Dead Gambling Legends - Fyodor Dostoevsky

First published Inside Edge magazine, July 2005 issue

“Yesterday was cold and even rainy: I felt weak all day, and my nerves were so bad I could barely stand up. It’s a good thing I was somehow able to sleep for two hours on the train. I wanted to sleep all day yesterday. But the game is here, and I couldn’t tear myself away; you can imagine how excited I was. Imagine it: I began playing in the morning and by lunchtime I had lost 16 imperials. I had 12 left and some thalers. I came back after lunch intent on being as reasonable as humanly possible and, thank God, I won back the 16 I lost and won another 100 guilders on top of that. I could have won 300, because I had them in my hands, but I risked them and lost.”

A sentiment all of us can understand after a particularly bad day at the roulette table, but these words were written almost 140 years ago by Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky to his wife Anna Grigorievna.


Dostoevsky wasn’t the first person to suffer heavy losses in a casino, but he was certainly one of the first people to go on record as a problem gambler. His addiction to the roulette wheel defined him as a writer and completely dominated his life. It also introduced him to his wife and enabled him to write The Gambler, a book that is described by some US academics as the best case history of disordered gambling in literature.

Things started off well enough. He was born in 1821 in Moscow into an affluent family and with his parents’ support graduated with a military engineering degree. Then it all started going downhill.

His mother died when he was 17 sending young Fyodor into a whirl of depression. But worse was to come. Two years later, his father became involved in a quarrel with his serfs that ended in his death. The manner of his death was unusual. The serfs poured vodka down his father’s throat until he was strangled. Not a real surprise that gambling became Dostoevsky’s vice and not alcoholism. That experience would put anybody off drinking for life.

According to Raif Geha, Chief of Immunology at Children's Hospital in Boston, in his study of Dostoevsky and The Gambler, the early death of his parents motivated Dostoevsky to gamble and to win not only money, but also win back his late mother, brought on by the guilt of losing his father. This opinon was based on a earlier premise put forward by Sigmund Freud who had studied Dostoevsky’s gambling at length.

"I suspect that self-punishment and defeat for the gambler are probably paradoxical but unintended," says Gehoa pompously as he dismisses the idea that Dostoevsky deliberately gambled to lose. Or maybe he just liked a bet on anything that moved.

With the help of a small income from his father’s estate, in 1844 Dostoevsky resigned his military commission to devote himself to writing. It would be a fair bet that he didn’t keep on the serfs who had dosed his father with vodka, but maybe that’s a book in itself.

Critical success quickly followed after the publication of his first books, Poor Folk and The Double, but any Russian writer worth his proverbial salt had to do a bit of time inside and so it was.

In 1849 Dostoevsky was arrested on April 23 in 1849 during a meeting with his fellow ‘utopian socialists’ and sentenced to death. After a particularly cruel mock execution the sentence was commuted to imprisonment in Siberia and he spent four years in hard labour wearing chains.

On his release in 1854 he was assigned as a common soldier and lost the estate left to him by his father. Eventually he became an ensign until 1857 when he married Maria Isayeva, and his estate was restored to him.

Then Dostoevsky decided to take a Gap Year and travel around Western Europe. Unfortunately for him, this was when the gambling really took root and it was almost two years before he could get the money together for the expensive fare home.

But as soon as he was back home again, his penchant for the roulette wheel and the resulting losses were compounded by the death of his wife and his brother. Saddled with debts and dependents and with creditors at his heels and debts of around 43,000 roubles, Dostoevsky skipped the country and continued his unsuccessful tour of Europe’s casinos.

By the time he returned to Russia in 1866, Dostoevsky was hopelessly skint and struggling to finish Crime and Punishment, the book that would finally make his name. Desperate for money, he then made the bet of his life.

He gambled with an unscrupulous publisher, FT Stellovsky, that he would deliver a new novel within a month if he would advance him some money. In return, Dostoevsky would forfeit all rights to his works for the next nine years. Stellovsky believed he had backed a stone-cold certainty, but, like some many punters before and after, he was proved wrong.

Dostoevsky went through his familiar angst of the soul for a few days until his friends suggest he use a young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna Snitkin, the star pupil of Russia’s first shorthand school. In keeping with the spirit of the bet, Dostoevsky spent the next 25 days dictating to her a novel based on his gambling experiences – The Gambler. He delivered the completed novel to Stellovsky on the very day their arrangement was supposed to expire.

Naturally, as is the wont of Russian romantics, he duly married Anna Grigorievna who struggled for the rest of their marriage to rein in Dostoevsky’s compulsion. As any gambler knows, Dostoevsky wasn’t the only person to perceive gambling as high spiritual drama. In it he found expression of the soul's despair and its twin hope for redemption. But such highfaluting sensibilities can have a more prosaic effect and destroy a marriage.

While Anna to a certain extent probably enjoyed the roller coaster ride of a gambler’s life, Dostoevsky lost huge sums and it was a regular feature of his life to pawn his wife’s jewellery, including her wedding ring. But as binge followed spree and spree followed binge, the success of Dostoevsky’s novels managed to keep his head above water and enable his wife to get her ring back.

But maybe his gambling problem wasn’t the great spiritual dilemma that academics profess. One of his famous (paraphrased) quotes gives us a clue: “I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”

While to some readers that quote may underscore Dostoevsky’s radical philosophical beliefs, that statement sounds more of an admission that he couldn’t add up properly. Maybe he was just bad at maths and didn’t know the difference between losing 30 and 300 Imperials, however ‘charming’ he made this out to be.

Whatever his lack of skill with numbers, Dostoevsky was a genius with words and when he died on 9 February, 1881 he left behind some of the world’s greatest novels. Unfortunately he also left behind some considerable gambling debts. As usual, it was down to his wife Anna Grigoryevna to sort them out and she then devoted the rest of her life to cherish the literary heritage of her husband, a task she undertook with considerable skill.

The final word has to go to Dostoevsky whose whole literary and gambling career that can probably be summed up in these few lines. There are also words of good advice for anybody who sometimes takes gambling a little too far. While the triumphs may taste sweet, the downside can be very sour indeed.

“Meanwhile, earning money like this, paying nothing, has something aggravating and stupefying about it, and then if you think what this money is for, if you think of the debts and about the people who need it aside from myself, then you feel that you can’t leave. But I also imagine my suffering if I lose everything and accomplish nothing: to take on all this and leave here poorer even than I came.”


Synopsis of The Gambler

Written by Dostoevsky in less than 25 days in a bet struck with a mercenary publisher, The Gambler is a psychologically probing novel that describes the life of a young Russian, Alexey Ivanovitch.

Based on Dostoevsky’s addiction to gambling, the action takes place in the unoriginally named German town of Roulettenburg. Alexey’s gambling problem is compounded by his complicated love affair with Polina Alexandrovna who finds it increasingly difficult to handle Alexey’s addiction.

The Gambler is essentially a story of passion and despair that ends in tragedy as it becomes clear that Alexey’s attempts to break even at the roulette tables will never happen. While Dostoevsky’s famous novels Crime And Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are weighty tomes that require serious concentration, The Gambler is a novella that is Dostoevsky’s most approachable novel.

Like other characters in Dostoevsky’s works, Alexey’s initial grappling with gambling is an attempt to break through the established order of things as he embraces the outsider aspect of the human condition. Unfortunately for Alexey and other problem gamblers, the roulette wheel is a more powerful machine than angst.

Although written in the first person and events being perhaps too associated with the author, the depth of other characters such as Alexey’s grandmother depict a life among German’s gambling classes as wonderfully authentic. The grandmother arrives from Moscow, borne on a throne-like chair, and determined to stop Alexey from further squandering the family fortune. But in demanding to see the casino herself she soon succumbs to the thrill of the roulette wheel. Anybody who ever does the lottery week after week will empathise with Alexey’s grandmother when her numbers come up the day after she’s frittered away all of her fortune.

As well as being the inspiration for an opera and a play, there have been several films based on Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. These include Michael Gambon in 1997’s The Gambler that closely resembles the romance between Alexey and Polina (Dostoevsky and Anna Maria) and features lusciously shot scenes in St Peterburg.

Other versions such as Rob Reiner’s 2003 saccharine Alex and Emma take the plot to the US where Cuban loan sharks replace Russian publishers. But the best version of all is probably 1974’s The Gambler that stars James Caan as a literary professor who rips off his girlfriend and proves that a Russian story can work just as well in New York. Look out for a terrific cameo role by James Woods.