The Gambler

In one of The Gambler’s opening scenes, Alexey tells an anecdote about trying to acquire a visa for Rome. He explains how he was forced to wait by an official because he was a “lowly Russian,” while members of other nationalities were seen immediately. As such, the novel begins with an idea about Russian victimhood and stereotypes that recurs throughout the text. At one point, Alexey says that “Russians abroad are too cowardly and terribly afraid of what people will say” (165). Their sense of inferiority before other nations, he suggests, leads them into slavish submission to convention. Meanwhile, Astley is alleged to have told Polina that “we Russians wouldn’t know anything without the Europeans and that we aren’t capable of anything” (246). In other words, Russians are not properly or fully “European” and must efface their own national identity if they wish to make any sort of progress or gain respect.

While these remarks reflect a genuine anxiety about the role of Russia and Russians within 19th-century European culture, they also serve a deeper role within The Gambler. Namely, these ideas about “Russians,” in contrast to the other nationalities described, serve as a way that Dostoyevsky can explore and critique competing values of the time by having them represented by different nations. The first of these represented is the “ability to acquire capital” (146). Linked to the emerging capitalist class in Germany, Dostoyevsky identifies this ability and desire to acquire capital with a German protestant work ethic. He satirizes the way in which the German proto-capitalist grows their wealth through, “a century or two of uninterrupted labour, patience, intelligence, honesty, character, firmness, [and] calculation” (148). He then contrasts this with the Russian, who “not only is incapable of acquiring capital” but “even squanders it somehow scandalously and to no purpose” (146).

Dostoyevsky’s point then is not to suggest that all Russians squander their money, nor is his point that there is something uniquely or necessarily “German” about the accumulation of capital. Rather, with this contrast between the “German” and “Russian” “method of accumulating” (147), Dostoyevsky aims to subvert the established idea that capital accumulation through endless calculating asceticism is a virtue. Instead, in the contrast with the “Russian” who lives for the moment, he depicts the new capitalist ethos as petty and joyless and one that subordinates human life and experience to capital.

The same is true of his claims about the French. Alexey, in the context of discussing des Grieux, talks about how even the most vulgar French person “can have manners, methods, expressions and even thoughts quite elegant in form” (269). They have this as an inheritance from the revolution and the dissolution of the old nobility. In contrast, the Russian is an uncultivated “bear,” and the English man is “awkward and inelegant” (270) by comparison. Thus, suggests Alexey, Russian women who can “discern beauty and have a weakness for it” (270) are naturally attracted to someone like des Grieux rather than Astley. However, again, Dostoyevsky is not to be taken too literally here. French people are not necessarily “elegant” any more than the English or Russians are “crude.” Rather, Dostoyevsky’s point, as with his satirizing of the German work ethic, is to criticize his society’s obsession with “form” and etiquette over originality of thought or spirit. In this sense, there is something redemptive and positive about the naïve crudity of the traditional Russian. Namely, such Russian roughness and honesty stand in contrast to the superficial cultivation and pretentiousness of allegedly “cultured” European society. This point would have been particularly poignant for Dostoyevsky in a Russia where educated elites spoke French and held up France as the epitome of culture and sophistication.