‘The Gambler’ by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Another short Dostoyevsky novel and one that I enjoyed reading a great deal more than ‘Notes from the Underground’. This one is also narrated by a central character, but while flawed, he is much more appealing to spend time with than the tortured chap who narrates the earlier book.

I read the Oxford World Classics edition in a translation by Jane Kentish.

‘The Gambler’ was first published in 1866 a few years after ‘Notes from Underground’ when things were just starting to look up for Dostoyevsky. It was written at the same time as the monthly instalments of ‘Crime and Punishment’, and was very much composed against a publisher’s deadline. It was because of this that the final chapters were dictated to the stenographer who would soon become Dostoyevsky’s second wife, Anna, and whose memoir I hugely enjoyed reading last month.

The novel concerns a group of characters (some Russian, others from elsewhere) who are living temporarily in a German spa town he calls ‘Roulettenburg’ which is based on Baden-Baden and Weisbaden that Dostoevsky visited regularly in order to ‘take the waters’ in a bid to ease his medical problems. Casinos feature prominently and the book is really about people with gambling addictions who are forever winning and then losing large amounts of money playing roulette and other games. The psychology of compulsive gamblers was very familiar to Dostoyevsky because he was for many years one himself.

There are also two ‘sort of’ love stories in the novel, but both concern women who are more interested in money and having fun than serious romantic entanglement. This is true of most of the characters in fact, this being a world that is portrayed here pretty cynically.

Just over half way through I found that my enjoyment suddenly spiked with the arrival of a splendidly spirited grandmother who is wealthy and who others see only as a source of future inheritance. She proceeds to gamble away merrily, before leaving the scene as fast as she arrives on it. Those passages are particularly compelling and fun to read.

Another character, called Pollina, is much less attractive a personality, but also compellingly drawn. She is apparently based somewhat on Apollinaria Suslova, a young woman with whom Dostoevsky appears to have had a pretty turbulent affair while living in Europe in the early 1860s. She is cold and appallingly manipulative, but also fascinating.

To what extent was Dostoyevsky making more serious and profound observations about the human experience in 'The Gambler'? I guess it could be argued that he was propagating the view that our lives are rather more determined by luck than we might like to think, that sudden reversals of fortune occur and that these are sometimes for the good and sometimes not. I was not so sure about this in all honesty, but I think he was very consciously portraying people as pretty unattractively venal. They are all looking to get rich without having actually to earn any money.

An interesting and engaging novel with an even more interesting back story.