1

Nabokovs Homework in Paris: Stphane Mallarm, Bend Sinister, and the Death
of the Author
Introduction
Vadim, the writer-protagonist of Nabokovs last completed novel, Look at the
Harlequins! (1974), says that in the period after writing The Dare (that is, Nabokovs
Dar, or The Gift (1938)), I began to experience the pangs of a strange transformation. I
did not wake up one Central European morning as a great scarab with more legs than any
beetle can have, but certain excruciating tearings of secret tissues did take place in me.
(99) This violent image alludes to a rupture and metamorphosis in the middle of
Nabokovs career which he had already written of in Speak, Memory (1951; 1967),
picturing it there as a death the death of Sirin, the name under which Nabokov had
published his Russian works.
But Speak, Memory dates the death of Sirin to 1940, the year that Nabokov shifted
into writing in English (Speak, Memory 221), while Vadims comments refer to the period
after Nabokov finished The Gift, in 1937 three years before Nabokov moved to
America. The years between 1937 and 1940, when Nabokov was living in Paris, were
ones of artistic (as well as personal) crisis. Nabokov was at sea, beginning and aborting a
number of works which would later form the basis of his best-known American novels.
The Enchanter (1939) he would later re-write as Lolita (1955), and Ultima Thule and
Solus Rex (1940) as Pale Fire (1962). These years in Paris are one of the least
investigated and most mysterious periods of Nabokovs career.

2
In the late 1930s, Nabokov was making a short-lived attempt to find a base for
himself in France by reinventing himself as a French writer. A frequent visitor to Paris
from as early as October 1932, when he gave a major public reading there, Nabokov in
1936 and 1937 published in French two pieces of prose, Mademoiselle O, and
Pouchkine ou le vrai et le vraisemblable, which appeared in the prestigious journals
Mesures and the Nouvelle Revue franaise. In the French version of Mademoiselle O,
Nabokov sought to stress his French origins by saying that it was Verlaine and Mallarm
who watched over my adolescence.1 He also developed relationships with such
important figures in the French literary world as Michel Leiris and Jean Paulhan. In
Lolita he would give these contacts to Humbert Humbert, who sat with uranists in the
Deux Magots (16) and is supposed to be writing a history of French poetry. 2 Look at the
Harlequins! signals the importance of this engagement with French culture when Vadim,
discussing the reviews of Bend Sinister (reincarnated as Esmerelda and her Parandrus),
says that his homework in Paris had never received its due. (108)
This comment most likely gestures towards the network of allusions Bend
Sinister (1947) makes to the French symbolist poet Stphane Mallarm, and especially to
one of his most famous poems, LAprs-Midi dun Faune (1865-76). Nabokov drew
special attention to these allusions in his 1963 foreword to Bend Sinister:

Stphane Mallarm has left three or four immortal bagatelles, and among these is
LAprs-Midi dun Faune (first drafted in 1865). Krug is haunted by a passage
from this voluptuous eclogue when the faun accuses the nymph of disengaging

1
2

Quoted by Foster in Nabokovs Art of Memory, 118.

For Nabokovs contact with French writers, see Boyd, Russian Years, 437.

3
herself from his embrace sans piti du sanglot dont jtais encore ivre (spurning
the spasm with which I was still drunk). Fractured parts of this line re-echo
through the book, cropping up for instance in the malarma ne donje of Dr
Azureus wail of rue (Chapter Four) and in the donje te zankoriv of apologetic
Krug when he interrupts the kiss of the university student and his little Carmen
(foreshadowing Mariette) in the same chapter. Death, too, is a ruthless
interruption; the widowers heavy sensuality seeks a pathetic outlet in Mariette,
but as he avidly clasps the haunches of the chance nymph he is about to enjoy, a
deafening din at the door breaks the throbbing rhythm forever. (10)

These references to Mallarm come to a focus in a central passage of Bend Sinister,

where Krug has a long dream about his childhood, culminating in an anxious scene in
which he is faced with an exam for which he is unprepared: The theme to be tackled was
an afternoon with Mallarm, an uncle of his mother, but the only part he could remember
seemed to be le sanglot dont jtais encore ivre. (75) That afternoon with Mallarm is
clearly LAprs-Midi dun Faune.
LAprs-Midi, in which a faun-artist dreams of two nymphs, one of whom he
possesses, and one who slips away from him just before his orgasm, haunts many of
Nabokovs later novels by its aesthetic and metaphysical indeterminacy, its exquisite
Symbolist play of language, and its correspondingly intense eroticism. Already, in The
Gift, Nabokov quotes from the very line of the poem, sans piti du sanglot dont jtais
encore ivre (305) which he would make central to Bend Sinister.3 In Lolita, Nabokovs
celebrated neologism nymphet recalls the nymphs of Mallarms poem. The basic plot
3

I am grateful to Will Norman for drawing my attention to this allusion to Mallarm in The Gift.

4
structure of Ada (1969) loosely matches that of LAprs-Midi, with Van, like the faun,
caught between two nymphs, Ada and Lucette. References to Mallarm also go beyond
those to LAprs-Midi. In Pnin (1957), we find that in a pretty edition of Mallarms
poems an especially able scholiast had already underlined in violet ink the difficult word
oiseaux and scrawled above it birds. (115) The opening couplet of John Shades poem
in Pale Fire, with its image of the waxing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane
alludes to Mallarms particular use of the word azur, and to a scene in his 1866 poem
Les Fentres. And, as I aim to show throughout this article, Bend Sinister engages with
details, images, ideas and problems from poems across Mallarmes oeuvre.
Nabokovs engagement with Mallarm emerges as a crucial factor in the artistic
metamorphosis or strange transformation, those tearings of certain muscles which
anticipated the death of Sirin. From the 1860s on Mallarm wrote poetry doggedly
working through the formal and linguistic implications for literature of the death or
disappearance of God, while in his theoretical writings formulating the views which in
1967 would be popularised by Roland Barthes under the slogan of the death of the
author. As Mallarm wrote in Crisis in Poetry (1895), if the poem is to be pure, the
poets voice must be stilled and the initiative taken by the words themselves, which will
be set in motion as they meet unequally in collision, so that the poet will be absent. 4
LAprs-Midi, and especially the line of the poem that Nabokov focuses on in Bend
Sinister, exemplifies this aspiration. Elsewhere in his writings of the late 1930s and early
1940s Nabokov very literally depicts the absence or death of his authors, but in Bend
Sinister he is marginally more oblique: the Author divides into two conflicting forces, the
one who writes Krugs tortures, and the other who steps in at the end to save him from
4

Mallarm: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters, 41.

5
them, making it nearly impossible to make sense of the text by appealing to the intentions
of any implied authorial presence.
Through a series of detailed allusions to LAprs-Midi, Bend Sinister shows
that it is following Mallarms conclusions about the psychological, linguistic, and formal
implications of this evacuation of textual authority. Nabokov focused on the word
sanglot in LAprs-Midi, where it can signify a sob of either grief or orgasm. He
made that ambiguity central to Bend Sinister, in which he explores the illicit relation
between Krugs mourning process for his dead wife Olga and his lust for his maid
Mariette. So, too, Bend Sinister investigates the word azur, which throughout Mallarm
encapsulates the absence of God. Like Mallarm, Nabokov asks whether the
transcendence towards which art gestures is real or merely the premise in a game of
aesthetic make-believe. In turn Bend Sinister opens the possibility that it has no
substance: its plot may be only the dream of the mourner depicted at the opening of the
novel, and the artwork itself may be made out of nothingness. But it is the linguistic
implications of the death of the author which are most important in Bend Sinister and
whose relevance extends into modernism as a whole. Here I show that Nabokov
understood that these implications were potentially self-contradictory, driving language
towards opposite poles of punning and austerity, represented for Nabokov in his
American period by the examples of Eliots Four Quartets (1943) and Joyces Finnegans
Wake (1939). This dilemma, the direct linguistic corollary of the death of the author, is in
Bend Sinister irresolvable, and on its intractability founders any attempt to extract from
the novel a clear authorial message.
1 Nabokov and the Death of the Author

6
Barthes essay on The Death of the Author is often presented to students as a
theoretical novelty, divorced from any literary and intellectual sources. Yet it is better
seen not as a claim about all of literature but as a theory of a certain developments in late
modernism, which can be dated specifically to the late 1930s and early 1940s, when
several authors, including Joyce and Borges as well as Nabokov, were all working
through the implications of Mallarms poetic. In Borgess 1939 story, Pierre Menard,
Author of Don Quixote, Pierre Menard, a devotee of Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarm, and
Valry, decides to copy out several chapters of Don Quixote. Word for word, Menards
Quixote is identical to the original, but it is a different book, since the same phrases mean
something completely different when written in the 1930s to what they meant when
written in the Spanish Golden Age; or also to someone who reads them while bearing
their original linguistic context in mind. 5 The meaning of a text is given neither by author
nor words alone, but by both in enigmatic combination with the readers expectations and
the assumptions of the linguistic context in which one reads it. In Finnegans Wake, which
Nabokov was reading in its fascicles from as early on as 1936 (RY 425), Joyce repeatedly
imagines the author as a mere forger, claiming authority for words not his own, and the
book as an epical forged cheque on the public, (181) Nabokov had already explored the
same idea of the artist as forger in The Leonardo (1933). He would develop the idea in
a different direction in Bend Sinister, where Paduks father has invented a mechanism for
faking other peoples handwriting, and Paduks tyranny represents a false authorship, set
against Krugs ill-fated struggle to win sovereignty over words.
The death of Sirin in Speak, Memory is only the apex of a long series of deaths of
authors in Nabokovs writing of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In The Paris Poem,
5

Borges, Fictions, 42-51.

7
written in 1943 but dealing with the critical years spent in Paris at the end of the 30s, he
imagines how now and then / ones heart starts clamouring: Author! Author!, only to
receive the reply, He is not in the house, gentlemen. (Poems and Problems 121) The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) ends with the death of the author Sebastian Knight.
In the 1939 story Vasiliy Shishkov, Nabokov imagines meeting an author who wants to
compose A Survey of Pain and Vulgarity, only to leave a manuscript in the authors
hands and vanish. (Stories 499) In the accompanying poem, The Poets, signed Vasiliy
Shishkov, the Russian poets announce their departure from the world: into a region
name it as you please: / wilderness, death, disavowal of language, / or maybe simpler: the
silence of love (Poems and Problems 95). Here the death of the author is one link in a
long chain of metaphors, a point Nabokov develops at the end of Bend Sinister, where the
author, having saved Krug, concedes that the immortality I had conferred on the poor
fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon words, adding, But the very last lap of his
life has been happy and it had been proven to him that death was but a question of style.
(200)
In these instances, the author is Nabokovs term for the safely detached
viewpoint within society and the novel that he refers to elsewhere as the ivory tower. In
1942, in The Creative Writer, he recommended the much abused ivory tower ... not as
a writers prison, but merely as a fixed address. (21) Four and a half years later, in a
letter that Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena on 15 th June 1946, he would partially recant
on this recommendation. Nabokov begins by boasting about a prize Dmitri has just won
in Latin, but this bright image of a protected childhood immediately casts a shadow into
Nabokovs thoughts:

Mityushenka [Dmitri] has been a marvellous student this year, he won a prize in
Latin. My dear, however one wants to hide in ones ivory tower, there are things
which wound one too deeply, for instance German atrocities, the burning of
children in ovens, - children, who are just as ravishingly entertaining and beloved
as our children. I retreat into myself, but I find there such hatred for the German,
for the concentr. camp, for every tyrant, that as a refuge ce nest pas grand chose.
(Perepiska s sestroi 41)

By choosing Cincinnatus as the name for the hero of Invitation to a Beheading, Nabokov
had signalled his commitment to the Roman ideal of retirement from political life. But
the thought of Latin now prompts Nabokov to acknowledge that such a retreat is no
longer possible for him. Here, as elsewhere in Nabokov, the ivory tower is closely
connected with the protection of childhood; and when a society fails to protect childhood,
that ivory tower crumbles. The Holocaust prompts Nabokov not to the familiar
conclusion that there cannot be a God who would allow such suffering, but to the
secondary, more Mallarman inference, that there can no longer be an Author who stands
back and dispassionately contemplates such pain.
This letter gives us the inner logic of Bend Sinister, which Nabokov was finishing
in June 1946. By choosing Bend Sinister as the title for his first American novel in the
new style, Nabokov was alluding to the heraldic insignia generally associated with
bastardy, that is, with paternity put in question. 6 In Bend Sinister, the philosopher Krugs
6

In his introduction to Bend Sinister (5), Nabokov says that the term is popularly, but incorrectly,
supposed to denote bastardy, but that the title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a
distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life, a sinister and sinistral world. But there were
many other images Nabokov could have used for distortion. When an author picks as his title a phrase

9
independence is compromised when he fails to protect his son David from Paduks
tyranny, having already agreed to collaborate with Paduk in an attempt to save David.
When David is in any case killed, this failure of paternal authority is matched by the
Author splitting into two contradictory forces. At the end of the novel, after Krugs
obstinate independence has led to the appalling torture and death of his son David, Krug
is on the point of death, when the author steps in to save him by lifting him out of the
novel. Unlike Cincinnatus, Krug cannot save himself. In a summary of the novel he sent
to Doubleday publishers, Nabokov wrote: This singular apotheosis (a device never yet
attempted in literature) is, if you like, a kind of symbol of the Divine power. I, the Author,
take Krug to my bosom and the horrors of the life he has been experiencing turn out to be
the artistic invention of the Author. (Selected Letters 50)
The fundamental ambiguity of an author who first tortures and then later saves his
character makes it difficult to read the book by inferring the authors purpose. In the light
of Nabokovs own play in this letter on the contradiction between the actions of I, the
Author and the Author, I suggest it is helpful to imagine two authors in Bend Sinister:
the Author who intervenes to save Krug, and by doing so erects again his ivory tower,
and the author whom he usurps, who had presided over most of the novel, and who had
allowed Krugs young son David to be tortured to death, even wallowing in the scene
with sickening facetiousness and gratuitous detail.7

whose main connotation is bastardy, the reader need not, and cannot, suppress that idea on the strength of
an authorial diktat. Here, as with his assaults on Freud, Nabokovs denial introduces into the text a
possibility which is not effaced but highlighted by being crossed out. If Nabokov had merely ignored this
possibility of bastardy he would have suppressed it better. But by raising it he initiated and exemplified the
play of authorial self-subversion with which Bend Sinister is concerned.
7
On this side of the implied author of Bend Sinister, see Kuzmanovich, Suffer the Little Children, 55: In
both Crystalsens story and in the scenes from the film shown to Krug, Davids death and torture are
presented precisely on the Ekwilist states terms as bumbling but creative cruelty.

10
Once noticed, this doubleness of purpose in Bend Sinister, once noticed, offers a
key to the novel. With his didactic sneering and heavy irony, the Author tries to put it
beyond question that we are reading a tale of heroic resistance against a vulgar and
cackhanded tyranny. Yet Krug is a very unsatisfactory hero. He fails to protect his son
and is vain and disloyal to his friends, and his bullying of Paduk in childhood provides
some grounds for seeing him not as the tyrants exact opposite but as his distant double.
Like Paduk, Krug indulges in licentious Mallarman wordplay or paronomasia, the
contagious sickness in the world of words which in his introduction Nabokov describes
as definitive of Padukgrad (8). And the sharp contrast that the Author establishes between
Krugs wholesome love for his dead wife Olga and the temptations of his sluttish maid
Mariette is compromised by a nightmare system of dreams and verbal repetitions, centred
on LAprs-Midi, which suggests a perverse reciprocity between these two objects of
longing, and between the grief and desire they embody.
2 Sanglot: Ambiguity and Duality in LAprs-Midi and Bend Sinister
In The Gift, Nabokov had already quoted the line of LAprs-Midi around
which he would later organise Bend Sinister. The quotation comes in the final chapter of
the novel, a chapter which Nabokov wrote in 1937 while already living permanently in
Paris. It is summer and Fyodor, having published his satirical book on Chernyshevski, is
enjoying the feeling of release after a period of hard work. He experiences this summery
freedom as the reward for his successful rebellion against the false idol of Chernyshevski
and the dour work-ethic he embodies. One hot morning, Fyodor goes off to sunbathe in
the Grunewald park in the suburbs of Berlin:

11
Somewhere in the vicinity sounded girlish voices, and he stopped in a pattern of
shadow, which swayed motionless along his arm but palpitated rhythmically on
his left side, between the ribs. []
The voices sounded closer and then receded. A horsefly that had settled
unnoticed on his thigh managed to jab him with its blunt proboscis. Moss, turf,
sand, each in its own way communicated with the soles of his bare feet, and each
in its own way the sun and the shade stroked the hot silk of his body. His senses
sharpened by the unrestricted heat were tantalized by the possibility of sylvan
encounters, mythical abductions. Le sanglot dont jtais encore ivre. He would
have given a year of his life, even a leap-year, for Zina to be here or any of her
corps de ballet. (305)

It is not clear whether we are supposed to imagine that Fyodor himself has been
reminded of Mallarms line, or that it is a narratorial interpolation. Even the text is
carefree, released now from imperatives of clarity. In either case, the allusion is apt above
all because the extreme sensuality of the moment recalls Mallarms poem. As in
Mallarm, Fyodor longs for the lone nymph whom he sees sprawl[ed], her legs bare to
the crotch and suede-soft to the eye (305). Conscience seems dissolved in the heat of
this Arcadian scene, and there is no self-accusatory pang in Fyodors desire for a young
girl, nor in his recognition that he could be satisfied either by Zina his beloved or by
any of her corps de ballet as if she were only the prima ballerina in the phantasmal
theatre of his erotic imagination. As in LAprs-Midi, Fyodor is positioned between
two nymphs: Zina, whom he possesses, though here she is absent, and the German girl,

12
who is inaccessible, though physically present. But for the reader who knows Mallarms
poem and notices the allusion, there is an extra point: Fyodor or Nabokov has
misquoted the line, missing out sans piti and changing du to le, and by doing so
hiding the pain and loss that Mallarms poem treats as inseparable from ecstasy.
LAprs-Midi is a study of unconsummated desire and the art it generates; the spasm or
sanglot of pleasure is simultaneously a sob also a sanglot of loss, since the nymph
pitilessly withdraws at the moment of climax. That sense of desire as something
inevitably mined by loss is absent at this moment of The Gift, or is, rather, suspended and
displaced, at least for a few paragraphs. It is only after that moment has passed that
Fyodor on the next page notices three lecherous Germans lying around lusting after the
same young girl, and is forced to see himself in the same light, the erotic reverie
collapsing into a mood of disgust. The charmed fabric which he himself had so carefully
spun completely fell to pieces, and he saw with revulsion the crumpled, twisted,
deformed by lifes noreaster, more or less naked or more or less clothed the latter were
the more terrible bodies of bathers (petty-bourgeois, idle workers) stirring on the dirtygrey sand. (306)
Nabokov would centre Bend Sinister around that ambiguity of sanglot which in
The Gift he had deflected so as to grant Fyodor a few paragraphs of impossibly
unclouded pleasure. Nabokov often organised his novels like this, around a snatch of
poetry in which he had identified an ambiguity or surprising element in a few simpleseeming words, and seen that it formed a conceptual crux around which the whole oeuvre
of that poet turned, and on which, correspondingly, he could make his own novel pivot.
He did this in Despair with lines from Pushkins famous lyric Tis time, my dear, tis

13
time, where he noticed that, surprisingly, Pushkins edenic realm is one not of pure play
and pleasure but of work and pure delight the very point which Hermann misses. He
spun similar intertextual webs around Poes Annabel Lee in Lolita, and Marvells The
Garden in Ada, and did so, most intricately, in Pale Fire, where the counterpointing of
Kinbotes misery and Shades happiness is brought to a focus in the set of lines Shade
quotes from the very centre of Popes Essay on Man, lines whose subtle ironies on folly
mediate between the more benign praise of folly in Popes earlier work and the
aggressive satire of his later poetry.8 In Bend Sinister, Nabokov had already done
something very similar by choosing the line of Mallarm from the centre of LAprsMidi dun Faune, a poem which in turn can be placed at the centre of Mallarms poetry,
mediating between his earliest, less linguistically experimental writing, and such later
poems as Un Coup de Ds (1897), in which Mallarm organises his words so that they
frequently signify two exactly opposite things. The line contains a word, sanglot, which
in Bend Sinister forms a secret passageway connecting Krugs grief for Olga to his desire
for Mariette, and undermines the apparent antithesis between those two passions which
the Author, Krugs conscience, and our own sense of propriety, would like at all costs to
maintain.
John Burt Foster has drawn attention to the quintessentially Mallarman
ambiguities in the line from LAprs-Midi:

Nabokov translates [this line] in erotic terms as spurning the spasm with which I
was still drunk [] But Nabokovs further comment that Death, too, is a
ruthless interruption remains enigmatic until we see the ambiguity of sanglot
8

See Karshan, Vladimir Nabokov, 132; 219-25.

14
and ivre. In their literal meanings of sob and drunk, they refer to Krugs
stunned grief for his wife as well as to what Nabokov calls his heavy sensuality.
During Krugs dream of the past [], accordingly, in a Mallarm allusion that
goes unmentioned, a class theme on The Afternoon of a Faun dissolves into the
painful vision of Krugs wife removing the jewels of earthly existence.9

In the ambiguity on sanglot as a sob of both sorrow and orgasm, grief and
desire, Nabokov found an instance of the semantic transparencies yielding layers of
receding or welling sense that in his preface he speaks of as characteristic of
Sinisterbad (Bend Sinister 9), the imaginary tyrannical kingdom of Bend Sinister. Early
on in the novel, Krugs tears of grief for his dead wife Olga are expressed in the language
of a sexual act when we are told that Krug yielded, with what pleasure there was in the
act, to the soft warm pleasure of tears. (16) Later, the young housemaid Mariette, who
tries to seduce Krug, is wearing a cheap musky perfume called Sanglot (136). This
invocation of Mallarms line suggests that Krugs grief for his wife is mixed with and
passes into his desire for Mariette, the sob of sorrow becoming the sob of sexual desire,
the grief and desire mixing to form the impalpable atmosphere or rank perfume of
Bend Sinister.
In LAprs-Midi, Mallarm embodies the ambiguity of sanglot, and all the
other dualities of his poem, in the figure of two nymphs with whom the faun is sexually
involved, one of whom is more chaste, the other with whom he is engaged in intercourse
until she tears herself away from his embrace just before he could have consummated his
desire just as, in Bend Sinister, Krug is about to succumb to Mariettes seductions when
9

Foster, Bend Sinister, 33-4.

15
Paduks thugs come banging at his door. Nabokovs preface encourages us to hold
Mallarms poem in the back of our mind as we read this scene: the paragraph in it on the
allusions to LAprs-Midi concludes with the comment that Death, too, is a ruthless
interruption; the widowers heavy sensuality seeks a pathetic outlet in Mariette, but as he
avidly clasps the haunches of the chance nymph he is about to enjoy, a deafening din at
the door breaks the throbbing rhythm forever. (10) Here Mariette is the nymph escaping
the faun. Yet the allusion to Mallarms lines summons back into this scene the ghost of
Olga, to fill the role of the other nymph; and since Krug does not in fact ever possess
Mariette, an alternative reading of the relation of LAprs-Midi to the whole of Bend
Sinister beckons, in which the nymph escaping the faun is not Mariette, but Olga, who
slipped away from Krugs embraces into death at the beginning of the novel. Her death is
the ruthless interruption to a marriage which Krug had expected to go on indefinitely. The
ambiguity of Mallarms line, with its layers of receding and welling sense, serves as the
bridge between reality and dream, desire and its oblique, hidden origins. Krugs dream, in
which he is unable to answer an exam on LAprs-Midi, suggests his unwillingness to
pry into the complex mechanics by which his process of mourning for his wife, and even
his tenderness for his son David, have perversely twisted and fused to produce his queasy
desire for Mariette with her attractively childish face (120).
If Krug, and with him the novel itself, balks from analysing this mixture into its
components, and fails to make them reassuringly distinct, this reluctance is in itself
Mallarman. In LAprs-Midi the faun reflects that:

Gay with the conquest of those traitorous fears,

16
I sinned when I divided the dishevelled
Tuft of kisses that the gods had ravelled.10 (Collected Poems 40)

That is, his sin, or crime, was to try to separate the two nymphs from one another; and
also, to attempt sexual intercourse by parting the vulval lips or nymphes..11 As with
much else in Mallarm, this scene offers an image for language itself. Mallarm arranges
his ambiguities so as to tantalise the reader, without encouraging him or her to parse the
ambiguities into their elements.
One possible approach for us, on this account, is not to separate out the dualities
of Bend Sinister still further, but to do what Krug is unwilling or unable to do, which is to
understand that Krugs lust for Mariette is obscurely connected to his longing for Olga.
Just before the final scene in which Krug and Mariette are interrupted on the verge of a
sexual spasm, Krug has had a dream in which he looked down on a river on which
snowflakes were falling and yet, strangely, not melting. In the river he saw a tugboat
passing, drawing a barge behind it. At that moment, a snowflake touched his underlip,
and melted, and he saw, just before the barge passed away under the bridge, that on it sat
a very fat Olga in the yellow blouse he disliked (158).

He awoke (asprawl on his leather armchair) and immediately understood that

something extraordinary had happened. It had nothing to do with the dream or the
quite unprovoked and rather ridiculous physical discomfort he felt (a local

10
11

The translations given are Henry Weinfelds.

Pearson, Unfolding Mallarm, 118.

17
congestion) [] What had happened was that again he knew he could write. (1589)

The peculiarity of this passage is Krugs brusque denial of suggestions we did not know
had been raised: that it had nothing to do with the dream or the local congestion
(presumably an erection). The implication is that Krug has woken up with precisely these
intuitions, unwelcome though they may be to his waking reason: that his dream has
broken his writers block, and that his regained sense of creativity is one and the same as
his rediscovered sexual potency. Like the snowflakes, he has unfrozen. All of Krugs
erotic and creative energies had been bound up into the process of mourning for Olga.
Now she passes away under the bridge, with him looking at her not with fondness but
with some distaste (she is fat, and wearing a blouse he doesnt like). Suddenly released,
his libido is redirected towards Mariette.
None of this is made clear. But as Bend Sinister puts it, when the dream-self is
dead for the ten thousandth time [] the day-self inherits for the ten thousandth time
those dusty trifles, those debts, those bundles of illegible letters (61). The day-self that
dominates the book does not know how to read those dream-letters, and the Author who
incarnates that day-self seeks to dissuade the reader from attempting to do so. But he has
not succeeded in clearing them away, and a full reading of the book will take account of
them. To do this we must overcome the powerful forces of psychic censorship and
repression that we would face in the interpretation of any dream. The logic of Krugs
dream recalls Freud, yet as always Nabokov is on hand in the preface to ridicule and
expel any thought of the Viennese Quack (all my books should be stamped Freudians,

18
Keep Out) a phrase which expresses a desire to keep at bay the interpretive police who
came hammering at the door when Krug was about to consummate his unspeakable
desire for Mariette (11). And the only mention of Freud in Bend Sinister comes after one
of Krugs dreams when, just after waking up, he looks into the bottom of a toilet bowl
where a safety razor blade envelope with Dr S. Freuds face and signature floated. (78)
The image is suggestive of how in the morning Krug, and the books day-self, want to
shave or flush away the mess accumulated overnight.
Yet the sheer crudity of this image, in a book that teaches us about the political
dangers of crudity, should incite in us a spirit of independence and resistance, and as it
happens Freuds well-known essay Mourning and Melancholia (1915) brings into
definition Nabokovs treatment of the same subject in Bend Sinister.12 Krugs dream
parallels Freuds description of how in mourning time is needed for the command of
reality-testing to be carried out in detail [] when this work has been accomplished the
ego will have succeeded in freeing its libido from the lost object. Then too, the morbid
self-disgust and sense of emptiness Krug experiences matches Freuds theory that in
depressive mourning the libido retreats into the ego, where it establishes an
identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus the shadow of the object fell
upon the ego, and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it
12

Nabokovs relationship to Freud is a contentious subject, but it is enough here to recall that Nabokov
certainly read Freud in the 1920s, and that in rejecting him so vehemently, as here in Bend Sinister, his
novels engage with him closely and ensure that he is a constant if despised presence within them. Like
many modernists, Nabokov was in competition with Freud for sovereignty over the unconscious, and to use
Freud to clarify his treatment of a particular subject is not to suggest that he was slavishly influenced by
Freud, but to show that he was working in the same territory as Freud and came to many similar
conclusions.
Nabokovs 1931 satire on Freud is in Sobranie sochinenii, 3: 697-9. For some accounts of Nabokovs
intimate duel with Freud, see Berman, Talking Cure, 211-38, and Green, Freud and Nabokov, 78: In
opening up a text by Nabokov, whenever we might forget about the existence of Freud, there is Nabokov,
reminding us of Freuds presence and thus establishing him as a figure within Nabokovs world. It is as if
Nabokov had a need to create Freud, a fictional Freud who became for Nabokov a manufactured foil or
double to his own authorial persona, analogous to those doubles so prevalent in his fiction.

19
were an object, the forsaken object. The self, which now feels as empty as the space
made absent by the loss of the loved object, is bullied by a vehement conscience which it
experiences as an alien and tyrannical interloper. This compares to the passage close to
the beginning of Bend Sinister, where Krug, sobbing with grief, discriminated between
the throbbing one and the one that looked on [] This was the last stronghold of the
dualism he abhorred. The square root of I is I. (17) Freuds comment that the loss of a
love-object is an excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make
itself effective and come into the open finds an echo in Krugs mixed feelings towards
Olga.13 Notwithstanding the tenderness with which he sanctifies Olgas memory, there are
a number of dissident details: the distaste he feels for her in his dream of her on a boat,
and another dream in which he sees her taking off her jewellery and then taking apart her
body itself, an expression of an eroticised mixture of love and hostility: his pity and
shame reached their climax, and at the ultimate gesture of the tall cold stripteaser,
prowling pumalike up and down the stage, with a horrible qualm Krug awoke. (76) Here
is not only the desire that Krug will later redirect towards Mariette but also the hostility
and shame, so that the seemingly opposite feelings of Krug towards Olga and Mariette
reveal themselves as the antithetical expressions of a single original unity of love and
hatred.
But there are other ways of reading those dream-letters than by appealing to
Freuds authority: Mallarms LAprs-Midi treats the same condition of ambivalence
and self-division in the face of loss that Freud theorises in Mourning and Melancholia.
The duality between the two sides of Krugs libido his seemingly more salubrious love
for Olga, and his humiliating aggressive desire for Mariette in itself corresponds to
13

Freud, Standard Edition, XIV, 252; 249; 251.

20
LAprs-Midi, in which the faun is a fundamentally dual creature, animal and man,
lascivious and lyrical. The faun effectively rapes the nymph, and then out of this brutal
act makes the ethereal music of his poem. This duality is even figured in the twin pipes of
the fauns flute; more profoundly, it is echoed in the dualities between the side of the faun
which thinks and that other side of the faun which is the object of thought, and between
the voice that speaks LAprs-Midi and the shadowy personage it addresses as you
tes sens fabuleux! (Collected Poems 38)
These doublings expand outwards into the larger plot structure of Bend Sinister,
namely the relation between Krug and Paduk. This is not quite, as it may first appear, a
direct opposition between virtuous hero and villainous tyrant. In Tyrants Destroyed, a
short story Nabokov wrote in 1938, the tyrant and the hero turn out to be two inseparable
halves of a whole; as the hero says about the tyrant, he was totally inside me, fattened on
the intensity of my hatred. (Stories 457) This is the idea which Nabokov developed into
Bend Sinister, which also hints at a covert reciprocity between the tyrant and his
opponent. Krug went to school with the tyrant Paduk, regularly bullying him, and Bend
Sinister seems quietly to suggest that Krug and Paduk are shadows or twins of one
another, alike in their bullying tendencies and single-minded egotism (51).
Nabokov had been playing with such secret affinities or dialectics between hero
and villain, and their corresponding virtues and vices, from the 1920s onwards. We can
find them, for instance, in his 1923-4 play, The Tragedy of Mr. Morn, a distant source of
Bend Sinister. In Morn, as Gennady Barabtarlo has shown, Nabokov studies how each of
Morns excellent qualities has a shadow counterpart, so that, for instance, personal
honor can transpose into an unpleasant haughty pride, as it also does in Krug. 14 So,
14

Barabtarlo, Nabokovs Trinity, 109-138; 128.

21
too, in The Gift, Nabokov hints at many implicit parallels underlying and complicating
the surface contrast of Fyodor and Chernyshevski, a perfect example of that dialectic
which the suggestively named Strannolyubski (strange love) playfully calls truths
merry-go-round (224). Nabokov hardly needed to have re-read Mallarm, then, to
conceive this point. But in Bend Sinister the tacit affinity between Krug and Paduk
crystallises a more specifically Mallarman logic, according to which seemingly opposite
propositions simultaneously conflict with and reinforce one another. In Mallarms 1883
sonnet, Quand lombre menaa de la fatale loi (When the shadow menaced with its
fatal law), for instance, the fatal law of the deterministic Newtonian universe
presupposes as its natural correlate some cruel tyrant who might by his sovereign power
have willed such a prison into being. To this imagined tyrant, Mallarm turns, and, in a
characteristic equivocation, alleges, Vous ntes quun orgeuil menti par les tnbres /
Aux yeux du solitaire bloui de sa foi. (You are but a proud lie composed of nothing /
In the eyes of the solitary dazzled by his faith.) (66) That is, on one reading, the solitary
poet sees through the lie of a materialist tyranny. On another reading, the lie of that
tyranny is constituted by the perspective of the dazzled solitary religious figure, who
erects that tyrant in preference to empty shadows, and indeed makes the tyrant out of that
frightening nothingness. This is the rationale of Bend Sinister, in which Krug sees
through Paduk and yet lends his tyranny the recognition of his hatred. More specifically,
Krugs vanity is the counterpart to Paduks power, as in Mallarm, where gloire
signifies both the laudable glory of poetic and intellectual aspiration and the selfdefeating vainglory or lust for power to which those ambition are often prey.15

15

See Las de lAmer Repos (Weary of Bitter Sleep), Victorieusement fui le suicide beau (The
beautiful suicide victoriously fled), and Petit Air I (Little Air I).

22
3 Nant: Doubt and Imagination
The paradox of something as substantial as a tyrant being composed of nothing
brings us to a central issue in Mallarm. We find the same paradox throughout Un Coup
de Ds, where at a certain point in the tenth folio we read that RIEN [] NAURA EU
LIEU [] QUE LE LIEU NOTHING [] WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE [] BUT
THE PLACE (142-3). The nothing here is the substantive something of the poem.
Nothing outside the poem will have taken place, yet the poem itself is a something, a
place made out of that nothing. The whole poem, with its drama of metaphysical
shipwreck, is only the massive expansion of a moment of thought. This paradox, which
Mallarm puts abstractly in Un Coup de Ds, he makes into a more definite image in
LAprs-Midi, where the faun cannot be sure whether or not his encounter with the
nymphs was only a dream. Aimai-je un rve? (Did I love a dream?) (38) When he
wakes up, the faun has only ce doux rien (these sweet nothings) (39) of nymphs lips
preserved in his memory, and together with this nothing, the smallest trace of a
something, Mon sein, vierge de preuve, atteste une morsure / Mystrieuse, due quelque
august dent; (My chest reveals an unsolved mystery [virgin of proof] / The
toothmarks of some strange, majestic creature:) (39). The faun cannot be sure if the
nymphs existed or were only a dream; nor whether the song or poem that he has made out
of his loss and doubt can perpetuate them and make them real; nor whether its beauty
represents anything in the world or only falsifies it. This doubt is the fauns theme: Mon
doute, amas de nuit ancienne, sachve (My doubt, nights ancient hoard, pursues its
theme) (38).

23
Bend Sinister is also a study in the poetics of doubt. In Nabokovs novel, as in
Mallarms poem, it is left unclear whether anything has happened, or whether the whole
novel is only the dramatisation of a single tortured moment in the psyche of the mourner
in the hospital whom we encounter at the beginning of the novel, who may be Krug, or
the author whom we glimpse staring at the same windows at the end of the novel, or
someone else entirely. It is true that in his preface to Bend Sinister, Nabokov says that
the puddle is observed by Krug from a window of the hospital where his wife is dying.
(8) But, as with many of Nabokovs comments in his prefaces, this seems a tactical
oversimplification that does not do justice to the novel itself. The I who speaks the
opening sounds very different from Krug in the rest of the novel. And if he is, as
Nabokov says, Krug, then the Krug we read about in the main body of the novel is a
figure of his imagination; for none of the events of the novel can have happened yet to
the figure of the first chapter of the novel, whose wife has not yet died.
The Author who speaks in the final chapter of Bend Sinister says that from the
window of his room he could also distinguish the glint of a special puddle (the one Krug
has somehow perceived through the layer of his own life (200), and in the preface to
Bend Sinister Nabokov says that the plot starts to breed in the bright broth of a rain
puddle, whose image reappears throughout the novel in various disguises, and vaguely
evokes in him [Krug] my link with him: a rent in his world leading to another world of
tenderness, brightness and beauty. (8) If Nabokov had followed through on his original
idea of calling the novel Vortex, 16 it would have focused attention on how all the action
of the novel may be seen as having been brewed out of the vortex of ripples (13) the
mourner sees in the puddle on the first page of the novel. We are invited to imagine a
16

See Boyd, American Years, 113.

24
system of regressions, in which this Author, sitting in his comparative paradise in
America, and grieving over the loss of his homeland, has personified that grief in the
figure of the mourner in the first chapter; used that mourner and the crystal of the puddle
as a looking-glass, in which he indulges and extends his anxieties, about the tyranny of
death and matter, and the well-being of his child; and then given those feelings form
through his memories of Hamlet and LAprs-Midi.
Paduk, then, whose name distantly recalls the Shakespearean word paddock, or
toad, applied to Claudius in Hamlet, becomes a figure for the tyranny of matter, and the
deaths of Olga and David an extension of the mourners helpless anger at fate and
mortality.17 On this reading Bend Sinister resembles Hamlet as Nabokov imagines it in
Nikolai Gogol, written around the same time, the wild dream of a neurotic scholar.
(140) As such, Bend Sinister develops the compositional idea Nabokov had been
exploring in the abortive 1939-40 novel of which we now only have Ultima Thule and
Solus Rex. There the plan was to encourage the reader to speculate on the extraordinary
imaginative processes of mourning: the main character in Ultima Thule, while fulfilling
his strange commission to draw the illustrations to the epic poem Ultima Thule, about
some Northern king, unhappy and unsociable, has somehow infused those drawings
with his grief over the death of his wife, and dreamed up the strange story of Solus
Rex. (Stories 510) Yet what is surprising is that the story imagined there is not, as in
Bend Sinister, about loss, tyranny, and grieving, but about perversion and disguise.
Nabokov would develop such speculations about the unpredictable transformations the
mourning imagination can work upon its raw materials into one of the central points of

17

On Paduk and paddock, see Grabes, Nabokov and Shakespeare, 503.

25
Pale Fire (1962), many of whose ideas, images, and themes can be traced back to Bend
Sinister and the Ultima Thule manuscript.18
In the final pages of Bend Sinister, Nabokov returns to the implication that all of
the action of the novel may be a nightmare conjured up out of the trivial surroundings of
a person sitting in his room. At the very end of the novel, when Krug is running madly at
a wall, the scene dissolves, to be replaced by the image of a moth striking the netting of
the window in the authors room. In the final words of the novel, it is a good night for
mothing (201). The image is chosen to allow the readers tongue to slip from mothing
towards nothing, recalling Krugs Mallarman reflection that the world may be
something made of nothing within nothing made of something. (146) Bend Sinister itself
is the smallest something made of nothing, the tenuously existent mothing of literature
easily elided by any too careless reader back into the nothing of unregenerate existence
(Nabokov mentions in his preface that at least one proofreader thought the last word of
the novel was a misprint (11)).
This is the sort of wordplay which Mallarm in his later poetry repeatedly
orchestrates so as to keep hope of immortality and perfect order poised in precarious
balance against fear of the abyss. In Un Coup de Ds (1897), the Jamais that follows
Un Coup de Ds in the opening words of the poem is wrenched from its normal
syntactic position, so that it can mean either that the throw of the dice will always
abolish chance or never will. In La chevelure vol dune flame lextrme (The
flight of flaming hair at the extreme (1887), the word vol can signify either poetic
flight or the theft of beauty from poetry by the woman combing her hair out. The
small domestic scene of a woman combing her hair, the quintessential image of beauty in
18

As Nabokov acknowledges in his 1973 note to Ultima Thule and Solus Rex in Stories, 658.

26
Mallarm, is expanded through wordplay into an image of the cosmos, with the hair
becoming the trail of a comet. Nabokov develops this image immediately after the moth
has departed from the author in his room in the closing pages of Bend Sinister: Across
the lane, two windows only were still alive. In one, the shadow of an arm was combing
invisible hair; or perhaps it was a movement of branches; the other was crossed by the
slanting black trunk of a poplar. (200)
It is, oddly, Mariette, and not Krug, who bears the easily missed traces of
Mallarms fauns dream: when she is on the point of succeeding, finally, in seducing
Krug, she put her knee against the bedding and, baring her shoulder, investigated the
marks that some playmates teeth had left near a small, very dark birthmark on the
diaphanous skin. (164) The image, referring back to the toothmark of the nymph in
LAprs-Midi, is as easily missed as the m that substantiates the dream and gives
substance to nothing. The record of a moment of desire interrupted and
unconsummated, it also prepares the ground for the scene on the next page where the
police interrupt Krug and Mariette. In his preface, Nabokov draws attention to
interruption as a crucial element of the link between LAprs-Midi and Bend Sinister:
in Nabokovs words, Krug interrupts the kiss of the university student and his little
Carmen, while Death, too, is a ruthless interruption (10). There are many other
moments of interruption in the novel, including the one in which Krug is about to sign the
document prepared by the university to curry favour with Paduk, before being interrupted
by the telephone (55), and that in which the Author intervenes to interrupt the scene of
Krugs execution in the final pages of the book.
4 Azur and Make-Believe

27
In his preface Nabokov calls Mallarm the author of three or four immortal
bagatelles (10), among them LAprs-Midi. A bagatelle is a piece of light music, a
trifle, and a game, a bit like billiards, played on a closed board with holes at one end. If
Mallarms poems are, in Nabokovs near-paradox, immortal bagatelles, it is because of
the lightness and grace with which they flirt with eternity and the absolute. In Music and
Literature (1894), his final statement, Mallarm defined art as a game insofar as, in a
dream of fiction, we seize the ideal which is absent here below, yet explosively present
up above, and hurl it to some forbidden, thunderbolt height of heaven. 19 This is the idea
behind Un Coup de Ds, in whose final words, Toute Pense met un Coup de Ds
(Collected Poems 145), and this dice-throw is at once a rebellion against and a
submission to the abyss or nothingness left by the disappearance of God. The central
image in Un Coup de Ds of a dice-throw in the abyss is a conscious homage to Pascal,
who famously conceived of the wager faith makes on the existence of God as a throw of
the dice. Bend Sinister points towards the dice-throw by putting Krug between Mallarm
and Pascal, whose Penses seem to have been an early influence on Krugs thought (118)
and whose vision of the empty vastnesses Krug invokes in those mirrors of infinite
space qui meffrayent, Blaise, as they did you (59).
Characteristically, Mallarm found a single word by which he could express the
emptiness of infinite space while retaining at least a memory of the divinity erased from
it. This is the word azur. As the translator and critic of Mallarm, Henry Weinfeld, says,
The Azure [] is one of the most important symbols in Mallarms poetry [] there is
a sense in which the very word itself contains an allegory of the spiritual crisis it

19

Selected Prose Poems, Essays, & Letters, 48. The editor, Bradford Cook, calls the essay in which
Mallarm says this, Music and Literature (1894), Mallarms last will and testament in prose (131).

28
symbolizes. [] That is to say that the word, Azure, is a metonymy that swerves away
from Ciel, which in French means both sky and heaven. (Collected Poems 363). So in
LAprs-Midi, the faun at first calls his melody Le visible et serein souffle artificiel /
De linspiration, qui regagne le ciel. (The visible, serene, and fictive air / Of inspiration
rising as if in prayer.) (38) The artifice of poetry will win back heaven (ciel). But the
vision fades, and the faun disconsolately reflects Mais, bast! Arcane tel lut pour
confident / Le jonc vaste et jumeau dont sous lazur on joue: (Enough! Arcana such as
these disclose their nature / Only through vast twin reeds played to the skies [the azure]).
(39)
One of the less obvious marks that LAprs-Midi leaves on the fabric of Bend
Sinister is the name of the university President, Dr Azureus. In Bend Sinister Dr Azureus
is about to be deposed, and the sky is only an empty azure, under which the modern poet
plays on his pipes with no assurance that his song is truth. But the most significant use of
the term is in the opening lines of the poem in Pale Fire, where John Shade declares the
agnostic creed of the Symbolist poet:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. (ll. 1-4)20

In this scene, the false azure in the windowpane is the false or treacherous reflection of
the real blue of heaven; the bird, imprisoned in the real, is shattered against the false
20

Boyd spots that azure here recalls Mallarm in Nabokovs Pale Fire, 282.

29
promise of transcendence and escape. But the poet, endowed with an imagination that can
take him beyond the real, can soar into that glimpse of the beyond and inhabit its
refracted dimensions.
Nabokovs use of the word azure points towards Mallarm. More broadly, the
constellation of images the window, the bird of the imagination, and the reflected sky
are Mallarman. But the scene seems more specifically to derive from a particular poem
of Mallarms, the early Les Fentres (1866). In this poem, an invalid, Las du triste
hospital (tired of the sad hospital) (11), rises from his bed and presses his nose against
the window. Likewise, the poet describes how he flees in disgust from the ordinary
towards the light of the Infinite, But, alas! the Here-below is master [] / And the foul
vomit of Stupidity / Forces me to hold my nose before the azure.

Is there a way, O Self, thou who hast known bitterness,

To burst the crystal that the monster has profaned,
And take flight, with my two featherless
Wings at the risk of falling through eternity? (12)

In Pale Fire, the answer to this question is the partial and contradictory one that
Mallarm himself would offer in his late poetry, and especially in Un Coup de Ds: that it
is possible to burst through the window, if only into the reflected sky of poetry, by
playing a game with the possibilities of language. Shade and Kinbote are imprisoned in
the Here-below, but through their imaginations of one another they can realise their
escape. In Bend Sinister, the answer is the more frustrated one of Mallarms earlier

30
poetic, choked with Baudelairean spleen, filled with images of the poet encased in the ice
of immediate reality the most prominent of which is the physical form of Adam Krug
himself, sour, corpulent, and blocked in his writing.
The opening of Bend Sinister, in which the nameless mourner looks out at the
view from a hospital window (13), also seems to derive from Les Fentres. If so, the
whole of Bend Sinister can be said to be framed, like a window, by the connection with
Mallarm. The final scene of the novel, with the moth hitting the wire netting at the
authors window, anticipates the beginning of Pale Fire, in which the moth has been
transformed into a waxwing. In Bend Sinister, the moth survives, glimpsed by the author
for a moment clinging to the screen before it let go and swung back into the warm damp
darkness (200), whereas in Pale Fire the waxwing dies. But through that death, the poet
finds his wings and takes flight, just as Shade seems to have been, literally or
metaphorically, reborn through Kinbote. In Bend Sinister, the moth has been chosen for
its dangerous proximity to nothingness, the Mallarman nant to which Krug refers at
one point (161). The moths survival leaves the author unregenerate and endows Krug
with only the most tenuous continued existence. As the author tells us, I knew that the
immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow was a slippery sophism, a play upon
words. (200) Krug is on the point of being executed at the end of Bend Sinister because
he refuses to accept Paduks offer to become head of the university and step into the
position of authority vacated by Dr Azureus. In Pale Fire, Shade enters the space left
after the waxwing comes to grief against the empty azure.
5 Something Made of Nothing Within Nothing Made of Something

31
Bend Sinister hints at a distant but definite relation that Mallarm bears to Krug.
Quite literally a relation: we are told that Mallarm was an uncle of his mothers (75).
One crucial aspect of this kinship consists in the fact that Mallarm and Krug both call
substance into question Mallarm that of his own poetry, Krug that of the world. At the
beginning of Chapter Fourteen, the central statement of Krugs doctrines, such as they
are, we are told that he had never indulged in the search for the True Substance, the One,
the Absolute, the Diamond suspended from the Christmas Tree of the Cosmos. (144)
This seems to be the core of his international reputation; some forty pages later, we
glimpse an American professor of philosophy, a gaunt hollow-cheeked, white-haired
man who had come all the way from his remote country to discuss with Krug the illusion
of substance. (188) Krug seems to have been encouraged in his philosophical objections
to this illusion by the recent discoveries of quantum mechanics if (as some of the wiser
neo-mathematicians thought) the physical worlds could be said to consist of measure
groups (tangles of stresses, sunset swarms of electric midgets) moving like mouches
volantes on a shadowy background that lay outside the scope of physics, then, surely, the
meek restriction of ones interest to measuring the measurable smacked of the most
humiliating futility. (144) And yet, problems as problems do exist even if the world be
something made of nothing within nothing made of something. (146)
This final thought could serve as a description of Mallarms poems, and indeed
as a gloss on the opening lines of the poem Salut (Salutation) which Mallarm placed
on the first page of Posies: Rien, cette cume, vierge vers / ne designer que la
coupe; (Nothing, this foam, virgin verse / Only to designate the cup:) (3). Mallarm
loved to play on the double sense of rien, as here, to signify the lack of something else

32
(a nothing made of something) and a substantive nothing (a something made of
nothing). It allowed him to incorporate into a single equivocation the essence of his
poetic: that, as he put it in a number of famous letters from the late 1860s, he sought to
evoke the emptiness spread through its [his thoughts] pores and turn it into a matchless
Nothingness. (Selected Prose 91) His verse is a matchless nothingness, mere foam;
and yet that nothingness acquires substance and form and outlines the empty container, it
designates the cup. That is, to quote for a second time the lines from Un Coup de Ds,
RIEN [] NAURA EU LIEU [] QUE LE LIEU NOTHING [] WILL HAVE
TAKEN PLACE [] BUT THE PLACE (Collected Poems 142-3). The white space on
the page and the disposition of the words on it became increasingly important to
Mallarm; as he put it in his preface to Un Coup de Ds, The blanks, in effect, assume
importance and are what is immediately most striking (121).
In his prose and his poetry alike, Mallarm deploys a series of figures for his
poetics of absence and nothingness. In The Book: A Spiritual Instrument, of 1895,
Mallarm rejects the facile equation of the poem with the material artefact of the
substantial book in which it happens to be printed, the physical space it occupies as a
mere matter of convenience. The poet writes upon our minds or upon pure space and it
is not the paper-knife but our consciousness alone which gives us possession of the
poem (Selected Prose 27-8). Often, as in his poem of 1895, Toute lme rsume (The
entire soul evoked), Mallarm implicitly compares the poem to the impalpable smoke
spiralling up from his cigar; he explains the image at the end of the poem when he writes:
Le sens trop prcis rature / Ta vague literature. Too fixed a sense erases / Your art in
its faint traces. (Collected Poems 77) (A portrait of Mallarm painted by his friend

33
Manet in 1876 shows the poet holding a cigar as if it were his pen, as if he wrote in
smoke.) In the famous Sonnet en yx, Ses purs ongles trs haut ddiant leur onyx
(Her pure nails on high displaying their onyx) of 1868, Mallarm gives us an image of
the poem as a ptyx, that is a fold, or a seashell in which the reader hears the sound of
his own inner space; this aboli bibelot dinanit sonore (Abolished shell whose
resonance remains) is ce seul objet dont le Nant honore (the sole object that
Nothingness attains) (69). These images figure Mallarms aspirations towards an
aesthetic of evanescence or near-perfect emptiness. But perhaps the most frequent and
suggestive of Mallarms images for form is that of the fan, opening into presence and
then closing upon a point of invisibility. Mallarm wrote no fewer than eighteen ventail
poems, many of them first written onto real fans, and included three of them in his
Posies. The fan offers an alteration of the traditional figure of the poetic wing. It images
the minimal existence of speech: Avec comme pour langage / Rien quun battement aux
cieux (With nothing else for speech / Than a pulsing in the skies) (49). Yet, like
speech, this near-nothing changes the shape of the world: Dont le coup prisonnier
recule / Lhorizon dlicatement. (Lightly each imprisoned stroke / Pushes the whole
horizon back.) (50)
The Mallarman idea of such a tremulously insubstantial work of art was on
Nabokovs mind around the time he began conceiving Bend Sinister in 1941. On January
21 of that year he published an article about Charles Conder, the fin-de-sicle painter who
was a friend of Mallarms and did indeed paint on fans. Nabokov took this as the
starting point of his article, contrasting those who use marble or bronze sheer weight
versus the tide of time, with those others such as the lady who painted her sunsets on

34
live spiderwebs, or Conder, whose gift to posterity was a faded little fan, and who
seemed to paint with a brush [] made of a childs eyelashes. (Faint Rose 11)
There are no fans in Bend Sinister, at least none that I can find. But the novel does
repeatedly invite us to consider it as a Mallarman art-object, an immortal bagatelle, a
something made of nothing, an illusion of substance, a superficially full book that
turns out on close inspection to be an empty box. In Krugs dream, in which, again a
child, he must take an exam about an afternoon with Mallarm, Krug is asked to help
someone cheat: Somebody on his left asked him to pass a book to the family of his
right-hand neighbour, and this he did. The book, he noticed, was in reality a rosewood
box shaped and painted to look like a volume of verse and Krug understood that it
contained some secret commentaries that would assist an unprepared students panicstricken mind. (75) This image of a book that turns out to be empty has already come up
in an early passage, where Orlik, the old zoologist, opened a little book lying next to
him and discovered that it was an empty box with a lone pink peppermint at the bottom.
(50) Earlier still, Krug opened a closet, lifted the lid of an empty trunk, looked inside
and then came back. (30) The recurrent image of a container that turns out to be empty
is varied in the image of a container that turns out to lack sides, like Mallarms
insubstantial cup, designated only by the foam of the verse it holds: a beggar holds out a
hat with a hole in the bottom: Three consecutive coppers fell and are still falling. (42)
On the wall of his study, Krug has hung a picture of Chardins 1736-7 painting, the
House of Cards, another image of a structure composed, with maximum fragility, out of
nearly insubstantial objects (38). Bend Sinister has no inside. In this respect it is like the
world as Krug, under the influence of modern physics, sees it: we live in a stocking

35
which is in the process of being turned inside out (161), he says; and again, about fifteen
pages earlier, immediately after Krug describes the world as something made of nothing
within nothing made of something, he adds a further equivocation: Or is outer and
inner an illusion too? (146) In 1940, the year before Nabokov had, in all likelihood,
begun writing Bend Sinister, he had taken a similar image to the one he would later use in
Bend Sinister and offered it as a description of the mind: The human mind is a box with
no tangible lid, sides or bottom, and still it is a box, and there is no earthly method of
getting out of it and remaining in it at the same time. (Prof. Woodbridge 15)
Nabokov had already deployed such Mallarman subversions of substance in The
Gift. When Fyodor imagines the reader of his poems, he asks, As he read them, did he
read them not only as words but as chinks between words, as one should do when reading
poetry? (33) The remark recalls Mallarms emphatic assertion, in Mystery in
Literature, that, as we read, we must bend our independent minds, page by page, to the
blank space which begins each one, so that, when the lines of chance have been
vanquished word by word, the blanks unfailingly return; before, they were gratuitous;
now they are essential. (Selected Prose 33-4) Of all the crayon pencils, Fyodor and Zina
always preferred the white one, which remained the longest because it didnt do much
work and embodied Linutile beaut: Precisely because it drew the invisible and
one could imagine lots of things. In general there await us unlimited possibilities. (178)
That use of blankness or whiteness as a structural principle would return in Pale Fire, in
which all the meaning resides in the space between Shades poem and Kinbotes
commentary, a space or interval like the one Mallarm made run down the centre of the
pages of Un Coup de Ds.

36
6 Invented Languages and Word Play
Mallarms dedication to the gaps between words stems from his view that
ordinary words are at best inadequate representations of reality. As he puts it in Crisis in
Poetry: Languages are imperfect because multiple; the supreme language is missing.
[] the diversity of languages on earth means that no one can utter words which would
bear the miraculous stamp of Truth Herself Incarnate. But this Babel is only an image,
for Mallarm, of a deeper inadequacy in ordinary language:

I am disappointed when I consider how impossible it is for languages to express

things by means of certain keys which would reproduce their brilliance and aura
[] When compared to the opacity of the word ombre, the word tnbres does
not seem very dark; and how frustrating the perverseness and contradiction which
lends dark tones to jour, bright tones to nuit! We dream of words brilliant at once
in meaning and sound, or darkening in meaning and so in sound, luminously and
elementally self-succeeding. (Selected Prose 38)

These remarks can themselves be taken as in part allegorical. For Mallarms project is
not merely to endow words with onomatopoeic qualities which would allow them to
imitate real-world things such as shadow, day, or night, but to enable them to represent
the often contradictory qualities of feelings, desires, and concepts so that sanglot can
be brought to indicate at once joy and sorrow, or rien something and nothing.
This ambition drives Mallarms writing in two seemingly opposite directions,
which would become the two limits of modernist linguistic practice, represented for

37
Nabokov by Four Quartets and Finnegans Wake. In an essay on Mallarm, Julia Kristeva
has identified these as those limits of nonsense that are silence and its paradoxical
double, polysemy. (33) On the one hand, Mallarm argues that out of a number of
words, poetry fashions a single new word which is total in itself and foreign to the
language a kind of incantation. (Selected Prose) For example, Mallarms introduction
of the word ptyx, nearly foreign to French and therefore a near-invention, into the
Sonnet en-yx, becomes a symbol of this drive in his poetry to turn the words of
ordinary language into a new language by stripping them of their immediate referents: the
drive, as he wrote in a famous line of Le Tombeau dEdgar Poe, Donner un sens plus
pur aux mots de lat tribu To give a purer sense to the language of the tribe. This is
the limit of silence, at which words lose their ordinary meanings in pursuit of the
transcendent as azur ceases to signify a colour and comes to signify the unreachable
transcendent abyss. As Mallarm wrote in a letter to Franois Coppe of April 20, 1868:
And now that I have had the horrible vision of a pure work, my reason is almost lost and
I have forgotten the meaning of even the commonest words. (Selected Prose 97)
In Four Quartets, Eliot inherited and enacted this first element in Mallarm,
abstracting language from its local, immediate, and personal referents, in line with the
stern Heraclitean epigraph he had placed at the head of the first of the Quartets, Burnt
Norton (1936): Although the word is common to all, most men live as if each of them
had a private sense of their own. Or, as he put it in the closing section of Burnt
Norton: Words, after speech, reach / Into the silence. Eliot acknowledged the
Mallarman affinity of this aspiration when he expressed it, in Little Gidding (1942),
the last of the quartets, by adopting Mallarms own statement of it in Le Tombeau

38
dEdgar Poe, taking it for granted that our concern was speech, and speech impelled
us / To purify the dialect of the tribe. 21 In Pale Fire, Nabokov would playfully allude to
this aspiration of Eliots in Four Quartets to transform or purify words so that they are all
internally defined by the poem and form a private language. By incorporating into Pale
Fire the three neologisms in Four Quartets grimpen, chthonic, and sempiternal
Nabokov treats these as definitive of Eliots suite of poems, just as ptyx had been
definitive of Mallarms effort to create his own new poetic language. Zemblan, the
invented language of Pale Fire, is a comically literal illustration of the Symbolist
doctrine that every good poem creates its own invented language by using each word in a
new way whose full meaning can only be understood in the context of all the other words
of the poem.
On the other hand, Mallarm frequently allows the ambiguities of individual
words to spray outwards, or allows words to merge into one another, driving them
towards the limit of polysemy. In The Book, he ironically praised the new
typographical machinery which had made newspapers possible as

a miracle, in the highest sense of the word: words led back to their origin, which
is the twenty-four letters of the alphabet, so gifted with infinity that they will
finally consecrate Language. Everything is caught up in their endless variations
and then rises out of them in the form of the Principle. Thus typography becomes
a rite.

21

Eliot, Collected Poems, 189; 194; 218. The epigraph to Burnt Norton is given by Eliot in the original
Greek; this is a translation.

39
The book, which is a total expansion of the letter, must find mobility in the
letter; and in its spaciousness must establish some nameless system of
relationships which will embrace and strengthen fiction. (Selected Prose 26-7)

So, for instance, at the beginning of Petit Air (Guerrier) (Little Air (Martial)), Mallarm
writes, Ce me va hormis ly taire / Que je sente du foyer / Un pantalon militaire (It
suits me not to hold my peace / That from the fireplace I sense / A military trouser
spread) (Collected Poems 65). As Henry Weinfeld comments, The opening line
contains one of Mallarms more fantastic puns, since hormis ly taire resonates against
its homonym hors militaire. (210) In other words, it suits the poet (Ce ma va), except
for keeping quiet about it (hormis ly taire), to remain outside of the military (hors
militaire).
It is just this slippage of syllables in Mallarm that Nabokov is imitating in Bend
Sinister when the elided syllables of the line from LAprs-Midi, Sans piti du sanglot
dont jtais encore ivre reappear throughout the text, with dont jtais becoming in Dr
Azureuss mouth, malarma ne donje (56), and dont jetais encore ivre becoming in
Krugs mouth Donje te zankoriv [do please excuse me]. (59) This compression of
syllables is taken up in Nabokovs homage to Finnegans Wake, the text that took
Mallarman (and Shakespearean) polysemy to its furthest possible limit. When Krug is
describing a film-version of Hamlet, he alludes to another rivermaids father (101), a
reference he explains in his introduction as being to James Joyce who wrote Winnipeg
Lake (10) that is, Finnegans Wake. In a series of Finnegans Wake-esque portmanteau
words, Krug describes:

40

Ophelias death. To the sounds of Liszts Les Funrailles she would be shown
wrestling or, as another rivermaids father would have said, wrustling [a
portmanteau combining wrestling and rustling] with the willow. A lass, a
salix. He recommended here a side shot of the glassy water. To feature a phloating
leaph. Then back again to her little white hand, holding a wreath trying to reach,
trying to wreathe a phallacious sliver. (101)

In Bend Sinister, such wordplay has political implications. As Krugs friend

Maximov says, the utterly nonsensical is a natural and logical part of Paduks rule (81).
In his preface, Nabokov draws attention to the punning that is characteristic of Paduks
state: Paronomasia is a kind of verbal plague, a contagious sickness in the world of
words; no wonder they are monstrously and ineptly distorted in Padukgrad, where
everybody is merely an anagram of everybody else. (8) The implication, a commonplace
of modernism, is that human individuality and meaningfulness depend on language being
used in a responsible and meaningful way. Paduks father was known as the inventor of
the padograph, a sort of typewriter designed to mimic handwriting; philosophically
speaking, the padograph subsisted as an Ekwilist symbol, as a proof of the fact that a
mechanical device can reproduce personality (66). The machine seems to give birth to
Paduks totalitarian ideology. Even as a schoolboy, Paduk had maintained that all men
consist of the same twenty-five letters variously mixed, and to prove this theory he
acquired an irritating trick of calling his classmates by anagrams of their names Adam
Krug for instance was Gumakrad or Dramaguk (64).

41
Yet despite all this hostility to wordplay, the author of Bend Sinister implies that
the novel itself should be seen as an elongated piece of wordplay when he says in the
penultimate paragraph: I knew that the immortality I had conferred on the poor fellow
was a slippery sophism, a play upon words. (200) And indeed Krug himself is in this, as
in so many other things, more alike to Paduk that we may at first like to admit. Seemingly
with approval, Krug reports on the film-version of Hamlet he had heard of in America,
essentially a transposition of Hamlets wordplay into the still more punning manner of
Finnegans Wake. And another of Krugs friends, Maximov, draws our attention to Krugs
own irresponsibility with language when, in answer to Krugs preeningly dandyish
statement that the word loyalty phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden
fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat
stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary definition. (79)
But what makes the attitudes of Bend Sinister still harder to infer is not just that
Krug and the author of Bend Sinister seem partly complicit in the licentious wordplay of
Paduk and his regime, but that in Paduk and Krug alike we can also identify a completely
contrasting relationship to language, a drive to purify and abstract language that seems
more reminiscent of Eliots Four Quartets than of Shakespeare or Finnegans Wake. If the
version of Hamlet with which Krug regales Ember revels in Shakespeares verbal license,
the version of Hamlet approved by the regime repudiates it. As the essay on Hamlet
written by one Professor Hamm has it,

As with all decadent democracies, everybody in the Denmark of the play suffers
from a plethora of words. If the state is to be saved, if the nation desires to be

42
worthy of a new robust government, then everything must be changed; popular
common sense must spit out the caviar of moonshine and poetry, and the simple
word, verbum sine ornatu, intelligible to beast and man, and accompanied by fit
action, must be restored to power. (97-8)

Similarly, the Paduk regime seeks to strip words of their excess reference in a way that
allows him to deny freedom. One of his official statements informs the citizens thus:

True, in other countries there is a lot of talk about freedom but in reality a lack
of funds does not allow one the use of the printed word. [] As our leader has
said: The workers know that freedom of speech in the so-called democratic
countries is an empty sound. (141)

Yet it is implied that Krug, with his suspicion of Shakespearean punning, shares
some of these brutally reductive attitudes to language that Paduks regime occasionally
finds convenient. At times Krug resists punning, to the point that when he is listening to
his friend Ember, who is translating Hamlet and revelling in Shakespeares wordplay,
Krug even ventures to express some reservations about Shakespeares puns, a thought so
outrageous that it is cut off halfway (108). In the chapter on Krugs philosophy, we are
told that his international reputation is rather precariously founded on the enormous
success with which he had delicately taken apart the systems of others on behalf of
brusque common-sense (145) (never an entirely favourable term in Nabokov) (147).

43
There is then, an apparent contradiction in the critique of language in Bend
Sinister. It treats as typical of Paduks tyranny both his linguistic reductiveness and his
verbal playfulness; and Krug, too is capable of each of these attitudes to language. Is this
merely a carelessness or sloppiness in the book, and not worthy of further investigation? I
suggest not. The contradiction is structured too systematically to be taken as insignificant.
Krugs dilemma, between these two poles of language, is expressed and clarified by his
friendships with Maximov, who speaks up for the noble linguistic austerity of a
philosopher and a loyalist, and Ember, who revels in the Shakespearean joys of linguistic
dissemination. Then, too, it reflects the systematic ambiguities of Bend Sinister, which
begins with an image of Krug stuck on a bridge in the middle of the night, unable to exit
on either side: an image of the irresolvable intellectual dilemmas of a mind caught
between two possibilities. Those two possibilities, of silence and dissemination, are
represented not only by Maximov and Ember, but also, more centrally, by Olga and
Mariette. Olga, through whom Nabokov mourns his lost native tongue, is the lost muse of
Russia, and of silence: that is of the chaste and ineffable truth Nabokov alluded to in the
lines from his The Poets (1939), in which the disavowal of language is equated with
the silence of love, and both with wilderness and death. (Poems and Problems 95) In
Mariette, on the other hand, we might recognise the spirit of French poetry, and
especially Mallarm, through which Nabokov had in the late 1930s begun translating
himself towards the West. Krugs mixture of disgust and desire for Mariette expresses the
texts own ambivalence about the play of language; and when Krug succumbs, or is about
to succumb, to that temptation, he is arrested and set on a course that will lead to madness
and possible death.

44
As such Bend Sinister stands in a precisely calibrated position in the logical
development of Nabokovs writing. For most of Invitation to a Beheading, Cincinnatus is
unable to express himself, imprisoned in the same clichs as his gaolers, with their
miserable facetious wordplay. The regime seeks to coerce him by making him accept as
his double or fate-mate his executioner, MSieur Pierre. But at the end of the novel,
Cincinnatus wins his freedom by finding his voice as an author, escaping the prison of
dead words, and rejecting any kinship with the powers of clich and orthodoxy. In Bend
Sinister, Krug is also struggling to write and find freedom, but he is made to fail, and the
repeated image of a spill dividing into two parts yet never completely separated is
suggestive of a unity Krug never finally escapes. He is, ultimately, successfully coerced
by the regime. Despite his best efforts, Krug loses his independence and his authority, in
both senses of the word, and is finally assimilated as Paduks unwilling double. In the
unyielding internal logic of the book, the death of the author makes irresistible an
insidious play of language which destroys the foundation of individuality and
independent meaningfulness. In Lolita, Nabokov would take this crisis several steps
further. Krugs authority is compromised when he fails to protect his son David from the
tortures of Paduks regime. But in Lolita, Humbert is effectively both the father and the
person who harms the child, as if Krug and Paduk had fused into a single figure. And the
wordplay which in Bend Sinister was clearly presented as sickly and politically
dangerous has in Lolita become the medium of aesthetic bliss. Krug may be tempted by
Mariette and the Mallarman wordplay she represents, but he does not succumb, or is
saved from succumbing by the pounding of the police on his door. Humbert on the other
hand had long ago yielded to those urges, and the book is a monument not only to his

45
perverse desires but to his equally perverse affairs with language. Lolitas name, with its
echo of litterae, or letters in Latin, suggests that Humberts exploitative play with her is
an unpleasant allegory of the novels own wordplay. Or, as Humbert puts it, in a desperate
exclamation in which one also hears the voice of Lolitas author, whoever He might be:
Oh, my Lolita, I have only words to play with! (32)
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