Challenging the Bard: Dostoevsky and Pushkin, a Study of Literary Relationship

Chapter Four: Gambling and Passion: Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Dostoevsky’s The Gambler

In , almost two decades after Dostoevsky’s spirited reaction to Pushkin’s“The Stationmaster,” The Bronze Horseman, and The Covetous Knight through Poor Folk, The Double, and Mr. Prokharchin, he decided to respond to these works again, but this time to take on in addition Pushkin’s greatest piece of prose fiction, The Queen of Spades, through the medium of Crime and Punishment and The Gambler. His last works of the s could hardly be construed as responses to Pushkin, nor could the works he completed in the early s, the years after his return to Petersburg from Siberia. But by , he was ready one more time to renew his engagement with his great predecessor, to revisit old themes and explore new ones, including the ideas of fortune, risk, daring , and passion. It is not entirely surprising that Dostoevsky would do so, since at this time he was thinking of revising some of his earlier work, in particular The Double, which was written, in part, as a response to Pushkin. But in  Dostoevsky was also a different man. In the late s he was arrested, imprisoned, and interrogated over his alleged revolutionary activities; he experienced what he thought was a reprieve from execution only one minute before the sentence was to be carried out; and between  and , he spent four years at hard labor in a prison in which the other prisoners made his life unbearable. In , two years before he finished The Gambler and Crime and Punishment, he experienced the death of his wife, his brother (his closest colleague), and one of his best friends, the poet and critic Apollon Grigor’ev. In addition, Dostoevsky’s ideas were becoming more conservative, and his writing began to reflect his growing disillusionment with the culture of theWest,its socialism no less than its capitalism,both of which he found  chapter  Gambling and Passion Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades and Dostoevsky’s The Gambler tainted by atheism, egoism, and rationalism, and as such alien to the Russian national character. So when Dostoevsky revisited Poor Folk in Crime and Punishment (which was originally entitled The Drunkards, a novel about the ravages of alcoholism among impoverished families in the capital),the representation of poverty was integrated into a much more ideological framework, in which religion and anti-rationalism played important roles. This is also true of the way The Gambler and Crime and Punishment rework the ideas of money, accumulation, fortune, power, and risk in Pushkin’s The Covetous Knight and The Queen of Spades, the main Pushkinian foci of interest for Dostoevsky during .1 In terms of influence, then, The Gambler and Crime and Punishment constitute an especially interesting example of literary response, in which an author, greatly changed,makes another attempt to engage the same works of his great literary precursor. In responding to The Queen of Spades, in Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky would create his own ambitious young man, a Petersburg type, with grandiose dreams. He obviously could not directly take on the gambling plot. For one, it was no longer possible to place the scene of gambling in Petersburg, given that roulette was not legal. Even more important, the hero, an impoverished student obsessed with murder, was an ascetic who would hardly work as the protagonist of a tale about gambling in which sexual passion not only played an important role but was fated to displace gambling itself at the center of interest. It is impossible to know whether Dostoevsky would have ever written The Gambler had he not been compelled by circumstances, but he took advantage of the opportunity to fashion a very different response to The Queen of Spades than he had given in Crime and Punishment. I suggest that seeing The Gambler in light of The Queen of Spades will help us more fully to appreciate Dostoevsky’s achievement in his novel on gambling; it will also provide the basis for revising received opinions about the work’s main characters and the relationship between gambling and love. And as Neil Cornwell has argued with Carlos Fuentes’s Aura in relation to The Queen of Spades, sometimes there are areas of an earlier work that can be opened up only through its transformation in a literary response.2 I hope that a few of these will be opened up as we explore Dostoevsky’s engagement with The Queen of Spades in The Gambler.3  After Exile Accumulation and Risk in The Covetous Knight...