The Gambler - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Spoilers)

[Carlton Carr]

Dostoevsky was well qualified to write the book, The Gambler, because of his own enslavement to roulette over an eight year period of his life. In a letter to a friend he describes the book as;

A description of a sort of hell...The main point is that all the ’gambler’s’ vital sap, all his energies, his impetuosity and boldness will be absorbed by roulette. He is a gambler, but not just an ordinary gambler.

Alexie, the main character bets, “On impossible odds, possessed by a mad desire to take risks, he gets higher and higher on the intensity of the drama he has created at the table of chance”.

The actual writing of The Gambler is a drama of risk because Dostoevsky was forced to write the book on a deadline because he has borrowed an advance from an unscrupulous publisher and if he is late in completing it he will be forced to forgo all royalties. In the end Dostoevsky does make the deadline but it is touch and go whether his destructive addiction or his creative genius would win this particular wager.

The original idea is that the gambler would stop his destructive compulsion but in the final version he doesn’t manage to recover from his addiction saying that he will only stop once he has recouped all his losses. Dostoevsky himself makes promises to his wife Anna that he will stop and, although he also promises himself that he will “think and keep control”, “play coolly, using his head", he is never able to keep these promises, using as his excuse that he has “weak nerves”. It is only five years after the completion of the book that he does manage to overcome his addiction to compulsive gambling.

As a problem gambler myself (now in my ninth year of recovery) I have read widely on the subject and Dostoevsky’s personal experience and his book The Gambler are used time and again to highlight the dangers involved in gambling addiction, common elements that are found in out-of-control gambling and the inevitable consequences not only to the problem gamblers finances but also to his/her character and personal relationships. A well known example of Dostoevsky’s experience being used to illustrate psychological hypothesis is Sigmund Freud’s essay, Dostoevsky and Parricide (1953).

The Gambler can be read as an entertaining and perceptive text book case on the aetiology of the compulsive gambler or for the sheer enjoyment of a novella, by a literary genius, that is as fresh and relevant today as it was when it was written in 1867.

[Bigwig1973]

I read The Gambler in support of a paper I was working regarding Dostoevsky's epilepsy. I guess I never took into consideration that the book was relevant to gambling addicts. I read about Dostoevsky's life. A nobleman's life is probably not physically hard, but it was probably very stressful, especially if he was at all concerned about the well-being of the peasants. Most would assume a nobleman wouldn't care, but it would be nice to think that they sometimes do. Even the responsibility men shoulder today in the United States, still being perceived as being the "bread winner", etc. for the family might be quite stressful, a family is enough to worry about, much less an entire estate of people, when sentiment towards royalty was not good, being ill with epilepsy, having gone to Siberia because of your own family, and being a gambling addict...it all adds up. I'm not sure what an addictive personality actually means, but if you could relate to The Gambler, the main character in the novel Notes From Underground is quite interesting. And, it isn't that long.