Nabokov's Dystopia: Bend Sinister, America and Mass Culture

Abstract

“I am as American as April in Arizona,” Nabokov claimed in a 1966 interview. Although he repeatedly emphasized his American citizenship and the affection he held for his adopted nation, my argument is that his 1947 novel, Bend Sinister, offers us an opportunity to interrogate the received narrative of Nabokov's unproblematic arrival and assimilation into the United States. In examining the engagement with mass culture in this dystopian novel, my intention is to restore some of the political valence denied the novel by both Nabokov and his readers, and to suggest how it functions as a critique of American culture which reveals the author's profound ambivalence about his adopted nation in the early to mid-1940s. Drawing on unpublished archive material, as well as theoretical work by Theodor Adorno, this paper opens up a new approach to Nabokov's American work and demands a reassessment of his avowed apoliticism.