Field, Andrew. VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov. 1986

Relying heavily on his own Nabokov: his life in art and Nabokov: his life in part, Field has produced the first critical biography of that writer. He describes in leisurely detail Nabokov's by-now familiar life: idyllic youth in pre-Bolshevik Russia, followed by six decades of exile and growing fame in the West. Field fixes Nabokov's oeuvre firmly in this personal and historical context (the kind of approach Nabokov loathed, of course) and sets The Gift , Lolita , and Pale Fire at "the summit of his art." The final, self-absorbed novels Field dismisses as "pseudo-Olympian." Lively, judicious, authoritativebut largely a reworking of old material.