Despair. Nabokov V.V.

“Despair” (1934)-the sixth novel by Vladimir Nabokov, written in Berlin, and his third, after the “King, Lady, Valet” and “Obskura cameras”, a psychological-criminal novel that rejects the conventions of this genre. Herman, the Berlin merchant of Russian-German origin, convinced of its genius, is plotting a crime that, like a work of art, should become a masterpiece of ingenuity and impeccability of execution. Life, however, turns out to be much more witty and fiction of a vicious plan, the crooked mirror of which only distorts reality.

the form of narration in the first person, the belief of the hero-storyteller into his own exclusivity and the brilliant syllable bring the “despair” to the written twenty years After Lolita.