Dostoevsky (113 page)

Aleksey spends the night with Polina in his room, and when she awakens “with infinite loathing,” she flings the fifty thousand francs in his face as she had wished to do with de Grieux. Aleksey is still puzzling over this event while composing
his manuscript a month later, and his pretended lack of comprehension (really a guilty self-deception) is reminiscent of the underground man’s self-excuses for the mistreatment of the prostitute Liza, who had come to him for aid. “To be sure,” Aleksey is honest enough to admit, “it all happened in a delirious state, and I knew it too well, and . . . yet I refused to take that fact into consideration.” But then he tries to reassure himself that “she wasn’t all that delirious and ill. . . . So it must be she knew what she was doing” (5: 298–299). What Polina did know was that Aleksey’s love had not been genuine enough, nonegoistic enough, to resist taking sexual advantage of her deranged and helpless condition.

Still under the spell of the psychic afflatus provided by his gambling exploit, Aleksey now goes off with his winnings to Paris in the company of Mlle Blanche. Mlle Blanche is honest enough in her own way and, while spending Aleksey’s money hand over fist, she introduces him to a friend, Hortense, who keeps him occupied in a manner suggested by her nickname,
Thérèse-philosophe
—the title of a well-known eighteenth-century pornographic novel. He becomes terribly bored at Mlle Blanche’s parties, however, where he is forced to play host to the dullest businessmen with newly minted fortunes and “a bunch of wretched minor authors and journalistic insects” with “a vanity and conceit of such proportions as would be unthinkable even back home in Petersburg—and that is saying a great deal!” (5: 304). The entire escapade comes to an end, and Aleksey is sent on his way, once all his money—to which he displays a total indifference (“un vrai Russe, un calmouk!” Mlle Blanche says admiringly)—has been dissipated, much to the benefit of Mlle Blanche’s social prestige (5: 308).

Although the main story of
The Gambler
ends with this episode, a final chapter, dating from a year and eight months later, provides a pointed commentary. Aleksey has now become an addicted gambler, traveling around Europe and picking up odd jobs as a flunkey until he can scrape together enough money to return to the tables. He is completely dependent on the “strange sensation” afforded by gambling, the thrill that enables him to affirm his identity and triumph momentarily over his gnawing sense of inferiority. “No, it wasn’t the money I craved. . . . I only wanted that the next day all these Hinzes [another employer], all these Oberkellners, all these magnificent Baden ladies, should all be talking about me, tell each other my story, wonder at me, admire me and bow before my new winnings.” Nonetheless, he also feels that “I have grown numb, somehow, as though I were buried in some sort of mire” (5: 312). This feeling is particularly aroused by a meeting with Mr. Astley, supposedly accidental but in fact carefully arranged at the instigation of Polina.

Auntie had died meanwhile, leaving Polina a comfortable inheritance, and she has been keeping a concealed but protective eye on Aleksey all this while. Mr. Astley, covertly sent to see if Aleksey has changed in any way, discovers that he is much the same—if not worse. Mr. Astley reveals that he has come to see Aleksey expressly on Polina’s behalf; it is really Aleksey that she has loved all along. “What’s worse, even if I were to tell you that she still loves you, why, you would stay here just the same! Yes, you have destroyed yourself. You had some abilities, a lively disposition, and you are not a bad man. In fact, you might have been of service to your country, which needs men so badly. . . . It seems to me that all Russians are like that, or are disposed to be like that. If it isn’t roulette, it’s something else but similar to it. . . . You are not the first who does not understand what work is (I’m not talking about your plain people). Roulette is preeminently a Russian game” (5: 317). Mr. Astley is merely repeating Aleksey’s earlier remark about the “poetic” nature of Russians, but now he shows the obverse side of this refusal to discipline the personality and harness it to achieve a desired result. The “poetic” character of the Russian personality, if left to operate unchecked, can lead both to personal disaster and to the obliteration of all sense of civic or moral obligation.

Read in such ethnic-psychological terms,
The Gambler
may be seen as Dostoevsky’s brilliantly ambivalent commentary, inspired by his own misadventures in the casino, on the Russian national character. Disorderly and “unseemly” though the Russian character may be, it still has human potentialities closed to the narrow, inhuman, and Philistine penny-pinching of the Germans, the worldly, elegant, and totally perfidious patina of the French, and even the solidly helpful but unattractively stodgy virtues of the English. “For the most part,” as Aleksey remarks to Polina, “we Russians are so richly endowed that we need genius to evolve our own code of manners. And genius is most often absent, for, indeed, it’s a rarity at all times. It’s only among the French and perhaps some other Europeans that the code of manners is so well defined that one may have an air of dignity and yet be a man of no moral dignity whatsoever” (5: 230).

But if Russians have not yet worked out their own code of manners, and if the dangers of such a lack have become obvious, they can only demean themselves by attempting to imitate any of the European models. For all his weaknesses, Aleksey arouses sympathy both because of his honesty about himself (except in the case of his night with Polina, which she has presumably forgiven) and because of his unerring eye and refreshing disrespect for the hypocrisies, pretensions, and falsities by which the Europeans cover up their shortcomings. There is an engaging brashness and sincerity about him that wins the friendship of all the “positive” characters (Polina, Auntie, Mr. Astley), and Dostoevsky certainly
hoped the reader would share some of their sentiment. Nor was Aleksey meant to be perceived as
entirely
a lost man, if we judge by his reaction upon learning that Mr. Astley had been sent by Polina: “ ‘Really, Really!,’ I exclaimed, as tears came gushing from my eyes. I just could not hold them back . . .” (5: 317). Such tears may presage something for the future, and they surely indicate an access of undistorted feeling of which the earlier Aleksey had been incapable.

While
The Gambler
should not be read in simple biographical terms, it nonetheless allows us to catch a glimpse of how Dostoevsky may have rationalized his gambling addiction to himself. From this angle, the work may be considered both a self-condemnation and an apologia. No doubt it must have been some consolation to believe, as Dostoevsky probably did, that his own losses, which almost always resulted from a failure to stop playing when he was ahead, were the consequence of a positive national Russian trait carried to excess, and not merely a personal defect of character. He was, after all, a “poet” in both the literal and symbolic senses of that word; and his “poetry” was proof that he found it impossible to subordinate his personality to the flesh-god of money, before whom, as he had written in
Winter Notes
, all of Western civilization was now prostrate. He lost materially, but in some sense he gained a certain reaffirmation of national identity from his very losses. One should also keep in mind that, at the time Dostoevsky wrote
The Gambler
, his yielding to this weakness had so far injured no one but himself, and could still be referred to with a certain bravado. It was only after his second marriage that the addiction began to elicit feelings of acute guilt and remorse.

The Gambler
, in any case, is a sparkling little work, whose style and technique are in the vein of satirical social comedy familiar from Dostoevsky’s Siberian novellas. The relation of Aleksey and Polina, and the portrayal of the treacherous allurements of gambling, strike a deeper note than these earlier productions; but while Aleksey’s gambling may be a “challenge to fate,” this challenge is not developed into the moral-religious questionings of the major novels. Not the least interesting aspect of
The Gambler
, finally, is that it points both backward and forward in Dostoevsky’s artistic development. Aleksey’s obsession with winning somewhat resembles Raskolnikov’s fascination with his theory of crime, and neither character can maintain the total, rational self-control of the emotions that is the prerequisite of success. Pointing to the future is the figure of Polina, the pure-souled woman degraded and almost driven mad by the violation of her deepest feelings when she finds herself in the position of being bought and sold. The outlines of the queenly Nastasya Filippovna in
The Idiot
, consumed with pathological hatred of herself and others for the same reasons, are already visible here; so, more faintly, is Aglaya Epanchina in Aleksey’s remarks about “young
Russian ladies” and their sentimental illusions about Europeans. In the tenaciously long-lived Auntie, the warm and lovable matriarchal tyrant, we can see a first sketch for the similarly sympathetic and choleric Mme Epanchina. Dostoevsky was thus already feeling his way toward some of the characters of his next great novel, but when he wrote
The Gambler
, he had not yet the faintest idea of what this new major undertaking would turn out to be.

¹
PSS
, 28/Bk. 2: 50–51.

The days immediately following the wedding were filled with postnuptial celebrations, and Anna remarks that “I drank more goblets of champagne during those ten days than I did all the rest of my life.” So too did her husband, and those celebratory libations brought on Anna’s first encounter with the frightening physical manifestations of Dostoevsky’s dread disease. It overtook him at the home of her sister, just as Dostoevsky, “extremely animated,” was telling some story. Suddenly, “there was a horrible, inhuman scream, or more precisely a howl—and he began to topple forward.”
¹
Although her sister became hysterical and fled from the room with a “piercing scream,” Anna seized Dostoevsky firmly by the shoulders, tried to place him on the couch, and, when this failed, pushed aside the obstructing furniture and slid his body to the floor. There she sat holding his head in her lap until his convulsions ceased and he began to regain consciousness. The attack was so severe that he could hardly speak, and the words he succeeded in uttering were gibberish. An hour later he suffered another onslaught, “this time with such intensity that for two hours after regaining consciousness he screamed in pain at the top of his voice. It was horrible.”
²
Such repeated attacks were mercifully infrequent, and Anna attributes the one she describes to the nervous strain, as well as the obligatory overindulgence in drink, of the postnuptial visits.

Anna proved capable of coping with such severe tests of her equilibrium and did not allow them to dampen her joy at being Dostoevsky’s bride. But she found herself initially helpless before a more insidious and covert threat—one that arose partly from the circumstances of Dostoevsky’s life, partly from her bruising contacts with other members of Dostoevsky’s family, most notably his stepson, Pasha. Dostoevsky’s routine made it almost impossible for her to spend any time with him alone. He wrote or read at night, slept through most of the morning, and rose in the early afternoon. An early riser, Anna busied herself with household matters while he slept, but found that it was usual for his young nieces and nephews to drop in during the late morning and stay for lunch.
In the afternoon, other friends and relatives arrived, and often remained for dinner. Anna, with no experience in managing a household, found this unceasing round of hospitality wearisome. The only people she found interesting and enjoyed entertaining were Dostoevsky’s literary friends, but Anna, closer in age to the young, was asked to take them to another room and look after their amusement.