The Gambler, written by the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky in the mid-nineteenth century (first published in 1866), tells the story of a certain Alexei Ivanovich, tutor of his state of the children of a ruined general. The general's daughter-in-law, Pauline Alexandrovna, is the object of a radical and exclusive love, bordering on madness, on the part of Alexei Ivanovich. The latter, to please him, and "exist" socially speaking, ventures roulette, and wins. Then begins an escalation in the obsession with play, as a self-destructive factor of human decadence.
A patron work
If you have read other works by Dostoevsky beforehand, you will not be able to help but find resonances, recurrences, echoes with this work. Indeed, The Gambler is both the genesis of his best-known works, which are Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), The Demons (1872), or The Brothers Karamazov (1880 ), and the model of these. In his Preface, Dominique Fernandez emphasizes "[…] This lucid attraction of the abyss, this horrified euphoria of the fall […] ", but also on the first occurrence of the woman-heroine, here Pauline Alexandrovna, both loved and hated. The different aspects of the domineering, capricious, fickle, and beautifully ambivalent woman, who would later be embodied by Nastasia Philippovna and Aglaé in The Idiot, Catherine Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment, or Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. Similarly, he concludes his Preface with what he calls:
"Irrationality, the absurdity of all love, the tendency of passion to be fulfilled in murder, these are again motives so typically Dostoevskian […]. "
The Gambler, the novel of an obsession
This novel is therefore the novel of a man's obsession with self-destruction. Also in his Preface, Dominique Fernandez speaks of a plot "rudimentary, dostoevskian to excess, all twists and disasters that border on caricature". In fact, Alexei's feverishness taken by the passion of the game seems to contaminate the whole story. We go from a love drama to the comical characterization of a cantankerous old woman. Events transport us from the seaside town of Roulettenbourg to Paris, then Hombourg, Spa, and Baden. Similarly, Alexei claims to be able to kill himself for love for much of this novel, but as soon as he has money, he flies to Paris, in the company of a venal courtesan.
Moreover, a similar gambling fever can be found in The Teenager, published in 1875, while Arkadi was going to an auction:
The feeling was a bit like in a playroom […] The heart does not beat yet, but it is already as if digging a little, as if shaking – a feeling that is not unpleasant. However, indecision quickly begins to weigh on you, you become blind […].
Throughout the pages, we are thus witnesses of a Dantesque spiral of alienation, where each act becomes condemnation. Fernandez then presents a psychological diagnosis of the Dostoevskian character in that he integrates a: "[…] The significance of the passion for play, with its procession of powerless efforts to free oneself from it and the opportunities it offers for the punishment of oneself […] mixture of horror and satisfaction that accompanies the forbidden gesture".
Dostoevsky and Alexei, two sides of the same novel
If The Player has a cathartic value in the sense that it reveals the flaws of man and his dangerous penchant for passions, this novel is also, in many ways, a Mimesis of its author. Indeed, Alexei and Fyodor appear strangely similar in what Dostoevsky presents in a letter to his friend Strakhov in September 1863 about his future novel The Gambler :
I paint a man whose character is absolutely open, a man versed in many matters, but incomplete in all things.
How can we not spot autobiographical correspondences in this novel centered on the game, when we know that Dostoevsky himself was dominated for a long time by this passion? The literary interest, however, is not to establish a list of similarities and differences between fiction and biography, but rather to show the importance of such a work in the author's literary project. Play "evokes something that is infinitely beyond them, a feeling of guilt that needs a constantly renewed punishment. By indulging in his vice [..] he seeks only to punish himself, for an ancient, irrational and inexpiable fault" (Preface, Dominique Fernandez).
Dostoevsky's The Player thus constitutes what could be called the initiative of a future work, where all Dostoevsky's ideas are concentrated, which will be amply developed in the rest of his novels. On the other hand, this novel is not to be read exclusively for its proleptic value, but also and mainly for its beauty and the poetry with which it deals with human failures.
Article written by Julie Madiot
