The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky
My sister recently won $2,600 in her first trip to a casino with her boyfriend and his mom. His mom had given her $200 to play with, consenting to the possibility that it could all be gone within the hour. Having never gambled myself, reading Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler gave me new insight into something she told me about the experience. She’d said after she won her first thousand, her boyfriend Reece wanted in on the action and asked to play for her. He lost a few hundred dollars almost immediately. She scolded him, demanding that he could “lose his own damn money” and would not be playing with her money again, the irony of the fact that the starting money wasn’t hers to begin with completely lost on her.
I wasn’t sold on the book until the Grandmother appeared. I found Alexei’s love for Polina a little nauseating, especially because Polina was so cruel about it from beginning to end. I wanted Alexei to get over her and move on – unrequited love drives me nuts. I want to scream at characters, and even at friends who have found themselves in similar situations, get over it – they don’t like you back, time to move on. I don’t understand people who want so desperately to be with someone who doesn’t want to be with them. Polina is also not my favorite character by any means, though the General has her beat in being the most pathetic character I’ve read in a long time. Both are consumed with their own, often manufactured problems and I have trouble sympathizing with them. The General’s pining after young, beautiful, out-of-his-league Blanche foils Alexei’s pining after Polina, but I wasn’t interested. When the Grandmother shows up, in all her obnoxious glory (she reminded me of my Grandma Winnie in many ways), I was hooked.
An avid gambler himself, Dostoevsky wrote of the intense highs and lows of the game; his descriptions were enlightening to say the least. Dostoevsky wrote the novel in only a month, after his publisher wouldn’t let him out of a deadline, so he wrote something close to his heart – gambling. Chapter 10, when the story really gets good in my opinion, recounts the Grandmother’s first encounter with the game of Roulette, and her immediate addiction is so well described. In general, Dostoevsky’s descriptions of the game, the internal monologue to keep playing, even the sense of time the player feels while throwing his/her bets, all gave such an accurate representation (at least from my perspective), that I simultaneously felt both the excitement of the Grandmother’s “luck” at winning and the dreaded feeling of warning coming from Alexei every time she lost. The sense of “just one more and we’ll win” is so well documented that as the reader, I’m teetering between “yes, just one more!” and “leave now before you lose everything!” The constant shift of blame is interesting, too. Each time the Grandmother loses, she blames whoever or whatever she can. She screams at Alexei that it’s his fault, she screams at the game, she screams at herself, she screams at anyone in her line of sight. And yet, each time she wins, she says things like, “There, now, see! I knew it, I knew it would turn up. Bet again, on the same number, on the same color.” The concept of chance is out of the window to the player; each play is calculated, no matter how random.
It made me think of my sister telling her boyfriend he could no longer play with her money, as if all the factors, 1) him playing, with 2) her money, somehow counted against him, and therefore he was to blame. As if the game wasn’t truly a game of chance. It made me think of how we are always looking for a pattern to make sense of things. She saw that she won when she played, but he lost when he played. Therefore, he was unlucky and she was lucky. And therefore, he couldn’t play anymore but she could. Dostoevsky explains this phenomenon beautifully and intensely – anytime the game was being played, I couldn’t put the book down. I wanted to know who was lucky and unlucky, where the patterns were, whether the players were right to have played just one more time. When the luck would run out.
The senses of high and low are also interesting phenomena throughout the book, especially in the second half. As Alexei’s addiction is held in contrast with the Grandmother’s, the reader becomes strangely convinced that Alexei’s luck is somehow better than the Grandmother’s because of his commitment to the game itself, unlike the Grandmother’s blatant intent to win based on her whims or the whims of other’s she’s tasked to play for her. It’s a strange feeling for the reader because Dostoyevsky is technically holding both forms of play as resulting in the same outcome – chance that often ends in disaster, as “luck” runs out or the player becomes too cocky, always choosing the wrong turn to be his “last.” He should have left earlier; she should have gathered her winnings in the last turn and now she’s lost everything.
Yet, I was convinced, as Alexei was convinced, that his form of play was “better” than the Grandmother’s because he “knew” when to stop. As the novel comes to a close, Alexei’s own addiction to (or “love for” as it is often described) the game still results in the same outcome as the Grandmother’s: he loses everything and still feels like he has a chance to win, if he just, to use a fitting cliché, plays his cards right. Just one more game. Just one more win. Just one more press of his luck.
It is not until Alexei has a transparent conversation with Mr. Astley that the reader begins to realize how far-gone Alexei is, and the novel ends in despair for the reader. Mr. Astley gives Alexei a small amount of money, stating that he refuses to give him more because he knows he will gamble it away. He plainly tells Alexei what Alexei cannot see himself: his addiction will be his ruin. His addiction has already been his ruin; it will get worse if he doesn’t stop himself. But Alexei has convinced himself otherwise. He cannot see it because he has transformed his view of his gambling as a means to an end, though his own internal monologues reveal this to be untrue; Alexei thinks he’s still in love with Polina and that gambling will get him back to her. He forgets he’s already tried this; Polina rejected him anyway, and he went back to gambling.
When Mr. Astley tries to point this out to him, it is especially tragic for Alexei to decide to try the exact same plan again: win everything back with gambling, and then Polina will love him and he’ll be back on top. He disregards where the true problem exists: his addiction to the game. The reader can no longer join in Alexei’s hope because the truth is too real to ignore; the reader has watched gambling destroy the lives of almost every character, and the prospect of it working “just one more time” is no longer a possibility the reader wants to root for. The reader becomes the spectator watching someone win far beyond his means and then lose it all within the same game; we become frustrated and think, “he should have stopped when he had the chance. Now it’s just sad.”
Thus, though Alexei’s assertion that, “Tomorrow. Tomorrow it will all be over!” sounds hopeful on its own, the words aren’t believed by the reader. We can’t join Alexei in his hope, because we know what the outcome will be. Though the final words of the novel try to embody a way out, a beacon of hope, the entirety of the work reveals a much darker meaning: Alexei has succumbed to the addiction of gambling and though he’s lost everything more than once, he cannot take his eyes off the impossible possibility that gambling could save him one more time.
Just one more game.
