The Gambler

Alexei is a young tutor in the household of a bankrupt Russian general, stranded in the resort town of Roulettenburg while the whole family waits for a rich grandmother to die and leave her fortune behind. He is in love with the general's stepdaughter, Polina, who treats him with a contempt he cannot stop craving — and he has discovered the one thing that feels more powerful than his humiliation: the roulette wheel. Dostoyevsky wrote this novel in twenty-six frantic days, dictating it to a stenographer under threat of losing the rights to everything he had ever written, and the urgency shows on every page. Drawn directly from his own catastrophic gambling addiction, The Gambler is a ruthlessly honest anatomy of obsession — the exact moment reason surrenders to the conviction that the next spin will fix everything. Few novels have ever gotten this close to what addiction actually feels like from the inside.