Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Gambler

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf and ‘to read’ list for too long.  So, after a few factual tomes, I thought this would be a change of length and pace.  

The book’s basic structure is as follows:  The narrator, Alexei, is the tutor to a rich Russian family’s children, living in a hotel suite abroad in Roulettenburg - a fictitious spa town in Germany.  Alexei is in love with Polina, who is the General’s step-daughter.  She needs money and asks Alexei to gamble for her at the casino, which he does reluctantly.  He wins and gives her the money but she won’t tell him what it's for.  Alexei later learns from another of Polina’s suitors staying at the resort, the Englishman Mr. Astley, that the family has no money.  The General has squandered the family fortune and, furthermore, has taken out many loans against his expected inheritance.  As such he desperately needs his aunt (The Grandmother) to die so he can inherit her estate.  

Alexei professes his love to Polina and promises he will do anything for her.  This prompts her to challenge Alexei to be rude to a baron and baroness of high social standing who are staying in the resort as well.  This leads the General to fire him as the family tutor but he continues to stay at the hotel.  

During this time, the Grandmother is still in Russia.  The family, their suitors and their creditors in Germany are all eagerly awaiting news regarding her ill health and the possibility of her imminent death.   The unctuous French pairing of Des Grieux and Mdme. Blanche both hang around in the hope that she will die, Des Grieux because he has loaned the General money and he wants to be paid back and Mdme. Blanche because she will only marry the General if he has money.  The General sends a telegram every day to Russia enquiring, it’s implied not very subtly, about his aunt’s health.  However, instead of the anticipated news of her death turning up in Roulettenburg, she does instead!  

‘Grandma’ is very grand and dismissive, is presumed to be fabulously wealthy and is treated in style by the hotel’s management.  She mocks the General’s covetousness and tells him to forget about getting any of her money.  She demands to go gambling and says she will only do so with Alexei.  She is initially successful and wins a considerable amount of money. Alexei helps her to begin with but then urges her to stop and refuses to gamble with her anymore as he sees her behaviour become more erratic.  This leaves her at the mercy of some avaricious Poles, who bamboozle her and steal her money.  She gets hopelessly addicted to gambling and loses 10x the sizable amount she had won over the next couple of days.  After these heavy losses, she returns to Russia by train.  

Alexei finds out from Polina that Des Grieux is selling the properties the General mortgaged to him because Grandma is not dead.  However, Des Grieux is going to give the General 50k back for Polina’s benefit.  She says she wishes she had 50k to throw back in his face. She reveals she has been Des Grieux’s mistress but that he won’t marry her now.   Inspired by this thought Alexei rushes to the roulette tables and furiously gambles everything he has in the world.  He goes on a winning streak and becomes a rich man.  He brings the money back to Polina who accuses him of trying to buy her like DG but then seems happy and spends the night in his room, which is thought to be scandalous.  In the morning she asks for 25k and then flings it in Alexei’s face before running off to Mr Astley’s hotel to be with him.  He then leaves for Paris with Mdme. Blanche and lets her spend all his money before the General turns up and marries her.  She still wants a husband with a grand title but doesn’t care if he’s rich anymore because she is already.  Alexei leaves and travels around gambling resorts unemployed trying to make a living or get rich again.  He learns from Mr. Astley that Polina is in Switzerland and is still in love with him.  He resolves to go and find her but eventually stays on to gamble more because he has premonitions of a big win.

There was a lot to enjoy in the book.  The gamblings scenes were a highlight, especially the Grandmother’s headlong charge and Alexei’s big win.  Dostoevsky captures the frenzied unrest of the throng at the tables superbly and accurately depicts the febrile energy, illusions of control, desperation, hope, fury, frustration and dazed exhaustion gambling can produce.  He also produces some reasons why Russians are particularly susceptible to gambling, via Alexei, with his usual Slavic exceptionalism!

The characters of the General and the Grandmother immediately spring vividly to mind and were particular favourites.  The former foppish and pathetic, the latter capricious, formidable and ferocious.  I liked the predatory pairing of the Little Frenchman (des Grieux) and the General’s fiance (Mdme. Blanche) very much.  They play the parts of the civilised guest and fiance in front of the General but I imagine them scheming furiously about their financial futures during their clandestine chats.  The narrative was mainly good too, especially the Grandmother's sudden, unexpected appearance at the resort.  

However, some parts of the novel were a bit overblown.  For example,  Alexei’s infatuation with Polina, where he offers to throw himself off a cliff to prove his love for her and encourages her to dare him to do anything to the same end.  Could the story have done without the Polina love story?  In its favour, it helps the narrative along by providing the reason for Alexei’s dismissal as the family tutor.  It gives Alexei a love interest, which ultimately shows just how deeply he has fallen into his gambling addiction.  It also gives a reason for Alexei to start gambling, although he could just as well have started when the Grandmother arrived.  Alexei’s love for Polina shows him to be obsessive and ultimately gives a good measure of how deeply addicted to gambling he has become by the end of the book.  

Against this, Polina’s situation can be a bit confusing.  She is in love with Alexei, the mistress of des Grieux and being courted by Mr. Astley.  The affair with des Grieux could be thought implausible given his hold over Polina’s step-father but does allow Alexei to indulge in some hilarious digressions on why Russian women are most susceptible to the charms of Frenchmen!  Polina is whimsical in the extreme, vain and barely seems to know what she’s doing most of the time.  She is living in a highly stressful situation, which could explain some of her erratic behaviour.  Eventually, Mr. Astley takes her to Switzerland for her health, which could be interpreted as a nervous breakdown.  Ultimately, it’s hard to separate out Polina’s love stories from the narrative but my sense is that it wasn’t strictly necessary for them to occupy such a central position.  I did like the way Alexei’s passion for Polina ignites his passion for gambling, which it eventually consumed along with everything else.  

The part where Alexei goes with Mdme. Blanche to Paris and allows her to spend all his winnings is a little stretched.  It does demonstrate, in a slightly forced way, how little Alexei cares for the actual objective of gambling - money.  Maybe he is still lovesick over Polina but this plot twist struck me as bordering on farce and maybe it’s supposed to be.

The book’s denouement, where Alexei learns that Polina does love him and is in Switzerland only to have a premonition about a huge gambling win and stay in Hamburg to play roulette, is poignant.  It seems like his love of Polina has been replaced by a love of gambling.

This book has an interesting background and is laced with significance and redolence of Dostoevsky’s own life.  For example, during his first marriage, Doestoevksy also had a mistress called Polina (Suslova) whom he met in Paris in 1862.  She was 20 years his junior and the affair ended when she left him for another man in 1863.  He may have begun to gamble heavily after this, or after the death of  his first wife in 1864.

Dostoevsky himself was a gambling addict for several years as amply demonstrated by these letters to his second wife:

‘I was so confident of a small win. At first I lost a little, but as soon as I began to lose, I wanted to win it back. I lost still more, then I was compelled to continue playing, at least to regain the money necessary for my departure – and I lost everything Anya, I will not implore you to take pity on me, better be dispassionate, but I am terribly afraid of your judgement’

May 1867

Things aren’t much better six months later:

‘Anya, my dear, my precious, I have lost everything, everything, everything! Oh! My angel, don’t be sad, don’t worry. Be confident, a time will come when I shall be worthy of you and I shall stop robbing you like a wretched low thief!’ Nov 1867

However, after having to leave Russia in 1867 to avoid creditors, Doestoevsky eventually returned to Russia in 1871 and managed to give up gambling around the same time.

Another interesting facet of the book’s history relating to gambling is that Dostoevsky seems to have written the book for a bet with a publisher (F.T.Stellovsky), to whom he owed money.  This was in 1865, the same year he wrote ‘Crime and Punishment’ . Dostoevsky bet the rights to ‘The Gambler’ itself and all his future works for 10 years if he couldn’t produce a novel in 30 days.  In order to win his bet, Dostoevsky hired a stenographer for the first time in his career.  She was Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, a woman 25 years his junior, who would later become his wife and an essential contributor to his work.The publisher tried to make himself unavailable to receive the book at the time of the deadline. However, at Anna’s suggestion, Dostoevsky took the manuscript to the police station and had it registered there with the time and date.  

This was a great book with memorable characters and vivid scenes of gambling written by someone who experienced the power of its vagaries first hand.

Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

This was a beautiful little book with a quintessentially Edinburgh feel to it.  Set around the 1930s, most of the narrative takes place at a school for girls.  A group of six are selected by Miss Brodie, a teacher in her prime, to be the creme de la creme of their age group - The Brodie Set.  There are periodic flashes forward to the student’s and teacher’s later lives so the fate of the characters are known.  The book has some narrative anticipation but its charms are not about finding out what happens next.  The joy of the book was more in the ingenious details and effortless touches Spark uses to construct such a vivid world.  The aphorisms of Miss Brodie, the brief but deep characterisations of the members of the set and the sketch of the art master’s home life and marital infidelities.  The prose is also excellent and never clunky.

A group of school friends is a familiar setting and a good way to establish individual identities within a larger collective one.  The Brodie Set is an extreme example of this tendency towards cliques but it’s believable and feels authentic.  The level of pupil-teacher interaction is also unlikely today but could be credible in the 30s.  Miss Brodie instructs the girls in a wide range of subjects outwith the conventional school curriculum with a heavy focus on her own history, travels and life.  With the exception of Sandy,  who’s Miss Brodie’s special confidante and whose character is fleshed in more detail, the characterisation of the other members is largely limited to their future fates or descriptions of what they’re known for as schoolgirls.  Jenny is known for her beauty, Rose is ‘famous for sex’, Eunice is famous for gymnastics and swimming, Monica is known for her mathematical abilities and her temper and Mary is famous for being the scapegoat for everything that goes wrong.  The details are scant but are oft repeated and so well chosen that the overall effect is very successful.

The star of the show is Miss Jean Brodie.  She chooses to dedicate her prime to educating her set in what she deems the original sense of the Latin verb ‘educere’ - to lead out.  This is exactly the kind of maxim that makes Miss Brodie so believable and engaging as a character.  The leading out takes the form of stories about her love life, trips to the theatre and art galleries, studies of the classics and lectures on the benefits of facism.  It all feels perfect for a middle class Edinburgh school teacher.  She carries a self confident feeling of always being in the right and the primary school teacher’s penchant for unequivocal statements.  Nonetheless, there’s also a slightly deranged, even desperate undercurrent to her character that’s never encountered directly.  Instead, it’s hinted at throughout the novel.  Who could disagree with her lofty aims of leading the girls out into adulthood through the means of a practical and well-rounded education?  But in practice, her obsession with Italian facism and the love lives of some of the set seem misguided and inappropriate.  

It’s the same when it comes to her own love life.  She eschews love in favour of her project of educating the girls, which immediately made me wonder what happened to her in the past.  Nonetheless, she falls in love with the art master, who loves her back, but won’t pursue it because he is married.  Instead, she conceives a highly questionable plan that Rose, the most beautiful of the set, should have an affair with him instead.  The singing master is also in love with her and she starts to sleep with him after she has abandoned her romance with the art master.  It’s a rather half-hearted affair on Miss Brodie’s part, with more emphasis on fattening him up than on romantic development, and he eventually marries another teacher.  I felt like there was some unmentioned personal tragedy that perpetually loomed over Miss Brodie.

As a reader, we never enter the inner world of Miss Brodie.  On the outside, she appears steadfast and resolute in her beliefs and actions but their very nature made me wonder where they came from.  In a sense, readers encounter Miss Brodie as her pupils would have.  We see the face that Miss Brodie wants to show to the world but never the true motivations behind the mask or the inner monologue that produces and sustains it.  She makes a big show of the dedication of her prime to the education of her set, but what is her personal stake in this?  The events of the story show it can’t simply be an altruistic love of education.  As Sandy comments after betraying Miss Brodie, in a strikingly similar fashion to the pronouncements of the lady herself,  ‘it’s only possible to betray where loyalty is due’.  Contrary to Miss Brodie’s overtly stated loyalty to the education of the girls, is she really using them and abusing the position of power she holds over them at an impressionable age?  There’s a fevered quality about her dedication to the set, her love of facism and her unusual approach to romance that makes it seem like a retaliation against something horrible in her past, which readers never learn anything about.  

The betrayal of Miss Brodie by Sandy, who she never suspects, is another excellent facet of the plot.  The headmistress, Miss McKay, is suspicious of Miss Brodie’s methods and periodically tries to infiltrate the set to gather intelligence to use against her.  Initially I felt like Sandy’s betrayal was an unnecessarily harsh treatment of a pitiable and well intentioned middle aged woman.  However, without knowing the true reasons for Miss Brodie’s condition and way of life, it became more and more ambiguous, especially when considered in the light of her more hare-brained schemes.  Do Sandy and the rest of the set actually have legitimate grievances for their treatment by Miss Brodie?

For a book of less than 200 pages, it contained so much.  The evocative, yet lightly sketched, characters.  The initial love triangle between the teachers and then the planned, and actual, affairs of members of the set with Mr Lloyd.  The headmistress’s scheming against Miss Brodie and her ultimate betrayal by Sandy.  Above all, it was a fascinating character study of Miss Brodie herself examined through the lens of the six set members.  It was thoroughly enjoyable and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it, especially to any Edinburgh natives!