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I hope to someday tackle Dostoyevsky's doorstopper novels like Brothers Karamazov & Demons but have generally stuck to his shorter to middle length work, and The Gambler continues that trend. The fact it's called The Gambler, and is set in a town called Roulettenberg means it doesn't take a genius to figure out the game at the centre of the novel. A game I've never played because I have zero interest in gambling or casinos.
So, did this make the novel in anyway appear uninteresting to me? Simple answer: no. Because there is so much more going on on a physiological level within the characters than simply placing bets and spinning the wheel. I'd say more heads get spun. And one thing that didn't surprise me, this being Dostoyevsky, is that the narrator was a wreck, driven by nothing but hope as he lives in a constant quiver of anxiety. For the most part the tone here is one of sordidness, which comes from the comedy of manners that Dostoevsky excels in. Humorous just as often as he is gloomy, his more primp characters in The Gambler spend an inordinate amount of time wracked by self-consciousness, in a narrative that is driven by an awareness of the distinction between vulgar gambling for money and the kind a gentleman can engage in, where the money doesn’t matter. This work is drooling with the kind of details that one assumes are somewhat autobiographical (he wrote this in a ridiculously short space of time in order to cover his many debts) and overall I found it an interesting book where the actual gambling came second to the first-rate telling of a degenerate. One thing I also noticed it that his characters are more recognizable from English or French literature than those who are profoundly Russian. In a way, it didn't feel like a Russian novel at all. Apart from some of the names of course. Who knows just how good this could have been had he made it longer and not rushed it. But as rushed novels go, it's pretty darn good.