The Gambler

In the glittering German spa town Dostoevsky calls Roulettenburg, a town that exists for its casino, the young Russian tutor Alexei Ivanovich circles two obsessions. The first is Polina, the proud stepdaughter of the debt-ridden General whose children he teaches — a woman for whom he would do anything, and who knows it. The second is the roulette wheel, to which she first sends him to play on her behalf, and which slowly takes possession of him.

Around them turns a desperate comedy of money and rank: a General waiting on a rich aunt’s death, a cold French marquis holding his debts, a scheming Frenchwoman, a watchful Englishman — and, at the novel’s astonishing centre, the old aunt herself, arriving very much alive and falling under the spell of the wheel before the family’s horrified eyes. By the end, fortunes have been won and lost, the love intrigues have curdled, and Alexei has learned the one thing that ruins him: that he can win.

Told in a breathless, first-person present that puts the reader inside the gambler’s fever as it burns, The Gambler is Dostoevsky’s most autobiographical book — written, against a punishing deadline, by a man who knew the compulsion from the inside. It is at once a swift, merciless study of addiction, a sly meditation on the reckless “Russian” soul against European calculation, and an unforgettable portrait of a man forever certain that tomorrow he will stop.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by C. J. Hogarth, paired with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s frantic composition, meaning, and method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.