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
THE GAMBLER
A Novel
(From a Young Man’s Notes)
CHAPTER I
I’VE FINALLY COME BACK from my two-week absence. Our people have already been in Roulettenburg for three days. I thought they would be waiting for me God knows how eagerly, but I was mistaken. The general had an extremely independent look, spoke to me condescendingly, and sent me to his sister. It was clear they had got hold of money somewhere. It even seemed to me that the general was a little ashamed to look at me. Marya Filippovna was extremely busy and scarcely spoke with me; she took the money, however, counted it, and listened to my whole report. Mezentsov, the little Frenchman, and some Englishman or other were expected for dinner; as usual, when there’s money, then at once it’s a formal dinner; Moscow-style. Polina Alexandrovna, seeing me, asked what had taken me so long, and went off somewhere without waiting for an answer. Of course, she did it on purpose. We must have a talk, however. A lot has accumulated.
I’ve been assigned a small room on the fourth floor of the hotel. It’s known here that I belong to the general’s suite. Byall appearances, they’ve managed to make themselves known. The general is regarded by everyone here as a very rich Russian grandee. Before dinner he managed, among other errands, to give me two thousand-franc notes to have changed. I changed them in the hotel office. Now they’ll look at us as millionaires for at least a whole week. I was about to take Misha and Nadya for a walk, but on the stairs I was summoned to the general; he had seen fit to inquire where I was going to take them. The man is decidedly unable to look me straight in the eye; he would very much like to, but I respond each time with such an intent—that is, irreverent—gaze, that he seems disconcerted. In a highly pompous speech, piling one phrase on another and finally becoming totally confused, he gave me to understand that I should stroll with the children somewhere in the park, a good distance from the vauxhall.{1} He finally became quite angry and added abruptly: “Or else you might just take them to the vauxhall, to the roulette tables. Excuse me,” he added, “but I know you’re still rather light-minded and perhaps capable of gambling. In any case, though I am not your mentor, and have no wish to take that role upon myself, I do at any rate have the right to wish that you not, so to speak, compromise me…”
“But I don’t even have any money,” I said calmly. “To lose it, you have to have it.”
“You shall have it at once,” the general replied, blushing slightly. He rummaged in his desk, consulted a ledger, and it turned out that he owed me about a hundred and twenty roubles.
“How are we going to reckon it up?” he began. “It has to be converted into thalers. Here, take a hundred thalers, a round figure—the rest, of course, won’t get lost.”
I silently took the money.
“Please don’t be offended by my words, you’re so touchy…If I made that observation, it was, so to speak, to warn you, and, of course, I have a certain right to do so…”
Coming back home with the children before dinner, I met a whole cavalcade. Our people had gone to have a look at some ruins. Two excellent carriages, magnificent horses! Mlle Blanche in the same carriage with Marya Filippovna and Polina; the little Frenchman, the Englishman, and the general on horseback. Passersby stopped and looked; an effect was produced; only it won’t come to any good for the general. I calculated that with the four thousand francs I had brought, plus whatever they had evidently managed to get hold of here, they now had seven or eight thousand francs. That is too little for Mlle Blanche.
Mlle Blanche is also staying in our hotel, along with her mother; our little Frenchman is here somewhere as well. The servants call him “M. le comte,” Mlle Blanche’s mother is called “Mme la comtesse”; well, maybe they really are comte and comtesse.[1]
I just knew that M. le comte would not recognize me when we gathered for dinner. The general, of course, did not even think of introducing us or of presenting me to him; and M. le comte himself has visited Russia and knows what small fry an outchitel[2] —as they call it—is there. He knows me very well, however. But, I must confess, I appeared at dinner uninvited; it seems the general forgot to give orders, otherwise he would surely have sent me to eat at the table d’hôte.[3] I appeared on my own, so that the general looked at me with displeasure. Kindly Marya Filippovna showed me to a place at once; but my having met Mr. Astley helped me, and willy-nilly I wound up making part of their company.
I first met this strange Englishman in Prussia, on a train where we sat opposite each other, when I was catching up with our people; then I ran into him on entering France, and finally in Switzerland; twice in the course of these two weeks—and now I suddenly met him in Roulettenburg. Never in my life have I met a shyer man; he’s shy to the point of stupidity, and, of course, he knows it himself, because he’s not at all stupid. However, he’s very nice and quiet. I got him to talk at our first meeting in Prussia. He announced to me that he had been at Nordkap that
summer, and that he would like very much to go to the Nizhny Novgorod fair. I don’t know how he became acquainted with the general; I believe he’s boundlessly in love with Polina. When she came in, he flushed a flaming crimson. He was very glad that I sat down beside him at the table, and it seems he considers me a bosom friend.
At table the Frenchman set the tone extraordinarily; he was careless and pompous with everyone. And in Moscow, I remember, he just blew soap bubbles. He talked terribly much about finance and Russian politics. The general sometimes ventured to contradict—but modestly, only enough so as not to definitively damage his own importance.
I was in a strange state of mind. Of course, before dinner was half-through, I managed to ask myself my customary and habitual question: “How come I hang around with this general and didn’t leave them long, long ago?” Now and then I glanced at Polina Alexandrovna; she ignored me completely. It ended with me getting angry and deciding to be rude.
It began with me suddenly, for no rhyme or reason, interfering in their conversation, loudly and without being asked. Above all, I wanted to quarrel with the little Frenchman. I turned to the general and suddenly, quite loudly and distinctly, and, it seems, interrupting him, observed that in hotels this summer it was almost impossible for Russians to dine at the table d’hôte. The general shot me an astonished glance.
“If you’re a self-respecting man,” I let myself go on, “you will unavoidably invite abuse and will have to put up with being exceedingly slighted. In Paris, on the Rhine, even in Switzerland, there are so many little Poles and sympathizing little Frenchmen at the table d’hôte that it’s impossible to utter a word, if you happen to be a Russian.”
I said it in French. The general looked at me in perplexity, not knowing whether he should get angry or merely be astonished that I had forgotten myself so.
“That means that somebody somewhere has taught you a lesson,” the little Frenchman said carelessly and contemptuously.
“In Paris I began by quarreling with a Pole,” I replied, “then with a French officer who supported the Pole. And then some of the Frenchmen took my side, when I told them how I wanted to spit in the monseigneur’s coffee.”
“Spit?” the general asked with pompous perplexity, and even looked around. The little Frenchman studied me mistrustfully.
“Just so, sir,” I replied. “Since I was convinced for a whole two days that I might have to go to Rome briefly to take care of our business, I went to the office of the Holy Father’s embassy in Paris to get a visa in my passport.{2} There I was met by a little abbé, about fifty years old, dry and with frost in his physiognomy, who, having heard me out politely, but extremely dryly, asked me to wait. Though I was in a hurry, I did sit down, of course, took out L’Opinion nationale,{3} and began reading some terrible abuse of Russia. Meanwhile, I heard someone go through the next room to see monseigneur; I saw my abbé bow to him. I addressed him with my former request; again, still more dryly, he asked me to wait. A little later another stranger came, but on business—some Austrian. He was listened to and at once taken upstairs. Then I became extremely vexed. I stood up, went over to the abbé, and told him resolutely that since monseigneur was receiving, he could finish with me as well. The abbé suddenly drew back from me in extraordinary surprise. It was simply incomprehensible to him how a Russian nonentity dared to put himself on a par with monseigneur’s visitors. In the most insolent tone, as if glad that he could insult me, he looked me up and down and cried: ‘Can you possibly think that Monseigneur would interrupt his coffee for you?’ Then I, too, cried, but still louder than he: ‘Let it be known to you that I spit on your monseigneur’s coffee! If you do not finish with my passport this very minute, I’ll go to him myself.’
“ ‘What! Just when the cardinal is sitting with him!’ the abbé cried, recoiling from me in horror, rushed to the door, and spread his arms crosswise, showing that he would sooner die than let me pass.
“Then I answered him that I was a heretic and a barbarian, ‘que je suis hérétique et barbare,’ and that to me all these archbishops, cardinals, monseigneurs, etc., etc.—were all the same. In short, I showed him that I would not leave off. The abbé gave me a look of boundless spite, then snatched my passport and took it upstairs. A minute later it had a visa in it. Here, sirs, would you care to have a look?” I took out the passport and showed the Roman visa.
“Really, though,” the general began…
“What saved you was calling yourself a barbarian and a heretic,” the little Frenchman observed, grinning. “Cela n’était pas si bête.”[4]
“What, should I look to our Russians? They sit here, don’t dare peep, and are ready, perhaps, to renounce the fact that they’re Russians. At any rate in my hotel in Paris they began to treat me with much greater attention when I told everybody about my fight with the abbé. The fat Polish pan,[5] the man most hostile to me at the table d’hôte, faded into the background. The Frenchmen even put up with it when I told them that about two years ago I saw a man whom a French chasseur had shot in the year twelve{4} —simply so as to fire off his gun. The man was a ten-year-old child then, and his family hadn’t managed to leave Moscow.”
“That cannot be,” the little Frenchman seethed, “a French soldier would not shoot a child!”
“Yet so it was,” I replied. “It was told to me by a respectable retired captain, and I myself saw the scar from the bullet on his cheek.”
The Frenchman began talking much and quickly. The general tried to support him, but I recommended that he read, for instance, bits from the Notes of General Perovsky,{5} who was taken prisoner by the French in the year twelve. Finally, Marya Filippovna started talking about something, so as to disrupt the discussion. The general was very displeased with me, because the Frenchman and I had almost begun to shout. But it seemed that Mr. Astley liked my argument with the Frenchman very much; getting up from the table, he suggested that he and I drink a glass of wine. In the evening, I duly managed to have a fifteen-minute talk with Polina Alexandrovna. Our talk took place during a stroll. Everybody went to the park near the vauxhall. Polina sat down on a bench opposite the fountain and sent Nadenka to play not far away with some children. I also let Misha play by the fountain, and we were finally alone.
At first we began, naturally, with business. Polina simply became angry when I gave her only seven hundred guldens in all. She was sure I’d bring her from Paris, in pawn for her diamonds, at least two thousand guldens or even more.
“I need money at all costs,” she said, “and I must get it; otherwise I’m simply lost.”
I started asking about what had happened in my absence.
“Nothing, except that we received two pieces of news from Petersburg, first, that grandmother was very unwell, and, two days later, that it seemed she had died. This was news from Timofei Petrovich,” Polina added, “and he’s a precise man. We’re waiting for the final, definitive news.”
“So everyone here is in expectation?” I asked.
“Of course: everyone and everything; for the whole six months that’s the only thing they’ve hoped for.”
“And you’re hoping, too?” I asked.
“Why, I’m not related to her at all, I’m only the general’s stepdaughter. But I know for certain that she’ll remember me in her will.”
“It seems to me you’ll get a lot,” I said affirmatively.
“Yes, she loved me; but why does it seem so to you?”
“Tell me,” I answered with a question, “our marquis, it seems, is also initiated into all the family secrets?”
“And why are you interested in that?” asked Polina, giving me a stern and dry look.
“Why not? If I’m not mistaken, the general has already managed to borrow money from him.”
“You’ve guessed quite correctly.”
“Well, would he lend him money if he didn’t know about grandma? Did you notice, at dinner: three times or so, speaking about grandmother, he called her ‘grandma’—‘la
baboulinka.’ Such close and friendly relations!”
“Yes, you’re right. As soon as he learns that I’m also getting something in the will, he’ll immediately propose to me. Is that what you wanted to find out?”
“Only then? I thought he proposed a long time ago.”
“You know perfectly well he hasn’t!” Polina said testily. “Where did you meet this Englishman?” she asked after a moment’s silence.
“I just knew you’d ask about him right away.”
I told her about my previous meetings with Mr. Astley during my trip. “He’s shy and amorous and, of course, already in love with you?”
“Yes, he’s in love with me,” Polina replied.
“And he’s certainly ten times richer than the Frenchman. What, does the Frenchman really have anything? Isn’t that open to doubt?”
“No, it’s not. He has some sort of château. The general told me that yesterday. Well, so, is that enough for you?”
“In your place, I’d certainly marry the Englishman.”
“Why?” asked Polina.
“The Frenchman’s handsomer, but he’s meaner; and the Englishman, on top of being honest, is also ten times richer,” I snapped.
“Yes, but then the Frenchman is a marquis and more intelligent,” she replied with the greatest possible equanimity.
“Is that true?” I went on in the same way.
“Perfectly.”
Polina terribly disliked my questions, and I saw that she wanted to make me angry with her tone and the wildness of her answer. I told her so at once.
“Why, it does indeed amuse me to see you in a fury. You ought to pay for the fact alone that I allow you to put such questions and make such surmises.”
“I do indeed consider it my right to put all sorts of questions to you,” I replied calmly, “precisely because I’m prepared to pay for them however you like, and my own life I now count for nothing.”
The Gambler Page 2