Tuesday, May 13, 2008
When he was 15 and Vladimir 16, Vladimir found Sergei's diary open on his desk and read it. He showed it to their tutor, who showed it to the children's father. In retelling the incident Nabokov writes, with uncharacteristic dryness, that Sergei's journal "abruptly provided a retroactive clarification of certain oddities of behavior on his part."
Among those oddities was Sergei's withdrawal from the famously progressive Tenishev school, an all-boy private school also attended by Nabokov and by poet Osip Mandelstam. According to Nabokov's principal biographer, Brian Boyd, Sergei left because of a series of "unhappy romances." It's unlikely that he found much sympathy within his immediate family. According to Sikorski, who quaintly refers to Sergei's homosexuality as his "attitude," the family instituted a kind of "don't ask, don't tell" policy. They took Sergei's revelation "absolutely quietly. Nobody ever spoke about it to him, and he was left to do as he wished." Marina Ledkovsky, Sergei's second cousin and a professor emerita at Barnard College, remembers that her own mother "pitied him quite a bit ... He adored his mother, and adored his father. He was so affectionate -- that's why it was so very hard for him."
When the revolution came in 1917, the Nabokov family fled Russia, barely escaping with a fraction of their fortune on a Greek cargo boat loaded with dried fruit. Neither Vladimir nor Sergei would ever return to his motherland. After brief stops in Athens and Paris, Vladimir wound up enrolled at Cambridge University; Sergei started at Oxford but joined his brother at Cambridge a semester later. There they played tennis together -- Sergei lacked a backhand but never double-faulted -- and hung around with the same set of displaced Russians. In Sergei's letters from the period, which have never been translated or published, most of his worries are about money and about his parents, who settled in Berlin.
The two brothers went on to earn identical degrees, seconds in Russian and French, but in all other respects Vladimir and Sergei were utterly different. "No two brothers could have been less alike," wrote Lucie Lion Nohl, another imigri, in a memoir of her acquaintance with Nabokov:
Vladimir was the young homme du monde -- handsome, romantic in looks, something of a snob and a gay charmer -- Serge was the dandy, an aesthete and balletomane ... [He] was tall and very thin. He was very blond and his tow-colored hair usually fell in a lock over his left eye. He suffered from a serious speech impediment, a terrible stutter. Help would only confuse him, so one had to wait until he could say what was on his mind, and it was usually worth hearing ... He attended all the Diaghilev premieres wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.
Composer Nicolas Nabokov, cousin to Vladimir and Sergei, paints much the same double portrait:
Rarely have I seen two brothers as different as Volodya and Seryozha. The older one, the writer and poet, was lean, dark, handsome, a sportsman, with a face resembling his mother's. Seryozha ... was not a sportsman. White-blond with a reddish tint to his face, he had an incurable stutter. But he was gay, a bit indolent, and highly sensitive (and therefore an easy butt for teasing sports).
When the brothers graduated in 1922, they joined their family in Berlin, which had become the social and cultural center of the Russian diaspora. Sergei fit easily into the growing gay community there, and he was friendly with German activist Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the world's first gay tolerance organization. Sergei and Vladimir went to work at a bank, but the 9-to-5 routine didn't suit them: Sergei quit after a week, Vladimir in a matter of hours. Vladimir remained in Berlin, where he met and married his wife, Vira, but Sergei moved on to Paris.
Paris in the '20s meant the legendary Paris of expatriates, the Paris of modernists and the avant-garde, of Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Picasso and the surrealists. Sergei would spend much of the next two decades there. While Vladimir never stopped mourning the Russia of his youth, Sergei most likely felt at home for the first time in a city that celebrated art and music, and that took his gayness in stride.
It becomes more difficult to track Sergei when he passed out of his brother's exhaustively documented life, but some details of his time in Paris survive. We know that in the winter of 1923 Nicolas introduced him to painter Pavel Tchelitchev, whose work now hangs in New York's Museum of Modern Art and who painted sets for Sergei Diaghilev. Tchelitchev was also gay and also a Russian imigri, and the two of them shared an apartment with Tchelitchev's lover, Allen Tanner.
The flat was so tiny that when Tchelitchev saw it he remarked, "We are to live in a doll's house!" It had no electricity and no bath -- they had to wash themselves in a zinc tub using water heated on a gas stove. Sergei survived by giving lessons in English and Russian. His circumstances may have been straitened, but the cultural scene in which Sergei found himself was rich beyond all measure. According to Andrew Field, Nabokov's first biographer, Sergei was good friends with Jean Cocteau, and he was also connected, through Tchelitchev and his cousin Nicolas, to Diaghilev, to composer Virgil Thomson, to those aristocratic aesthetes the Sitwells and even to the legendary salons conducted by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at 27 Rue de Fleurus.
He must have cut quite a figure. Sergei was an incorrigible dandy, and he wore a bow tie at all times. According to one story, told by a former archbishop of San Francisco, he was notorious for attending Mass in full makeup. Nicolas' son Ivan is now in his 60s, too young to really remember Sergei, but he remembers his mother's account of him. According to her, Sergei was "the nicest of all the Nabokovs ... a sweet, funny man ... much nicer, much more dependable and much funnier than all the rest of them."
According to Ledkovsky, Sergei was deeply kind, "always a gentleman," devoted to music but also steeped in Russian, French and English poetry -- all languages that, along with German, he spoke fluently. "He could recite anything by heart, and when he recited poetry, he would not stutter at all." He was also himself a poet, in her opinion a good one, though none of his work survives. "He was a very talented, brilliant man," says Ledkovsky. "If he were not so timid and shy, if he didn't feel so ... out of place, who knows? He might have been the equal of Vladimir."
The story of Sergei's life in Paris has a Cinderella ending. Sometime in the late '20s or early '30s he met and fell in love with a wealthy, aristocratic Austrian, whom Nabokov's biographies have heretofore referred to as "Hermann." After a great deal of research, he emerges as one Hermann Thieme.
Charming, handsome, something of a dilettante, Thieme was the son of an insurance magnate. His family owned (and still owns) Schloss Weissenstein, a magnificent 12th century castle in the tiny Alpine village of Matrei im Osttirol near Innsbruck, Austria. During the '30s Hermann and Sergei often retreated to Schloss Weissenstein. Iva Formigoni, Hermann's niece, now lives in Milan, Italy, but she still remembers the two of them lounging around the castle grounds together and playing tennis and bridge with her and her parents. When Sergei came to stay with Ledkovsky's family in Berlin, he kept a picture of Hermann on his night table. ("I immediately noticed him," she says, "because he was so extremely good-looking!")
In a letter that Sergei wrote to his mother, he describes the joy his relationship with Hermann gave him. "It's all such a strange story, sometimes even I don't understand how it happened ... I'm just suffocating with happiness." Some of Sergei's shyness seems finally to have left him. "There are people," he wrote, "who would not understand this, to whom such things would be completely incomprehensible. They would rather see me in Paris, barely surviving by giving lessons, and in the end a deeply unhappy creature. There is talk about my 'reputation' and so on. But I think that you will understand, understand that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me."
Was his own brother one of those strangers? After Vladimir met Hermann for the first time, he described the scene to his wife in a letter: "The husband, I must admit, is very pleasant, quiet, not at all the pederast type, attractive face and manner. All the same I felt rather uncomfortable, especially when one of their friends came up, red-lipped and curly."
Nabokov simply didn't like homosexuals. Even after Sergei's death, Nabokov used homophobic slurs that make the modern reader cringe. In one letter he describes Taos, N.M., where he spent a summer, as "a dismal hole full of third-rate painters and faded pansies." And he referred to gay Russian critic Georgy Adamovich as "Sodomovich."
According to Andrew Field, his first biographer, Nabokov considered homosexuality to be a hereditary illness. Nabokov's homophobia is in fact one of the dirty little secrets of 20th century literature, on a par with T.S. Eliot's anti-Semitism. "I believe Nabokov was quite homophobic," says Galya Diment, vice president of the Nabokov Society and a professor in the Slavic department at the University of Washington. "It behooves his fans and admirers to admit it -- and also to regret it."
Where did this prejudice come from, in a man who spoke out vehemently against both racism and anti-Semitism (his wife was Jewish)? Nabokov's father, also named Vladimir, was a politician, and he was deeply involved in legislative debates over homosexuality. In pre-revolutionary Russia consensual homosexual intercourse was a crime (as it still is in parts of the United States), and although V.D. Nabokov, as he was known, argued for the decriminalization of sodomy, his attitude toward homosexuality was complicated: He made it abundantly clear that his legislative arguments were based on purely constitutional grounds, on abstract notions of freedom and privacy, and that he personally considered homosexuality to be "deeply repugnant" to any "healthy and normal" person. V.D. Nabokov died in 1922 in Berlin, shot in the chest while breaking up the attempted assassination of a visiting Russian dignitary. Nabokov's diary records that in their last conversation, the night before, Vladimir and his father had discussed Sergei's "strange, abnormal inclinations."
Abnormal or not, homosexuality was actually an important part of life in the Nabokov family. In "Speak, Memory," we meet little Vladimir's beloved governess, "lovely, black-haired, aquamarine-eyed Miss Norcott," who "was asked to leave at once, one night at Abbazia." What grown-up Vladimir doesn't tell us is that Miss Norcott was dismissed because she was a lesbian. Nabokov also had no fewer than two gay uncles. Konstantin Nabokov, his father's brother, was chargi d'affaires at the Russian Embassy in London. Vasily Rukavishnikov, Vladimir's maternal uncle, was also a diplomat, though a less successful one. He did succeed, however, in making an indelible impression on his young nephew.
Uncle Ruka, as he was universally known, was a wealthy, eccentric dilettante, and there's every indication that he was in love with the young Nabokov; certainly his attachment to his favorite nephew went beyond what was appropriate. He appears to have subjected Nabokov to a mild form of sexual abuse: "When I was eight or nine," Nabokov writes in "Speak, Memory," "he would invariably take me upon his knee after lunch and (while two young footmen were clearing the table in the empty dining room) fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments." In his biography of Nabokov, Boyd notes "Humbert's first feignedly nonchalant fumbles with Lolita," and suggests that "the adult Nabokov's disapproval of homosexuals and his solicitude for childhood innocence may all have their origins here."
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