Pleasure is always useful, and wild, limitless power – even over a fly – because this is also a kind of pleasure. Man is a despot by nature and loves to be a tormentor.
Passion is sometimes not a man’s feeling. But which passion is stronger – for a woman or for gambling?
For many years Dostoevsky was passionately fond of playing roulette and the topic of gambling was acute for him. It is worth noting that the novel “The Gambler” was written by him to pay off debts after playing in the casino in just 26 days. Perhaps it is these autobiographical motives that give the work a special flavor.
The plot takes place in a fictional German city in the family of a general, where the main character, Aleksey Ivanovich, serves as a teacher. The novel is so full of commercialism and a thirst for money – the general is waiting for the death of his grandmother in order to receive an inheritance and marry an impostor French woman who dreams of becoming madame la generale and spending a lot of money on her whims, while the general’s daughter Pauline is in love with a Frenchman, a friend family, which only to the duty of her father had pure and strong feelings. Against the background of this feeling of the protagonist and the Englishman for Pauline, we are perceived as something sublime and sincere. But what will happen if the “dying” old woman suddenly, cheerfully and cheerfully visits them all and becomes addicted to roulette? From that moment on, I could not tear myself away from the book and swallowed it in one evening.
Sometimes the wildest thought, the most seemingly impossible thought, is so strongly entrenched in the head that you finally accept it for something realizable … Moreover, if an idea is combined with a strong, passionate desire, then perhaps sometimes you will finally accept it for something fatal, necessary, predestined, for something that can no longer be and will not happen!
I will repeat more than once that Dostoevsky is a talented psychologist. Word by word, sentence by sentence, and now you are already irrevocably immersed in this atmosphere, in this society, frantically feeling yourself a part of it. Emotionality and an abundance of exclamation marks help to understand more sharply and deeper the feelings of the protagonist. Sometimes it seemed that I was standing at the roulette wheel and bet on zero, rouge, twelve averages, forgetting reality and saying goodbye to the last guilders ..
This is not just a novel, it is a story of how a craving for gambling can finally and irrevocably destroy a person. Yes, Dostoevsky himself defeated the addiction, but could the main character cope with it? The last lines of the novel: “Tomorrow, tomorrow everything will be over!” make it clear that this will never end …