The Gambler: Dostoevsky’s Sharp, Funny Portrait of Addiction at the Roulette Table
In The Gambler (1866), a stormy cast lives side by side: a pathetic, lovesick, bankrupt general; a calculating, cheating Frenchman; an excessively neat and reserved Englishman; a talkative, aggressive old lady; and, finally, a young fortune-hunter.
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)
Title: The Gambler (1866)
Format: English paperback (Penguin Classics), 400 pages, translated by Ronald Meyer; includes six other stories
Scope: Short novel about gambling addiction, set in a German spa town
Amazon: www.amazon.es/dp/0140455094 (ASIN 0140455094)
Realism Amid Absurdity
The sharpness with which Dostoevsky depicts human relationships places us in a realist novel, however absurd the characters’ behaviour may become. With insight and, at times, humour, he describes the destructive side of gambling, a pathology that becomes especially harmful when it is joined to betting.
The Vicious Circle
In this novel we witness the vicious circle of addictive emotions: frustration at losing, recklessness and the stubborn insistence on playing on, the greed and flattery of opportunists and cheats; ruin, depression, self-contempt and, finally, the furious desire to play again; all of it in an afternoon at the roulette wheel.
Dostoevsky knew the subject from the inside: he wrote the book in a few weeks, under a punishing deadline, to pay off his own roulette debts.
A Novel Written in Twenty-Six Days
The Gambler has one of the most dramatic origin stories in literature. In 1866 Dostoevsky, deep in debt, had signed a contract with the publisher Stellovsky that would give the publisher the rights to all his works for years if he did not deliver a new novel by 1 November. With the deadline weeks away and Crime and Punishment still being serialised, he hired a young stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, and dictated The Gambler to her in twenty-six days. He met the deadline, and the following year he married Anna.
From Life
Dostoevsky knew his subject from the inside. During his travels in Germany in the 1860s he had lost large sums at the roulette tables of spa towns such as Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden, and the compulsion would torment him for years. The novel’s Polina, proud and capricious, owes much to Apollinaria Suslova, with whom he had a stormy affair. The narrator, Alexei Ivanovich, a tutor in the household of a ruined Russian general, speaks with the feverish candour of someone who knows he cannot stop.
The Grandmother
The novel’s most unforgettable character is the wealthy old grandmother whose death the whole family is waiting for, so that they can inherit. Instead she arrives in Roulettenburg in perfect health, carried in her chair, sharp-tongued and imperious, and promptly discovers roulette. Her headlong ruin, scene by scene, is both very funny and terrible, and it shows Dostoevsky’s comic gifts, often overlooked by readers who know only his darker books.
Echoes
Sergei Prokofiev turned the novel into an opera, first staged in 1929. Readers who enjoy this book can move on to Notes from Underground or, with time, to Crime and Punishment, written in the same year.
The Psychology of Play
What gives the book its lasting power is the narrator’s honesty about why he plays. Alexei does not gamble mainly to win money; he gambles for the sensation of risk, the moment when everything hangs on the turn of the wheel. Dostoevsky understood, long before modern psychology, that the losses are part of the attraction, and the final pages, where Alexei promises himself that tomorrow everything will change, are among the most truthful descriptions of addiction ever written.
Why Read It
The Gambler is a quick, fresh and lively read that shows how weak a human being can be, a slave to the stimulus of emotions. It is also the most accessible way into Dostoevsky: short, funny and fast. This Penguin volume adds six stories, including ’Bobok’ and ’The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’.
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