In his new novel The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov, author Paul Russell brings an almost forgotten witness to history back to life: the younger brother of the great writer Vladimir Nabokov, a gay man who lived in the shadow of his famous family.

Russell spoke with Lambda Literary Review about creating Sergey’s unreal life, blending historical fact with a novelist’s imagination, and reveling in the syntax of Gertrude Stein.