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Chapter Three Purging Bad Money: The Gambler “Do not love silver and gold, or cling to them.” —Zosima Rather force exercised on being that is really lived than shadowy solicitude for faceless numbers! From the former a way leads to God, from the latter only one to nothingness. —Martin Buber Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. —Wordsworth LIFE AND ART Throughout his life, Dostoevsky was profoundly concerned with the power of the written word and the ethics of literary creation. His early works of the 1840s, as we have seen, utilize clichés of romantic novels to draw attention to the sensitive boundaries between art and life. When he resumes literary activity in the 1860s after ten years of prison and exile, Dostoevsky deepens his focus on the dangers of abstract thinking, the seductive power of fantasy , dream life, and artistic literature, and the supreme value of human relationships . As before, he creates works in which the surface of the language conceals a deeper truth, one that is impossible to put into words. In The Gambler (Igrok; 1866), facts of the author’s biography—his gambling obsession , a guilty love affair, his encounter with the West, his debts—find their reflection in an ostensibly simple literary plot that communicates a message about the dangers of calculation, money, and the “law.” The events of Dostoevsky’s disorderly life in the early 1860s have provided irresistible bait for interpreters of The Gambler, which he wrote within a single month under crushing pressure. In 1865, Dostoevsky had obligated himself to the notorious publisher F. T. Stellovsky to produce a novel by November 1, 1866, under the threat of losing the income from any future works for a period of nine years afterward.1 The story of how the middle43 Chapter Three 44 aged, widowed writer hired a young stenographer, who enabled him to finish his novel and then became his wife, is itself worthy material for a romance novel. The content of The Gambler reflects Dostoevsky’s two extraordinary passions in the early 1860s—for gambling and for Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova . His tormented relationship with Polina, which began in 1862 or 1863 before the death of his first wife, compounded the strain and guilt caused by his inevitable gambling losses.2 The fact that Dostoevsky only gambled when he was in western Europe is surely relevant in any analysis of the critical attitude toward Western secular culture that figures prominently in his journalistic writing of the 1860s and 1870s. There also seems to be a significant connection between the writer’s compulsion to gamble—and in fact to lose—and his productivity as a creative writer.3 Dostoevsky demonstrated an inability to write until he had repeatedly lost all his (and his second wife’s) possessions at the roulette tables.4 Add the inevitable sensationalistic biographical information discovered (and invented) by zealous psychoanalytical critics, and it becomes too easy to overlook the most important thing: the literary quality of the novel itself. Despite all the distractions it offers the voyeuristic reader, The Gambler stands on its own merits. As Dostoevsky settled into the daily routine of dictating to his diligent young assistant, he tamed the tensions of his recent passions and distilled them into an engaging and symbolically rich work of art. Narrative literature is a form of thinking that develops meaning through plot, chronicling a series of events through time and placing them in an overall design and order. The presence of a plot distinguishes narrative from lyric; the presence of a narrator distinguishes it from drama. An interpretation that hopes to do justice to the narrative work of art must take into account these two basic generic features: the identity of the narrator and the meaning built by the story he tells. The Gambler features a first-person narrator , Aleksei Ivanovich, who takes part in the action. Building on the tension between narrator and tale, Dostoevsky’s compact novel offers a morally instructive message on the incompatibility of value systems based on money, on the one hand, and love, on the other. The Gambler features two interconnected and symbiotic plots leading into the vortex of the casino. In one, an old lady, “the grandmother,” gambles away the inheritance of her younger relative, a Russian “general” traveling through the watering places of western Europe. In the other, Aleksei Ivanovich, the tutor of the general’s children, harbors a lacerating and self-abasing love for the general’s grown stepdaughter Polina...

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