Black Wedding for Sergey Nabokov

1) Collage, Kohlezeichnung auf Karton

2) Kohle auf Karton

à 100 x 70 cm

2018

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*Black wedding

When a person dies unmarried and of young age, a living person can take part in a ceremony called the Black Wedding (crna svadba) and commit to being their spouse for a whole year. The wedding is held at the same time as the funeral.

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*Sergey Nabokov,

poet and pedagogue, brother to Vladimir Nabokov.

The Nabokovs left Germany in the 1940s and fled to the United States without telling Sergey. He went home, only to find the apartment empty. Sergey was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 on charges of having homosexual contacts.

 

In 1945 Vladimir Nabokov had a dream in which Sergey died on a bunk in a concentration camp. The next day he received a letter informing him of the death of Sergey by dysentery and hunger.