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Late in life Nabokov wrote to his first biographer Andrew Field, in a failed attempt to set him on the right path:

“I should have warned you, perhaps, before you started upon your project, that despite a semblance of joviality and ready wit, I am really a rather dreary and lonely person in terms of visible life. . . . The number of friends I have had or have is quite abnormally small and amongst them the two or three intimate ones I ever had are now dead. The jolts of my era kept creating gaps in space and gulfs in time between me and the few people dear to me. . . .”

(That sad, understated phrase “jolts of my era,” sums up a revolution that exiled him from Russia and a personal fortune at 18, the assassination of his father, two separate flights from Nazis with his Jewish wife, and the deaths of his brother and close friends in German concentration camps.)

Nabokov then continues outlining what he views as the ideal biography:

“To sum up: the only rational and artistic way to write the history of an individual of my dismal kind (whose only human and entertaining side is the gift of inventing clouds, castles, lakes) would be to follow his development as a writer from his first opaque poems to Transparent Things.”

Nabokov thus provides his biographer with a blueprint, but also hands over the keys. “Cloud, Castle, Lake,” is an early story dealing with one of his key themes, “a tribute to a world predisposed for happiness and a lament for a world nevertheless condemned by history to so much unhappiness” (Boyd’s phrase.) But the story also contains some his first metafictional trapdoors and suggestions of an authorship beyond this world, which would build throughout his work until Transparent Things. His growing emphasis on metaphysics in his works was given an official imprimatur in 1979 when Véra Nabokov stated that potustoronnost, “otherworldliness,” was the “watermark” of her husband’s late fiction.

While Field seems to have ignored or lost this VN’s letter, Brian Boyd happily took this direction and built over two volumes just the sort of “rational and artistic” history of the writer and his work, that Nabokov had in mind.

While volume one dealt with all the “jolts” of history, volume two begins with the Nabokovs' arrival in America in 1940. It takes us thru Nabokov’s struggles to find work despite as he wrote to Edmund Wilson, “Funny—to know Russian better than any living person—in America at least—and more English than any Russian in America—and to experience such difficulty in getting a university job;” his years in the university like Pnin and John Shade; his summer Humbertian rambles around the West hunting butterflies with Vera; his years working in libraries annotating like Kinbote Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Vol. I; the storm he would call “Hurricane Lolita;” and finally his years of creative repose in Montreux.

While few writers have had more interesting histories, it’s ultimately Nabokov’s work that’s more interesting and lasting, and this is were this book is most valuable giving us context gained from unparalleled access to materials and Nabokov’s family, and then Boyd’s insightful analysis of the individual works. These analyses are given in individual chapters, and if published as a separate volume, “Boyd’s Guide to Nabokov,” would likely be the best single-volume criticism of Nabokov.

There are many approaches to Nabokov’s work, and while Boyd will be invaluable for them all, I chose the more masochistic thru-hiking route. I would read along in the biography stopping to read the referenced work (poem, story, novel, play) en route, then read Boyd’s commentary before proceeding to the next stop. What was unexpectedly rewarding about this method was the time Boyd spends on the short stories and poems both analyzing them and setting them in context with his larger works. Thus you can see VN trying out, in early stories like “The Aurelian” and later ones like “The Vane Sisters,” themes and techniques he would expand on in larger works.

Boyd’s style is natural and free of academic jargon. Despite being a doorstop, the reading is easy and can be read in sections or as a reference work. The biography does drag a bit at this end, as Nabokov himself does. If I had one criticism of the book, however, it would be that because this is a biography of Nabokov the Writer rather than the Man, we never really end up with a real clear idea what he was like beyond his work and public persona. Nabokov, would of course, say that is is completely irrelevant, but we are nonetheless curious. Fortunately, we have Stacy Schiff’s excellent biography of Véra, Vera which after reading I feel like I got a much better sense of how different Nabokov was in real life than I’d imagined him.

The definitive biography by the uncontested expert. No scholar should be without the weighty tome in their arsenal.