The Gambler

About the book

Returning to his employers in Roulettenberg, the narrator finds a household whose appearance of wealth rests on anxieties that everyone can feel but few will state plainly. Money, status, and his attachment to Polina make even an ordinary conversation a contest of interpretation. The gaming tables offer a more concentrated form of uncertainty, where a turn of fortune seems capable of changing everything at once. Dostoyevsky's first-person account allows excitement and humiliation to reshape the narrator's explanations as events unfold. The novel is interested in the difference between imagining freedom and becoming absorbed by a new form of dependence. Its sharp exchanges and sudden reversals make a short, intense study of a mind drawn toward the very instability it hopes to master.

• Chance and compulsion
• Money and status
• Emotional dependence

Why read it

For an urgent narrative in which the psychology of risk reaches beyond the casino into every relationship.

C. J. Hogarth English translation