In Despair[Otchayanie] Nabokov/Sirin tries his hand at portraying an antihero and anti-artist. This predetermines the special principle behind the character’s creation: the Ich-Erzahlung (first-person) narration and the algorithm of Hermann’s consistent and total negation and expulsion from reality. The article analyses the main types of the author’s position in the novel: a subjectified narration, the ‘two-voice word,’ etc. The author particularly draws our attention to Hermann’s mystical fear of mirrors. For many years the character was haunted by one and the same nightmare: he enters a room, which is completely bare, desolate and painted clean white. The dream appears to be a metaphor of the hollowness of his personality. It is this hollowness that the hero fears he might see reflected in a mirror. The scholar traces allusions to H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). The despair of the protagonist has a truly existential magnitude, his escape barred both into the ‘otherworldliness’ and the meta-reality. The latter has such a vague presence in the material world and is so devoid of distinctive parameters that it hardly justifies the description of being real.