The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin ed.)

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  10. Cuirassiers: Mounted cavalry soldiers, named for the breastplate armour they wore, the cuirasse.

  11. Un vrai russe, un calmouk: A true Russian, a Kalmyk! The latter (also spelled Kalmuck) are a Mongol people who live in south-western Russia, west of the Volga River, on the north-western shore of the Caspian Sea.

  12. Bal Mabille: Notorious Parisian dance hall founded in 1831 by Mabille, a dance instructor. The dancers, who performed the scandalous cancan, were often available to gentlemen after hours. A number of photographs and drawings survive of the Bal Mabille dancers.

  13. à batons-rompus: In fits and starts.

  14. Il a de la chance … mon million: He’s lucky … I will have a château, muzhiks, and then I’ll always have my million. Babouchka: French form of the Russian babushka (grandmother).

  15. très comme il faut … il faut: Very proper … He, nevertheless, is very proper.

  16. zakuski: Hors-d’oeuvres (Russian).

  17. Mais vois-tu … n’est-ce pas: But you see … these devilish Russian names, in a word, Madam, the general’s wife with fourteen consonants. Isn’t that lovely? The general’s surname is Zagoryansky, but for Blanche it might as well be Zagoziansky or the even more ludicrous and absolutely non-Russian sounding Sago-Sago.

  18. Tu étais bon enfant … et tu seras heureux: You were a good boy … I thought you were stupid and you looked like you were … Wait! … We will always be friends … and you will be happy!

  CHAPTER 17

  1. Racine: The French classical dramatist, Jean Racine (1639–99), author of the verse tragedies Iphigénie (1674) and Phèdre (1677), was enthusiastically embraced and defended by the young Dostoyevsky, despite the prevailing Romantic opinion held by many, including his brother, that Racine was somewhat outdated.

  2. Apollo Belvedere: Marble copy of lost bronze original that was made in 350–325 BC. Rediscovered in the late fifteenth century, this statue of the Greek god Apollo has been considered for centuries the essence of classical perfection and the epitome of male beauty (now located in the Vatican Museum).

  BOBOK

  1. my portrait … verge of madness: On the genesis of this story, see the Introduction, ‘Three Stories from A Writer’s Diary’.

  2. feuilleton: See The Gambler, Chapter 2, note 1.

  3. Attic salt: A metaphor for refined wit that can be traced back to Cicero, who prized Greek (Attic) oratory.

  4. Voltaire’s bon mots: That is, the clever sayings or witticisms of Voltaire (1694–1778), the French moralist, satirist, historian, dramatist and all-round genius of the Enlightenment.

  5. bobok: Bean (Russian).

  6. uniform: Civil servants were required to wear uniforms, which reflected the rank of the wearer.

  7. the smell, the smell … local ecclesiastics: The pun here is impossible to translate. Dostoyevsky plays on the colloquial term for ‘smell’ (dukh), which more usually means ‘spirit’, and the word for ‘ecclesiastic’ (dukhovnyi).

  8. bread crumbs … it’s a sin: See Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: ‘This particularly naturalistic and profaning detail – a half-eaten sandwich on the grave – gives us occasion to touch on a symbolic attribute of the carnival type: throwing bread on the ground is permitted, for that is sowing, fructification; throwing it on the floor is forbidden, for that is barren soil’ (ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 139).

  9. Suvorin’s calendar: Calendars were one of the early publishing successes for Alexey Suvorin (1834–1912), who became particularly well known for his cheap editions of the classics, both Russian and foreign. The Russian Calendar for 1872, which doubled as a reference book and factbook about Russia, included a section on folk customs and beliefs.

  10. preference: See ‘A Nasty Business’, note 33.

  11. Rest, dear ashes, until the joyful morn: The epitaph belongs to Nikolay Karamzin (1766–1826), major Sentimentalist prose writer and poet, author of History of the Russian State (1818– 26). It was used by the Dostoyevsky brothers on their mother’s gravestone.

  12. torments: A series of difficult ordeals or torments during the first forty days after a person’s death. Memorial prayers are said on the ninth and fortieth days.

  13. kutya: Mixture of a boiled grain (e.g. rice, barley) and honey (or sugar, raisins, etc.) traditionally served as part of the funeral and memorial meals. The first ingredient symbolizes the resurrection; the latter the blessings of the life to come.

  14. Vale of Jehoshaphat: Located near Jerusalem, the valley is named in honour of the Judaean king, and according to Joel 3:2, the Last Judgement will take place there.

  15. Ecke … Botkin: V. E. Ecke (1818–75) and S. P. Botkin (1832–89) were well-known Petersburg medical practitioners.

  16. Lebezyatnikov:Crime and Punishment has the ‘fawning’ Andrey Lebezyatnikov (lebezit’ means ‘to fawn’) and his ‘progressive’ tendencies.

  17. polisson … en haut lieu: Scamp, mischievous boy … in high places.

  18. Zieffel the Yid: Dostoyevsky uses the derogatory Russian word zhid (Yid), rather than the conventional noun evrei (Jew). Dostoyevsky’s deep-seated xenophobia can be seen in the caricatures of Germans, Jews and Poles that appear in his fiction; his anti-Semitism becomes even more blatant in the articles in A Writer’s Diary (see, for example, the short piece ‘The Jewish Question’ in the March 1877 issue). Joseph Frank tackles the complicated issue of Dostoyevsky’s anti-Semitism in his chapter ‘The Jewish Question’, in Dostoevsky:The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 301–19.

  19. grand-père: Grandfather.

  20. Cher: Dear.

  21. Citizen: ‘Bobok’ was published in the 5 February 1873 issue of the Citizen (see Introduction).

  THE MEEK ONE

  1. whose wife is lying on a table: It was customary in Russia for the body of the deceased to be laid out on the table (here two card tables pushed together) prior to the arrival of the coffin. See Liza Knapp’s discussion of this passage in connection with the entry Dostoyevsky recorded in his notebook upon the death of his first wife (16 April 1864): ‘Masha [i.e. Marya Dmitryevna] is lying on the table. Will I ever see Masha again?’ (The Annihilation of Inertia:Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), pp. 1–2ff.; 37–43).

  2. Victor Hugo … The Last Day of a Condemned Man: Victor Hugo (1802–85), French Romantic poet, novelist and dramatist, conceived Last Day of a Condemned Man (1829) as a protest against the death penalty. The work, comprised of forty-six entries, is the journal of the condemned man’s sufferings from the time he receives the death sentence until the very last moments of his life. The book ends abruptly, for the condemned man cannot record his own execution. The work was translated into Russian by Dostoyevsky’s brother, Mikhail.

  3. gros de Naples: Heavy silk fabric.

  4. Voice: In the 1870s, the circulation of this St Petersburg daily, one of the most influential newspapers in all of Russia, reached 22,000.

  5. Sternly, sternly and sternly: See ‘A Nasty Business’, note 48.

  6. new movement: The 1870s witnessed a number of liberal reforming movements, including women’s rights and the ‘woman question’, ‘going to the people’ in order to educate and mobilize the Russian peasantry, as well as frankly revolutionary and terrorist organizations, as portrayed in Dostoyevsky’s Demons (1871–2).

  7. I – I am part of that part of the whole that desires to do evil, but creates good: The pawnbroker stumbles in his quotation from Scene 3 of Faust:Part I (1808), a poetic drama by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). In answer to Faust’s ‘Who art thou then?’, Mephistopheles replies: ‘Part of that Power, not understood / Which always wills the Bad, and always works the Good’ (Faust, tr. Bayard Taylor (New York: Modern Library, 1912), p. 46).

  8. pro and contra: For and against (Latin).

  9. à l’anglaise: In the English manner.

  10. �
��first impressions of existence’: An inexact quotation from Alexander Pushkin’s ‘The Demon’ (1823), which reads: ‘In those days, when all the impressions of existence were new to me’. In the poem, the lyric hero’s marvelling at the world (‘the maidens’ glances, the rustling grove and the song of the nightingale at night’) is spoiled by the evil genius who despises inspiration and fills the poet’s soul with icy poison. Both Pushkin’s Demon and the pawnbroker are destroyers of youthful innocence and wonder.

  11. blood boiling and an over-abundance of energy: Allusion to Mikhail Lermontov’s ‘Do not trust yourself’ (1839), which is structured on the Romantic dichotomy of poet vs. the crowd, a frequent theme in his mature lyrics. Here the crowd taunts and jeers at the poet, asking why they should care whether he has suffered or not, and the poem ends with the poet being compared to a ‘tragic actor waving a cardboard sword’. The quotation is from the first stanza, in which the ‘young dreamer’ is told to ‘fear imagination’, which is merely the ‘ravings of his sick soul … Either the blood boiling or an over-abundance of energy’. The pawnbroker fittingly quotes the lines attributed to the crowd; in other words he is quite removed from Mephistopheles in Faust or the poets in Pushkin and Lermontov. Dostoyevsky alludes to this poem in the opening pages of The Brothers Karamazov, when he is describing Adelaida Ivanovna, Fyodor Pavlovich’s first wife.

  12. In Pursuit of Happiness and Songbirds: The first is a four-act play by the popular dramatist Pyotr Ilyich Yurkevich (d. 1884), which had its premiere in St Petersburg in 1876. Songbirds is the Russian title of the charming opéra bouffe La Périchole (1868) by the French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). Based on a novella by Prosper Mérimée and set in Peru, the libretto tells the story of two street singers, too poor even to afford a marriage licence, who are united after a few hours of toils and tribulations. The two works reflect the pawnbroker’s middlebrow tastes.

  13. Mill: The utilitarian philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill (1806–73), author of The Subjection of Women (1869), of which two translations into Russian appeared in 1869. In the opening paragraph of his argument for equality between the sexes, Mill writes that he believes: ‘the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’. When the pawnbroker refers to women’s ‘lack of originality’, he no doubt has in mind: ‘If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them with those of men, either in the literary or the artistic department, such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into one thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of originality’ (London: Longmans, 1869, pp. 127–8).

  14. Crimea: Region and peninsula located on the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov.

  15. basta: Enough! (Italian).

  16. Vyazemsky House on Haymarket Square:Voice published a sketch of the Vyazemsky House, a Petersburg flophouse located in the slums of Haymarket Square: ‘One can say without exaggeration that this house is a breeding-ground and receptacle of every possible disgraceful outrage of which a person, oppressed by poverty and ignorance, might commit … At the present time, in this den live approximately 7000 people, ragged, filthy, who have not seen either a comb or soap since birth, and the great majority of whom, almost to a man, are drunk’ (28 October 1876). Much of Crime and Punishment is set in Haymarket Square – both Sonya and Raskolnikov live there, and it is where he bows down and kisses the earth; the unsavoury Svidrigailov admits to spending nights in the Vyazemsky House.

  17. Hussar: See ‘A Nasty Business’, note 39.

  18. Police Bridge: So-called because of its proximity to the residence of the Chief of the St Petersburg Police, the structure, known today as the Green Bridge, carries Nevsky Prospekt across the Moika River.

  19. Boulogne: Dostoyevsky visited the port and seaside resort Boulogne-sur-Mer, located on the northern coast of France, in the summer of 1862.

  20. Gil Blas and the Archbishop of Granada: In the picaresque novel Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–35) by the French satirical dramatist and prose writer Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747), the adventures of the young Gil Blas are his education gleaned from a succession of masters. He is asked by the archbishop to comment on his latest, clearly unsuccessful, sermon, and makes a few careful, exceedingly diplomatic criticisms – and is banished by the archbishop. This scene was a favourite of Dostoyevsky’s, who refers to it on multiple occasions in his letters and works.

  21. Inertia: This is the third instance of ‘inertia’ (kosnost’), which could also be rendered as ‘sluggishness’ or ‘stagnation’. Its placement here signals its importance. Previous translations have proposed ‘insensibility’, ‘insensateness’, ‘immutability’ or ‘blind force’. According to Liza Knapp’s compelling analysis of kosnost’ as a metaphysical concept in Dostoyevsky’s works, ‘in Russian usage, the Latinate word inertsiya [inertia] is more strictly associated with Newtonian mechanics than is the Slavic word kosnost’ … But in Dostoevsky’s day kosnost’ was used to denote the mechanical principle of inertia, as defined in Newton’s law of motion, and more generally to denote the property of being “subject to mechanical necessity” ’ (The Annihilation of Inertia, p. 4).

  22. bogatyr: Heroic warrior of the byliny, the Russian folk-epic songs that date back to at least the eleventh century. While some are historical and others mythical, all are models of courage and strength.

  23. The sun … isn’t it dead: The figure of the dead sun draws on imagery from Revelation 16:8–9.

  24. ‘People, love one another’ – who said that: Well-known words spoken by Jesus: ‘This I command you, to love one another’ and ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you’ (John 15:17, 12). See also ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ and note 11.

  THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

  1. the 3rd of November: The significance of the date is never explained in the text. Eric Naiman draws parallels between the story and the items in A Writer’s Diary devoted to Ekaterina Kornilova, a seamstress who pushed her stepdaughter out of a fourth-storey window. (The child miraculously survived.) He notes, among other things, the importance of a young girl at the close of the two narratives and of the adjective ‘fantastic’. (This juxtaposition of essay and fictional treatment is also seen in connection with the story ‘The Meek One’ – see Introduction, ‘Three Stories from A Writer’s Diary’.) Judging from Dostoyevsky’s correspondence and notebooks, it seems likely, according to Naiman, that Dostoyevsky visited Kornilova in prison on 3 November (‘Of Crime, Utopia, and Repressive Complements: The Further Adventures of the Ridiculous Man’, Slavic Review, 50:3 (1991), pp. 512–20).

  2. droshky: See ‘A Nasty Business’, note 43.

  3. Voltaire armchair: A wide, deep, comfortable armchair with a tall back, named for the philosopher, see ‘Bobok’, note 4. This naming points to the Western origins of the narrator’s philosophical malaise.

  4. stoss: Also known as stuss, it is a variant of faro, the card game at which Hermann ultimately loses in Pushkin’s ‘Queen of Spades’. Whole fortunes were lost at the faro table in Russia in the nineteenth century. Playing with old, dirty cards is one more indicator of the captain’s degradation.

  5. Nevsky Prospekt: See ‘White Nights’, note 2.

  6. dream, that my brother is dead and buried: Dreams play a major role in Dostoyevsky’s works, for example, Crime and Punishment. He often dreamed of his brother who had died twelve years before this story was written; moreover, he accorded his dreams an almost mystical and prophetic significance.

  7. Sirius: The brightest star in the night sky, commonly known as the ‘Dog Star’ on account of its position in the constellation Canis Major. In ancient times, the Greeks believed that the position of Sirius in the sky would foretell the ‘dog days’ of summer; the Egyptians used it to predict the annual flooding of the Nile.

  8. Greek archipelago: The islands in the A
egean Sea, the ‘cradle’ of European civilization. Compare this scene with the depiction of the ‘Golden Age’ in Stavrogin’s confession in Demons (the chapter ‘At Tikhon’s’), which reappears in The Adolescent (1875; Part III, Chapter 7).

  9. trichina: A parasitic worm. In the epilogue to Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov is hospitalized during Holy Week and dreams of a pestilence of trichinae that causes madness.

  10. holy fool: A Fool-in-Christ who lives outside of society and its norms, who does not have a fixed residence, but wanders, living on the charity of strangers, who may be mad or may merely simulate madness, who is able to divine truths or perhaps see the future and who delivers his message in parables or in symbolic language.

  11. to love others as yourself: Christ’s teaching to his disciples: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater …’ (Mark 12:31). See also ‘The Meek One’ and note 24.

  Appendix I

  Names in Russian

  All Russians have three names: the given name, the patronymic and the surname. Thus: Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky; Anna Grigoryevna Dostoevskaya. The patronymic is the father’s given name and the ending -ovich or -evich for males, -ovna or -evna for females. Patronymics can be abbreviated by omitting the -ov/-ev, as in ‘A Nasty Business’ with Semyon Ivanych, rather than the expected Ivanovich; such abbreviation usually connotes a degree of familiarity. Note that in The Gambler, Grandmother, as was customary, addresses her manservant by patronymic alone – Potapych.

  Most given names have affectionate or diminutive forms, as in English. Thus, Nadezhda: Nadya, Nadenka; and Marfa: Marfusha, both characters in The Gambler. In ‘White Nights’, the Dreamer is surprised when his unknown companion says, ‘My name is Nastenka … That’s all! Is that really not enough for you?’ In other words, she does not reply with name and patronymic, but merely the diminutive (Nastenka is the diminutive of Anastasia). Finally, there is Polina in The Gambler, who is addressed by most characters, with the exception of Grandmother, by the French equivalent (Polina) of her Russian name, Praskovya.