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) 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". Additionally, the book is rich in intertextual connections to other authors such as Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, and Conan Doyle. "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. British author Martin Amis ranked it second on his list of best Nabokov