The Gambler and Other Stories

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‘White Nights’ and ‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding’ first published 1848

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FYODOR MIKHAYLOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY was born in Moscow in 1821, the second of a physician’s seven children. When he left his private boarding school in Moscow he studied from 1838 to 1843 at the School of Military Engineering in St Petersburg, graduating with officer’s rank. His first novel to be published, Poor Folk (1846), was a great success. In 1849 he was arrested and sentenced to death for participating in the Petrashevsky Circle; he was reprieved at the last moment but sentenced to penal servitude, and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison at Omsk, Siberia. Out of this experience he wrote The House of the Dead (1861–2). In 1861 he began the journal Vremya (Time) with his brother; in 1862 and 1863 he went abroad, where he strengthened his anti-European outlook, met Apollinaria Suslova, who was the model for many of his heroines, and gave way to his passion for gambling. In the following years he fell deeply in debt, but in 1867 he married Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (his second wife), who helped to rescue him from his financial morass. They lived abroad for four years, then in 1873 he was invited to edit Grazhdanin (Citizen), to which he contributed his Writer’s Diary. From 1876 the latter was issued separately and had a large circulation. In 1880 he delivered his famous address at the unveiling of Pushkin’s memorial in Moscow; he died six months later in 1881. Most of his important works were written after 1864: Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1865–6), The Gambler (1866), The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871–2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

RONALD MEYER teaches Russian literary translation at Columbia University. He is the editor of the Penguin edition of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, translated by Robert A. Maguire (2008), and Anna Akhmatova’s My Half-Century: Selected Prose (1992); co-translator, with David Lowe, of The Complete Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, volume 1 (1988); and co-editor of Russian Literature of the 1920s: An Anthology (1987). His other translations include works by Babel, Chekhov, Gogol, Lipkin, Nagibin and Palei.

Chronology

1821 (30 October)^* Born Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, in Moscow, the son of Mikhail Andreyevich, head physician at Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, and Marya Fyodorovna, daughter of a merchant family.

1831–6 Attends boarding schools in Moscow together with his brother Mikhail (b. 1820).

Mother dies. He and his brother Mikhail are sent to a boarding school in St Petersburg.

1838 Enters the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering as an army cadet (Mikhail is not admitted to the Academy).

1843 Graduates from the Academy. Attached to St Petersburg Army Engineering Corps. Translates Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet.

1845 Establishes a friendship with Russia’s most prominent and influential literary critic, the liberal Vissarion Belinsky, who praises Poor Folk and acclaims its author as Gogol’s successor.

1846 Poor Folk and The Double published. While Poor Folk is widely praised, The Double is much less successful. ‘Mr Prokharchin’ also published.

1847 Nervous ailments and the onset of epilepsy. ‘A Novel in Nine Letters’ and ‘The Landlady’ are published.

Several short stories published, including ‘A Weak Heart’, ‘An Honest Thief’, ‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding’ and ‘White Nights’.

1849 Netochka Nezvanova published. (23 April) Arrested along with other members of the Petrashevsky Circle, and convicted of political offences against the Russian state. Sentenced to death, and taken out to Semyonovsky Square to be shot by firing squad, but reprieved moments before execution (22 December). Instead, sentenced to an indefinite period of exile in Siberia, to begin with eight years of penal servitude, later reduced to four years by Tsar Nicholas I.

1854 Released from prison, but immediately sent to do compulsory military service as a private in the infantry battalion at Semipalatinsk, south-western Siberia.

1855 Alexander II succeeds Nicholas I as Tsar; some relaxation of state censorship.

1857 Marries the widowed Marya Dmitriyevna Isayeva. Publication of ‘The Little Hero’, written in prison during the summer of 1849.

1859 Allowed to return to live in European Russia. (December) The Dostoyevskys return to St Petersburg. The Village of Stepanchikovo and its Inhabitants and Uncle’s Dream published.

Mikhail starts a new literary journal, Vremya (Time). Dostoyevsky is not officially an editor, because of his convict status. The Insulted and the Injured and first part of The House of the Dead both appear in Vremya.

1862 ‘A Nasty Business’ and second part of The House of the Dead published in Vremya. Makes first trip abroad, to Europe, including England, France and Switzerland. Meets Alexander Herzen in London.

Winter Notes on Summer Impressions published in Vremya, which is shut down by the government later this year. After Marya Dmitriyevna is taken seriously ill, travels abroad again. Begins liaison with Apollinaria Suslova.

1864 (March) With Mikhail founds the journal Epokha (Epoch) as successor to Vremya. Notes from Underground published in Epokha. (April) Death of Marya Dmitriyevna. (July) Death of Mikhail.

1865 Epokha ceases publication because of lack of funds. Suslova rejects his proposal of marriage. Gambles in Wiesbaden. Works on Crime and Punishment.

Crime and Punishment in the Russian Messenger, and The Gambler published. The latter written in 26 days with the help of his future wife, the stenographer Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (b. 1846).

1867 Marries. Hounded by creditors, the couple leaves for Western Europe and settles in Dresden.

1868 Birth of daughter, Sofia, who dies only three months old. The Idiot published in serial form.

1870 Vladimir Lenin is born in the town of Simbirsk, on the banks of the Volga. Defeat of France in Franco-Prussian War.

1871 Moves back to St Petersburg with his wife and family. Birth of son, Fyodor.

1873 Becomes contributing editor of conservative weekly journal Grazhdanin (Citizen), where his A Writer’s Diary is published as a regular column. ‘Bobok’ appears in the issue of 5 February.

1876 A Writer’s Diary restarts as an independent publication; ‘The Meek One’ appears in it in November.

1877 ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ published in A Writer’s Diary in April.

1879 First part of The Brothers Karamazov published. Struggling with bad health, Dostoyevsky visits the health spa in Bad Ems, Germany, in the summer for treatment.

1880 The Brothers Karamazov published (in complete form). Anna starts a book service, where her husband’s works may be ordered by mail. His ‘Pushkin Speech’ delivered in Moscow at the unveiling of a monument is greeted with wild enthusiasm; the speech is published in A Writer’s Diary, which resumes publication.

(28 January) Dostoyevsky dies in St Petersburg. The funeral procession from the author’s apartment numbers over 30,000. Buried in the cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery.

Introduction

New readers are advised that this Introduction makes details of the plots explicit.

‘MONEY IS EVERYTHING!’ – THE GAMBLER

On 4 October 1866, Dostoyevsky was faced with yet another financial crisis. As his letters make abundantly clear, he was dogged by money problems throughout his adult life, from the time he was away at school, imploring his father for money (‘I’m in debt all the way around and very much. I owe at least 50 roubles. My God! … Save me’¹) until a year before his death, when his wife had finally managed to pay off the debts accumulated over a lifetime. What was different about the present crisis was that he was enjoying unprecedented success with the serialization of Crime and Punishment, which had secured his stature as one of the leading writers in Russia, along with Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev. Nevertheless, he found himself besieged by creditors. And though he had been in desperate straits before, it was different this time – he needed to write and deliver a novel in twenty-six days or forfeit the rights to his works for the next nine years.

The troubles had begun the previous year. In July 1865 Dostoyevsky agreed to one of the most infamous publishing contracts in the history of Russian literature with the publisher and bookseller Fyodor Stellovsky, whose name lives on solely from this one agreement. Dostoyevsky had established the journal Epoch (Epokha) the year before with his brother Mikhail, who died a few months later. Dostoyevsky unwisely decided to assume responsibility both for Mikhail’s personal debts and those he had accumulated from the journal. Despite Dostoyevsky’s very real efforts to keep Epoch afloat, it went under in March 1865 from financial problems. Now the sole support of six people (his stepson, Mikhail’s widow and her four children), Dostoyevsky found himself in a truly impossible situation. He put off dealing with Stellovsky as long as he could, but there was no alternative. According to the contract, the unscrupulous publisher acquired the rights to publish a three-volume collection of Dostoyevsky’s works; moreover, the author was obligated to write a new short novel specifically for this edition. If Dostoyevsky failed to produce the promised work on schedule (1 November 1866) the publisher had the right to publish all of Dostoyevsky’s works without any royalty payment whatsoever for the next nine years. Knowing that he was perhaps signing away his past as well as his future, Dostoyevsky agreed and took the 3,000 roubles Stellovsky offered. After paying off his most urgent debts and providing for his dependants, he was left with the far from princely sum of 175 roubles, which he took with him abroad later that month and promptly gambled away at the roulette tables in Wiesbaden, while his lover Apollinaria Suslova waited for him in Paris.

The following summer, in a letter to Anna Korvin-Krukovskaya, whom he courted after the death of his wife in 1864, Dostoyevsky, who had not written a word of the contracted novel, complained that Stellovsky refused to give him an extension. He then went on to boast that he wanted:

to do an unprecedented and unconventional thing: write 30 signatures [i.e. 480 printed pages] in four months, in two different novels, of which I’ll work on one in the morning, and the other in the evening and finish on time … I’m convinced that not one of our writers, past or living, wrote under the conditions in which I constantly write. Turgenev would die from the very thought.²

However, the idea of writing two novels simultaneously, that is, Crime and Punishment, which was being serialized in the Russian Messenger, and the as yet unnamed second novel, came to naught. And so with only a month left, Dostoyevsky decided, on the recommendation of a friend, to enlist the services of a stenographer. The twenty-year-old Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina (who would become his second wife) arrived at 11:30 on the morning of 4 October to take down in shorthand his new novel, The Gambler.

Years later Anna Grigoryevna would recall that the building she had entered resembled Raskolnikov’s lodgings in Crime and Punishment – she was an ardent admirer of the writer. The two quickly worked out a routine where Anna Grigoryevna would take his dictation during the afternoon and then transcribe a fair copy at home in the evening. Long tea-breaks provided an opportunity for the writer to entertain her with dramatic episodes from the story of his life: arrested in 1849 for his participation in a political discussion group, sentenced to death by firing squad, last-minute reprieve while awaiting execution on Semyonovsky Square, prison, exile in Siberia. And then there was his literary career: the famous debut with his novel Poor Folk, friendships with Vissarion Belinsky, the foremost literary critic of the day, as well as the poets Nikolay Nekrasov and Apollon Maykov (the latter visited during one of their working afternoons) … In her memoirs, Anna Grigoryevna writes that ‘the very idea, not only of meeting this gifted writer, but also of helping him in his work, filled me with excitement and elation … With each passing day Dostoyevsky was growing kinder and warmer toward me. He often addressed me as golubchik [darling], his favourite expression.’³ Remarkably, the novel was finished and delivered to Stellovsky on the deadline. Dostoyevsky proposed marriage to Anna a week later, and they were married in February of the next year.

Even though the actual writing of The Gambler took all of twenty-six days from start to finish, Dostoyevsky had been mulling over the work for quite some time. He outlined it in a letter dated 18 September 1863:

The plot of the story is the following: a certain type of Russian living abroad. Note: there was a big question about Russians living abroad in the journals this summer. That will all be reflected in my story. And in general, the whole contemporary moment of our inner life will be reflected … The main point is that all his life juices, energies, violence, boldness have gone into roulette. He is a gambler, and not an ordinary gambler, just as Pushkin’s miserly knight is not an ordinary knight …

If House of the Dead drew the attention of the public as a portrait of convicts, whom no one had portrayed graphically before House of the Dead, then this story will definitely draw attention as a GRAPHIC and very detailed portrait of the game of roulette.⁴

While the comparison with the House of the Dead might first strike one as forced or even outrageous, the casino does represent another type of closed, special world, in which one needs to be initiated into new rules of conduct in order to survive. We learn these rules from reading Alexey Ivanovich’s ‘notes’ and following his career as a gambler; as Dostoyevsky wrote in that same letter, he is ‘a poet in his own way’.

The Gambler, as Joseph Frank suggested, marks Dostoyevsky’s single foray into depicting what would come to be known as the ‘international’ theme in the work of such writers as Henry James, where a character’s psychology and actions are evaluated not only in terms of personal traits or individual temperament, but also how they reflect national values.⁵ The novel opens with Alexey Ivanovich (who is not named until Chapter 6), the author of these ‘Notes of a Young Man’, as the subtitle puts it, returning to Roulettenburg to rejoin his party, the family of a retired Russian general living abroad. As the town’s name implies, gambling is the one and only industry – we see nothing of the town or its residents apart from the casino and its environs. The hotel and casino are populated by an ever-changing international congress of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Poles and Russians. As Mikhail Bakhtin remarked: ‘these are people cut off from their native land and folk, whose life ceases to be determined by the norms of people living in their own country, their behavior is no longer regulated by that position which they had occupied in their homeland’.⁶ Scandal is the norm. Fortunes and identities come and go. For example, Mademoiselle Blanche de Cominges, as Alexey Ivanovich learns from Mr Astley, had previously gone under the names Mlle Zelmá and Barberini.

The international theme, however, also provides the xenophobic Dostoyevsky with an opportunity to indulge in stereotypes. As a result, we have Alexey Ivanovich’s satirical portrait of German family life and the Vater (father); his escapade with the ‘fat baroness’ and her husband, the ‘dried-up Prussian’; the Marquis des Grieux, who ‘like all Frenchmen’, is nothing more than surface, flattery and deceit; Mlle Blanche, the grasping courtesan, who takes him to Paris and fleeces him of 200,000 francs in three weeks; and the ‘little Poles’ who try to steer Grandmother’s play at the roulette table, stealing from her and swindling her as they do, all the while maintaining that they are ‘honourable’. The far from flattering portraits of the Germans and Poles here remind one of the chapter in Crime and Punishment, detailing the memorial meal for Marmeladov, written just a few months earlier, where Katerina Ivanovna ridicules her ‘stupid German’ landlady and excoriates the ‘wretched little Poles’ (Part V, chapter 2).

The Russians, on the other hand, seem to be losing their Russianness, which is best exemplified by Polina, the professed object of the narrator’s passion, who has forgone her Russian name, Praskovya, for a more European-sounding equivalent. Or the minor character Prince Nilsky, whom Grandmother refers to in his hearing as that ‘shabby little creature, the one with the glasses’, not recognizing him as a fellow countryman. The exception to this rule, of course, is Grandmother, the embodiment and personification of Russia, who midway through the novel literally rolls into this enclave of expatriate Russians and rootless Europeans, upsetting everything and everybody. She is one of Dostoyevsky’s great creations, literally stealing the show when she is onstage. She speaks her mind to people’s faces, asks blunt questions and tells the general in no uncertain terms that he will not get money from her. Furthermore, she is perceptive and though exacting, she is kind. She voices her approval of Mr Astley on first meeting (‘I’ve always liked the English, there’s no comparison with the little Frenchies!’), and she immediately shows Polina a gruff kindness (‘I could love you, Praskovya’); in fact, before leaving Roulettenburg she asks Polina to come live with her in Russia. Finally, though she does succumb to the temptation of roulette and gambles away all of the considerable money that she’s brought with her from Russia, thus seeming to prove the narrator’s observation that ‘roulette is simply made for Russians’, she does at last realize that she has been a fool and returns home immediately, to Russia. Apart from Mr Astley nobody else seems to have a home; it is from him that she borrows the 3,000 francs to make the journey. (It is surely not a coincidence that Dostoyevsky received 3,000 roubles from Stellovsky for the rights to print an edition of his collected works, which would include The Gambler in the third volume.) Finally, she has promised to build a church on one of her estates, a testament both to her Russianness and her innate goodness.

In her essay, ‘The Russian Point of View’, Virginia Woolf characterizes Dostoyevsky’s novels as ‘seething whirlpools’ and summarizes the opening pages of The Gambler by way of illustration:

We open the door and find ourselves in a room full of Russian generals, the tutors of Russian generals, their stepdaughters and cousins, and crowds of miscellaneous people who are all talking at the tops of their voices about their most private affairs. But where are we? Surely it is the part of a novelist to inform us whether we are in a hotel, a flat, or a hired lodging. Nobody thinks of explaining.⁷

Though Woolf exaggerates the number of generals, tutors and stepdaughters, she is right about the confusion that greets the reader of The Gambler. Alexey Ivanovich, our confused and perplexed diarist, half of the time cannot make heads or tails of what is going on; the other half he leaves out information that is crucial for the reader, because he has no cause to interrupt his narrative to give potted histories of characters he already knows or explain events that he does understand. And thus the first paragraph introduces seven characters, some by name, others are merely described (‘Mezentsov, the little Frenchman and some Englishman were expected for dinner’), with no explanation of who they are or their relationship to the diarist or his party.⁸ Much of this does become clear during the course of the novel, but others remain enigmas. For example, who is Mezentsov? He is never mentioned again.

To complicate the picture, The Gambler has been traditionally viewed as Dostoyevsky’s most autobiographical novel. To be sure, Dostoyevsky had ample first-hand knowledge of risk-taking and the ‘poetry’ of gambling. The fact that Alexey Ivanovich believes himself to be in love with the general’s stepdaughter, Polina, whom he regards, for some reason, as a femme fatale, and that during the course of the novel he offers to be her slave, to throw himself down from a mountain peak and to kill her former lover would seem to draw a parallel with Dostoyevsky’s tortured love affair with Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, particularly as it played out during their travels abroad. Dostoyevsky travelled with Suslova in Europe (France, Italy and Germany) on more than one occasion, attempting, by and large unsuccessfully, to satisfy his passions for his paramour and gambling simultaneously. Certainly, Dostoyevsky drew on his personal experience at the roulette tables in Wiesbaden and elsewhere, as well as the far-from-placid affair with Suslova, when composing his novel, but to view the work as thinly veiled autobiography is to confuse the mature writer with his adolescent narrator.

All but one of the works in this volume, from the early story ‘White Nights’ (1848) to the late ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1877), are told by a first-person narrator, a form that clearly interested the author. It’s worth recalling, for example, that Crime and Punishment, the writing of which preceded and followed The Gambler, was originally cast as a first-person confession, but the mechanics of the much longer story with its several plot lines proved to be too unwieldy. How was one to convey all of the information necessary for the story and at the same time maintain the sense of Raskolnikov’s frenzied delirium after the murder? The solution was to change the narration to a third-person omniscient point of view, but one where the narrator is closely attuned to his character’s consciousness, as if he were closely following him, just a step behind.

The Gambler, of course, is a much more compact work with a greatly reduced cast of characters and a fairly straightforward storyline. And yet we are so accustomed to granting privilege to the teller of the tale that we tend not to question the accuracy of Alexey Ivanovich’s account, even though there are accumulating signs that he is not a reliable narrator. Most importantly, his whole picture of Polina is wrong. While, on the one hand, he vows to be her slave, on the other, he ignores her, mistrusts her and, most importantly, misunderstands her. In fact, he admits that Polina ‘had always been something of a mystery for me’. Significantly, when he is gambling, ostensibly for her sake, while she waits for him in his room, he acknowledges several times: ‘I don’t remember whether I even once gave a thought to Polina all this time.’ And when he does return to his room, he essentially mimics des Grieux and tries to buy her; she runs to Mr Astley for protection. Meanwhile, Alexey Ivanovich is comforted by the very much inferior Mlle Blanche, who takes him away to Paris for three weeks of delirium and folly. When Alexey Ivanovich had no money she treated him like a servant; now that he’s won a fortune, she treats him like a fool. We do not learn until the final scene between Alexey Ivanovich and the always astute Mr Astley how much Polina loved and continues to love Alexey, because this story has always been told from his point of view.

In the opening pages Alexey Ivanovich keenly feels the inferiority of his position in relation to the others of the general’s entourage. (Many of Dostoyevsky’s heroes nourish a morbid hypersensitivity: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, for example.) To compensate, he commits schoolboy pranks (heckling the baroness) and tells outrageous stories (spitting in the monseigneur’s coffee) at the dinner table, which serve to emphasize his immaturity rather than put him on the level of the rest of the company. From the very beginning he believes that roulette will make his fortune and then Polina and the others will take notice of him. He goes to the roulette table the first time to play for Polina, with her money (a condition he feels will make him unlucky), and although he’s put off by the casino, because it is all ‘so filthy – somehow morally sordid and dirty’, he wins and delivers the money to Polina. His second time at the tables he loses everything he had won. And yet, as he tells her in Chapter 5: ‘I am still absolutely certain that I will win. I’ll even confess to you that you have just raised a question for me: Why has my senseless and shocking loss today not left me with any doubt whatsoever? I am still absolutely certain that I will win without fail as soon as I start playing for myself.’ This blind belief in a game of absolute chance clearly echoes Dostoyevsky’s own romance with roulette. In the autumn of 1863, Dostoyevsky wrote to his brother from Wiesbaden to explain how he can linger in the gambling halls when Suslova is in Paris:

You ask how one can gamble away one’s shirt while travelling with the person you love. My friend Misha I created a system of gambling, put it into practice, and immediately won 10,000 francs. The next morning I betrayed that system because I became overly excited, and I immediately lost … I need money, for me, for you, for my wife, for writing a novel. Tens of thousands are won here easily. And besides, I came here with the idea of saving all of you and of shielding myself from disaster. And then, in addition, there was faith in the system.⁹

In October 1863 Dostoyevsky was forced to borrow all round, including from Suslova who pawned a watch so that he could make the journey back to Petersburg – his ‘system’ had let him down again, as it would for many more years to come, until he suddenly quit gambling for good in 1871.¹⁰

Alexey, like Dostoyevsky, cannot quit while he is ahead. Winning a fortune is not the object, but rather experiencing the thrill. After all, he fritters away one fortune with Blanche. He admits in the final chapter, which takes place a year and a half after his exploits in Paris, that he is a ‘beggar’ and that he has ‘ruined himself’. We learn that he’s been a lackey and in debtor’s prison, and he admits to himself that ‘it was not the money that was dear to me!’ He is well and truly addicted to gambling: ‘I had dared to take a risk and – now again I was a man among men!’ The ending of the novel leaves no doubt that Alexey Ivanovich is a slave to gambling and will never see Polina again. He still views gambling as his salvation: ‘To be reborn, to rise up from the dead. I need to show them … To let Polina know that I can still be a man.’

‘White Nights’ takes the reader back almost twenty years to the early days of Dostoyevsky’s writing career. Narrated by the unnamed Dreamer of the subtitle (‘A Sentimental Love Story (From the Memoirs of a Dreamer)’), the story opens with an extended monologue of how he spends his days alone in the capital even though he has been a resident there for eight years. He roams the city and observes, but does not speak to anyone. He befriends not people but certain houses he passes on his wanderings.

The story takes place over a series of four nights – the celebrated white nights¹¹ – and a morning. On the first night the Dreamer chances to observe a young girl leaning against a railing of the canal. He hears what he believes to be a muffled sob. As he writes, ‘I turned around, took a step in her direction and would certainly have uttered the word “Madam”, but for the fact that I knew that this exclamation had already been uttered a thousand times in all the Russian society novels.’ His actions and speech take their cue from books – everything he sees and experiences is filtered through literature. But he does spring into action here and saves the girl from the unwanted attentions of the teetering, drunken gentleman pursuing her. The Dreamer and the girl agree to meet at the same spot on the following night.

The second night the Dreamer and Nastenka exchange their life stories. The Dreamer begins his ‘ridiculous story … as though [he] were reading something that had been written down’. His life, and its telling, is circumscribed by literature. So much so that he narrates his own life story in the third person (‘our hero’), embellishing it with high-flown rhetorical flourishes and a veritable profusion of literary and cultural allusions, most of which, we must assume, are beyond the understanding of the good and simple Nastenka. In fact, after his lengthy ‘introduction’, Nastenka observes that it sounds as though he were reading from a book and suggests that perhaps he could tell it ‘less splendidly’. But that’s just the point. The Dreamer lives in absolute isolation; apart from his servant Matryona, words are his only companions; all action is confined to the realm of dream and fantasy. He has absented himself from participation in real, living life, taking refuge in a world of dreams.

Seventeen-year-old Nastenka’s story is as plain-spoken and straightforward as the Dreamer’s is florid and rhetorical. We learn of her quiet life with her blind grandmother, the only interesting detail being that the latter pins her granddaughter to her dress so that she knows where she is at all times. The two sit side by side all day long, day in and day out. Everything changes with the advent of a new lodger, a young man, who invites them to the opera, loans them books by Walter Scott (in French translation) and Pushkin. Inevitably, Nastenka develops a fondness for the lodger. On hearing that he is moving away for a year, she packs up her belongings and goes to his room. The lodger and Nastenka agree to part, but the lodger will return for her a year later. In other words, Nastenka risks everything for love, in direct contrast to the Dreamer who merely fantasizes about speaking to a woman.

The Second Night finishes with a ‘letter scene’, borrowed from Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, the opera to which the lodger has taken Nastenka and her grandmother. The Dreamer suggests that he deliver a letter from Nastenka to the lodger. She asks him how it should be written; he recites an eloquent draft. The Dreamer proposes that she arrive tomorrow with the letter, to which ‘Nastenka answered, a bit confused, “the letter … but …” But she didn’t complete her thought. At first she turned her little face away from me, blushed, like a rose, and suddenly I felt in my hand a letter that had evidently been written long ago, sealed and all ready to go.’ Whether we are to assume that Nastenka copied the manoeuvre from Rossini or whether this represents the spontaneous strategy of a young girl in love, it manifests Nastenka’s resolve, as opposed to the Dreamer’s passivity. For that matter packing her bundle and making her way to the lodger’s room had been a risky step for a young girl. Such a move turns out badly in countless stories.

Nastenka has told the Dreamer that he may not fall in love with her, but of course he had done so at first sight. His love grows on each successive night, though he does not declare himself until the fourth night, when it seems unlikely that the former lodger will come to the appointed spot by the canal, even though they know he has arrived in the capital. Just as they are planning their new life together, the lodger appears and Nastenka rushes to him. The Dreamer watches them walk away together. The next morning he receives a letter from Nastenka, asking him to be happy for her and for him not to abandon the couple.

The final lines of the story find the Dreamer once again in his room as he imagines his life fifteen years hence, still in the same room, just as lonely. His memoir ends with the lines: ‘My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man’s life?’ The Dreamer would have us answer that no, indeed, such bliss can fulfil a man’s life. But on reflection, many of us would answer, ‘Yes, that’s much too little.’

The figure of the young girl in distress is a constant in Dostoyevsky’s fiction, from ‘White Nights’ to such later works as Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov comes to the aid of a drunken young girl, about sixteen years old, who is being pursued on the embankment by a gentleman (Part I, Chapter 4), or the little girl who appeals to the narrator in ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ (1877). Dostoyevsky’s ‘A Christmas Party and a Wedding’, which was published the same year as ‘White Nights’, is a story of lechery in which the little girl does not get away, but is married off to her pursuer cum suitor with society’s approval.

Subtitled ‘From the Notes of an Unknown Person’, the story is comprised of two unequal parts, namely, the narrator’s attendance at the two events of the title. The first part, the description of the children’s Christmas party, begins with a tongue-in-cheek sociological analysis of the hosts and their guests, ranging from the very bottom, the guest from the provinces who had been invited purely as a courtesy, to the ‘personage’ Yulian Mastakovich at the top. For that matter, the children are also sorted out in terms of social worthiness, as is made evident by the distribution of presents. It goes without saying that the most expensive gift is given to the eleven-year-old girl with the stupendous dowry and that the governess’s boy receives a book without illustrations. Meanwhile, Yulian Mastakovich calculates how much the dowry will gain in interest over five years, the time it will take for the girl to be of marriageable age. It does indeed seem that his motive for courting the poor girl is not lechery per se, but greed. But clearly that is of little consolation to the poor girl, who in the second part arrives at her wedding with tear-stained eyes.

‘A Nasty Business’ was published in the Dostoyevsky brothers’ journal Time (Vremya) in 1862, a year after the emancipation of the serfs, and is clearly written in response to discussions about the Great Reforms being instituted in Russia at the time. The youngest of the three generals assembled as the story opens, Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky, advocates, after several glasses of champagne, extending the ideas behind the government reforms to everyday life, all under the banner of ‘humaneness’. Nikiforov, his cynical host, cryptically observes that ‘we won’t bear it’. The remainder of the story gives Pralinsky an opportunity to put his philosophy into practice, which needless to say turns out to be a miserable failure.

Through a chain of unforeseen circumstances, Pralinsky happens upon the wedding celebration of Pseldonimov, a petty clerk from his office. (Many of the surnames are in keeping with the satirical thrust of the story: Pralinsky conjures up confectionery visions of sticky pralines; the bride is the daughter of Mlekopitayev, that is, ‘mammal’; Pseldonimov is only a letter away from psevdonim, the Russian word for ‘pseudonym’.) The tipsy Pralinsky, who has visions of becoming a famous statesman one day, an event that he thinks might even be commemorated by the raising of a monument, ventures to grace the proceedings with his presence. During the rehearsal of his entrance we see that he means to be on equal footing with the wedding guests, but it is to be an equality of the patronizing, patriarchal sort. In any event, he enters the gathering, but not before he has literally put his foot into the galantine set to cool on the porch. Ignoring this bad omen, he walks into the house, the dancing stops and there’s general embarrassment all round. This continues for hours, as Pralinsky drinks two bottles of champagne that his poor clerk can ill afford. The evening ends with him sick, nursed all night long by Pseldonimov’s mother, and then he scurries away in the early morning, deeply ashamed of his behaviour. The story ends with his signing a transfer request for Pseldonimov and admitting to himself, in the story’s final line, that he ‘couldn’t bear it!’

In 1873, Dostoyevsky was made editor of Citizen (Grazhdanin), a weekly journal owned by the conservative Prince Meshchersky. Finding himself in frequent disagreement over politics with Meshchersky, who advocated, for example, rolling back the Great Reforms initiated by Tsar Alexander II, the day-to-day grind of running a journal took an even greater toll. But it was here that Dostoyevsky began publishing his A Writer’s Diary, not the independent publication that he had originally envisioned, but a monthly column that would comment on social and cultural problems of the day. As he wrote in the introductory column: ‘My position is highly uncertain. But I shall talk to myself and for my own amusement, in the form of this diary, and we’ll see what comes of it. What will I talk about? About everything that strikes me or gives me pause for thought.’ Indeed, the contents range from articles on literature and sketches of literary acquaintances to essays on national and international politics. And there was even one genuine short story published in the sixth instalment – ‘Bobok’.

The genesis of these ‘Notes of a Certain Person’, as ‘Bobok’ is subtitled, can be traced to an item that appeared on 14 January 1873 in the newspaper the Voice:

A Writer’s Diary reminds one of the famous notes which end with the following exclamation: ‘Nevertheless, the Bey of Algiers has a bump on his nose!’ It’s enough to look at the portrait of the author of A Writer’s Diary, currently on exhibit in the Academy of Arts, to feel that same compassion for Mr Dostoyevsky that he so inappropriately mocks in his journal. This is the portrait of a man exhausted by a grave illness.

The story can quite literally be regarded as Dostoyevsky’s reply to this attack. ‘Bobok’ begins in medias res, with Semyon Ardalyonovich accusing Ivan Ivanych (a name so common as to imply Everyman) of never being sober. After abruptly dropping Semyon Ardalyonovich altogether, the narrator immediately turns to the subject of his own portrait. The Voice columnist had commented on the now famous likeness of Dostoyevsky, painted in 1872 by Vasily Perov (1834–82), which portrays the writer, deep in contemplation, with hands clasping his knees; the portrait is mentioned again at the end of the story.¹²

More importantly, the ‘notes’ that the Voice article refers to, by quoting the exclamation about the Bey of Algiers, are ‘The Notes of a Madman’ (more commonly translated into English as ‘The Diary of a Madman’, 1835) by Russia’s comic genius, Nikolay Gogol. The allusion elicits from Dostoyevsky a Gogolian response in genre, narrator and style.¹³ Both ‘Bobok’ and ‘The Notes of a Madman’ share the same genre identification – notes (zapiski). Furthermore, both Ivan Ivanych and Gogol’s diarist, Poprishchin, from the very beginning are mad or teetering on the brink of madness. Dostoyevsky’s Certain Person, even before he goes to the cemetery for ‘diversion’, observes that something strange is happening to him and that he is ‘beginning to see and hear certain strange things. Not exactly voices, but it’s as if someone were right beside me, saying: “Bobok, bobok, bobok!” ’ This clearly echoes Gogol’s Poprishchin: ‘To be frank, quite recently I’ve started hearing and seeing things that I’d never heard or seen before.’¹⁴ Finally, there’s the matter of style. A friend of the Certain Person remarks: ‘Your style is changing … it’s choppy.’ Indeed, he clearly holds up Poprishchin’s ‘jerky’ style as a model for his own. The Certain Person is a failed writer. His feuilletons¹⁵ go unpublished and he seems to make a living on hack work, translations, advertisement copy, obituaries and risqué compendiums. (Note that none of these genres is what would be called ‘high’ literature.)

The Certain Person ‘end[s] up’ at the funeral of a distant relative, but in keeping with the preamble to the story, he shows no reverence for the deceased, but instead gloats that the surviving family with its many daughters will not be able to make ends meet. In other words, his behaviour continues to be inappropriate. He performs a naturalistic survey of the graveyard (for example, the smiling corpses, open graves filled with green water, the stench) as befits the same sort of realism that captured the warts in his portrait. Although he is one of the pallbearers, he does not attend the service, but instead stretches out on a gravestone and begins to listen to the voices coming from the graves.

of their previous life. They will tell their life stories to entertain themselves. Since they have vowed to be without shame, the stories will indeed represent the ‘most shameless truth!’

The Gambler
and Other Stories

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

‘MONEY IS EVERYTHING!’ – THE GAMBLER

The Gamblerand Other Stories

Contents

Chronology

Introduction

‘MONEY IS EVERYTHING!’ – THE GAMBLER

The Gambler
and Other Stories