Gambling
Dostoyevsky’s Gambling
A detrimental gambling habit is amongst the first details even the most distantly aware of readers can recall of Dostoyevsky, a fragment well and truly accreted into his oeuvre. Beyond detrimental, Dostoyevsky’s penchant for gambling, his preferred manner the roulette table, introduced him early on to the “unseemly world of usurers and pawnbrokers that he portrayed so exhaustively in his novels” (Kjetsaa, 39). Dostoyevsky’s attraction to gambling began, according to K.A. Lantz, in 1844, when he lost 1000 rubles he had received from his father’s estate to “professional sharpers” (Lantz, 156). It grew during his Siberian military conscription, as Dostoyevsky engaged in a voyeuristic passion for gambling, watching on at those who had money to wager, writing to an acquaintance “I see and understand how vile this monstrous passion is… yet it draws me, as if it’s sucking me in” (qtd in Lantz, 156). The period in the early to mid 1860’s saw Dostoyevsky frequent casinos in Wiesbaden, going so far as to lose all of his money in the span of five days in late July 1865 (Mochulsky, 270). Dostoyevsky’s fascination with the roulette tables regularly resurfaced in his marriage to Anna Grigorievna; Lantz draws from Grigorievna’s memoirs that detail her husband’s desperation during this period when he was without any money to wager, “[he] would be so depressed that he would begin to sob, [and] fall on his knees before me” (qtd in Lantz, 157). Dostoyevsky developed what can be termed a ‘system’ for his roulette gambits, surmising after only a few days studying that, according to Geir Kjestaa, “only he could master this game”, the game being “pathetically simple” and requiring only “that one play systematically and keep a cool head” (Kjetsaa, 155). Nonetheless, Dostoyevsky’s downfall was his “lack of self-control”, and ultimately the mathematical realities of a roulette table were for him “empty talk of anxious souls with no head for numbers” (Kjetsaa 155).
In surveying the influence of this passion, perhaps the writing most obviously drawn from Dostoyevsky’s experiences at the roulette tables is his 1867 novella The Gambler. It is essential to remember, as Joseph Frank writes, Dostoyevsky “never wrote a fictional work whose significance was merely autobiographical”, however the novella provides necessary insight into the man’s understanding of his own gambling mania (Frank, 171). The devastating story of Aleksey Ivanovich is for Dostoyevsky, according to Frank, both a “consequence of a national Russian trait carried to excess” and symbolic of the “poet” in the man, rendering it “impossible to subordinate his personality to the flesh-god of money” (Frank, 182). Frank surmises that The Gambler can be read as either a realist’s “self-condemnation” or manic “apologia”, or a confluence of the two (Frank, 182). In a similar manner, this question is evident in Sytze F. Kingma’s distinction between what he believed Dostoyevsky argued for in the novella, an “autonomous gambler” reliant on certain conditions, nominally “the acceptance of loss combined with sufficient financial means”, and Freud’s analysis which Kingma highlights as claiming that the “autonomous game cannot exist without the autonomous gambler who is aware of and responsible for the ‘artificiality’ of this conception of the game” (Kingma). Either way, both realism and rationalising are borne of the same premise, “Dostoyevsky loved gambling for the sake of gambling, loved its baseness, its terror, its sweet torture” (Mochulsky, 325).
Frank, Joseph. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Pr., 1995. Print.
Kingma, Sytze F. “Dostoevsky and Freud: Autonomy and Addiction in Gambling.” Journal of Historical Sociology (January 2015): Wiley Online Library. Web. <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/johs.12086/full>.
Kjetsaa, Geir. Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Trans. Siri Hustvedt and David McDuff. London: Viking, 1987. Print.
Lantz, Kenneth. The Dostoyevsky Encyclopedia . London: Greendwood Press, 2004. Print.
Mochulsky, Konstantin. Dostoevsky: His Life and Work. Trans. Michael A. Minihan. N.p.: Princeton U Press, 967. Web.