The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Advance Praise for
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

“This astounding book will remind the reader not of Nabokov, but of Tolstoy: for the epic sweep across history, of course, but even more for the great Tolstoyan trick of finding the one detail in a bit player—the livid scar on the naked thigh of a Russian peasant, the subversive ‘hangman's lock' of hair sported by a kid in Nazi Berlin—that somehow conjures up a whole vanished world of seeing and feeling. Sergey Nabokov is a triumphant invention: eyes and heart wide open through every catastrophe, he emerges as a new kind of hero, an intrepid conquistador of loss.”

—Mark Merlis, author of
American Studies
and
Man About Town

 

“Always readable and compelling, Paul Russell's
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
is a brilliant impersonation, literary prestidigitation of a higher order, and in the end, a unique and solidly mature work.”

—Felice Picano, author of
True Stories: Portraits From My Past

 

“What makes this remarkable novel unforgettable is the exact and vivid portrayal of Sergey Nabokov as he makes his way through an extraordinary time in history. Paul Russell's writing is breath-taking. This book will surely become a classic.”

—V. G. Lee, author of
The Comedienne
and
As You Step Outside

 

“The historical life of Sergey Nabokov was altogether real and all too short. But there are forms of history that only fiction can suggest, and this subtle novel movingly brings back from the shadows a rich, lost life.”

—Michael Wood, author of
The Magician's Doubts:

Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction
and
Yeats and Violence

 

“
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
advances the art of biography even as it proves itself the very best of Paul Russell's fine novels. I read half of it not even thinking that Sergey Nabokov was a ‘real person,' largely because the intimacy author Russell brings to his subject is the total kind one finds only in art, but then something told me, you're reading two sorts of book at once—a stupendous thrill ride all by itself. History and myth combine to tell the saga, apparently from inside, as we've never experienced it—the splendors and miseries of Tsarist Russia, the picnic of modernism that was the 20s Paris of Cocteau, Stein, and Diaghilev, and the unfolding nightmare of the Third Reich. Our hero lacks his brother's genius, but he is that rare creature, the genuinely brave and sweet man to whom one hates to say goodbye. And now we don't have to.”

—Kevin Killian, author of
Shy
and
Arctic Summer

 

“It takes an accomplished novelist to bring to glittering life a lost and foreign world. Paul Russell achieves this feat with disarming ease in
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
, a daring, ambitious, playful, intelligent, and deeply affecting novel. Russell lavishes upon Vladimir Nabokov's unheralded and doomed younger brother Sergey the divine attention, sympathy, and patience we all wish to receive from our creator. While compulsively reading this book, I felt an occasional twinge of envy, and I thought that it must have been as exciting to write as it is to read.”

—Valerie Martin, author of
The Confessions of Edward Day

 

“The only thing ‘unreal' about this novel is the skill it took to write it. Paul Russell exhibits uncanny knowledge of the period and its people. He is an unfailing guide through St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin, dope dens, literary salons, drag balls, and war-torn streets. From the height of genius and to the depth of the gutter, Russell extends his precise, penetrating, and panoramic gaze.”

—David Bergman, author of
The Violet Hour

 

“Paul Russell's sublime novel
The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov
is an astonishing work of art. In lucid prose, Russell retells the story of Nabokov's gay brother, allowing us a clear window into an overlooked life and an underwritten aspect of history. This mesmerizing novel not only recreates the shifting, unstable epoch of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, but reimagines Sergey's persona, his loves, and fate with great authenticity and imagination. It's a heartbreaking novel that everyone should read.”

—Alistair McCartney, author of
The End of the World Book

By the same author

 

 

 

 

 

THE AIR-RAID SIRENS COMMENCED SHORTLY before midnight. From the cellar we heard the cough of the antiaircraft guns on the city's perimeter, the bombers' drone, the rolling thunder of gigantic footsteps. All this we have grown accustomed to, but now the drunken giant strode directly toward us. We felt the building above us shudder, heard the windows blow out in a crystalline shower, smelled the weird bloom of the incendiaries. Then the deafening footsteps receded, the din quieted—only to be overtaken some minutes later by the fire's roar as it spread through the neighborhood. The pressure drop sucked the cellar door from its hinges. We scrambled to shoulder it back into place. With damp cloths we shielded our faces against the smoke. Our ears and temples throbbed. We cried aloud. We prayed.

“All the same,” I told Herr Silber this morning, “England is the most civilized country in the world.”

My words hung almost legibly in the frigid air of our office. A stunned silence met them. Several nervous faces glanced our way, then returned to their paperwork. Most of my associates in the Eastern Front Editorial Department had managed to show up for work. As Dr. Goebbels reminds us, in the Reich there are no longer any rights, there are only duties.

“Obviously, Herr Nabokov,” said my colleague, a little unsteadily, “we're all under a great deal of stress. Perhaps you might consider taking the rest of the day off.”

I knew he was trying to be kind. Every one of us in that room understood exactly what had just happened. Feeling dangerously lightheaded, I rose, made a bow. “
Danke sehr
,” I said. “I believe I will.”

What has been said cannot be unsaid. That is the reality of the Reich. Who should know that better than the staff of the Propaganda Ministry?

Herr Silber made the usual stiff-armed salute. There was no point anymore in returning it, so I did not.

I sensed all eyes following me as I left. In the corridor a poster warned: THE ENEMY SEES YOUR LIGHT! DARKEN IT! Shards of glass littered the front steps. Otherwise the Ministry remained remarkably unscathed, though its neighbors on Wilhelmstrasse were not so lucky. The Chancellery, the Arsenal, the Hotel Budapest—all had been reduced to rubble. I skirted a bomb crater nearly as wide as the street, its cavity already filled with water from a severed main. A burnt-out lorry perched on its lip. Nearby lay a headless mannequin which I chose not to inspect closely. All along my nearly impassable route the air hung thick with masonry dust, a hideous oily ash, an odor of char and kerosene and I scarcely dare think what else. Among incinerated trams and buses wandered unearthly shades. On Kurfürstendamm a stout middle-aged woman in a flimsy
nightgown and fur stole approached and threw her arms around me. Gratefully I embraced her, if for no other reason than that we were both still alive.

“What despicable barbarians!” Herr Silber had said to no one in particular in that frigid shell of an office. “Murderers. Jackals. Jews! The British are by far the worst war criminals of all.”

Who could blame him? The firestorm had overspread the city from west to east. Charlottenburg, Unter den Linden, Alexanderplatz—all were said to be devastated. Nonetheless, I said what I said—“
Trotz allem, England ist das zivilisierteste Land der Welt
.”

Last week a young lady was arrested from the building next door for black-listening to foreign broadcasts. Only yesterday I witnessed an older gentleman plucked from the tram by the Sicherheitsdienst for mentioning to another passenger what hardly needs mentioning: that the war goes very badly for the Reich. The civilized lads of the RAF will not have devastated this city so fully that the Gestapo cannot find their way to me. Flight is out of the question. Where would I go? The Nansen passport we Russian exiles carry is worthless. Besides, I am a convicted sex criminal under regular surveillance since my release from an Austrian jail last year.

I write this in my shell-shocked lodgings in Ravensbergerstrasse. The windows are gone, the electricity and water are out, my nerves are badly shredded, and I cannot get the sight of that headless mannequin out of my head. For courage I rely on black market brandy I have been hoarding for a wedding next week. In a recent novel by the incomparable V. Sirin—quite popular in our émigré circles—a condemned man wonders how he can begin writing without knowing how much time remains. What anguish he feels, realizing that yesterday there might perhaps have been enough time—if only he had thought to begin yesterday.

 

 

 

I WAS BORN IN SAINT PETERSBURG, RUSSIA, on March 12, 1900, the second son of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and Elena Ivanovna Rukavishnikov. My father was a highly regarded criminal lawyer, newspaper editor, and prominent “Cadet,” as the Constitutional-Democrats opposed to the Tsar were known in those days. My mother came from fantastic wealth, and if some of my father's many enemies enviously whispered that his marriage betrayed a certain calculation, I never saw evidence of anything but a sustained and altogether enviable love between them.

My parents' initial attempt at a son having arrived stillborn, their firstborn, Vladimir Vladimirovich, was all the more precious to them. I gather my own debut, a scant eleven months later, was less enthusiastically received. Through the years I have given a good deal of thought to my brother's perspective on this
premature interloper in his private paradise, and concluded that part of his antipathy for me has always lain in his suspicion that I might represent a hasty revision on the part of the Creator that somehow reflected badly on him.