A baker"s dozen of fiction by a modern master that spans the twentieth century from the last days of the Czars, to the Bolshevik Revolution, Nazi Germany, and contemporary middle-class America. Looking back nostalgically to the past and ahead to a future age of scientific miracles, Vladimir Nabokov makes each of the characters in these stories - young lovers, a forgotten poet, a Russian movie producer, a tragic butterfly collector - come vividly alive.