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[SIGHTING] Kerbel on Bend Sinister
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Nabokov's Dystopic 'Bend Sinister' Turns 65 by Sam Kerbel in "The Jewish Daily Forward" Forward (blog)
June 12, 2012, 11:00am
"It's hard to imagine Vladimir Nabokov as a commercial failure. Yet that was precisely what happened with...the nightmarish and satirical dystopian novel "Bend Sinister," ...Originally titled "The Person from Porlock," then "Game to Gunm[etal]" and later "Solus Rex," "Bend Sinister" was Nabokov's first novel composed in the United States...it received only lackluster promotional treatment. [ ] It didn't help the book's success that it garnered mostly mediocre to outright negative reviews upon its release. The New Republic praised its fluent prose - which "belies its author's comparative unfamiliarity with the language" - while disparaging Nabokov's "apparent fascination with his own linguistic achievement." Diana Trilling published a notoriously scathing write-up in The Nation two days after its release, arguing that "what looks like a highly charged sensibility in Mr. Nabokov's style is only fanciness, forced imagery, and deafness to the music of the English language, just as what looks like innovation in method is already its own kind of sterile convention." [ ] This is doubly unfortunate given the rich biographical history from which "Bend Sinister" emerged, especially the author's personal encounters with anti-Semitism. Nabokov was raised by a father who stridently opposed anti-Semitism in pre-1917 Russia, and in 1925 he married a Jewish woman, Véra Slonim, with whom he raised a son in 1930s Germany. As an intensifying anti-Semitic environment cost Véra her job and put Nabokov's career in jeopardy, they first moved to France and later fled to New York as Hitler's troops marched on Paris. Even in America, Nabokov frequently encountered anti-Jewish sentiment, with one Russian professor at Columbia lamenting, 'All one hears here are Yids'."....
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/the-arty-semite/157635/nabokovs-dystopic-bend-sinister-turns-/#ixzz1xiiRReOM
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