The Gambler Wife_A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky by Andrew D. Kaufman

Author:Andrew D. Kaufman [Kaufman, Andrew D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
ISBN: 9780525537144
Goodreads: 56987850
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Published: 2021-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

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An addiction as merciless as Dostoyevsky’s, conquered? How did it happen?

Scholars have sometimes explained the end of the writer’s gambling addiction by noting that there was no public gambling in Russia, or that the Prussian government shut down the German casinos in 1872, depriving Dostoyevsky of any opportunity to gamble during his frequent trips to the country in the 1870s. Yet legal gambling existed in European countries other than Germany; if he’d been determined to do so, Dostoyevsky could easily have found opportunities to head back to the tables. There is simply no evidence that the thought ever crossed his mind.

Nor was the writer’s repatriation to Russia an adequate explanation for the banishment of his addiction. For one thing, the psychological and biological factors that researchers believe fed Dostoyevsky’s addiction—anxiety, poverty, and epilepsy—did not disappear upon his return to Russia. On the contrary, at least in the short term, his poverty and attendant anxiety only intensified as the couple struggled to build their life from scratch, and with a new child to boot. Was it the cultural environment of Russia herself, then, that cured him? One Slavic scholar, William J. Leatherbarrow, seems to think so, concluding from his reading of The Gambler that:

the semiotic system with which Dostoevsky surrounds the act of gambling in his novel implicates that act deeply in his vision of European cultural collapse. Is it not, therefore, only to be expected that he should feel no need to gamble when in his native Russia and that such a form of demonic possession should overwhelm him during years of desperate exile in the wilderness of Western Europe?

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