The Gambler

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Dostoevsky knew the passion for gambling very well; he was under its sway intermittently for some eight years, from his first trip abroad in 1863, where he had beginner’s luck at roulette in Wiesbaden, until the spring of 1871, when he was again in Wiesbaden and lost everything almost at once. At one point during those years he even gambled away his young wife’s wedding ring. This last time, however, gripped by a sort of mystical terror, he went running in search of the local Russian priest, lost his way in the dark, and wound up not in front of the Orthodox church but in front of a synagogue. There, for whatever obscure reason, something decisive occurred. “It was as though I had had cold water poured over me,” he wrote to his wife. “A great thing has been accomplished within me, a vile fantasy that has tormented me for almost ten years has vanished.” And indeed he never gambled again.

For Dostoevsky, roulette was not only a means of getting rich “suddenly, in two hours, without any work,” as Alexei Ivanovich, the narrator and hero of The Gambler, says, but also “some defiance of fate, some desire to give it a flick, to stick [his] tongue out at it.” What fascinated him and possessed him was the “poetry” of the game of chance, the look into the abyss, the ultimate risk, a susceptibility that he saw as part of the “unseemliness” of the Russian character. But for Dostoevsky, as for his hero, that unseemliness had its positive side precisely in its impracticality; it was open to passion and to the unforeseeable. “Perhaps I’m a dignified man,” Alexei Ivanovich says to Polina, but I don’t know how to behave with dignity. Do you understand that it may be so? All Russians are that way, and you know why?

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