King, queen, jack

In his second novel, written in Berlin, "King, Queen, Knave" (1928), Vladimir Nabokov turns to material from German life and for the first time undertakes a deep investigation of bourgeois psychology, continued later in "Laughter in the Dark" and "Despair". Behind the criminal plot with a love triangle lies a masterfully revealed confrontation between two polar life images: the stereotypical, soulless, automated, and the natural, full-blooded, creative. In the conditional world of advertisements and fashion magazines, the consciousness and nature of the young "queen", the main heroine of the book, materialize as if by themselves, and conversely, the everyday life and projects of her husband, the wealthy merchant Dreyer — the "king" in that complex game that Nabokov plays with the reader, are filled with unexpected poetry.
This edition is supplemented with an episode from the expanded English version of the novel, translated into Russian for the first time.