Written in Berlin, The Spy (1930) is one of the most enigmatic and witty Russian works by Vladimir Nabokov, in which all the main original features of the writer's mature style appeared. According to one of the possible interpretations, the painfully conceited hero of this metaphysical detective, finding himself outside the usual circle of things and circumstances, begins to perceive reality and his own "I" through the prism of otherworldly experience. Reality no longer seems unshakable, perhaps because “everything beyond death is at best a falsification,” as the hero of Nabokov’s story “Terra Incognita,” says the hero of Nabokov’s story “Terra Incognita, “a hastily glued semblance of life, furnished rooms of nothingness.”The twelve short stories selected by Nabokov were written between 1930 and 1935 and are arranged in the order that the author determined based on considerations of their internal connections and thematic or stylistic similarity to The Spy.This edition reproduces composition of the author's collection published in Paris in 1938Editorial design preserved in PDF A4.