In the Library
The Gambler
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1867
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by C. J. Hogarth
- Chapters
- Chapters 17
- Length
- Length 60k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
I have no money for gambling,” I quietly replied.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The same voice a year earlier, a man explaining his own worst behaviour with total clarity and no intention whatever of stopping.
£1.99
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Written in the same desperate year and under the same debts, and driven by the same idea that a man can reason himself into anything.
Free in the app
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Another study of appetite outrunning means, where the debts are as real as the romance and arrive with the same inevitability.
£1.99
About the book
Zero. The ball drops, and a tutor who has no business at the table watches a fortune vanish and feels something close to joy. Roulette in this book is not a metaphor for risk; it is the thing itself, and it is described by someone who knew the exact temperature of that room, the exact sound of the croupier, and the exact self-justifying voice in his own head. Dostoevsky wrote it in twenty-six days under a contract that would have handed a publisher the rights to everything he ever wrote if he missed the date, and he dictated it to a young stenographer he married four months later. The debts were real and so was the compulsion. What makes it more than a case study is Polina, and the way love and gambling turn out to run on the same broken machinery: the certainty that this time the thing withheld will finally be given.