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The Gambler


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The Gambler brilliantly captures the strangely powerful compulsion to bet that Dostoevsky, himself a compulsive gambler, knew so well. The hero rides an emotional roller coaster between exhilaration and despair, and secondary characters such as the Grandmother, who throws much of her fortune away at the gaming tables, are unforgettable. The book's publishing history is equally so: Under the pressure of a deadline from an unscrupulous publisher, and with rights to his entire oeuvre at stake, Dostoevsky dictated the book in less than a month to the star pupil of Russia's first shorthand school. Then he married her.

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Novel or Counterfeit?

Dostoyevsky's enigmatic work, "The Gambler" is neither a novel nor not a novel. It is a counterfeit novel and it is intended to be read as such. I come to that conclusion because it is clear from his other works that this author knows exactly how to write a novel and has done so on many other occasions --- so if in this case he wrote something very strange that starts out as if it were a novel and then collapses in on itself I have to assume he did so on purpose...Does anyone else read the story like this besides Peter Hodgson and myself?

Posted By Richard Winston at Tue 24 May 2005, 6:03 PM in The Gambler || 2 Replies

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