The Coral Island are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and "The Coral Island" is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that in comparison to "Robinson Crusoe" such books generally replaced some of the original's romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as "The Coral Island" and Frederick Marryat's 1841 novel "Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific".
Despair (novel) violence between the Nazis and Communists. It would not be long before the Nazi party would come into prominence and Hitler appointed as chancellor. This would only fuel Nabokov's hatred for totalitarian governments, and this disdain was incorporated somewhat into "Despair" (Hermann is pro-Communist) and more prominently later on in "Invitation to a Beheading" (1936), Nabokov's next novel. In 1935, Nabokov began to become increasingly intrigued with the English language and elected to translate his two most recently written novels at the time, "Laughter in the Dark" (1932) (first translated as "Camera Obscura") and "Despair". Nabokov remarked that translating "Despair"