A sheltered childhood in Tsarist Russia, fleeing from the revolution, indulgences in the Parisian bohemia, and death in the Neuengamme concentration camp: in just 45 years (1900-1945), Sergei Nabokov experiences tumultuous times. In his aristocratic family, the effeminate, stuttering boy is an outsider, merely a "shadow against the backdrop of my richest memories," as his famous brother Vladimir Nabokov later describes him. During his flight, he travels through Cambridge and Berlin to Paris, where he quickly gains access to the circles around Cocteau, Diaghilev, and Gertrude Stein. When he is on the verge of dying from opium addiction, a friend takes him to his castle in Tyrol, where the Nazis arrest the pair in 1941. After a brief imprisonment for "unnatural vice," Nabokov goes to Berlin, where he works as a translator in the Ministry of Propaganda.