The narrator and protagonist of the story, Hermann Karlovich, a Russian of German descent and owner of a chocolate factory, meets a homeless man in the city of Prague, who he believes is his doppelgänger.

Nabokov began to compose Despair while he was living in Berlin beginning in July 1932 and managed to complete the first draft on September 10 of the same year.

Nabokov infamously despised Dostoevsky's writing, with its excessive soul-searching and glorification of criminals and prostitutes, and this is reflected in Despair and Hermann, who carries certain similarities to Raskolnikov, who had also planned a perfect murder in Crime and Punishment.

[5] Additionally, the book is rich in intertextual connections to other authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle.

[5] Despair is generally acclaimed as one of Nabokov's better Russian novels, along with Invitation to a Beheading and The Gift (1938), and has a reasonable volume of literary criticism.

Nabokov comments on this in the foreword to the later edition of Despair, where he remarks that "Hermann and Humbert are alike only in the sense that two dragons painted by the same artist at different periods of his life resemble each other.

Both are neurotic scoundrels, yet there is a green lane in Paradise where Humbert is permitted to wander at dusk once a year; but Hell shall never parole Hermann".

[8] To put it simply, the reader can never be positive if Hermann is accurately narrating the events because he tends to overestimate his own skills and talents while ignoring reality around him.

Vladislav Khodasevich pointed out that Nabokov is obsessed with a single theme: "the nature of the creative process and the solitary, freak-life role into which a man with such imagination is inevitably cast.

[10] In 1978, the novel was adapted into the film Despair, directed by the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and starring Dirk Bogarde.