The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (45 page)

As he was an Aryan, his crime was much more serious than mine. A Slavic beast, I was merely sent to an Austrian jail; he was dispatched to the 999th Afrika Brigade, commonly known as the Straight-to-Heaven Battalion.

Upon my release from jail, desperate for work of any sort and incapable of facing Hermann's parents, upon whom I had brought such catastrophe, I wrote to my friends abroad seeking help. I even went so far as to write Gertrude and Alice, from whom I received the following prompt reply:
Miss Stein knows she knew you but no longer knows how she knew nor when nor where nor why she knew you when she knew you. Nonetheless she wishes you the very best.

Cocteau also answered my pleas, commiserating,
My dear, don't panic; all will be well. Be very still and very small and all this
will undoubtedly pass you by. These are difficult and unlovely times for everyone, mon petit. Would you happen to know any sources of opium? Bébé, Boris, and I are quite desperate.

For a short time I worked at a half-Russian office in Prague. When that office was closed, I made my way, in March 1942, to Berlin.

 

I have been writing all this in a room whose windows have not been shattered, whose roof is intact, luxuries for which I am grateful. The ravaged city is quiet this midafternoon, though even here the smell of oblivion hangs in the air. For some time now, I realize, someone has been knocking on the front door. Has Onya gone out? Is it Felix? It is not yet three. I peer down from my window to see several men clustered on the sidewalk beyond the front garden. They wear the unmistakable green and black uniforms of the Sicherheitsdienst
.
Felix is not among them. There will be no news of Hugh; perhaps there never was.

From what I can see, some of the soldiers below look quite handsome. Ever since that lift boy in Wiesbaden so many years ago, I have loved Germans. Perhaps he is one of them. Would that not be sublime? In any event, I look forward to making their acquaintance, however briefly. Perhaps we shall even strike up an improbable friendship on our way to headquarters. One never stops longing, after all, for beauty, love, belonging.

The knocking continues. The whole world seems very still. For some reason I find myself remembering a moth pupa stirring in the warmth of a train compartment somewhere between the unforgotten past and the unforeseeable future. Someone is calling my name. Since I appear to be alone in this pleasant and suddenly quite useless villa, I believe I must go see who it is.

SERGEY VLADIMIROVICH NABOKOV WAS ARRESTED on December 15, 1943. Charged with having uttered subversive statements (“
staatsfeindlichen Äußerungen
”), he was conveyed to Arbeitserziehungslager Wuhlheide, and on March 15, 1944, dispatched as prisoner number 28631 to Konzentrationslager Neuengamme, a labor camp outside Hamburg, where he died on January 9, 1945, of dysentery, starvation, exhaustion.

His brother thrived in America. As he no longer needed to distinguish himself from his famous father, of whom no one in this new world had ever heard, Vladimir Vladimirovich shed the pseudonym “Sirin” and began to publish under his own name.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
, with its curious but bravura English, was issued by New Directions in 1941, and proved to be but the first of many masterpieces the magician would pull out of the astonishingly capacious top hat of his adopted language. In the late 1940s he wrote a first chapter to a novel titled
Scenes from the Life of a Double Monster
. Upon reading those pages, Véra dissuaded him from continuing the project,
though that orphaned chapter eventually appeared as a short story in the
New Yorker
.

Only in 1966, when he and Véra were living comfortably in their adopted Switzerland—
Lolita
having propelled him to wealth and worldwide fame—did Nabokov briefly address the subject of his dead brother. The third version of his celebrated autobiography
Speak, Memory
contains two pages absent from the earlier editions. “For various reasons,” he writes, “I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother. He is a mere shadow in the background of my richest and most detailed recollections.” After enumerating their many differences, his perplexities and discoveries regarding Sergey's character, his various instances of regrettable behavior toward him, Nabokov concludes, with eloquent abjection, “It is one of those lives that hopelessly claim a belated something—compassion, understanding, no matter what—which the mere recognition of such a want can neither replace nor redeem.”

 

Hermann Thieme survived the war and afterward returned to Castle Weissenstein, where he lived as a recluse until his death in 1972.

THE FIRST THROB OF THIS NOVEL WAS PROVOKED by Lev Grossman's essay “The Gay Nabokov,” published by
Salon.com
in 2000. I am indebted to Lev not only for his superb detective work but also for his encouragement and for providing me with translations of the four letters from Sergey which reside in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. One day, no doubt, a larger trove of letters will surface—from Paris, from Castle Weissenstein, who knows?—that will prove any number of my speculations dead wrong. Nonetheless, I hope some shadow of truth will continue to haunt these pages even if certain bare facts turn out to have been otherwise.

Vladimir Nabokov's
Speak, Memory
as well as Brian Boyd's
Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years
and Stacy Schiff's
Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)
provided essential background information. Other helpful biographies included Francis Steegmuller's
Cocteau
, Parker Tyler's
The Divine Comedy of Pavel Tchelitchew
, Serge Lifar's
Serge Diaghilev: His Life, His Work, His Legend
, Richard Buckle's
Diaghilev
, John Malcolm Brinnin's
The Third
Rose: Gertrude Stein and Her World,
and Amanda Vaill's
Everybody Was So Young.
Diaries and memoirs were particularly useful in conveying precious ephemera, and I would point interested readers to the following: Tamara Karsavina's
Theatre Street
, Maurice Paléologue's
An Ambassador's Memoirs
, Prince Felix Youssoupoff's
Lost Splendour,
Konstantin Nabokov's
The Ordeal of a Diplomat
, Nadine (née Nadezhda Nabokov) Wonlar-Larsky's
The Russia That I Loved
, Nicholas Nabokov's
Bagazh
, Bravig Imbs's
Confessions of Another Young Man
, Jean Cocteau's
Opium
, Nina Berberova's
The Italics Are Mine
, Marie Vassilt-chikov's
Berlin Diaries, 1940–45
, Christabel Bielenberg's
Ride Out the Dark: The Experiences of an Englishwoman in Wartime Germany
, and
While Berlin Burns: The Diary of Hans-Georg von Studnitz, 1943–1945
. Among useful other histories, too numerous to list in full, were Dan Healey's
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia
, Graham Robb's
Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century,
Simon Volkov's
Saint Petersburg,
W. Bruce Lincoln's
Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia
, Robert Leach's
Vsevolod Meyerhold
, and William Wiser's
The Crazy Years: Paris in the Twenties.
The text is suffused with borrowings from these sources, including interlarded and unattributed direct quotes or paraphrases from Cocteau, Lifar, Stein, and the various Nabokovs.

A lovely succession of research assistants aided me along the way: Alyssa Barrett, Craig Libman, Joseph Langdon, Matthew Hunter, Jieun Paik. I am solely responsible for any misuse or misinterpretation of the recondite information they heroically obtained for me. I would also like to thank David Young and David Walker, who first abetted my love of Nabokov's work while I was an undergraduate at Oberlin, and Daniel R. Schwarz, Edgar Rosenberg, and Harry Shaw, the very supportive members of my dissertation committee when I wrote on Nabokov at Cornell. Many Vassar students in the several Nabokov seminars I have taught over the years have
also added immeasurably to my thinking on the subject.

Many, many thanks to my indefatigable agent Harvey Klinger, and to my brilliant editor at Cleis Press, Frédérique Delacoste. The advice of several trusted readers was invaluable in the long process of composition and recomposition, and I gratefully acknowledge the help given me by Chris Bram, Mary Beth Caschetta, Johnny Schmidt, Jieun Paik, and, most of all, the incomparable Raye Young (1916–2010), who not only read the manuscript multiple times but even encouraged me to deliver the whole intricate contraption aloud to her one crystalline Christmas week at Westbrook House in Frome, Somerset.

On a June evening in 2004, when I was first beginning to dabble in this dream, I went with my friend Karen Robertson to see the New York City Ballet dance three immortal Stravinsky/ Balanchine creations, including
Apollo
, at whose 1928 première I have imagined Sergey. Afterward, we shared a late dinner at a restaurant near Lincoln Center, and at Karen's urging I talked about the novel, which was still inchoate though I had begun to do some research. I told her what I knew so far, and together, quite casually, as one does in conversation, we began to conjure him—the unhappy, rejected boy he had been, the young man finding his brave way amid the pleasures and perils of Paris, the adult rewarded all too briefly with love before the darkness swallowed up everything—and gradually, the way a moth will begin to haunt the window screen of a lit room on a summer night, there he was: this lovely, benign, ghostly, and not uncomplicated companion.

This book is dedicated to that ghost.

PAUL RUSSELL
grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. He attended Oberlin College and later studied at Cornell University, where he earned an MFA in Creative Writing in 1982 and a PhD in English in 1983. He has taught at Vassar College and the University of Exeter. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, he is the author of six novels. Read more about him at
paul-russell.org
.

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Published in the United States by Cleis Press, Inc.,
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eISBN : 978-1-573-44732-4

 

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

 

2011025234