Pressed by his creditors and by the publisher Stelovski, Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler in just a few weeks, in October 1866. This novel served as the catalyst for Dostoevsky's acquaintance with his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, who stood by him as a guardian angel until the end of his life.
The Gambler has an autobiographical basis and includes the author's experiences from his second trip abroad in 1863, to the German spa towns of Wiesbaden and Homburg, where Dostoevsky encountered the world of roulette and gambling and became fascinated by it for a period. In the character of the main hero, Alexei Ivanovich, many of the psychological trials that Dostoevsky suffered at that time are reflected, while in the character of Polina, the inner world of Polina Suslova, his then-lover, is mirrored. At the same time, in the personas of the other characters, Dostoevsky satirizes in a particularly vivid manner the mores of Western Europeans, especially the French, and the moral decay of France during the period of the Second Empire, while emphasizing the moral superiority of his, albeit fallen, Russian heroes against them.
One of Dostoevsky's vices takes on a symbolic, tangible form in what is the very essence of his Being: the pathological mania for gambling. Since he was a child, he has had a passion for cards - but only in Europe does he discover the diabolical mirror of his nervousness: Red and Black, roulette, this dangerously primal game of dualism. The green felt of Baden, the roulette of Monte Carlo are his most intense ecstatic moments in Europe: they hypnotize him more than the Montana of the Sistine, the statues of Michelangelo, the southern landscapes, the art and culture of the entire world. Because there he finds the intensity, the final decision: black or red, odd or even, happiness or annihilation, loss or gain - condensed in those seconds when the wheel spins: the intensity concentrated within this flash of pain or pleasure, as desired by his temperament.
