Despair (Twentieth Century Classics S.)

Hermann is a German chocolate manufacturer, who lives in bourgeois comfort with his pleasing but stupid Russian wife and her drunken cousin. On a business trip to Prague, Hermann stumbles across a man he believes to be his double and starts plotting to turn this encounter to his advantage.

Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899 in St Petersburg. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most famously, Lolita. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one of the most outstanding Russian émigré writers. He died in 1977.