The Gambler and Other Stories

This Penguin Classics collection brings together White Nights, A Christmas Party and a Wedding, A Nasty Story, The Gambler, Bobok, The Meek One and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man. In the title novella, Alexei Ivanovich works as tutor to the family of an indebted Russian general in Roulettenburg, a fictional German spa town dominated by the roulette tables. His volatile devotion to Polina, the general’s dependence on an expected inheritance and the arrival of a formidable elderly aunt turn financial desperation into a contest of pride, humiliation and compulsion. Alexei believes gambling can give him freedom and authority, but each wager exposes how thoroughly chance has taken control of him.

The shorter works range across Dostoyevsky’s career and the changing society of nineteenth-century Russia. Dreamers, civil servants, unhappy couples, social climbers and even the talkative dead inhabit Saint Petersburg under Nicholas I and during the Great Reforms of Alexander II. White Nights offers an intimate story of unreturned love, while Bobok and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man move into grotesque and visionary territory. Read together, the pieces examine money, status, marriage, loneliness, suicide, moral vanity and the possibility of redemption, linking the cosmopolitan casino culture of European spa towns with the cramped rooms and bureaucratic hierarchies of the imperial capital.