A detached intellectual, alien to compassion and indifferent to human pain - this is the image of Vladimir Nabokov that has developed in the mass consciousness. Philologist and literary critic Andrea Pitzer invites us to look at the master’s work from a completely new angle. Exploring Nabokov's prose through the prism of his biography, marked by world wars, revolutions, and mass emigration, the author discovers the most important details that have so far eluded the attention of readers. Fragment by fragment, painstakingly recreating the external and internal contours of the writer's personality, Pitzer makes us see a new, hitherto unknown Nabokov - a genius of hoax, who hid in his works the history of horrors of the twentieth century.