With "Laughter in the Dark" and "Despair," the two novels in this volume, Nabokov's first Russian phase comes to an end. Together with the earlier novel "King, Queen, Knave," they are Nabokov's most cinematic works, and both were later actually adapted into films: "Laughter in the Dark" by Tony Richardson and "Despair" by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. When he translated his Russian novel "Kamera obskura" into English under the title "Laughter in the Dark" in 1938, he revised it, more so than any of his other English translations, to the extent that in some ways a new novel emerged. This volume, which also includes the first German translation of the original version in the appendix, allows the curious reader for the first time to make a direct comparison between both text stages, thereby indirectly providing a glimpse into Nabokov's workshop.