This book consists of two parts: “From the Bottom of the Box” and “Transparent Objects”. The first included American stories by Nabokov, written from 1943 to 1951, after which he never returned to this genre. “Transparent Objects” (1972) is a short story (or short novel) of the late Swiss type. “Once it took me about forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I had to invent America,” Nabokov wrote in the afterword to Lolita. Now he had to “invent” hotel and ski resort Switzerland. And it is no coincidence that the main character of Transparent Objects, an editor and proofreader (the same age as his son), is the type of person who was most often the object of observation of the writer, periodically visited by employees of publishing houses. The reader may smile when he learns that Dmitry Nabokov, who was fond of mountaineering, visited his parents several times, climbing the facade of Montreux Palace (reproduced on the cover of this book) from his number 52 to their 64th.