Speak, Imagination

Paul Russell Conjures Nabokov’s Gay Brother

by Nina Shengold, December 29, 2011

Two brothers, born to an aristocratic Russian family, emigrate during the chaos of the Bolshevik revolution. Vladimir Nabokov goes on to become the celebrated author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and dozens of other works. His brother Sergey is arrested for homosexual activity and dies in a Nazi concentration camp, nearly forgotten by history.

“I’m a little embarrassed that I hadn’t thought of Sergey as a subject before, because I’ve been living with his brother for years,” says novelist Paul Russell, whose PhD dissertation at Cornell explored the effect of Nabokov’s physical and linguistic exiles on his protean body of work.

Then again, Vladimir rarely mentioned Sergey, barely eleven months his junior. “All I knew until I read Lev Grossman’s essay [“The Gay Nabokov,” Salon, 2000] were two pages he added to the third edition—the third edition—of Speak, Memory. It was clear he had a very painful relationship with his brother,” Russell says. “You could read between the lines and tell Sergey had been gay, but Grossman filled in enough details to suggest a potential character whose life could be expanded further.”

Russell’s just-released novel The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov (Cleis Press, 2011) does just that, brilliantly re-creating the many worlds in which the historical Sergey moved: pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Cambridge University, the gay demimonde of expatriate Paris, a fairy-tale castle in the Austrian Alps, war-torn Berlin.
“Every time Sergey changed countries, I’d think, ‘Oh great, now I have to build a whole new stage set,’” Russell says with a laugh. “I’m very dependent on the research of others, because I never leave my house.”

This is clearly not true—he teaches literature at Vassar and just gave a reading at Philadelphia landmark Giovanni’s Room—but his Rosendale farmhouse does have the air of a private retreat. It’s easy to picture Russell poring over research books in front of the living room woodstove, with his feet on a Turkish rug and one of his four cats curled nearby, or sitting amid the rambling gardens he’s built over the past 20 years, which even in winter attest to a landscaper’s vision.