by Vladimir Nabokov
This is pretty great overall. It appears to be a parody of the Orwell, Huxley, Koestler “topical trash” that Nabokov supposedly despised. Now, I am a fan of all that stuff, but this is still pretty dead on. Dead on both in mocking such literature and also in making the very same point as that lit...
It's interesting to compare Bend Sinister with 1984. (Nabokov didn't much like Orwell, and thought he was a hack). Orwell's take on totalitarianism, is, roughly, that it's evil. Nabokov's is more that it's terminally stupid. Even when the rulers of the State would actually prefer to get things right...
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