The Gambler/ Bobok/ A Nasty Story

Dostoyevsky was writing from first-hand experience. Only a few years before, hurrying to meet Apollinaria Suslova in paris, he had stopped at Wiesbaden on impulse and begun to play roulette. He had been completely seduced. Among the characters caught up in this account of life around the gambling tables, ‘Grandmamma’ and silly, mercenary Mademoiselle Blanche are unforgettable cameos. The novel’s hero gripped by exhilaration and despair, ‘a poet in his own way’ is drawn with the concentrated force of memory; while in Polina Dostoyevsky bequeaths his most tender portrait of the proud young woman who had captured his imagination and came to haunt his later novels. This Penguin Classic also contains two of Dostoyevsky’s best blackly comic stories: Bobok and A Nasty Story. The cover shows a detail of The Salon d’Or by W. P. Frith in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa