Andrew Field does not exist. The book recently published under his name, Nabokov: His Life in Part, is in fact a novel written by Vladimir Nabokov. It is the final and most triumphantly ironic work of one of the most important authors of this century. Such, at any rate, is the impression created upon a reader of Nabokov's fiction by Mr. Field's new book.

I do not actually know whether Andrew Field exists, and I would prefer not to find out. Unfortunately, so as to protect this publication and myself from possible legal action, I must appear to assume that Mr. Field does exist. But I shall continue to read and think of Nabokov: His Life in Part not as if it were some stranger's strange job of biography, but rather as one of Nabokov's own delightful blends of fact and fiction. For there is no other way to make sense of this book.

"I have no desire to twist and batter an unambiguous apparatus criticus into the monstrous semblance of a novel," as Charles Kinbote puts it in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire (1962). But like Kinbote's "Commentary" on John Shade's poem, Nabokov: His Life in Part is not nearly so unambiguous as it seems. Vladimir Nabokov may as conceivably be the author behind Andrew Field's work as he is of the series of Russian novels published under the name of V. Sirin. It would be far from the first time that the author had fooled us for, as his readers well know, Vladimir Nabokov is nothing if not a master of disguise. (p. 72)

More than a few of Nabokov's acknowledged novels are properly read as intellectual comedies in which more or less persistent biographers struggle to pin down their more or less unwilling subjects. The centerpiece of his most ambitious Russian novel. The Gift (written in 1937), is the biography of a real writer (Nikolai Chernyshevsky) as composed by Nabokov's imaginary narrator. In Conclusive Evidence (1951, later Speak, Memory, "An Autobiography Revisited"), Nabokov fashioned his own memoir into a durable work of art. And in Pnin (1957) a distinguished Russian émigré, teaching, like Nabokov himself, at an American university, is ridiculed and belittled by a mean-spirited narrator who only succeeds in making his subject more lovable than ever. I submit (as 'Andrew Field' would say) that Nabokov: His Life in Part inherits its themes from all of these books; and that, as a deft and complex intellectual comedy, it deserves its place on the shelf of Nabokov's best fiction.

The comedy in this book is easily overlooked and yet, for that very reason, all the more satisfying once it is perceived. It derives from the exaggerated obtuseness of the character named 'Field' as he persists in tormenting the character named 'Nabokov.' 'Field' plays Kinbote to 'Nabokov''s John Shade. 'Field' appropriates 'Nabokov,' he belittles him, he ridicules him, he makes his life miserable—and makes himself ludicrous in the process…. 'Nabokov,' meanwhile, performs as the classic comic butt (falling fully dressed into ponds, committing impossible blunders of syntax) and yet somehow—here is the magic—he manages to transcend his "biografiend." It is an astonishing performance. (p. 73)

Nabokov: His Life in Part is not only the comedy of 'Field' versus 'Nabokov'—it is also the sequel to Nabokov's first memoir Speak, Memory, and therefore contains the author's long-promised account of his American period. Nabokov's success in co-ordinating these two fundamentally different genres—the autonomous comedy and the personal memoir—marks the true mastery for which this book must be valued. (p. 74)

Those of any sensitivity who try to read Nabokov: His Life in Part as a serious biography can only be pained by 'Field's' disrespect for his subject, in much the same way that the naive reader of Pale Fire resents Kinbote's distortion of John Shade's poem. In fact, the kinship of these two responses is one of the surest clues to the 'Field' book's true nature. (p. 75)

In his discussions of Nabokov's novels, 'Field' seems at times to exemplify literary biography's very worst tendency, a denial of the possibility of artistic creativity: "Glory is a direct telling of many details of Nabokov's life in slightly altered form." After such statements as this, no reader who has any acquaintance with Nabokov should be able to take 'Andrew Field' seriously. (p. 76)

The paradoxical effort of two characters writing about each other to produce a single book informs the basic structure of at least three other Nabokov novels: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pale Fire, and Ada. In the last line of Sebastian Knight, the famous author and his biographer reveal themselves to be one and the same person, an invisible but strongly implied Vladimir Nabokov…. The debate in the Life in Part over whether John Shade or Charles Kinbote is the real author of Pale Fire is protracted to such an absurd degree that the reader cannot fail to recognize that true responsibility for that novel lies with neither but behind them both in Nabokov's own implied authorship. The issue is neatly displayed in a splendid diagram of the situation of Pale Fire in the Life in Art—no more of Shade than his legs or of Kinbote than his head can be made out, suggesting that they may indeed be one creature, and the entire scene is illuminated by a radiant sun labelled NABOKOV—but of course 'Andrew Field' takes no note of these things in his accompanying text. The same struggle for control of the implied authorship takes place in the Life in Part as in Pale Fire, but in the 'Field-Nabokov' contest the stakes are much higher. The names of both contenders appear on the cover of the book. (p. 80)

Vladimir Nabokov's death so soon after the publication of Nabokov: His Life in Part is impossible to discuss at this point without pain. But it must be asserted that such patterns do lie at the very center of the master's work. In Pale Fire, John Shade dies into the last line of his poem when an assassin mistakes the poet for his critic. At the end of The Defense (1930), Luzhin perishes into the eternity of his chessboard, finally at one with the patterns of his art. Nabokov wrote of Ada and Van,

One can even surmise that if our time-racked, flat-lying couple ever intended to die, they would die, as it were, into the finished book, into Eden or Hades, into the prose of the book or the poetry of its blurb.

Nabokov's final, most oblique and most personal novel concludes as follows:

—Done and done then. A portrait of Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-American writer of our time and of his own reality.

The End. Oh. The End. (p. 81)

[The Editors of Chicago Review add the following disclaimer]: The Editors of Chicago Review accept no responsibility for the views expressed in the preceding article. Andrew Field is a well-known critic who has published widely, and not only on Nabokov; he teaches at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. We offer "NABOKOV: His Life Is Art" to our readers as a curiosity merely; the reality of Mr. Walkarput is itself in some doubt. (p. 82)