page_title: Sergey Nabokov
section_title: Russia
hierarchical_section_title: Sergey Nabokov / Life / Russia
caption_attribution_description: English: Nabokovs Vladimir, Kirill, Olga, Sergey, Elena
context_page_description: Sergey Vladimirovich Nabokov was a Russian poet and pedagogist who was born on 12 March 1900 in Saint Petersburg. Sergey died on 9 January 1945 in a Nazi concentration camp located in Neuengamme. He was brother to Vladimir Nabokov.
context_section_description: Sergey was born 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 Bolshoy Morska 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.
caption: The Nabokov children in 1918 (from left to right): Vladimir, Kirill, Olga, Sergey and Elena
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