In a 1963 edition of the book, Nabokov explains that "this choice of a title was an attempt to suggest an outline broken by refraction, a distortion in the mirror of being, a wrong turn taken by life."

This book takes place in a fictitious European city known as Padukgrad, where a government arises following the rise of a philosophy known as "Ekwilism", which discourages the idea of anyone being different from anyone else, and promotes the state as the prominent good in society.

Paduk makes an offer to allow Krug to personally kill those responsible, but he swears at the officials and is locked in a large prison cell.

Nabokov, who was teaching at Wellesley College at the time, first began writing Bend Sinister in 1942 while the greater part was composed in the winter and spring of 1945–1946, soon after the completion of World War II.

During the war against the Axis powers and after their downfall, a new wave of pro-USSR sentiment swept America, as the Soviet Armed Forces had played a large role in the Allied victory, which deeply disturbed Nabokov, a fierce opponent of Communism.

Brian Boyd writes that Nabokov wrote the novel in "an attempt to show that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia represented fundamentally the same brutish vulgarity inimical to everything most vulnerable and most valuable in human life".

[7] Such influences aside, Nabokov was insistent on his aestheticism, disclaiming any interest in the "literature of social comment" and denying "automatic comparisons between Bend Sinister and Kafka's creations and Orwell's clichés".

[8] Of the reviews it did garner, reactions were generally mixed, perhaps best exemplified by The New Republic's comments which called it "at once impressive, powerful and oddly exasperating.

"[9] The novel did receive a glowing review from The New York Times: "It will be too bad if this book fails to find an audience because the armed battle with tyrant states has ended.

[11] Brian Boyd, writing in his book Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, praises the "jarring self-consciousness" and "inventiveness and challenge of particular passages" in the novel; but he concludes that Bend Sinister "does not reward us enough as we read to justify all its difficulties and disruptions".

The Forward wrote "Bend Sinister, for all its shortcomings, evinces an unnerving prescience that reminds us of our proximity to a darker past, but also our ability to overcome it.