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obituary for Elena Dmitrievna Sikorsky (nee Nabokov)
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From Brian Boyd
Nabokov's sister, Elena Sikorski, died peacefully in her sleep on May 9. Born in 1906, the second youngest of the five children, she lived in St Petersburg, Yalta, London and Berlin, before moving with her mother to Prague in 1923. Married young to Peter Skulyari, she divorced and remarried again in 1932, to Vsevolod Sikorski, by whom she had one son, Vladimir, born in 1939. A librarian at the National University Library in Prague, she was able to extricate her family from Czechoslovakia by obtaining in 1947 a position as a UN librarian in Geneva, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her husband died there in 1958. Elena Sikorski is survived by her son (a simultaneous interpreter who has translated some of his uncle's stories into French), her daughter-in-law and two grandsons.
One reason Nabokov found Montreux such a congenial place to stay after arriving there more or less by chance in 1961 was that it was only an hour away from his favorite sibling. They had become close for the first time in the Crimea, where Elena eagerly colored in her brother's Belyan prosodic diagrams and acquired some of his zeal for butterflies, and they remained close in their emigre years. Readers of _Selected Letters 1940-1977_ (1989) can sense the warmth between them once they were able to reestablish relations across the Altantic after World War II; naturally, there is still more conclusive evidence in _Perepiska s sestroy_ (_Correspondence with my sister_, 1985).
VN and ES met for the first time in over twenty years in 1959, and after the Nabokovs settled in Europe in 1961, often visited and even holidayed together. Elena kept on the wall of her little Geneva apartment the framed original of the mock schedule that VN drew up for her on November 26 1967 when she came to "mind" him during Véra's absence for a week in New York--perhaps the best sample of what Dmitri calls their "very special intellectual and ludic camaraderie." This enchanting chart appears in print and facsimile in both _Selected Letters_ and _Perepiska s sestroy_. Even if you have no Russian, you could do worse than sample the drolleries of the facsimile as a kind of tribute to writer and recipient and what they shared.
In the 1970s, until her declining mobility made the trip impossible, Elena-the only one of V.D. Nabokov's family ever to cross the Soviet border-began to revisit Russia every summer. Her first report back to Montreux HQ, in 1972, was vivid enough to inspire her brother with the plan of sending a fictional stooge to report on _his_ return to the Soviet Union. Before her departure in 1973 Nabokov plied his sister with a checklist of details to look out for. A diligent and delighted spy, she collected just what he needed to impart an air of immediacy to Vadim Vadimych's return to the Soviet Union in _Look at the Harlequins!_.
To Nabokovians from all over the world who wrote, rang, visited, interviewed, taped, filmed and generally pumped her, Elena Sikorski was unfailingly generous with her time and memories. She was open, informal and unguarded, warm and even fond, courageous and uncomplaining. I for one will miss her greatly.
Nabokov's sister, Elena Sikorski, died peacefully in her sleep on May 9. Born in 1906, the second youngest of the five children, she lived in St Petersburg, Yalta, London and Berlin, before moving with her mother to Prague in 1923. Married young to Peter Skulyari, she divorced and remarried again in 1932, to Vsevolod Sikorski, by whom she had one son, Vladimir, born in 1939. A librarian at the National University Library in Prague, she was able to extricate her family from Czechoslovakia by obtaining in 1947 a position as a UN librarian in Geneva, where she remained for the rest of her life. Her husband died there in 1958. Elena Sikorski is survived by her son (a simultaneous interpreter who has translated some of his uncle's stories into French), her daughter-in-law and two grandsons.
One reason Nabokov found Montreux such a congenial place to stay after arriving there more or less by chance in 1961 was that it was only an hour away from his favorite sibling. They had become close for the first time in the Crimea, where Elena eagerly colored in her brother's Belyan prosodic diagrams and acquired some of his zeal for butterflies, and they remained close in their emigre years. Readers of _Selected Letters 1940-1977_ (1989) can sense the warmth between them once they were able to reestablish relations across the Altantic after World War II; naturally, there is still more conclusive evidence in _Perepiska s sestroy_ (_Correspondence with my sister_, 1985).
VN and ES met for the first time in over twenty years in 1959, and after the Nabokovs settled in Europe in 1961, often visited and even holidayed together. Elena kept on the wall of her little Geneva apartment the framed original of the mock schedule that VN drew up for her on November 26 1967 when she came to "mind" him during Véra's absence for a week in New York--perhaps the best sample of what Dmitri calls their "very special intellectual and ludic camaraderie." This enchanting chart appears in print and facsimile in both _Selected Letters_ and _Perepiska s sestroy_. Even if you have no Russian, you could do worse than sample the drolleries of the facsimile as a kind of tribute to writer and recipient and what they shared.
In the 1970s, until her declining mobility made the trip impossible, Elena-the only one of V.D. Nabokov's family ever to cross the Soviet border-began to revisit Russia every summer. Her first report back to Montreux HQ, in 1972, was vivid enough to inspire her brother with the plan of sending a fictional stooge to report on _his_ return to the Soviet Union. Before her departure in 1973 Nabokov plied his sister with a checklist of details to look out for. A diligent and delighted spy, she collected just what he needed to impart an air of immediacy to Vadim Vadimych's return to the Soviet Union in _Look at the Harlequins!_.
To Nabokovians from all over the world who wrote, rang, visited, interviewed, taped, filmed and generally pumped her, Elena Sikorski was unfailingly generous with her time and memories. She was open, informal and unguarded, warm and even fond, courageous and uncomplaining. I for one will miss her greatly.