The Gambler

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In this dark and compelling short novel, Dostoevsky tells the story of Alexey Ivanovitch, a young tutor working in the household of an imperious Russian general. Alexey tries to break through the wall of the established order in Russia, but instead becomes mired in the endless downward spiral of betting and loss. His intense and inescapable addiction is accentuated by his affair with the General’s cruel yet seductively adept niece, Polina. In The GamblerThe Gambler, Dostoevsky reaches the heights of drama with this stunning psychological portrait.

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Paperback, 188 pages

Published April 8th 2003 by Modern Library (first published March 10th 1866)

tags: historical, romance, novels, cultural, roman, classics, literature, 19th century, russia, russian literature, historical fiction, fiction

Book Quotes

“Or perhaps it is because it is so NECESSARY for you to win. It is like a drowning man catching at a straw. You yourself will agree that, unless he were drowning he would not mistake a straw for the trunk of a tree.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Drowning, Dying, Win

“most men love to see their best friend in abasement; for generally it is on such abasement that friendship is founded.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“If the spirit has passed through a great many sensations, possibly it can no longer be sated with them, but grows more excited, and demands more sensations, and stronger and stronger ones, until at length it falls exhausted.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Excited, Exhausted, Sensations

“Des Grieux was like all Frenchmen, that is, cheerful and amiable when it was necessary and profitable, and insufferably dull when the necessity to be cheerful and amiable ceased. A Frenchman is rarely amiable by nature; he is always amiable as if on command, out of calculation. If, for instance, he sees the necessity of being fantastic, original, out of the ordinary, then his fantasy, being most stupid and unnatural, assembles itself out of accepted and long-trivialized forms. The natural Frenchman consists of a most philistine, petty, ordinary positiveness--in short, the dullest being in the world. In my opinion, only novices, and Russian young ladies in particular, are attracted to Frenchmen. Any decent being will at once notice and refuse to put up with this conventionalism of the pre-established forms of salon amiability, casualness, and gaiety.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“You have disgraced the name of Russia, madam!" shouted the general, "and there are police for that!”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Well, yes, yes, to be enslaved to you is a pleasure. There is, there is pleasure in the ultimate degree of humiliation and insignificance!" I went on raving. "Devil knows, maybe there is in the knout, too, when the knout comes down on your back and tears your flesh to pieces...But maybe I want to try other pleasures as well.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“وبدلا من أن أفكر في المستقبل ، أراني أحيا تحت تأثير ذكريات حديثة ، تحت تأثير كل تلك العاصفة التي ما تزال قريبة ، تلك العاصفة التي حملتني زوبعتها زمانا ثم ألقتني على الأرض. وما زلت أحس في بعض الحظات أن الزوبعة ستأخذ بي ، أن الصاعقة ستنطلق ، فيطبق جناحها عليّ أثناء عبورها ، وأنني وقد فقدت التوازن وطاش صوابي ، سآخذ أدور ، وأدور ، وأدور ...”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“ما أنا الآن؟ صفر! ماذا أستطيع أن أكون غداً؟ أستطيع أن أحيي موتي فأستأنف الحياة. أستطيع أن أكتشف في نفسي الإنسان قبل أن يضيع.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Culture, Fashion, Identity, Society, Style

“Yes; even if a gentleman should lose his whole substance, he must never give way to annoyance. Money must be so subservient to gentility as never to be worth a thought. Of course, the SUPREMELY aristocratic thing is to be entirely oblivious of the mire of rabble, with its setting; but sometimes a reverse course may be aristocratic to remark, to scan, and even to gape at, the mob (for preference, through a lorgnette), even as though one were taking the crowd and its squalor for a sort of raree show which had been organised specially for a gentleman's diversion.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“El caballero auténtico, aunque pierda cuanto tiene, no debe alterarse. El dinero está tan por bajo de la dignidad de un caballero que casi no vale la pena pensar en él.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“... ولكن اللذة مفيدة دائما ، والسلطة المطلقة التي لا حدود لها نوع من المتعة ، ولو كانت سلطة على ذبابة. الإنسان ظالم بطبيعته : إنه يحب التعذيب . وأنت تحبين هذا أكثر مما تحبين أي شئ آخر.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“it's as if I'm afraid to spoil the charm of what has only just passed by a serious book or some serious occupation. As if this ugly dream and all the impressions it left behind are so dear to me that I'm even afraid to touch it with something new, lest it vanish in smoke!”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Sí, a veces la idea más delirante, la que parece más imposible, se le clava a uno en la cabeza con tal fuerza que acaba por juzgarla realizable... Más aún, si esa idea va unida a un deseo fuerte y apasionado acaba uno por considerarla a veces como algo fatal, necesario, predestinado, como algo que es imposible que no sea, que no ocurra.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Gerçekten, insan en iyi dostunu karşısında küçülmüş bir halde görmekten zevk alıyor. Zaten, dostlukların temeli çoğunlukla böyle küçümsemelere dayanıyor. Bu pek eski ve her akıllı adamın bildiği bir gerçektir.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

topics: Arkadaşlık, Dostluk, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Kumarbaz

“لعل نفس الإنسان ، بعد أن تعاني مثل هذا العدد الكبير من الإحساسات ، لا تنتهي إلى الشبع منها ، بل تهتاج وتطلب المزيد من إحساسات جديدة ما تنفك تعنف ثم تعنف ، إلى أن تصل إلى درجة الإنهاك.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Resulta curioso y ridículo lo mucho que a veces puede expresar la mirada de un hombre vergonzoso, morbosamente púdico, tocado por el amor, precisamente cuando este hombre preferiría que la tierra se abriera bajo sus pies antes de decir nada o de darlo a entender con la palabra o con los ojos.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“I haven’t been here long, but, nevertheless, all the same, what I’ve managed to observe and verify here arouses the indignation of my Tartar blood. By God, I don’t want such virtues! I managed to make a seven-mile tour here yesterday. Well, it’s exactly the same as in those moralizing little German picture books: everywhere here each house has its Vater, terribly virtuous and extraordinarily honest. So honest it’s even frightening to go near him. I can’t stand honest people whom it’s frightening to go near. Each such Vater has a family, and in the evening they all read edifying books aloud. Over their little house, elms and chestnuts rustle. A sunset, a stork on the roof, and all of it extraordinarily poetic and touching…”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“In the same way, I saw our General once approach the table in a stolid, important manner. A lacquey darted to offer him a chair, but the General did not even notice him. Slowly he took out his money bags, and slowly extracted 300 francs in gold, which he staked on the black, and won. Yet he did not take up his winnings—he left them there on the table. Again the black turned up, and again he did not gather in what he had won; and when, in the third round, the RED turned up he lost, at a stroke, 1200 francs. Yet even then he rose with a smile, and thus preserved his reputation; yet I knew that his money bags must be chafing his heart, as well as that, had the stake been twice or thrice as much again, he would still have restrained himself from venting his disappointment.”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“أنا أعلم أنني حين أكون معك أحتاج إلى أن أتكلم ، أن أتكلم ، أن أتكلم ..... فأتكلم إنني حين أكون معك أفقد حب نفسي كله ، وليس يهمني هذا”

― Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer, essayist and philosopher, perhaps most recognized today for his novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

Dostoyevsky's literary output explores human psychology in the troubled political, social and spiritual context of 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the embittered voice of the anonymous "underground man", was called by Walter Kaufmann the "best overture for existentialism ever written."

His tombstone reads "Verily, Verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." from John 12:24, which is also the epigraph of his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
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