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The gay Nabokov

The novelist never could face the secret that cost his brother his life.

By Lev Grossman
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May 17, 2000 | I n 1918, a year after the Russian Revolution, Vladimir Nabokov and his four siblings posed for a photograph as a present for their mother. The children were in Yalta, in exile from their native St. Petersburg. In the photo, the air of the fabulous wealth and privilege they grew up in still clings to them. The girls are wearing matching sailor suits. Little Elena, Vladimir"s younger sister, holds a patient pet dachshund in her lap.

In the background looms a serious and rather beautiful young man dressed entirely in black. His intense gaze meets the camera"s through an exquisite pince-nez. He is not Vladimir, who is wearing a bow tie and looking hilariously full of himself. He is Sergei Nabokov, born 11 months after his famous brother and with a very different fate ahead of him.

 
Vladimir Nabokov, of course, would go on to become one of the most important writers of the 20th century, earning not only critical acclaim but international fame and financial success as well. Sergei would never be famous -- in fact, his existence has been all but covered up by his family -- but in its own way his life would be just as remarkable. Shy, awkward and foppish, the opposite of his gregarious brother, Sergei had a secret: He was gay.

Sergei"s homosexuality would cast a long shadow over his strange and heroic life, and it would also, ultimately, be the cause of his horrifying and untimely death. It cast a shadow over Vladimir"s life as well: He loved his brother, but whatever else he may have been -- a brilliant writer, a loving father -- Vladimir was a confirmed homophobe, and his gay brother was a constant source of shame, confusion and regret to him.

Vladimir"s tortured relationship with Sergei is one of the secret stories of an otherwise very public life, and Nabokov scholars are only now slowly coming to terms with the depths of Nabokov"s prejudice. They"re also becoming increasingly aware that Sergei is a crucially important figure in his brother"s work, a presence with whom Nabokov grappled, in different ways and with different degrees of success, throughout his lengthy oeuvre. Meanwhile, the facts of Sergei"s life are still obscure -- forgotten or concealed behind euphemisms or confined to the dusty realm of footnotes and archives.

It"s a question worthy of a Nabokov novel: How could the lives of two brothers, both brilliant and talented, both rich and handsome, have led to two such different places: one to literary immortality, the other to the hell of a Nazi concentration camp?

Sergei Vladimirovich Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg on March 12, 1900. The Nabokovs were members of imperial Russia"s most exclusive social circles, and the children grew up in a glamorous whirl of country estates, liveried servants, balls, boating parties and annual vacations in Biarritz, France, and on the Riviera. The family was extraordinarily wealthy; their lineage included princes and generals and government ministers, and even their faithful dog, Box II, was descended from a pair that belonged to Anton Chekhov. Nabokov once told an interviewer, "I probably had the happiest childhood imaginable."

But Sergei did not. While Vladimir was the eldest and the center of attention, Sergei grew up out of the limelight, shy and unhappy and somewhat odd. Elena Sikorski, ne Nabokov, the girl with the dachshund in her lap, is now 93 and the last surviving Nabokov sibling, but she remembers her aristocratic Russian youth with absolute clarity. When I telephoned her at her home in Geneva to ask about Sergei, she spoke of him fondly, but not without regret. Her voice is surprisingly deep, with an elegant, stateless European accent and just a hint of a quaver. "He was not the favorite of the family," she recalls. "I think that he was rather miserable during his childhood."

Nabokov was fascinated by doubles, and his work is full of them -- mirrors, twins, reflections, chance resemblances. Sergei was his brother"s double, a "shadow in the background," as Nabokov put it. All his life Vladimir would be the golden wordsmith, the master of language; Sergei was afflicted with an atrocious stutter that would only get worse as he got older. He idolized Napoleon and slept with a bronze bust of him in his bed. He also loved music, particularly Richard Wagner, and he studied the piano seriously. Vladimir, by contrast, was almost pathologically insensitive to music, which he once described as "an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds." He would creep up behind Sergei while he was practicing and poke him in the ribs -- something he remembered with bitter remorse in later life. "They were never friends when they were children," says Sikorski. "There was always a sort of aversion."

Nabokov said that he hardly remembered Sergei as a boy. He once wrote, "I could describe my whole youth in detail without recalling him once." But Sergei lurks in every corner of "Speak, Memory," Nabokov"s 1951 memoir, "quiet and listless," peering at his older brother "like a little owl," or stumbling around a roller rink in Berlin as his indefatigable brother repeatedly laps him. In a photo of the two boys taken in 1909 in front of their grandmother"s mansion, 10-year-old Vladimir stands with his hands on his hips, legs apart, imperiously staring down the camera. Sergei hides under the brim of his sun hat, one arm held protectively across his midsection, the other stroking his cheek in a strikingly girlish gesture. In retrospect it seems surprising that it took the rest of the family as long as it did to discover what Sergei probably already knew.