The Spy

Written in Berlin, "The Spy" (1930) — one of the most enigmatic and witty Russian works by Vladimir Nabokov, in which all the main original features of the author's mature style are manifested. According to one of the possible interpretations, the painfully self-loving protagonist 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 unshakeable, possibly because "everything that is after death is at best a falsification, — as the hero of Nabokov's story "Terra Incognita" says, — a hastily glued semblance of life, furnished rooms of non-being".
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 closeness to "The Spy". This edition reproduces the composition of the author's collection published in Paris in 1938.