Stan K-Bootle: Bravo Carolyn: but ruling out google
and wiki would surely end scholarly research as we know it today ;=)
Warning: this email contains more than the recommended daily allowance
of irony.
JM: Google and Wiki are invaluable
tools but I learned it the hard way that any clue has to be double-checked
against a traditional dic or book.
In one of my new (unimproved) programs I
learned that wikipedia and google are in conflict!
Nabokov-admirers shouldn't let what wiki offers about
"Bend Sinister" to sit quietly on-line without adding their little contribution
to it. There is a warning, and it shows how to
proceed:
Below are two links and a plot summary (with no
reference to Olga, to David...to the novel's "beating heart."
1st edition cover. Bend Sinister is a 1947
dystopian novel written by Vladimir Nabokov. .
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_Sinister...
Plot summary
wapedia.mobi/en/Bend_Sinister_(novel) 
This
book takes place in a fictitious
European nation known as Padukgrad,
where a government arises following the rise of a
philosophy known as "Ekwilism,"
which discourages the idea of anyone being any different from anyone else, and
promotes the state as the prominent good in society. This government is led by a
man named Paduk and his "Party of the Average Man." As it happens, the
world-renowned
philosopher Adam
Krug was in his youth a classmate of Paduk, at which period he had bullied him
and referred to him disparagingly as "the Toad." Paduk arrests many of the
people opposing his Ekiwilist philosophy, including many of Krug's friends, and
attempts to get the influential Professor Krug to promote the state philosophy
to help stomp out dissent and increase his personal prestige.He makes an offer
to Krug, but Krug refuses outright, and the idea that nothing has changed in
their plans, and makes an offer to allow Krug to personally kill those
responsible. He swears at the officials and is locked in a large prison cell.
Another offer is made to Krug to free 24 opponents of Ekwilism, including many
of his friends, in exchange for doing so. But by this time he has largely gone
mad, and at the first opportunity he rushes Paduk and is killed.