Despair is a darkly comic novel narrated by Hermann Karlovich, a German businessman of Russian descent who is proud of his intelligence and artistic taste. While travelling near Prague, he meets a tramp whom he believes to be his exact double, and he begins to plan something that he calls a perfect work of art. As he explains his scheme, the reader sees how unreliable and self-admiring he is. A play on the doppelganger theme and on Dostoevsky, the book is a sly study of vanity, delusion and the gap between what a narrator claims and what is true.