Bend Sinister

Bend Sinister (1947) is Nabokov's first novel written in America and his most directly political. Set in an unnamed country recently taken over by a totalitarian regime called the Ekwilist Party, whose ideology is built around a grotesque parody of equality, the novel follows Adam Krug, a celebrated philosopher whose international reputation the regime wants to exploit as a legitimizing credential. Krug refuses to cooperate, and the state's response escalates from pressure to coercion to something far worse. Nabokov wrote the novel in the shadow of both Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, and while he resisted political allegory as a category, the novel's portrait of how a regime degrades and destroys individuals who insist on their own reality is as pointed as anything in the genre.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, black cloth. New York: Henry Holt, 1947. #10650.
The number "12" is ink-stamped on top page edges, else a near fine copy in dust jacket with one short tear on rear panel and light edge wear. An attractive copy.