King, Queen, Jack

In his second novel, published in Berlin in 1928, Nabokov departs from the biographical and nostalgic tones of Mashenka and gives free rein to his imagination. It is King, Queen, Knave that marks the birth of the writer Nabokov (still writing under the pseudonym V. Sirin), who will soon conquer first Europe and then America. The plot, as if taken from a low-grade pulp novel, is only a cover for a sophisticated game with the reader. Its heroes are the most ordinary ones, whom you can meet, for example, in a train carriage. There, in fact, the reader gets to know them, as if by chance, stopping his gaze on this trinity. A rich husband, a mercenary wife and a poor relative. Naturally, according to the rules of a pulp romance novel, both men are in love with the same woman. Through this banal love triangle, Nabokov, as if through a prism, examines all the basic fears, hopes, sexual complexes and intellectual aspirations of a person at the beginning of the 20th century, who in fact is not much different from a person at the beginning of the 21st century.