In his second novel, The King, Queen, Knave (1928), written in Berlin, Vladimir Nabokov turns to material from German life and for the first time undertakes a deep study of philistine psychology, which was then continued in Camera Obscura and Despair. Behind the criminal plot with a love triangle lies a masterfully revealed confrontation between two polar lifestyles: stereotyped, soulless, brought to automatism, and natural, full-blooded, creative. In the conditional world of advertisements and fashion magazines, the very consciousness and nature of the young “lady”, the main character of the book, is materialized, and vice versa, the life and projects of her husband, a wealthy businessman Dreyer, are filled with unexpected poetry, the “king” in that complex game played by with the reader Nabokov.

This edition is supplemented with an episode from the extended English version of the novel, translated into Russian for the first time.

The publisher's layout has been preserved in PDF A4.