The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin ed.) Read online

  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.’

  THE DREAMER

  ‘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.’

  DOSTOYEVSKY AS SOCIAL CRITIC

  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.