The Spy

Written in Berlin, "The Spy" (1930) — one of the most enigmatic and witty Russian works of Vladimir Nabokov, in which all the main original features of the writer's mature style are manifested. According to one possible interpretation, the painfully narcissistic hero of this metaphysical detective story, finding himself outside the usual circle of things and circumstances, begins to perceive reality and his own "self" through the prism of otherworldly experience. Reality no longer seems immutable, possibly because "everything that lies beyond death is at best a falsification, — as says the hero of Nabokov's story 'Terra Incognita', — a hastily glued semblance of life, furnished rooms of non-existence." The twelve stories selected by Nabokov were written between 1930 and 1935, and they are arranged in the order determined by the author, based on considerations of their internal connections and thematic or stylistic proximity to "The Spy." This edition reproduces the composition of the author’s collection published in Paris in 1938.