Reading Dostoevsky's The Gambler

My 1972 paperback.  A college friend gave this to me after he had read it for a class he was taking.  I have held on to it ever since but only read it several weeks ago.  It is the first book by Dostoevsky I ever owned, predating all the other paperbacks I read earlier this year.  See here, here, and here.

 

2022 has definitely been the year of Dostoevsky in my life.  I read his short novel The Gambler a couple of months back but am only now posting about it since I felt, at the time, overly satiated with this brilliant writer.  As I mentioned in a previous post, Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler under pressure to fulfill his obligation to pay off a loan he desperately needed to pay a portion of his overwhelming debts.  

The Gambler is told from the perspective of Alexei, a young tutor in service to a Russian family residing in a German hotel.  Alexei tutors the children of Polina, a young woman with whom he has fallen in love.  She is the stepdaughter of a retired general, a widower, who has mortgaged everything he owns to a wealthy Frenchman.  The General is waiting for his wealthy sick aunt, who is called “Grandmother,” to die so that he can inherit enough money to pay off his debts.

That is the bare bones of the story, which, in typical Dostoevsky fashion, becomes ever more complicated with the interactions of a myriad of characters as the plot unfolds.  While all that is interesting enough, the story itself is really of secondary importance for me.  Of far more interest is how Dostoevsky uses the narrative to explore the addiction of gambling itself, something from which he suffered at the time of its writing (see the link above reviewing Kevin Birmingham's excellent biography for more details).

Basically, it is the story of how Alexei becomes addicted to gambling and the impact of that addiction on his life.  It starts with a simple request by the manipulative and seemingly indifferent Polina to place a roulette bet for her.  In reality, Dostoevsky is mapping out for the reader how the addiction begins.  Though she does not reciprocate his love for her, Alexei happily does as she requests and wins.  The addiction begins with winning.  

Alexei knows almost nothing of roulette before he plays.  Initially, he goes to the casino with the intent to merely observe the game.  As he watches the “riffraff” surrounding the table, he is impressed with “their respect for the business at hand, the seriousness and even reverence with which they were crowding around the tables.”

Before leaving the table, he is compelled to place a bet.  He is playing with money Polina gave him and this immediately distracts him with the sensation that, in doing so, he is “spoiling his own luck.”  His first small wager is a simple one.  He bets the next number will be even.  Interestingly enough the wheel turns up 13 (a unlucky foreboding?) and he loses.  But then he rattles off a winning streak almost without thinking.  

Suddenly, Alexei has eight times the amount of money Polina gave him.  “I felt overcome by a strange and unusual feeling which I found so unbearable that I decided to leave.”  This feeling is a strange mixture of the attraction of winning so much so quickly and the utter dissatisfaction of playing with someone else's money.  Alexei tells Polina he will not wager for her again.  From now on he will play only for himself.  

So, in the course of one brief encounter with roulette, Alexei is hooked.  He is not so successful the second time.  After winning big several times in a row, turning two hundred into four thousand in five minutes(!), he is overcome with “some kind of strange sensation built up in me, a kind of challenge to fate, a kind of desire to give it a flick on the nose, or stick my tongue out at it.”  He proceeds to lose it all in a single bet.  In this way, Dostoevsky shows us that, while winning hooks the player, it is actually the losing that summons gambling's powerful and bizarre addictive powers.

Alexei's initial encounter with roulette begins to impact his existential relationship with money.  Though he has yet to walk away from the table as a winner (except, importantly, when he was gambling with Polina's money), he sees what little he has left as the pathway to wealth.  “Strange thing, I haven't won anything yet, but I act, I feel, and I think as if I were a rich man, and can't imagine myself in any other way.”

Almost halfway through the novel, quite unexpectedly, the supposedly ill and dying Grandmother appears at the hotel with a full entourage of servants and luggage.  Though bound to a wheelchair she is full of life and feistiness.  It does not take her long to inform the General that she knows all about his debts and his plans for an inheritance and, further, he will not be receiving any of her money.

She insists on being taken to the casino so as to see what all the fuss is about with this game of roulette.  Alexei ends up being her guide and explains a great deal to her that he has, in fact, only recently discovered himself.  This allows Dostoevsky to share with the reader more details about the games and the culture of the casino.

Grandmother certainly has her wits about her and observes the roulette table closely.  She notices a man at one end of the table winning considerable amounts on his high-stakes bets.  She loudly asks Alexei to “tell him to quit, tell him to take his money quickly and go away.  He will lose it all, he'll lose it all if he doesn't right away!”

But Alexei explains that Grandmother cannot shout that way at the table and that sort of advice is not allowed in the casino.  Every gambler is responsible for themselves and what one wins or loses is no ones business but their own.  Disgusted, Grandmother turns to the other end of the table where a young woman with a dwarf sidekick (for some reason, the novel is quite comical at times, also the story takes place in “Roulettenberg” as another example of humor) are playing with a style more to the old woman's liking.

As with Alexei earlier, who only wished to observe the game to begin with, Grandmother is soon demanding that Alexei place her money as she commands.  But Grandmother is not cautious at all.  She proceeds to place three bets on zero and, against the odds, the number comes up three times in a row.  

The effect of this upon Alexei is profound.  “I was myself a gambler;  I felt it that very moment.  My limbs were trembling, and I felt dazed.”  Through Alexei, Grandmother proceeds to place all of her lucky winnings with a more cautious bet, upon red.  The next number to come up on the wheel is a red one.  In no time at all, Grandmother has won thousands, at which point she demands that her wheelchair be wheeled back to the hotel.

The old woman's next encounter with roulette turns out differently, however.  She plays the same strategy of betting on zero and on red multiple times.  Zero never comes up.  But the red bets give her some winnings.  Finally, she grows tired and impatient with zero and decides to place all of her winnings on red.  In doing so, she is specifically doing the very thing she was so critical of the high-stakes gambler she detested when she first observed the table the previous day.  Dostoevsky shows the reader how one's own best judgment is impaired the more one becomes addicted to gambling.  The wheel spins and turns up – zero!  Just when she tired of playing that number, she loses everything by not betting on it.  Alexei notes that “a few snickers were actually heard around us.”

Before long Grandmother has lost even more money and is cashing in personal bank notes to continue betting.  “This time I tried my best to impress on her that she should keep her stakes low, assuring her that with a change of luck she would always be able to raise them.  But she was so impatient that, even though she agreed with this at first, there was no way to stop her once she had started to play.  No sooner had she won a few bets at a hundred or a hundred and twenty gulden than she started pushing me: 'There, you see!  There, you see!  I won, didn't I?  If we had put down four thousand, instead of a hundred, we'd have won four thousand, and what have we got now?  It's all your fault, your fault!'

“And so, though I felt exasperated by the way she was playing, I finally decided to keep quiet and to give no more advice to her.”  As it happens, Grandmother once again loses everything, ominously enough when zero comes back up and her bet was a sophisticated one, a stake on a large variety of numbers, virtually everything except zero.  Disgruntled, Grandmother retreats to the hotel again.

She broods only momentarily before declaring she would return to the table.  “As sure as I am alive, I'll win it all back!”  Alexei is astonished at how quickly the old woman changed her mind.  (Of course, Dostoevsky is showing us how it is easy to objectively judge another gambler's behavior but subjective clarity is a much more difficult thing to achieve.  It is the nature of any addiction.)  Alexei tells Grandmother that he will not assist her this time.  He later learns that the old woman lost everything.

Grandmother ends up losing considerably more the next day before finally giving up.  The reader is told that she actually had “three significant winning streaks” in the long process of her demise.  Alexei was not present when it happened but he tells us: “It was quite inevitable: any time a person such as she gets started on that road, it's like sliding  down a snow-covered hill on a sled; you pick up speed, going faster and faster.”  Again, what is so easy to see in others is difficult to see in oneself.

Of course, he might as well have been talking about himself.  In another session with roulette, he tells us: “Now I felt like a winner and was afraid of nothing, of nothing in the world, as I plunked down four thousand on black...Black won.  From there I don't remember any count, nor order of my bets.  I only remember, as though I had been in a dream, that I had already won something like sixteen thousand, then lost twelve by three consecutive unlucky strokes...

“I believe that no more than a half an hour had passed since I had arrived when the croupier suddenly informed me that I had won thirty thousand gulden, and that, inasmuch as the bank had a policy of not meeting any claim higher than this at any one time, the roulette game would be closed until next morning.”

Incredibly, upon his return in the morning, he once more won thirty thousand and shut the table down again.  “My temples were wet with perspiration and my hands were trembling.”  He returns the next day.  “I wanted to impress the spectators by taking mad risks.  And then – what a strange sensation! - I remember distinctly how all of a sudden a terrible craving for risk took possession of me, now quite apart from any promptings of vanity.  It may be that, in passing through so many sensations, the soul does not become sated but is only stimulated by them and will ask for more and ever stronger sensations until utterly exhausted.”

Riding high on his emotional wave of luck, Alexei wins 100,000 francs.  He is a rich man.  He attempts to give some of his money to Polina (who is need of it in relation to the General's debts) but she thinks he is trying to “buy” her and flings it back in in face after a strange episode where they end up falling asleep together on the sofa.  He never sees her again.  Instead, through the twists and turns of Dostoevsky's story-telling, he ends up in Paris and spends his money on the lifestyle of Mademoiselle Blanch, who ends up marrying the General.  Alexei buys himself an expensive watch, diamond cuff links, among other things along the way.

Within the span of about 20 months, Alexei finds himself in a “loathsome” condition, near broke, when he decides to spend what little he has left on roulette again.  He wins seventeen hundred gulden in less than five minutes.  “It is at moments like this that one forgets one's earlier failures!  Why, I had got this at the risk of more than my life itself.  But I had dared to risk it, and there I was once again, a man among men.”

But it doesn't last.  Over the course of weeks (we are not sure how many), he keeps losing more and more of his winnings.  He cannot help himself.  “I even dream of gambling. Yet at the same time I have a feeling that I have grown numb, somehow, as though I were buried in some kind of mire.”  While walking through a park he vows to give up gambling...as soon as he has won back what he has lost.

Alexei has become pathetic by the end of the novel.  He was an educated young man, a tutor of children.  Now he no longer reads books or even newspapers.  He has lost contact with the happenings of the world.  He is virtually friendless.  He suddenly learns that Polina actually did really love him, despite her careless actions.  He vows to find her and to rekindle their relationship.

But first, of course, he must obtain the necessary funds.  The novel ends with him engaged in the self-delusion of an addict.  “If I'd start carefully … oh, really, am I really childish enough to believe this?  Could it be that I still refuse to admit that I am hopelessly lost?  But, then, why couldn't I rise again?  Yes!  All it takes is to be calculating and patient just once in your lifetime – that is all!  All it takes is to keep control of yourself just once, and your whole life can be changed in an hour!”

The internal dialog is masterful in The Gambler and the type of insightful psychological writing Dostoevsky does so well.  As this review indicates, it is his exploration of the psychology of gambling that interests me most in this novella.  Though the story itself ends rather depressingly, the way it is told, the characters that are presented, the bits of humor sprinkled throughout, and the power of his prose make it worth reading.

While certainly not one of his best novels, The Gambler is surprising particularly if the reader knows the circumstances under which it was composed.  While simultaneously completing Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky dictated this novella with the assistance of a stenographer (his future wife) to escape a desperate debt arrangement.  It was written at a torrid pace in about 30 sessions over the course of less than a month.  Given the circumstances and what was at stake, there is a great deal of himself revealed in this short work.  Indeed, The Gambler was literally a gamble against time, a bet that the author fortunately won.  Again, see the previously mentioned link above for the details, which are, in many ways, more exciting than the novella itself.

I myself do not like gambling.  I have never even bought a lottery ticket.  Many years ago, I spent a couple of afternoons at a casino, just walking around and observing as others in my party wagered in various games.  To me it was one of the most depressing places I've ever seen in my life.  People mindlessly putting quarters in slot machines and pulling the levers.  It was not entertaining or thrilling or even living.  The stark emptiness of the place overwhelmed me.  

I traveled to Las Vegas in 2011 and experienced the same emptiness only on a grander scale.  A glitzy, colossal amalgamation of absurd nothingness, inauthentic smiles and shallow thrills.  So, I don't have anything like the same experience that Dostoevsky had with roulette or any other game of chance.  But we all struggle with our own demons and I certainly have mine.  For that reason, The Gambler offers a rich psychological investigation from which we can all benefit.  It is a wonderful, quick read.  Profound enough, without the depth and breadth of his more complex works, it is a superb example of how economical writing can nevertheless yield svelte, enlightening, and entertaining results.