A long time ago, before this blog and even before I joined Goodreads, I tried reading Dostoevsky. I had this weird habit where every National Day, I’d spend the time leading up to the evening NDP parade tackling a long Russian book. I read Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, and a few others, but to be honest, the only ones I understood and enjoyed were the novels by Tolstoy.

But a while back, I was talking with a friend who liked Russian literature and I figured, it’s been a few years, it’s time to give Dostoevsky another try. So I got a copy of The Gambler and decided to read it.

I’m not going to lie, I was rather perturbed by the start because I didn’t really know what was going on. It sort of starts of in media res*, with the protagonist Alexei Ivanovich coming back from his vacation and finding his employer’s family in a state of tension. They are all waiting for a Grandmother to die and live them money. Alexei starts gambling, partly because he wants to and partly because Polina, whom he loves, treats him with contempt. And then Grandmother comes.

This was such a strange novel. It feels… sordid, for lack of a better word. Alexei clearly has started in a sort of fevered dream, where he thinks he’s got ahold of what’s going on but his actions show a man who’s driven crazy by love and can’t really control himself. I have to say, Dostoevsky did an excellent job conveying Alexei’s state of mind to the reader through the first person narrative – I felt his emotions and pretty much just floated through the book the way that he did.

There’s a lot of things in here about Alexei’s various opinions about the Russians, French, and English, but what really shines through is the impression of a man who quickly becomes addicted to gambling, though he doesn’t realise it. The Grandmother who suddenly appears really acts as a way for Alexei to verbalise what is happening to him by describing her falling in love with the act of gambling.

This was a strange, short novel and you know what I really wanted after reading it? Apart from shaking off the sensation of having imbibed the psyche of a gambler, I really, really wanted to read the story from Polina’s point of view. She’s viewed as an inscrutable character to Alexei (who, let’s face it, is not a reliable narrator) and I think her story would have been equally fascinating.

*Okay, perhaps not in the strictest definition of the term because it doesn’t really start with that much action. But there’s really no introduction to who Alexei is or why he is there and you pretty much have to figure out things and it felt like describing the start as “in media res” fit.