The gay Nabokov : The novelist never could face the secret
that cost his brother his life.
By Lev Grossman, May 17, 2000
excerpts: "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.
.........
Nabokov once told an interviewer, "I probably had the happiest childhood
imaginable." But Sergei did not...
.........
"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...
"
........
"They were never friends when they were children," says Sikorski [Elena
Nabokov]. "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 ...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. 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)"
.........
Vladimir remained in Berlin, where he met and married his wife, Vera, but
Sergei moved on to Paris...the legendary Paris of expatriates, the Paris of
modernists and the avant-garde...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...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 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...In a letter that Sergei wrote to
his mother, he describes the joy his relationship with Hermann gave him:"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?
.........
According to Andrew Field, his first biographer, Nabokov considered
homosexuality to be a hereditary illness... Abnormal or not, homosexuality was
actually an important part of life in the Nabokov family.
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."
........
"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 ?...
..........
Since Nabokov's death in 1977, the responsibility for managing his
posthumous reputation has fallen to his son Dmitri, who is fiercely protective
of his father's public image...When his father's attitude toward homosexuality
came up on NABOKV-L, a public e-mail list devoted to Nabokov's work, Dmitri
leapt into the fray. "I knew it was only a matter of time before the
sexual-preference police would go to town on my father," he wrote.
He summed up Nabokov's ambivalence perfectly: "He had a sense of justice, a
homosexual brother, and not one but two homosexual uncles. Among the writers he
admired there were plenty of homosexuals, from Proust to Edmund White. He had a
number of homosexual friends..."
..............
At no point did Nabokov, who in "Lolita" would wring pathos from the
sufferings of a child molester, ever have the courage to publicly state that his
brother was gay. "It may be a kind of prudery," muses Michael Wood...("The
Magician's Doubts")...From the giggly ballet dancers of Nabokov's first novel,
"Mary," to the ghastly Gaston Godin, Humbert Humbert's neighbor in "Lolita," to
the egomaniacal narrator of "Pale Fire," they are vain, silly, usually
effeminate Many of them are pedophiles. Not once did Nabokov, the master
observer, describe an instance of mature love between adults of the same sex --
even though a glowing example of that love was right before his eyes.
...........
Although Nabokov's gay characters are two-dimensional at best, Sergei found
other, more interesting ways to haunt his brother's fiction. In "The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight," ...one finds uncanny references to Sergei everywhere...
"The similarities of Sebastian and Sergei fit so well together, it's an aspect
of the work that you really have to consider," says Michael Begnal...
Brian Boyd... believes that the real inspiration for Lucette was
Sergei. "The centrality of Lucette in 'Ada,'" he argues in an e-mail, "in some
ways seems to reflect Nabokov's sense of Sergei: the non-favorite, the frail one
beside his confident sibling, the concentration camp victim ... the one we're
invited to ignore, and even want to dismiss from the story, but eventually
realize we should never have overlooked."
If Boyd is right, "Ada" gives us a last glimpse of Nabokov thinking about
Sergei -- and maybe, at last, starting to think about him in a new light. "I
think that Nabokov often tries to be inhumanly secure, and confident, and happy,
and unregretful," Wood observes. "If he pulled that off, he would be a monster.
It's a fine thing to try -- and an even finer thing to
fail."
................
Whatever peace Nabokov may have made with Sergei in fiction, it came long
after Sergei's death in fact.
( On Nov. 24, 1943, he served as best man at Ledkovsky's wedding. Three
weeks later he was arrested for the second time.Sergei's conduct in the camp was
nothing less than heroic.)