From salon an excerpt from an article:
After Sergei’s death, Vladimir described him in a letter to Edmund
Wilson as “a harmless, indolent, pathetic person who spent his life
vaguely shuttling between the Quartier Latin and a castle in Austria.”
Nabokov rarely mentioned Sergei in print — at least not by name. It
wasn’t until the third published version of his “Speak, Memory” that
Nabokov even felt able to include an account of Sergei’s life. In an
early piece of autobiography, recently published in the New Yorker,
Nabokov describes his brother “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.”
At no point did Nabokov, who in “Lolita”
would wring pathos from the sufferings of a child molester, ever have
the courage to publicly state that his brother was gay. “It may be a
kind of prudery,” muses Michael Wood, author of a book on Nabokov, “The
Magician’s Doubts,” and chairman of Princeton University’s English
department. “He obviously had a terrific affection for his brother. He
also had a fixed distaste for homosexuality.”
But however
distasteful he found it as a person, Nabokov as a writer found
homosexuality perversely irresistible, and gay characters turn up in
almost every one of his 17 novels. There’s invariably something
strangely wooden about them. Nabokov was the archenemy of clichi, a
writer passionately committed to overturning tired literary conventions
through careful observation of the real world, but his homosexual
characters are as a rule egregiously stereotyped.
From the giggly
ballet dancers of Nabokov’s first novel, “Mary,” to the ghastly Gaston
Godin, Humbert Humbert’s neighbor in “Lolita,” to the egomaniacal
narrator of “Pale Fire,” they are vain, silly, usually effeminate — he
uses the word “mincing” a lot — shallow, intellectually trivial and
ineffectual, and the narrator generally introduces them with a nudge
and a wink and a snigger. Many of them are pedophiles. Not once did
Nabokov, the master observer, describe an instance of mature love
between adults of the same sex — even though a glowing example of that
love was right before his eyes.
Although Nabokov’s gay characters
are two-dimensional at best, Sergei found other, more interesting ways
to haunt his brother’s fiction. In “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,”
Nabokov’s fictional account of a man’s attempt to write the life of his
mysterious half-brother, one finds uncanny references to Sergei
everywhere, from the title character’s name, which alliterates with
Sergei’s, to his foppishness and his failures at sports, to a series of
uneasy meetings between the brothers in Paris that closely parallels
those of the real-life Nabokov brothers. “The similarities of Sebastian
and Sergei fit so well together, it’s an aspect of the work that you
really have to consider,” says Michael Begnal, an English professor at
Wesleyan University who writes on Nabokov. “My impression was that he
had to put the whole Sergei situation to rest in his own mind, and in a
way that’s what he’s trying to do.”
When he learned of Sergei’s
death in 1945, Nabokov was in the middle of writing “Bend Sinister,”
his most political novel. Like Sergei, the hero of “Bend Sinister”
speaks out against a brutally repressive regime, and like Sergei, he
would pay for his courage with his life. But Nabokov’s feelings about
his brother were never simple: In “Bend Sinister” it’s not the hero
who’s gay but the dictator who orders his death. In 1967, when he
finally told the story of Sergei’s life, Nabokov’s writing conveys a
sense of unspoken strain and remorse: “For various reasons,” he writes,
“I find it inordinately hard to speak about my other brother.”
In
“Ada,” his longest novel and one of his last, Nabokov made his best and
final attempt to come to terms with his feelings about his brother in
print. “Ada” is the story of an incestuous love affair between Van Veen
and Ada Veen, brother and sister. Their younger sister, Lucette, is
also passionately in love with Van, and she spends most of the novel
trailing around after the couple, getting in the way and generally
making a pest of herself. Van’s indifference drives Lucette to despair,
and toward the end of the book she throws herself from a cruise ship in
the middle of the Atlantic.
the rest of the article:
http://www.salon.com/2000/05/17/nabokov_5/singleton/
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