At ten o’clock in the evening, he left the manuscript with the district police officer, who gave him a dated receipt for it. To Stellovsky’s undoubted dismay, Dostoevsky had won. A week later, he proposed to his stenographer and was accepted.

Dostoevsky first conceived of The Gambler as a short story about “Russians abroad.” It is, as Joseph Frank rightly points out,

 

the only work of Dostoevsky’s that is “international” in the sense of that word made familiar by, for example, the fiction of Henry James. It is, in other words, a story in which the psychology and conflicts of the characters not only arise from their individual temperaments and personal qualities but also reflect an interiorization of various national values and ways of life.

 

The Gambler, Frank concludes, is “a spirited but by no means uncritical meditation on the waywardness of the Russian national temperament.” That waywardness is dramatized in its contrasts with the French, who are all external form and thus perfect deceivers, and the Germans, who are stolid “savers” and “so honest it’s even frightening to go near them.” The one Englishman in the novel, Mr. Astley, is a personally noble and virtuous man, but of limited imagination. He is “in sugar,” as the narrator observes. The Russian is none of these things, and that is so not only of the narrator-hero, Alexei Ivanovich, but of his employer, the retired General Zagoryansky, of the general’s stepdaughter, Polina, and even of the seventy-five-year-old Russian matriarch whom everyone refers to simply as “grandmother”—a superbly comic and contradictory portrait of the old landowning aristocracy.

Dostoevsky had gone abroad in 1863 not only to try his hand at gambling but to join a young woman by the name of Apollinaria (Polina) Suslova, a twenty-year-old writer who had become his mistress and soon became his tormentor. The milieu of Roulettenburg, the name of the heroine, and her “love/hate” relations with Alexei Ivanovich have led commentators to an autobiographical reading of The Gambler that is not borne out by the novel itself. There is certainly much of Dostoevsky’s personal experience behind it, in the relations of eros and roulette, but the unexpected ending shows us a Polina who has little in common with Suslova, and there is above all the character of the narrator himself, who is far from being a disguised self-portrait of the author.

Alexei Ivanovich is twenty-four years old, of noble birth but no fortune, employed as a tutor in the general’s household. He is also an amateur writer, who is struggling to understand himself and what has happened to him by writing it down. The nameless narrator of Notes from Underground is also an amateur writer engaged in the same struggle, as is Arkady Dolgoruky, the narrator-hero of The Adolescent. The man from underground is forty years old; Arkady Dolgoruky is going on twenty (Alyosha Karamazov, the hero of The Brothers Karamazov, is also twenty). We might say, then, that in the development of Dostoevsky’s later work, adolescence is the goal, and Alexei Ivanovich is well on his way to it.

But what drew Dostoevsky to these young protagonists? The Russian émigré thinker Vladimir Weidlé suggests an answer in his magisterial inquiry into the destiny of modern art, Les abeilles d’Aristée (“The Bees of Aristaeus”). He speaks of the need “to find for the work of literature, and first of all for the novel, a vital ambiance that does not force it into the mechanization of processes and the rapid drying-up of imagination.” Hence we see novelists choosing adolescents as heroes,

 

or at least young people who do not yet have an entirely fixed and stable personality or an exactly circumscribed place in society. These people, who are not yet caught up in their destiny, can change, can choose, can imagine an unlimited future. It is only with such characters that one can succeed in realizing that thing which has become so infrequent in the novel today and which is designated by a familiar but rarely understood word: adventure.

“Adventure is what advenes, that is, what is added on, what comes into the bargain, what you were not expecting, what you could have done without. An adventure novel is an account of events that are not contained in each other.” Such is the admirable definition formulated by Jacques Rivière in one of his finest critical essays.

 

Even if it becomes explicable by what follows, says Weidlé, the true adventure “must always appear to us first of all as free and unexpected.” That condition is what gives inner unity to Dostoevsky’s world, from the misadventures of Alexei Ivanovich in Roulettenburg to Alyosha Karamazov’s vision of the messianic banquet. For Dostoevsky, it is not the finished man, sculpted by the hand of destiny, who embodies the highest human truth, but the unfinished man, who remains open to what can only ever be freely and unexpectedly given.

Richard Pevear

 

TRANSLATORS’ NOTES
_____

Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father’s first name), and last name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic. Diminutives are commonly used among family and intimate friends; they have two forms, the casual and the endearing (Pyotr becomes Petrushka or Petrusha). Servants are sometimes referred to by a spoken form of their patronymic (Alexeich, instead of Alexeevich).

The following is a list of the principal Russian names in the two short novels brought together here, with a guide to their accentuation.

 

The Double

Yákov Petróvich Goliádkin (Sr. and Jr.)

Pyótr (Petrúshka, Petrúsha; no patronymic or last name)

Krestyán Ivánovich Rútenspitz

Vladímir Semyónovich (no last name)

Andréi Filíppovich (no last name)

Olsúfy Ivánovich Berendéev

Klára Olsúfyevna Berendéev

Antón Antónovich Sétochkin

Néstor Ignátievich Vakhreméev

Emelyán Gerásimovich (Gerásimych; no last name)

Iván Semyónovich (no last name)

Alexéich (no first name or last name)

Karolina Ivánovna (no last name)

 

The Gambler

AlexéiIvánovich (no last name)

General Zagoryánsky (? or Zagoziánsky; no first name or patronymic)

Polína Alexándrovna (Mlle Pauline, Praskóvya; no last name)

Antonída Vassílyevna Tarassévichev (Grandmother, la baboulinka)

Potápych (no first or last name)

 

Approximate Values of Currencies Used in The Gambler

 

4 pfennigs = 1 kreuzer

60 kreuzer = 1 florin or 1 gulden

2 florins or guldens = 1 thaler

10 florins or guldens = 1 friedrich d’or

 

3 deniers = 1 liard

4 liards = 1 sol, or sou

20 sous = 1 livre

6 livres = 1 écu (silver)

4 écus = 1 louis d’or

1 livre 3 deniers = 1 franc

 

1 florin or gulden = 2 francs

1.5 florins or guldens = 1 rouble

1 friedrich d’or = 20 francs

1 louis d’or = 24 francs

 

THE DOUBLE

A Petersburg Poem

 

CHAPTER I

I T WAS NEARLY eight o’clock in the morning when the titular councillor 1 Yakov Petrovich Goliadkin came to after a long sleep, yawned, stretched, and finally opened his eyes all the way. For some two minutes, however, he lay motionless on his bed, like a man who is not fully certain whether he is awake or still asleep, whether what is happening around him now is a reality or a continuation of the disordered reveries of his sleep. Soon, though, Mr. Goliadkin’s senses began to receive their usual everyday impressions more clearly and distinctly. The dirtyish green, sooty, and dusty walls of his little room, his mahogany chest of drawers, the imitation mahogany chairs, the red-painted table, the oilcloth Turkish sofa of a reddish color with little green flowers, and finally his clothes, hastily taken off the night before and thrown in a heap on the sofa, all gazed at him familiarly. Finally, the gray autumn day, dull and dirty, peeked into his room through the dim window so crossly and with such a sour grimace that Mr. Goliadkin could in no way doubt any longer that he was not in some far-off kingdom but in the city of Petersburg, in the capital, on Shestilavochnaya Street, on the fourth floor of a quite large tenement house, in his own apartment. Having made this important discovery, Mr. Goliadkin convulsively closed his eyes, as if regretting his recent dream and wishing to bring it back for a brief moment. But after a moment he leaped out of bed at a single bound, probably hitting finally upon the idea around which his scattered, not yet properly ordered thoughts had been turning. Having leaped out of bed, he ran at once to the small round mirror that stood on the chest of drawers. Though the sleepy, myopic, and rather bald-pated figure reflected in the mirror was precisely of such insignificant quality as to arrest decidedly no one’s exclusive attention at first sight, its owner evidently remained perfectly pleased with all he saw in the mirror.