Meanwhile, Dostoevsky also reached an agreement with the publisher Mikhail Katkov for another work he had in mind. He originally conceived it as a novella, but it eventually grew into Crime and Punishment. Work on it absorbed him completely. The first two parts appeared in 1866, in the January and February issues of Katkov’s journal, The Russian Messenger. The critical response was enthusiastic, encouraging Dostoevsky to continue working on it through the spring and summer. In July, realizing that he was in trouble, he decided to divide his working day in two, writing Crime and Punishment in the mornings and the novel for Stellovsky in the evenings. But by the end of September he had still not written a line of the other book. “Stellovsky upsets me to the point of torture,” he told his old friend Alexander Milyukov, “I even see him in my dreams.” Milyukov suggested that he hire a stenographer and made the arrangements himself. On October 4, 1866, a young woman named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina came to Dostoevsky’s door. She was the best stenography student in the first secretarial school in Petersburg. He dropped work on Crime and Punishment and began dictating The Gambler to her. On October 29, the novel was finished. Anna Grigoryevna brought him the copied-out manuscript the next day for final corrections, and on November 1, Dostoevsky went to deliver it to Stellovsky. The bookseller was not at home, and his assistant refused to accept responsibility for receiving it. At ten o’clock in the evening, he left the manuscript with the district police officer, who gave him a dated receipt for it. To Stellovsky’s undoubted dismay, Dostoevsky had won. A week later, he proposed to his stenographer and was accepted.
Dostoevsky first conceived of The Gambler as a short story about “Russians abroad.” It is, as Joseph Frank rightly points out, the only work of Dostoevsky’s that is “international” in the sense of that word made familiar by, for example, the fiction of Henry James. It is, in other words, a story in which the psychology and conflicts of the characters not only arise from their individual temperaments and personal qualities but also reflect an interiorization of various national values and ways of life.
The Gambler, Frank concludes, is “a spirited but by no means uncritical meditation on the waywardness of the Russian national temperament.” That waywardness is dramatized in its contrasts with the French, who are all external form and thus perfect deceivers, and the Germans, who are stolid “savers” and “so honest it’s even frightening to go near them.” The one Englishman in the novel, Mr. Astley, is a personally noble and virtuous man, but of limited imagination. He is “in sugar,” as the narrator observes. The Russian is none of these things, and that is so not only of the narrator-hero, Alexei Ivanovich, but of his employer, the retired General Zagoryansky, of the general’s stepdaughter, Polina, and even of the seventy-five-year-old Russian matriarch whom everyone refers to simply as “grandmother”—a superbly comic and contradictory portrait of the old landowning aristocracy.
Dostoevsky had gone abroad in 1863 not only to try his hand at gambling but to join a young woman by the name of Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a twenty-year-old writer who had become his mistress and soon became his tormentor. The milieu of Roulettenburg, the name of the heroine, and her “love/hate” relations with Alexei Ivanovich have led commentators to an autobiographical reading of The Gambler that is not borne out by the novel itself. There is certainly much of Dostoevsky’s personal experience behind it, in the relations of eros and roulette, but the unexpected ending shows us a Polina who has little in common with Suslova, and there is above all the character of the narrator himself, who is far from being a disguised self-portrait of the author.
Alexei Ivanovich is twenty-four years old, of noble birth but no fortune, employed as a tutor in the general’s household. He is also an amateur writer, who is struggling to understand himself and what has happened to him by writing it down. The nameless narrator of Notes from Underground is also an amateur writer engaged in the same struggle, as is Arkady Dolgoruky, the narrator-hero of The Adolescent. The man from underground is forty years old; Arkady Dolgoruky is going on twenty (Alyosha Karamazov, the hero of The Brothers Karamazov, is also twenty). We might say, then, that in the development of Dostoevsky’s later work, adolescence is the goal, and Alexei Ivanovich is well on his way to it.
But what drew Dostoevsky to these young protagonists? The Russian émigré thinker Vladimir Weidlé suggests an answer in his magisterial inquiry into the destiny of modern art, Les abeilles d’Aristée (“The Bees of Aristaeus”). He speaks of the need “to find for the work of literature, and first of all for the novel, a vital ambiance that does not force it into the mechanization of processes and the rapid drying-up of imagination.” Hence we see novelists choosing adolescents as heroes, or at least young people who do not yet have an entirely fixed and stable personality or an exactly circumscribed place in society. These people, who are not yet caught up in their destiny, can change, can choose, can imagine an unlimited future. It is only with such characters that one can succeed in realizing that thing which has become so infrequent in the novel today and which is designated by a familiar but rarely understood word: adventure.
“Adventure is what advenes, that is, what is added on, what comes into the bargain, what you were not expecting, what you could have done without. An adventure novel is an account of events that are not contained in each other.” Such is the admirable definition formulated by Jacques Rivière in one of his finest critical essays.
Even if it becomes explicable by what follows, says Weidlé, the true adventure “must always appear to us first of all as free and unexpected.” That condition is what gives inner unity to Dostoevsky’s world, from the misadventures of Alexei Ivanovich in Roulettenburg to Alyosha Karamazov’s vision of the messianic banquet. For Dostoevsky, it is not the finished man, sculpted by the hand of destiny, who embodies the highest human truth, but the unfinished man, who remains open to what can only ever be freely and unexpectedly given.
Richard Pevear
THE GAMBLER
A Novel
(From a Young Man’s Notes)
CHAPTER I
I’VE FINALLY COME BACK from my two-week absence. Our people have already been in Roulettenburg for three days. I thought they would be waiting for me God knows how eagerly, but I was mistaken. The general had an extremely independent look, spoke to me condescendingly, and sent me to his sister. It was clear they had got hold of money somewhere. It even seemed to me that the general was a little ashamed to look at me. Marya Filippovna was extremely busy and scarcely spoke with me; she took the money, however, counted it, and listened to my whole report. Mezentsov, the little Frenchman, and some Englishman or other were expected for dinner; as usual, when there’s money, then at once it’s a formal dinner; Moscow-style. Polina Alexandrovna, seeing me, asked what had taken me so long, and went off somewhere without waiting for an answer. Of course, she did it on purpose. We must have a talk, however. A lot has accumulated.
I’ve been assigned a small room on the fourth floor of the hotel. It’s known here that I belong to the general’s suite. Byall appearances, they’ve managed to make themselves known. The general is regarded by everyone here as a very rich Russian grandee. Before dinner he managed, among other errands, to give me two thousand-franc notes to have changed. I changed them in the hotel office. Now they’ll look at us as millionaires for at least a whole week. I was about to take Misha and Nadya for a walk, but on the stairs I was summoned to the general; he had seen fit to inquire where I was going to take them. The man is decidedly unable to look me straight in the eye; he would very much like to, but I respond each time with such an intent—that is, irreverent—gaze, that he seems disconcerted. In a highly pompous speech, piling one phrase on another and finally becoming totally confused, he gave me to understand that I should stroll with the children somewhere in the park, a good distance from the vauxhall.{1} He finally became quite angry and added abruptly: “Or else you might just take them to the vauxhall, to the roulette tables. Excuse me,” he added, “but I know you’re still rather light-minded and perhaps capable of gambling. In any case, though I am not your mentor, and have no wish to take that role upon myself, I do at any rate have the right to wish that you not, so to speak, compromise me…”