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) was distributed to the wrong audience. Nabokov would later lament that "Despair" was "a rhinoceros in a world of hummingbirds". Nabokov intended Hermann, and the novel in general, to be kind of a Dostoevskian (who is referred to as "Dusky and Dusty" in the novel) parody; this is even more evident as the original working title for the novel was to be "Zapiski mistifikatora" ("Notes of a Hoaxer"), akin to Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground". At one particular, Hermann even contemplates titling his narrative "The Double", before he realizes it has been used, and opts for "Despair" instead. Nabokov infamously despised