Speaking of Adam Krug, the name of Bend Sinister's hero seems also to refer to Dante's Divine Comedy. There is ad (inferno) in Adam, while krug means "circle" (hell as imagined by Dante has nine circles*). Besides, in Paradiso (Part Three of Divina Commedia) Dante meets Adam (the first man).

On the other hand, Adam Krug is a namesake of Adam Falter,** a character in VN's story Ultima Thule (1942). Its protagonist and narrator (like Krug, the artist Sineusov just lost his wife) asks Falter (a medium who solved "the riddle of the universe") if one can expect an afterlife. The author of "Бессмертие души" ("The Immortality of Soul," 1797), Derzhavin (who lost "Plenira," his first wife, in 1794) would have answered "yes." Here is the poem's second stanza mentioning "the circle of all creatures:"

Жива душа моя! и вечно

Она жить будет без конца;

Сиянье длится беспресечно,

Текуще света от Отца.

От лучезарной Единицы,

В ком всех существ вратится круг,

Какие ни текут частицы,

Все живы, вечны: — вечен дух.

*I suspect, the author of "В круге первом" ("In the First Circle") hasn't read Bend Sinister (or VN's Russian stories).

**Falter is Sineusov's former tutor. Innokentiy, the narrator in VN's story "Krug" ("The Circle," 1936), is the village schoolmaster's son.

Alexey Sklyarenko