The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov Read online




  Table of Contents

  Praise

  By the same author

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgments

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TO OUR READERS

  Copyright Page

  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

  War Against the Animals

  The Coming Storm

  Sea of Tranquillity

  Boys of Life

  The Salt Point

  1

  BERLIN

  NOVEMBER 23, 1943

  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.

  2

  ST. PETERSBURG

  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.

  As for my undoting parents, they were disappointed, as I was later told by my needlessly honest grandmother Nabokova, to find their second offspring such a pallid reprise of their first. I was an uncommonly listless child: nearsighted, clumsy, inveterately left-handed despite attempts to “cure” me, and cursed with a stutter that only grew worse as I matured.

  One of my earliest memories: I must have been four. Russia was at war with Japan, and my mother, brother, and I were ensconced with our English governess, Miss Hunt, in the Hotel Oranien in Wiesbaden, having been sent abroad by my father’s worries over the deteriorating political situation at home. About our German winter I remember little save for the young man who operated the hotel lift. Though he must have been no older than fifteen or sixteen, he seemed to me the epitome of manhood, dashingly handsome in his brimless gold cap, crimson blazer, and tight ink-black trousers with a single crisp stripe of gray defining the length of each long leg. Though I do not remember this myself, I am told that I had a habit of fondly clinging to his trouser leg as he worked the lift controls—rather like the little monkey that accompanied the organ grinder the hotel staff were incessantly shooing away from the sidewalk just beyond the hotel’s front entrance.

  It was during that winter of my innocent infatuation that my brother convinced me to escape from the hotel he for some reason considered more a prison than a palace. I no longer recall what sweets or other reward Volodya promised me, but I remember very well our ride down from the fourth floor, and how the enchanting lift boy seemed to think nothing amiss in allowing two unaccompanied children free egress into the lobby. As Volodya dashed forth I paused, placed my hand on my heart, and bade my bemused idol a desperate “Adieu, mon ami!” which I had feverishly rehearsed during our descent. Then I raced to catch up with my charismatic brother, who, winding among the legs of guests, had already managed to escape the clamor of the lobby for the even more clamorous street.

  The organ grinder and his bright-eyed monkey leered at us. The avenue was a maze of clattering carriages and electric trams spitting terrifying blue sparks. I had never ventured from the Oranien without my mother or Miss Hunt holding my hand; to this day I marvel that Volodya appeared to know exactly where he was going in the chaos of the street. I struggled to keep up, as he kept looking back at me over his shoulder in an exasperation I knew meant he already regretted having cajoled me to join him.

  In no time I realized we were lost. I kept my eyes on Volodya’s dark-blue navy jacket. The sky was dull and lifeless, the air chill and heavy, the town a uniform gray. Only my brother was a dancing point of color and energy. How long we wandered I cannot say, but eventually we neared the river, to which Miss Hunt had taken us by carriage several times so that we might stroll the promenade.

  At a pier where a steamer lay docked, there was commotion as the last of the passengers boarded. Without a moment’s hesitation, Volodya bounded up the gangway, only to be brought up short by a stern-looking man with a great mustache.

  “Sir, our parents have already gone on board,” Volodya explained in silken English. “They will be terribly alarmed if we fail to join them.” Volodya addressed the crowd. “Please, is there an Englishman here who can help a fellow countryman?”

  They all stared at this stalwart five-year-old and his cowering brother.

  “Why, dear, we’re Americans,” exclaimed a large lady who held a little black dog in the crook of her arm. “By all means, board with me, my child.”

  Thus folded in her protective skirts, we passed onto the boat, whereupon Volodya cried, “Mama, Papa!” and grabbing me by the hand, broke away from our temporary savior. At that moment, a quiver ran from prow to stern, a whistle shrieked, and the boat began to pull away from the pier.

  I remember the calm of that leaden river as we left the city, and the houses thinned to fields and vineyards. Whenever in later years, whether in Paris or London or Berlin, I have heard those slowly rising chords that usher in Wagner’s river maidens, I am back on that steamer on the Rhine, standing beside my brave, mad, thrilling brother and allowing, at last, tears of terror and homesickness to run down my wind-flushed cheeks.

  “What are we to do?” I wailed.

  “Everything,” he crowed. He spread his arms wide. “Seryosha, we’re sailing to America. We’ll shoot elephants and ride horses and meet wild Indians. Just think of it.”

  At
the next landing, a policeman stood waiting and scooped us up to a nearby police landau. The lift boy, having had immediate second thoughts about the wisdom of allowing us out on our own, had reported our escape, and hotel staff had traced us to the pier just as our steamer moved beyond the range of their frantic hails.

  Back at the hotel, my brother took stoically whatever discipline our mother managed to mete out. Our father, when eventually informed of our adventure, laughed heartily. Everyone seemed to sense that I had been the unwilling partner. The only one to suffer any permanent harm was poor Miss Hunt, who, on account of her negligence in allowing us to slip from our rooms, found herself promptly fired—hardly the first or last of our governesses to be bested by my brother. As for the superb lift boy, I never saw him again. Now that I think of it, I suppose he may have been fired as well.

  My mother’s brother, Vassily Ivanovich Rukavishnikov—known to us as Uncle Ruka—was a delightful exotic. He dressed gaily. One never saw him without a carnation in his lapel, or opal rings adorning his long fingers. He favored spats and high-heeled shoes, which I found tremendously elegant, though his mincing gait provoked cruel imitation by my brother. He was vain and passionate, sallow-skinned, raccoon-eyed, dashingly mustachioed and, like the younger of his two nephews, cursed with a stutter.

  We saw him mostly in summer, when he alighted at Rozhestveno, his domain which, with my mother’s Vyra and my grandmother Nabokova’s Batovo, made up the family estate along the Oredezh River.

  In late June, up would go the flag atop his house, announcing his arrival from those wintering haunts in France or Italy or Egypt we knew only from his extravagant stories. The shuttered house would be opened, the front portico’s grand columns hastily repainted, the furniture unveiled, the carpets beaten and aired. He brought us gifts, which he bestowed upon us gradually, so that the days of June were a continual revelation of colorful books and puzzles, playing cards, hand-painted lead hussars and uhlans, and once, when I was six, an enchanting little bronze bust of Napoleon that I took to bed with me every night for many weeks, till Volodya’s scorn eventually caused me to forgo that comforting practice.