Despair

7 hrs. 4 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Vladimir Nabokov

Narrator Vyacheslav Gerasimov

Description

A mid-level Berlin businessman plans and carries out an “ideal murder” to collect insurance, and then writes a novella about it—only to reread it with horror and discover the fatal flaw in his cunning scheme that he himself recorded on the pages… Within the framework of a detective story about supposed double identities and “murder as a kind of fine art,” Nabokov plays brilliantly with eternal literary plots about genius and villainy, true and false talent, crime and punishment—plots that later will unfold in the famous “Lolita.”