Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokov (Russian: Сергей Владимирович Набоков; 12 March 1900 – 9 January 1945) was a Russian poet and pedagogue. He died in a Nazi concentration camp located in Neuengamme. He was brother to Vladimir Nabokov.
Life
Russia
Sergey was born in Saint Petersburg into the noble Nabokov family. His father was the noted Russian lawyer and statesman Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov. His mother, Elena Ivanovna, was the daughter of philanthropist Ivan Rukavishnikov. Sergey was the second son, being 11 months younger than Vladimir.
Unlike his older brother, Sergey was a shy, awkward boy. He had poor eyesight and a severe stutter. He developed a strong passion for music around the age of ten, playing fragments of piano operas and going to concerts with his father. He talked little with Vladimir.
Sergey spent the first years of his life at the Nabokov house on Bolshaya Morskaya Street in Saint Petersburg, and at the family's suburban estate in Vyra, near Siversky. He began his education at Tenishevski's school, where he studied for five years, and then transferred to the First Junior High School.
When Sergey was 15, Vladimir found a page of his diary and gave it to his tutor, who later passed the page to the father. It implied that Sergey was homosexual. The family reacted relatively calmly to this fact, partly because Sergey's uncles Konstantin Nabokov and Vasiliy Rukavishnikov were homosexuals. According to Brian Boyd, delayed remorse provoked the intensiveness with which Vladimir Nabokov later protected his own private life. Sergey gradually became more alienated in family relations. The father, being a progressive liberal politician, ran a campaign aimed at abolishing criminal prosecution of homosexuals.
The October Revolution forced the Nabokovs to move to the Crimea. On November 2 (O.S.; 15 N.S.) 1917, Sergey and Vladimir Nabokov left Saint Petersburg forever in the sleeping car of the train to Simferopol. During their journey, soldiers escaping the front entered the carriage. According to Vladimir, his brother "a first-rate actor", faked symptoms of typhus, and the brothers were ignored. In April 1919, before the beginning of Bolshevik rule, the Nabokov family left Russia forever and settled in Berlin.
Europe
Sergey and Vladimir studied Russian and French philology at Trinity College, Cambridge. They spent much time together, often playing tennis. The brothers were quite different, with Sergey being tall, slim, blond, with pink skin, with an elegant aesthetic, and cheerful but sensitive.
After graduating in 1922, the brothers returned to their family in Berlin. Both tried to work in the banking sector, but were unable to do such work. Vladimir worked for only several hours total, and Sergey lasted a week. In Berlin, the brothers split up. Given the atmosphere of tolerance in Germany at the time, Sergey behaved freely, participating actively in the gay community and meeting Magnus Hirschfeld. He soon moved to Paris, where he lived in the tiny apartment of his immigrant friend Pavel Tchelitchew and Pavel's lover Allen Tanner, who introduced him to the gay cultural elite of Paris, such as Jean Cocteau, Sergei Diagilev, Virgil Thomson, and Gertrude Stein. From 1924 to 1926 he was romantically involved with a Polish painter living in Paris, Józef Czapski; the relationship ended when Czapski, who was suffering from typhus, went to London for treatment.
According to contemporaries, Sergey Nabokov was a nice, intelligent young man who spoke four languages fluently, knew French and Russian poetry, and loved music and theater, which made him very different from his brother. In Paris, he taught English and Russian while fending off starvation. He wrote poems but they are not preserved. In 1926 Sergey converted to Catholicism.
In the Paris of the late 1920s, Sergey met Hermann Thieme, the son of the Austrian insurance tycoon Carl Thieme, who became the love of his life. The two moved to Weissenstein Castle, Matrei in East Tyrol. In the 1930s, they traveled together around Europe. In the early 1930s, relations with his brother Vladimir got better: Sergey even taught him German.