Mr. Goliadkin is the precursor of the man from underground, of Velchaninov in The Eternal Husband, of Stavrogin in Demons, of Versilov in The Adolescent, and finally, most tellingly, of Ivan Karamazov. The notion that The Double is an exploration of the abnormal and pathological, the description of a man going mad, is mistaken (though Otto Rank, in his Don Juan, A Study of the Double, found in it “an unsurpassed clinical exactitude”). Dostoevsky was concerned here, as everywhere, with penetrating into the depths of the normal human soul, but by means of an extreme case and a bold device—the “literal” splitting of his hero into two Goliadkins. The attempt to determine whether Mr. Goliadkin Jr. is a flesh-and-blood double or a fantasy provoked by the “persecution mania” of Mr. Goliadkin Sr. runs into a host of difficulties as we follow the various turns of the story. Dostoevsky deliberately leaves the boundary between fantasy and reality undetermined. The whole novel thus becomes an embodiment not only of psychological but of ontological instability.

The Double was the first expression of Dostoevsky’s genius, prefiguring his later work in a way not to be found in anything else he wrote in those years or even in the first years after his return from exile in 1860. In a letter to his brother in 1859, he spoke of his plans to rewrite it: “In short, I’m challenging them all to battle, and, finally, if I don’t rewrite The Double now, when will I rewrite it? Why should I lose an excellent idea, a type of the greatest social importance, which I was the first to discover, of which I was the herald?” But nothing came of it. For the three-volume edition of his collected works published in 1865 by the bookseller F. T. Stellovsky, he simply abridged the text (that is the version translated here) and supplied it with a new subtitle, “A Petersburg Poem.” It was only with Notes from Underground, published in 1864, that he returned to the “idea” of The Double, not to rewrite it but to re-create it with incomparably more human experience and artistic skill.

Notes from Underground opened the way for the five great novels on which Dostoevsky’s fame chiefly rests. In their shade, however, lie some smaller works of a rare formal perfection, more concentrated and at times more penetrating than the major novels, works such as The Eternal Husband, “The Meek One,” and “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” The Gambler belongs to their number.

The chance Dostoevsky took in writing The Gambler was not an artistic one; the risk was all too mundane, but the reward was quite unexpected. The deaths of his first wife and of his beloved brother Mikhail in 1864 had left Dostoevsky heavily in debt. Stellovsky, an unscrupulous “literary speculator,” in Mochulsky’s words, approached him with the offer of a flat fee of two thousand roubles, without royalties, for an edition of his collected works. Dostoevsky refused, but in the end he had no one else to turn to. The terms of Stellovsky’s second offer were stiffer than the first. For three thousand roubles he bought the rights to publish a three-volume edition of Dostoevsky’s complete works, and demanded in addition to that a new novel, ten printer’s sheets in length, to be delivered to him by November 1, 1866. The agreement further stipulated that if the manuscript was not delivered on time, Stellovsky would become the owner not only of Dostoevsky’s existing works but of all he would write for the next nine years.

Meanwhile, Dostoevsky also reached an agreement with the publisher Mikhail Katkov for another work he had in mind. He originally conceived it as a novella, but it eventually grew into Crime and Punishment. Work on it absorbed him completely. The first two parts appeared in 1866, in the January and February issues of Katkov’s journal, The Russian Messenger. The critical response was enthusiastic, encouraging Dostoevsky to continue working on it through the spring and summer. In July, realizing that he was in trouble, he decided to divide his working day in two, writing Crime and Punishment in the mornings and the novel for Stellovsky in the evenings. But by the end of September he had still not written a line of the other book. “Stellovsky upsets me to the point of torture,” he told his old friend Alexander Milyukov, “I even see him in my dreams.” Milyukov suggested that he hire a stenographer and made the arrangements himself. On October 4, 1866, a young woman named Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina came to Dostoevsky’s door. She was the best stenography student in the first secretarial school in Petersburg. He dropped work on Crime and Punishment and began dictating The Gambler to her. On October 29, the novel was finished. Anna Grigoryevna brought him the copied-out manuscript the next day for final corrections, and on November 1, Dostoevsky went to deliver it to Stellovsky. The bookseller was not at home, and his assistant refused to accept responsibility for receiving it.