narcissus, shows how heady a wine the English language may be for a foreign writer of parts who has thoroughly acquired it. Bend Sinister, Vladimir Nabokov's second novel in English (he has written seven in Russian), is one of the most intelligent nightmares of dictatorship in modern fiction. It is also a lip-smacking over the flavors of English prose to rouse the tired syntax in 10,000 editorials. Nabokov's style glimmers with reflections of many great styles (Gogol's, Flaubert's, Joyce's) and yet is distinctly his own: rapid, brilliantly metaphorical, daintily savage and smooth. The reader, never bored, can run his own blue pencil through Nabokov's excesses, such as the "anal ruby" of a bicycle. He will not have to use the pencil often.

In form, Bend Sinister is a frank piece of dreamwork. Real as only a serious work of imagination can be, it tells the story of Philosopher Adam Krug during a revolution in a dream country which has strong resemblances to Germany, to Russia and, in certain aspects, to the U.S. The frightened faculty of his university call on Philosopher Krug to intercede for their institution with the new dictator, Paduk (nicknamed the Toad), who was a clammy schoolmate of Krug's 30 years before. Krug refuses; the dictatorship goes on.

The "Harmonious Majority." Life under the Ekwilist (equalitarian) regime is sketched by Nabokov with a disgusted charm unequaled by contemporary satirists. He has an ear for the obscene overtones of the dictator's loudspeaker: " 'From now on,' continued the tremendously swollen Tyrannosaurus, 'the way to total joy lies open. You will attain it, brothers, by dint of ardent intercourse with one another ... by adjusting ideas and emotions to those of a harmonious majority ... by letting your person dissolve in the virile oneness of the State.' "

The secret of Bend Sinister's effect is that it places side by side, heightened by the selectivity of an adept and angry writer, the most moronic abominations of totalitarianism and the finest lights of the secular European mind. The hoaxed and flattered humanity of the mass man is contrasted with the honest and deeply suffering humanity of the individual; but all this is done so lightly that it seems a mocking and superior amusement.

When the Ekwilist State triumphs, murdering innocence, Nabokov's style is still playful, but it takes on a Swiftian intensity. Krug goes mad. And it is clear that the professor's doom (which is Europe's) came about not merely because he was honorable, but because he was vain, obtuse to evil, and absorbed in his own past.

The Author. Vladimir Nabokov (rhymes with a block off), 48, is a research fellow at Harvard's Agassiz Museum. A robust and urbane Russian emigre, Nabokov spends his mornings studying butterflies at the museum, teaches Russian and Russian literature three afternoons a week at Wellesley. As professional lepidopterist, Nabokov has claimed the discovery of several butterflies since he came to America, notably of Neonympha Dorothea, a creature named for a friend who "kicked it up" from the ground as they were walking in the Grand Canyon. Nabokov has written English verse of distinction, both original and in translation of Pushkin and Lermontov. He became a citizen two years ago. Says he: "I think in America I have found more sophisticated, subtle and delicate minds than I ever found in Europe." His first novel in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and his study of Gogol (1944) were both critical successes; Bend Sinister is sure to be another.

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