The Double and the Gambler
CONTENTS
____
Title Page
Introduction
Translators’ Notes
THE
DOUBLE
CHAPTER
I
CHAPTER
II
CHAPTER
III
CHAPTER
IV
CHAPTER
V
CHAPTER
VI
CHAPTER
VII
CHAPTER
VIII
CHAPTER
IX
CHAPTER
X
CHAPTER
XI
CHAPTER
XII
CHAPTER
XIII
THE
GAMBLER
CHAPTER
I
CHAPTER
II
CHAPTER
III
CHAPTER
IV
CHAPTER
V
CHAPTER
VI
CHAPTER
VII
CHAPTER
VIII
CHAPTER
IX
CHAPTER
X
CHAPTER
XI
CHAPTER
XII
CHAPTER
XIII
CHAPTER
XIV
CHAPTER
XV
CHAPTER
XVI
CHAPTER
XVII
Notes
About the Translators
Other Translations by Richard Pevear and
Larissa Volokhonsky
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
_____
In my view, all Russians are that way, or are
inclined to be that way. If it’s not roulette, it’s something else like it.
Mr. Astley in The
Gambler
Dostoevsky knew the passion for gambling very well; he
was under its sway intermittently for some eight years, from his first trip abroad in 1863, where
he had beginner’s luck at roulette in Wiesbaden, until the spring of 1871, when he was again in
Wiesbaden and lost everything almost at once. At one point during those years he even gambled
away his young wife’s wedding ring. This last time, however, gripped by a sort of mystical
terror, he went running in search of the local Russian priest, lost his way in the dark, and
wound up not in front of the Orthodox church but in front of a synagogue. There, for whatever
obscure reason, something decisive occurred. “It was as though I had had cold water poured over
me,” he wrote to his wife. “A great thing has been accomplished within me, a vile fantasy that
has tormented me for almost ten years has vanished.” And indeed he
never gambled again.
For Dostoevsky, roulette was not only a means of
getting rich “suddenly, in two hours, without any work,” as Alexei Ivanovich, the narrator and
hero of The Gambler, says, but also “some defiance of fate, some
desire to give it a flick, to stick [his] tongue out at it.” What fascinated him and possessed
him was the “poetry” of the game of chance, the look into the abyss, the ultimate risk, a
susceptibility that he saw as part of the “unseemliness” of the Russian character. But for
Dostoevsky, as for his hero, that unseemliness had its positive side precisely in its
impracticality; it was open to passion and to the unforeseeable. “Perhaps I’m a dignified man,”
Alexei Ivanovich says to Polina,
but I don’t know how to behave with dignity. Do you
understand that it may be so? All Russians are that way, and you know why? Because Russians are
too richly and multifariously endowed to be able to find a decent form for themselves very
quickly. It’s a matter of form. For the most part, we Russians are so richly endowed that it
takes genius for us to find a decent form. Well, but most often there is no genius…
The problem of giving expression to this richly
endowed but as yet unformed Russian character challenged Dostoevsky throughout his creative life.
The old tutor Nikolai Semyonovich discusses it at the end of The
Adolescent (Dostoevsky’s penultimate novel, published in 1875), implicitly drawing a
comparison with the work of Tolstoy. “Yes, Arkady Makarovich,” he writes to the adolescent
hero,
you are a member of an accidental
family, as opposed to our still-recent hereditary types, who had a childhood and youth so
different from yours. I confess, I would not wish to be a novelist whose hero comes from an
accidental family! Thankless work and lacking in beautiful forms. And these types in any case are
still a current matter, and therefore cannot be artistically finished.
Dostoevsky chose to be precisely that unenviable
novelist. In 1863, when the idea of The Gambler first came to him, he
wrote to his friend Nikolai Strakhov: “The subject of the story is…a certain type of Russian
abroad. Note: Russians abroad were a big topic in the newspapers this summer. All this will be
reflected in my story. And also in general it will reflect the contemporary moment (as much as
possible, of course) of our inner life.” Dostoevsky constantly tried to capture that
“contemporary moment” or “current matter” which had not yet found expression. That is one of his
most distinctive qualities as a writer. Five years later, after months of work on what would
eventually become The Idiot, he wrote to another friend, the poet
Apollon Maikov, about his idea of portraying “a perfectly beautiful
man…The idea flashed even earlier in some sort of artistic form, but only some sort, and what’s needed is the full form. Only my desperate situation forced
me to take up this as yet premature thought. I took a risk, as at roulette: ‘Maybe it will
develop as I write!’ ” The gambler’s defiance of fate, the risk of embarking on the
unforeseeable, thus becomes a metaphor for Dostoevsky’s own artistic process.
The two short novels brought together here were both
gambles, but of very different sorts and separated by a period of twenty years. The first,
The Double, dates to 1845. Dostoevsky was then twenty-four years old
and still intoxicated with the praise that had been showered on his first novel, Poor Folk, which had been finished in the spring of that year and shown in
manuscript to the foremost critic of the day, Vissarion Belinsky. Thirty-two years later, in the
January 1877 issue of his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky wrote of how
Belinsky had summoned him a few days after that. Carried away with admiration, the fiery critic
had cried out to him: “This is the mystery of art, this is the truth of art! This is the artist’s
service to truth! The truth is revealed and proclaimed to you as an artist, it has come as a
gift. Value your gift, then, and remain faithful to it, and you will be a great writer!”
Dostoevsky had left Belinsky, as he says, “in rapture.”
I stopped at the corner of his house, looked at the
sky, at the bright day, at the people passing by, and felt with my whole being that a solemn
moment had occurred in my life, a break forever, that something altogether new had begun,
something I had not anticipated even in my most passionate dreams…I recall that moment with the
fullest clarity.
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