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Dostoyevsky – Gambler and Analyst
Dostoyevsky wrote the book "The Gambler" in 1866 in an attempt to rescue his finances. The story provides a vivid description of his own gambling life and captures the weird and powerful gambling compulsion that Dostoyevsky himself, knew well.
Dostoyevsky the Writer
The book brilliantly captures the strangely powerful compulsion to bet that Dostoyevsky, himself a compulsive gambler, knew so well. The hero, like all gamblers, 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, Dostoyevsky dictated the book in less than a month to the star pupil of Russia's first shorthand school. Then he married her.
Roulettenberg in “The Gambler”
In "The Gambler", Dostoyevsky introduces a scheming cast of characters gathered in Roulettenberg, a fictitious German spa town with a casino and international clientele. All fortunes depend on the impending death of Granny, a rich 75-year-old woman who arrives in Roulettenberg, very much alive, and proceeds to the casino.
Alexei and Granny are introduced to the roulette wheel and soon become hooked, although they start gambling for different reasons: Alexei thinks that "Money is everything!" whereas Granny wants to prove to her nephew, the greedy General, that she is still very much in control of the purse strings. They both "chase their losses" and pursue a cycle of winning, losing, desperation and exhaustion. Granny eventually burns out and returns to Moscow, but almost two years later, Alexei, still in denial, drifts from casino to casino.
Dostoyevsky's Alexei is a prototypical gambler who rationalizes and defends his growing obsession with roulette. For Alexei, a big win at roulette would earn him entrance into the aristocracy and transform him from outsider to insider.
Dostoyevsky the Gambler
"The Gambler" even today, is analyzed and scrutinized by scientists searching to further decipher the gambling disorder and uncover its causes. The novel is used to develop hypotheses about problem gambling behaviors, such as the gambler's motivation is not to win - an argument also made by Sigmund Freud, who studied Dostoevsky's gambling.In contrast the theory that the gambler subconsciously wants to lose is also a theory of Freud's, which, in Dostoevsky's case, he pinned to parental loss in early childhood.
Conversely, Raif Geha, chief of immunology at Children's Hospital in Boston, in his study of Dostoyevsky and "The Gambler", sees Alexei's motivation to gamble not to lose, but, indeed, to win - and win not only money, but also win back his late mother, brought on by the guilt of losing his father. "We suspect that self-punishment and defeat for the gambler are probably paradoxical but unintended," Geha concludes.
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