Customer Reviews

The Gambler

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I loved this book. I'm not sure that any book entitled "Gambling Psychology" would include a better profile of the psychopathology that is gambling addiction. The main character's massochism is also a wonderful case study of how such personalities operate and function. The plot is excellent and "granny" is so perfectly described that it's as if the author included a photograph of her. Much of the Russian psyche is on display and the reader will get a glimpse into people and lifestyles that are quite in keeping with what one might find today in our own Roulettenberg, Las Vegas. This was a concise but pleasant ride through human nature.

The Gambler is primarily a book about obssession and mania, a topic that Dostoyevsky would go on to further explore using criminal, political and religious themes as a backdrop. The God in the gambler is not Christ, but Lady Luck and her spinning ways at the roullette wheel. This book written while FD was majorly in debt due to gambling losses explores his need to gamble. Moreover, it is a book that contains some of Dostovesky most memorable tertiary characters. Alexi the narrator is a young tutor and part of a Russian general's entourage in a Riviera. He falls in love with the General's neice, who is constantly tormenting, taunting and pathologically luring him. She makes Alexi, who is not only a compulsive gambler, but an impulsive cretin commit "unspeakable" acts to bourgeoise and lesser royalty in public.... Alexi's desperate failure to win the niece's attention's is marked by his increasing need to gamble his pitous funds. But Lady Luck does smile on Alexi for a while (although he is so agitated he doesn't know it), before taking everything away from him: money, love and his meager Russian pride. The novel sees the disintegration and paradoxic increased euphoria of Alexi's character, until he is at the end so depraved that one wonders what keeps him from going mad. It is, of course, the brilliance of the book. Gambling, which is his undoing, is also his ultimate salvation, his wheel spinning, silver ball bouncing hope. The more depraved Aleci becomes the more manic and inspired the prose becomes with Dostoyevsky's frenetic brilliance making the best of us get itchy palms. At the end you yourself will want to hit the roullette wheel with an inspiration that can only come from the poisoned and infectious mind of a religious man and great writer who once viewed God not as the Arbiter of Good and Evil and Creator of Worlds, but God as a roll of dice, a deal of the cards and a most terrible and remorseless spin of the wheel.
Although most people consider this book a minor work, it is Dostoyevsky at his inspired best. While it doesn't have the profound (and morbid) philosophy of Notes from the Underground, it has incredible characterization and a humorous, dramatic narrative

The story behind the creation of The Gambler is well-known--due to heavy debt, Dostoevsky had less than four weeks to write a novel to avoid losing the rights to all his works, both past and future. To make his task a bit easier, he hired the star pupil of a stenography school (whom he later married) to take dictation, and for the material of the novel he borrowed heavily from his own life--he had experience as a compulsive gambler, and he used his mistress Apollinariya Suslova as a model for the character Polina.

The result was an inspired, though by necessity short, work of art. The passages set in the casino do an excellent job of capturing the tortured fascination that gamblers have with the roulette wheel even for readers, such as myself, who have avoided casinos all their lives. However, The Gambler is not just about gambling--it features an intriguing array of characters which are developed quite well in the mere 117 pages of the novel. "Granny," for instance, is probably just about the most amusing character I've seen in Dostoevsky, and the entangled aims of all the characters make for a very lively narrative. It seems as though, if he had the opportunity, Dostoevsky could have written a whole novel about any one of them.

Obviously, The Gambler lacks the depth and brilliance of Dostoevsky's more famous long works, but if you're after a quick, entertaining read, it's really an excellent choice.

The Gambler is primarily a book about obssession and mania, a topic that Dostoyevsky would go on to further explore using criminal, political and religious themes as a backdrop. The God in the gambler is not Christ, but Lady Luck and her spinning ways at the roullette wheel.

This book written while FD was majorly in debt due to gambling losses explores his need to gamble. Moreover, it is a book that contains some of Dostovesky most memorable tertiary characters. Alexi the narrator is a young tutor and part of a Russian general's entourage in a Riviera. He falls in love with the General's neice, who is constantly tormenting, taunting and pathologically luring him. She makes Alexi, who is not only a compulsive gambler, but an impulsive cretin commit "unspeakable" acts to bourgeoise and lesser royalty in public. One instance has Alexi at her command bumping into a German baronesse's breast and not apologizing. Alexi's desperate failure to win the niece's attention's is marked by his increasing need to gamble his pitous funds. But Lady Luck does smile on Alexi for a while (although he is so agitated he doesn't know it), before taking everything away from him: money, love and his meager Russian pride. The novel sees the disintegration and paradoxic increased euphoria of Alexi's character, until he is at the end so depraved that one wonders what keeps him from going mad. It is, of course, the brilliance of the book. Gambling, which is his undoing, is also his ultimate salvation, his wheel spinning, silver ball bouncing hope. The more depraved Aleci becomes the more manic and inspired the prose becomes with Dostoyevsky's frenetic brilliance making the best of us get itchy palms. At the end you yourself will want to hit the roullette wheel with an inspiration that can only come from the poisoned and infectious mind of a religious man and great writer who once viewed God not as the Arbiter of Good and Evil and Creator of Worlds, but God as a roll of dice, a deal of the cards and a most terrible and remorseless spin of the wheel.

Although most people consider this book a minor work, it is Dostoyevsky at his inspired best. While it doesn't have the profound (and morbid) philosophy of Notes from the Underground, it has incredible characterization and a humorous, dramatic narrative

Dostoevsky's life during the period which THE GAMBLER was written was filled with his own gambling debts and an ominous publishing arrangement that nearly destroyed his future hopes of sustaining himself as a writer. The manuscript was dictated in a month to a young stenographer who was to later become Dostoevsky's wife and paved the way for the classics, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

The story takes place in the fictional city of transience, Roulettenburg, and begins with the first-person narrative of the main character cum principal gambler, Alexey Ivanovitch. Alexey is a tutor for the family of a Russian General whose heavily-leveraged fate is tied to the inheritance of an aunt (Granny). The plot moves to show several inter-relationships between the characters, romantic and financial, that seem dependent on the death of Granny, and later, her stakes at roulette, in order to be fully realized. Each of the relations are cultivated to evoke the futility of being a slave in the midst of this hawkishness: Alexey and Polina, the General and the Frenchman, de Grieux, the General and Mlle. Blanche, Astley and Polina - all walk in each other's footsteps chasing after the same banknotes in a comedy-of-errors atmosphere of gambling and unrealized posterity. Practically the entire purpose of the book can be summarized on the first page at the end of the first paragraph when Alexey says, "Things have accumulated." The accumulations are more figurative than literal and directly tied to spiritual well-being. This is not just the case for Alexey but for the other characters as well.

When one thinks of a gambler, the connotation of unnecessary risk comes to mind. Everything about Dostoevsky's story is a gamble (for this is the spirit in which it was penned) and, like the compulsion of such vice, the character's actions are conducted in rash, unpredictable interchanges based solely on the machinations of chance, as to determine a "sort of order in (their) sequence." Polina, who is the love interest of Alexey, is but a tease and is symbolic of the vexations of his habit, the roulette wheel. Her mercurial temperament indeed goes from red to black to red - odd and even - with the silver ball of her intentions vacillating far out of the reach of Alexey whose judgment is clouded by psychological enslavement to her and the Casino. Despite gesticulations such as, "I must have money, come what may...I must get it or I am lost," money is not what motivates any of the relationships in the novel. This is not the type of accumulation Dostoevsky refers to. Rather, it is the inward rush of chance and the untenable nature of the future that binds one person to the other in fits of instability and personal corruptions in the quest for the miraculous.

The characters live in the present only, governed by an undercurrent of turpitude. And as with most of Dostoevsky's preoccupations of this vein, this emotional attachment on the part of the characters in THE GAMBLER allows him to deftly work in Christian themes of faith and temptation through the symbol of the Schlangenberg (Snake Mountain). At first introduction to this symbol, we are reminded of the second temptation of Christ and can associate Polina with the Devil and Alexey as a Christ-like characterization. As a test of his faith, Alexey promises to throw himself from the Schlangenberg at Polina's whim, which somewhat perverts the order of the Biblical temptation. Here, he is a more defeated Christ who would willingly offer to sell his soul for masochism and yield to the fate of the fall regardless of life or death, or more properly, the win or loss. Alexey is in love with Polina in the same manner as he is with gambling and this relationship that moves from hate ("morally horrid and dirty"), to love ("in the halo of her glory"), to hate ("How insolent and how greedy...") hinges on the suddenness of chance only. He even goes so far as to admit to her that roulette is his "only escape and salvation" while also acknowledging the morass of "humiliation and the slavery" by which he is held. If he were in fact to thrust himself from the peak of the Schlangenberg in servitude of his passion, he would complete the perpetual cycle of life of the gambler by having come back to z'ro with everything lost and nothing gained.

In the secondary characters such as the General and the Frenchman (Marquis de Grieux), with the former entirely indebted to the latter through a failed business transaction, it is revealed that their relationship is predicated on much of the same compulsive emotional substance of Alexey and Polina. When Alexey asks of himself, "But can I leave Polina...?" Dostoevsky really says, "The gambler is a hopeless junkie" and when the General sweats over an inheritance in order to pay off the many mortgages owed to the Frenchman, there is an even more tangible sense of the effects of heedless risk. Dostoevsky gives us the essential nature of supply and demand and the very real accumulations of despair in the commerce of addiction.

It is no wonder famous psychologists defer to the work of Dostoevsky for there is possibly no better representation of the motivation of man than that which is found in his fiction. THE GAMBLER is recommended more as a secondary text to complement a concentrated study of the author. At times the work feels overly chancy and less focused as if during dictation Dostoevsky had four out of five chambers loaded with bullets playing a more sinister game of roulette. The biography is an important part of forgiving some of the less brilliant aspects of this book and one should keep in mind the environment in which this book was composed; the massive strain to produce that befell Dostoevsky at the time. As such, while the work is harried in spots and lacks some of the more advanced thought and plot construction found in the later masterpieces referenced at the beginning of this review, it is an important part of understanding Dostoevsky's legacy. For a true appreciation of the author, start with the later works and then come back to bet away a few hours on a book like THE GAMBLER.

A note on translation: When reading an author whose work requires the aid of translation, I deem it best to adhere to one translator or the other in order to as closely hear a consistency in the author's voice as is possible. In the case of Dostoevsky, most scholars claim the preferred translations are those of Constance Garnett. Garnett was the first to translate Dostoevsky into English and while not perfect (as has been shown in more modern times with her near-miss titling of THE POSSESSED, now more readily accepted as THE DEVILS or DEMONS), her translations featured in the 12 volume collection, THE NOVELS OF FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1912-20) are generally considered as the most accurate versions available. To my knowledge, all of the Garnett translations are produced in reasonably priced mass-market and trade paperback forms. For the collector, at least three Garnett-translated Dostoevsky works are available in leather-bound editions from the Easton Press: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV (both from "The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written" series) and THE IDIOT (from the "Collector's Library of Famous Editions" series).

© 2005-2006 Edward J. Carvalho

This short novel, written at break neck speed to appease his publisher, is stunning. By turns humorous and deeply dark it reveals how all our lives are subject to the wheel of fate, and that with every turn could be happiness or ruin.

This is a very good book. A brilliant motley set of characters as usual with dostoevsky. Also a very interesting plots and a very memorable hero. I liked Alexei very much, he reminded me a bit of Stendahl's Julean Sorelle. anyway, it shows gambling for all it's shallowness and stupidness but it lacks the religious and philosophical insight of most of dostoevsky's latter work. It's not one of Dostoevsky's best, but what is mediocre for Dostoevsky is still a very very good book in comparison to other writers. I do recommend this book.

The Gambler is one of Dostoevsky's small masterpieces. I can think of no story, current or historical, that addresses the subject of gambling and addiction in such a convincing manner. The interactions between masters and servants, lovers, and nationalities are so well illustrated that it makes you catch your breath. I myself have no interest in gambling. Still, I have probably read this novella ten times over the years. If Dostoevsky's larger works are a little intimidating, start here and work your way up. All of it is worth the time and effort.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky is not an easy writer --well, which Russian author can be called easy? -- but once you get into his books, it is difficult to put it down. One of the best ways to be introduced to his works is the short --and even funny-- novella `The Gambler'. Working with fiction and reality, this is an addictive novel.

As the story goes, a gambler himself Dostoyevsky had been paid by his publisher and had a writer's block therefore couldn't write anything. He hired a stenographer to help him. So she did, and they ended up falling in love. And the world received one of the best novellas ever. On a lighter note, in 2003, this story was updated in a movie called `Alex & Emma'. While it is a great plot, the film didn't succeeded for many reasons. On the other hand, there is a movie version, also called `The Gambler', made in 1997, with Michael Gambon and directed by Károly Makk that is much closer to the novel and much better.

The book tells the story of a compulsive gambler named Alexey Ivanovitch that while in a German spa casino gets involved with a couple of people, and has the greatest gamble of his life. Alexey will find love and hate, friends and enemies and will learn a lesson he will never forget. To tell more is to spoil all the fun of discovering all the twists in this amazing book.

As someone who knows what he is writing about, Dostoyevsky paints a vivid portrait not only of Alexey but also of the casino and its gamblers. People win and lose in the question of minutes, and the more they lose the more obsessed they are. Just like life.

Dostoyevsky's prose is crafted and beautiful. This is one of the aspects that make this book so timeless. The other one that the novella deals with human nature, and it nave loses interest --no matter when or where. The human soul is the same everywhere. So are our wishes and failures. And to write about it, Dostoyevsky is first among equals.

Brilliant, emotionally twisted novel with subdued observations and madly intoxicating behaviors.
Souls are bared and hidden,feelings are life threatening and questions are unasked.
This is a different Dostoevsky,with the same amazing sweeping sheer power of writing but exploded in your face rather than carrying you along the minefield!