A Passion for Particularity : VLADIMIR NABOKOV: The American Years, <i> By Brian Boyd (Princeton University Press: $29.95; 735 pp.)</i>

Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire”(1962), one of the cleverest novels ever written, consists of a long poem by a New England poet called John Shade, and a commentary on and index to the poem by an emigre scholar called Charles Kinbote, who claims to have been the poet’s friend and confidant. The reader gradually realizes that Kinbote is mad, suffering from the delusion that he is the exiled king of a Ruritanian country overtaken by an oppressive revolution, and determined to read this self-aggrandizing fantasy into Shade’s poetic meditation on the tragic death of his daughter.

It was Nabokov’s ironic fate to suffer a similarly fraught relationship with the scholar Andrew Field, whose early critical homage pleased the author, but whose later biographical studies infuriated him with their psychological speculations and factual errors, including an idee fixe that Nabokov’s father was an illegitimate son of Czar Alexander II. “It was not worth living a far from negligible life . . . only to have a blundering ass reinvent it,” he commented on Field’s “Nabokov: His Life in Part,” published in 1977 just before his death.

Brian Boyd has, one hopes, appeased the vexed spirit of the novelist by his monumental biography which, though not officially “authorized,” had the cooperation of Nabokov’s widow Vera and is a work of meticulous scholarship and almost unqualified admiration for its subject. The first volume, “The Russian Years,” published in 1990, was widely praised, though some found it rather ponderous in style. This second installment is livelier, perhaps because Boyd, a professor of English in New Zealand, is more at home in the Anglophone part of Nabokov’s literary career, perhaps because the previous volume was inevitably overshadowed by Nabokov’s incomparable autobiography of his early years, “Speak, Memory.”

The story this volume has to tell is one of the most remarkable in the annals of modern literature. Nabokov “reinvented” himself long before Andrew Field got to work, converting himself from a European writer whose medium was Russian into an American writer whose medium was English, and achieving fame and wealth in the process. In 1940, he, his wife and their young son Dmitri arrived in New York as almost penniless refugees from the Nazi invasion of France. American academia proved generously hospitable to him as it had to many other intellectual fugitives from a terrorized Europe. In spite of having no Ph.D. or other orthodox qualifications, Nabokov was able to obtain employment as a college professor.

At Cornell he became a highly popular lecturer, notorious for his searchingly specific examination questions: “What did Mr. Price’s daily newspaper cost him (in ‘Mansfield Park’)? What gentleman of Normandy teaches what Dansker to scrime in ‘Hamlet’? Describe the wallpaper in the Karenins’ bedroom.” His eccentric value judgments (Dostoevsky was “a third-rate writer and his fame . . . incomprehensible”) infuriated but also stimulated his students, while his improvisational wit enchanted them. Informed that he was giving a lecture to the wrong class in the wrong classroom, “he readjusted his glasses on his nose, focused his gaze on the motionless . . . figures seated before him, and calmly announced, ‘You have just seen the “Coming Attraction” for Literature 325. If you are interested, you may register next fall.’ ”

Some of these behavioral quirks went into the composition of “Pnin,” the episodic adventures of an accident-prone emigre Russian professor, published as a book in 1957. It was the first full-length literary product of his American years, and one of the earliest “campus novels.” But at the same time Nabokov was working semi-secretly on “Lolita,” conscious that it was his masterpiece and yet, in those puritanical times, probably unpublishable.

Its eventual publication by Maurice Girodias’ somewhat disreputable Olympia Press in Paris provoked a predictable uproar that Nabokov wittily called “Hurricane Lolita”; but the overwhelming support of the international literary community (Graham Greene was honorably in the van) ensured that it appeared in America in 1958 without attracting prosecution. It was the first novel since “Gone With the Wind” to sell more than 300,000 copies in the first three weeks after publication, and by the mid-1980s, Boyd informs us, it had sold 14 million copies worldwide.

This success relieved Nabokov of financial anxiety and the need to teach. He returned to Europe and, without quite intending to do so, settled there with the devoted Vera, living in a hotel in Montreux writing his books, hunting butterflies, and giving the occasional interview to journalists--always on condition that their questions were submitted in writing in advance.

“Pale Fire” (1962) enhanced his reputation, and the film of “Lolita,” which won him a nomination for the best screenplay Oscar in the same year, enlarged his fame. His name was mentioned frequently in connection with the Nobel Prize. But in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s his star declined. The eagerly awaited “Ada” (1969) seemed to many reviewers a literary folly, while “Transparent Things” and “Look at the Harlequins” dismayed even devoted fans like John Updike and Martin Amis. Boyd suggests that feminism and multiculturalism created a climate unsympathetic to a writer whose values were always conservative and Eurocentric, but one can’t help thinking that Nabokov’s second emigration, from America to the ivory tower of the Montreux Palace Hotel, had something to do with it.

Not that Boyd is willing to concede any significant decline in the quality of his hero’s work. Every book is defended passionately and at length. Indeed, there is rather too much critical discussion in this biography, and Boyd’s determination to stamp a definitive interpretation on every item in Nabokov’s corpus becomes oppressive.

He is most interesting, but I think wrong, on “Pale Fire,” arguing that the whole book--poem, commentary and index--is supposed to be written by Shade. His “conclusive” evidence, a scrap of unpublished verse by Nabokov referring to an “index” compiled by “Shade,” would seem so only to a biographer. His reading impoverishes rather than enriches the novel, removing the contrast and tension between the “real” world of Shade and the fantasy world of Kinbote. If Shade invented Kinbote, he might have invented his dead daughter too, for all we could know. To get around this difficulty, Boyd invents, or reinvents, a frame for the narrative for which there is no textual warrant. He should have heeded his subject’s frequent warnings about the dangers of interpretation.

Although Nabokov was a man of idiosyncratic behavior, and a writer who, as he said himself, belonged to no movement or school, his life and work had an extraordinary consistency in his passion for particularity and distrust of generalization and paraphrase. His obsessive quest for a totally faithful, literal translation of Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin,” which cost him years of exhausting labor and drew him into a famous public controversy with his old friend Edmund Wlson, was one symptom of this devotion to the particular. So was his hatred of Freudian interpretation, in which everying can be made to stand for something else.

His microscopic exam questions were not frivolous teasing of his students, but reminders that works of literature reflect and preserve the unique significance of every moment of life. “In art as in science there is no delight without the detail,” he said.

He himself was a distinguished exponent of the most particular of scientific disciplines, the taxonomy of butterflies, and his art was dedicated to capturing the unique but ephemeral atoms of experience in the net of language.

We might link this obsession with particularity to the other recurrent theme of his work, the recovery of lost time, and trace both back to the traumas of losing the happy world of his childhood in the Russian Revolution, and then seeing his father murdered in a bungled act of political terrorism. Boyd has given us the materials to make such connections in this munificently detailed biography, and put all readers of Nabokov in his debt.