The Jetsam - Lara Biyuts (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📗

his other lovers. Fairly soon, in 1916 he died of heart attack in France, but the young VN had been an owner of the large fortune and real estate only for a short while, because the October Revolution robbed his of everything, and his uncle’s European real estate belonged to others.

Thus, homosexual influences surrounded VN on both sides of the family community -- paternal and maternal. There was also one Mikhail Nabokov, a railway clerk who was mentioned as a covert queer in the police dossier in 1889 that is 10 years before the writer’s birth, and the man well may be Vladimir Nabokov’s far cousin of a less noble line. However, there was a homosexuality which was much closer to the writer. It was the brother who was carefully covered up in the memoirs.

His younger brother Sergei, who was born 11 months after him, seemed to be much closer to VN than the younger brother Kirill, Sergei should be Vladimir's best friend, but the deliberate estrangement, which the writer established in their adult life, is imaged on the period of their childhood so strangely that the writer mentions his brother in his memoir only briefly -- “no friendship was between us . . .” “. . . I could describe my whole youth in detail without recalling him.” Indeed, he dedicates only several lines to Sergei in his memoir written in Russian, but Sergei lurks in every corner of Speak, Memory, VN’s 1951 memoir. Shy, awkward and foppish, Sergei Nabokov was Vladimir’s direct opposite, a “shadow in the background”, as VN put it. Their sister, Helene Sikorski recalls that the brothers were never friends when they were children. Sergei loved music, particularly Richard Wagner, and he studied the piano seriously. Vladimir, by contrast, was almost pathologically insensitive to music. By virtue of the terrible stutter and love for music Sergei resembled Uncle Ruka, and apparently, some genes he had inherited by this genealogical line. When he was 15 and Vladimir 16, Vladimir found a letter on Sergei’s desk and read it. That was a letter from their English tutor-trainer to Sergei; from the letter one could draw a conclusion that there was a love affair between the trainer and Sergei. Having no life experience Vladimir did not understand the sense of the letter and brought it to his parents so that they would explain why the trainer wrote in this way. His father, an experienced lawyer understood all and dismissed the Englishman.

But at school Sergei had love affairs too. He fell in love with his heterosexual classmates who did not reciprocate. Revealed, his secret inclinations enforced him to leave the famously progressive Tenishev School.

In his family -- the extraordinarily wealthy aristocratic family of St Petersburg -- Sergei did not find sympathy though he did not meet a great indignation or family scenes. His parents’ attitude towards his homosexuality was calm at least outwardly. Nobody ever spoke about it to him; the family instituted a kind of “don't ask, don't tell” policy; they took Sergei’s revelation absolutely quietly, and he could do whatever he wanted. But he loved his mother and father and he realized that his homosexual inclinations did not make glad them. As for his father, Vladimir Nabokov the elder, a Russian outstanding criminologist, journalist, and liberal politician, the coming of the third gay in the family inspired him for studying the juridical aspects of the problem in general.

The Nabokov family left Russia in the wake of the 1917 February Revolution for a friend's estate in Crimea, where they remained for 18 months; then following the defeat of the White Army in Crimea in 1919, the Nabokovs traveled through Constantinople to England, where VN and his brother Sergei enrolled in Cambridge. Neither Vladimir nor Sergei would ever return to his motherland.

While studying Slavic and Romanic languages at Cambridge, the brothers played tennis and mingled in the circle of Russian emigrants; both of them made equal progress, but in other respects the brothers were utterly different. Their cousin, Nikolai Nabokov writes: “Rarely have I seen two brothers as different as Vladimir and Sergei. The older one, the writer and poet, was lean, dark, handsome, a sportsman, with a face resembling his mother's. Sergei... 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)”. Nikolai Nabokov’s family recalled that 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.”

In his young manhood he was tall and very thin, always well-dressed, a gentleman, kind and courteous. The dandy, an aesthete and balletomane, he attended at all premiers of Serge Diaghilev Ballets Russes being wearing a flowing black theater cape and carrying a pommeled cane.

After graduation from Cambridge, the brothers joined their family in Berlin -- that was in the year when their father was assassinated. Vladimir Nabokov the elder was attending a political conference when two Russian Monarchists approached the stage singing the Tsarist National Anthem and opened fire, with the intention of killing the publisher and politician, leader of the Constitutional Democratic Party-in-exile Pavel Miliukov. In response, Nabokov jumped off the stage and attempted to disarm one of the gunmen, but being shot twice, died instantly. Nabokov's demise was an ironic death for a lifelong democrat: he died defending one of his political opponents. This episode of mistaken, violent death would echo again and again in his eldest son’s fiction (in the novel Pale Fire, for example, the poet Shade is mistaken for a judge who resembles him and is murdered). In his diary VN the younger wrote about the last evening he spent with his father: “We talked through the open door -- talked about Sergei, about his strange, abnormal inclinations.”

Both brothers went to work at a bank, but the 9-to-5 routine did not suit them: Sergei quit after a week, Vladimir in a matter of hours. In Berlin, within the colony of Russian émigrés, Vladimir gained a reputation as a novelist and poet, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Sirin. He met his Véra and married her. And Sergei fit easily into the growing gay community. However, soon he moved on to Paris. Here, in the big town that set the tone in modernism and avant-gardism he stayed for the next 20 years.

In the winter of 1923, his cousin, composer Nikolai Nabokov introduced him to painter Pavel Tchelitchev, who worked for Diaghilev and who was a homosexual too. Sergei Nabokov was invited to share an apartment of Tchelitchev and his lover Allan Tanner. The flat was so small that Tchelitchev called it “a doll’s house”; no electricity, no bath, and they had to wash themselves in a zinc tub using water heated on a gas stove. Sergei gave lessons in English and Russian for living. He was always in straitened circumstances but this was atoned with the society he mingled now. Sergei was good friends with Jean Cocteau, and he was also connected, through Tchelitchev and his cousin Nicolas, to Diaghilev, composer Virgil Thomson, to those aristocratic aesthetes the Sitwells and even the legendary salons conducted by Gertrude Stein and other outstanding intellectuals of Paris. He spoke fluently Russian, German, English and French, knew long poems by heart, and oddly enough, when he reciting poetry, he did not stutter at all. Stutterers are known to stop stuttering as they sing -- apparently, Sergei perceived poetry as music. He was also himself a poet -- his poems have not survived -- and those who knew his poems said they were good. A highly talented person, he might be equal to Vladimir in literature if he were not so timid and shy in everyday life. VN describes his brother as “drifting in a hedonistic haze, among the cosmopolitan Montparnassian crowd that has been so often depicted by a certain type of American writer. His linguistic and musical gifts dissolved in the indolence of his nature.”

In Paris, sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s, Sergei met and fell in love with a wealthy aristocratic Austrian of the name of 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.” -- (Grossman). Hermann and Sergei traveled about the capitals of Europe returning every time to the castle Weissenstein, where they walked and played tennis and bridge with Herman’s relatives. In a letter that Sergei wrote to his mother, he said: “It all is such a strange story, sometimes even I don’t understand how it happened ... I’m just suffocating with happiness... There are people, who would not understand this, to whom such things are completely incomprehensible. They would prefer to see me in Paris, barely surviving by giving lessons, and in the end, a deeply unhappy thing. There is talk about my ‘reputation’ and so on. But I think that you will understand, taking that all those who do not accept and do not understand my happiness are strangers to me.”

By this time, Vladimir had been married for a long while, the brothers were “on quite good terms” at the time, and he acquainted Sergei with his wife. Now, Sergei said: “Since I know your wife, you have to meet the man who is my lover.” The meeting took place at the terrace of a small restaurant. After Vladimir first saw Hermann, he described the scene to his wife in a letter: “The husband, I must admit, is very nice, quiet, not at all the pederast type. Attractive face and manners. All the same I felt rather uncomfortable, especially when one of their friends showed up, red-lipped and curly.”

In the spring of 1940 Hitler invaded France, and by May the Germans were bombing Paris. Vladimir and his family left for America on the last boat out of St. Nazaire, but Sergei was away in the countryside at the time. Returning to Paris he chose to stay in Europe with Hermann. The Nazis were already rounding up homosexuals as actively as they did to Jews, and in order to avoid attracting suspicion Sergei and Hermann rarely saw each other. Sergei took a job as a translator in Berlin, but he had no stomach for war, and the Allied bombings frightened him horribly. The fighting grew more intense, and flight became impossible; Sergei had almost no money, and as a refugee from the czarist Russia his only travel document was a flimsy Nansen passport. In 1941, the Gestapo arrested Sergei on charges of homosexuality. It released him four months later, but he was placed under constant surveillance. It's ironic that at that moment, after the lifelong shyness and stuttering, Sergei could not keep silent. He began to speak out against the injustices of the Third Reich to his friends and colleagues. In winter of 1943, he was arrested for the second time. The file that the police kept on Sergei accuses him of subversive statements. There may have been more to the story: Princess Zinaida Shachovskaya, whose relations with the Nabokov family have sometimes been strained, has written an un-translated memoir in which she asserts that Sergei was in fact involved in a plot to hide an escaped prisoner of war, a former Cambridge friend, a pilot who been shot down above the German territory. Now Sergei was taken to Neuengamme, a large labor camp near Hamburg, where he became prisoner # 28631. Conditions were horrible: the camp was a center for medical experimentation, and the Nazis used the prisoners to conduct research on tuberculosis. Of the approximately 106,000 inmates who passed through Neuengamme, fewer than half survived, and as a rule, the guards singled out homosexuals for particularly