King, lady, jack. Nabokov V.V.

In his second, written in Berlin, the novel “King, Lady, Valet” (1928) Vladimir Nabokov turns to the material from German life and first accepted for a deep study of the philistine psychology, then continued in the “Camsteen” and “Despair”. Behind the criminal plot with a love triangle lies the masterfully revealed confrontation of two polar lines of life: a stencil, soulless, brought to automatism, and natural, full -blooded, creative. In the conditional world, advertisements and fashion magazines are embedded as if the very consciousness and nature of the young “lady”, the main character of the book, and vice versa, unexpected poetry are filled with the life and projects of her husband, the rich in the King of the King in that difficult game that leads with a reader of Nabokov.

The real edition is supplemented by an episode from an expanded English version of the novel, first translated into Russian.