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It is an exaggeration to say that Nabokov had three great passions besides literature - chess, butterflies and films. The novel, in which the art critic Albert Albinus lusts after a seventeen-year-old aspiring actress, Margot, and plays a relationship game with her full of paralysing obsession, seems to be a tribute to the medium of film. Indeed, the first Russian edition of this work in 1932 was called Kamera obskura, or "dark chamber". The author translated it into English six years later under the title Laughter in the Dark, and its fame was cemented by the 1969 film adaptation of the same name.

In the book, which has the same compelling power on the reader as the haunting atmosphere of a biograph, the writer weaves the fabric of a psychological thriller about an unbalanced love relationship in which the hunter becomes the hunted. In doing so, he sketches the contours of a drama that will become a precursor to the scandalous Lolita. The afterword is written by Jiří Kratochvil.