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In Dostoevsky, I find nothing but a friend, a sincere friend. A friend, to be precise, who never stops revealing to me his darkest corners, who continues to advise me on the righteous path while adding, at the end, that the righteous path is always the most boring one. A person to embrace, to cherish dearly. He once told me that it's not God, nor goodness that sustains this world, that for this world that's been in shambles for too long, a dose of God changes nothing. He told me that only simple goodness, the kind that isn't personal goodness, that is devoid of calculation, can improve things. One just needs to stop calculating to feel goodness. I believed him, sometimes I feel better.
The Gambler is his novel, his part of life told to the public that most takes away space from his private life. For some time, he intended to write about the Russian gambler, his turbulent relationships with the motherland and the modernity felt and nurtured at the gaming tables. He could have calculated, meticulously chosen the words, explored his characters' souls, but he did not. He didn't have the time. To honor a binding agreement with the publisher Stellovsky, which stipulated that the failure to deliver an unpublished work by the first of November would entail the republication, for nine years, without payment of royalties, of all the works of the great writer, he stopped calculating, exhausted all his torments, his condition of a man harassed by debts, and in twenty-eight days wrote The Gambler. In doing so, he needed a stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who became his great love, the love of his entire life, or rather of what was left of it.
The protagonist of the story is Aleksey Ivanovich who recounts his events in the first person and it's easy to see this character as the author's direct intrusion into the story, but it's not so. At least, not only. Dostoevsky - one of the few people for whom the expression "national-popular" is not an insult - identifies with all the Russian-origin characters present in these pages, because he feels his nation, he feels it completely and thus can be found in the turbulent Polina - the woman loved, inexplicably, by everyone. He is found in the General, a fifty-five-year-old man in love - when love becomes a dangerous thing, he says, referring also to himself and his condition, at the time of writing, of a lover too late in life - with a frivolous French girl. He can be found in the grandmother, rich owner from Moscow, in love with and attached to life, who loses, to spite her nephew (the General), burdened by debts, almost all her assets at the green table.
The Gambler is, essentially, the book that Dostoevsky dedicates to love. All the Russian characters are driven by love and restlessness, because he says that Russians, when faced with life, with love, cannot choose the right action or word, the right mechanism to avoid ruining themselves. They cannot because they do not want to choose, they do not want to subtract words, emotions, and sensations from their feelings. They want everything and want it simultaneously. And so, unlike the Russian characters, Dostoevsky depicts modernity and the bourgeoisie through the deeds of De Grieux, a false and calculating Frenchman like all Frenchmen, moneylender and, being French, the very essence of the bourgeoisie that, with its refined and calculated ways, threatens the virtues of Russian girls.
The story moves here, among these "beings". Aleksey Ivanovich throws himself into his life and onto the green table like a bird of prey, a perfect example of life devoid of calculation, and it is on the green table that he ruins and redeems himself, continuously ruins and redeems himself. Aleksey Ivanovich is the last bastion of European romanticism that opposes modernity, putting his life in Polina's hands. If you want me to throw myself off this mountain, I will, he says to her. Aleksey Ivanovich is goodness and, as such, is a river in flood. De Grieux, his opposite, is mild, calculating, squalid. He waits for the right moment to get back the money he lent, to marry Polina and her dowry, and when he realizes that his money will never see the way back and consequently Polina will never have a dowry, he escapes. Aleksey Ivanovich, on the other hand, starts to gamble to redeem his condition as a man, to be able to offer a dowry to Polina, to be able to live off their love. He will play for the last time only when he is sure of this girl's love for himself. In fairness, that is.
To those who naturally lean towards goodness go Dostoevsky and this book. Dostoevsky is reserved for them. It may seem little, but it is not at all. The Gambler was given to me on a sunny morning spent walking through the alleys of Naples, by a positive, kind person, in good faith. I do not have the time to further investigate this person as I would like, but I have enough to say to him once again "thank you". May Dostoevsky be with you.
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