Abstract: The article analyzes the features of the journey of the main character of V. V. Nabokov's novel «King, Queen, Knave». The trivial situation of the hero moving from the province to the capital in search of success turns into a metaphysical journey in the book, the mythological and literary roots of which go back to the «Divine Comedy» by Dante Alighieri. In a collapsed, metaphorical form, this plot manifests itself at the very beginning of «King, Queen, Knave», when the hero moves on a train from a third-class carriage to a second-class carriage. At the same time, Nabokov ironically compares this transition with moving from hell to heaven. The novel «King, Queen, Knave» is full of mistakes that the characters make due to their physical (in Franz) and spiritual (in everyone) blindness, but the main mistake of the book is the aberration of perception of the inner reality of loved ones, which determines the distortion of the reception of the external world. Instead of ascending to heaven, Franz finds himself in a state of being in the lower circles, where adulterers and murderers are tormented. Nabokov simultaneously follows Dante's scheme and ironically rejects it: Franz in Nabokov's optics is a spiritually untenable and static hero, and the world is largely based on random event couplings. Nevertheless, the plot of the real and metaphysical movement of the hero in «King, Queen, Knave» demonstrates the situation of tragic self-deception of a person making a journey from hell to hell. The relevance of the article is determined by the continuing interest of Russian and foreign literary criticism in the semantic and poetic multilayeredness and density of Nabokov's texts, to the specifics of their plot, to the peculiarities of their character system, to the originality of their motivic system, etc.