Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder (34 page)

Money, however, continued to be a problem. “Don't imagine that everything is roses,” he wrote to his brother after his novel debuted. “I don't have a kopek to my name, as before.” Although Dostoevsky was paid for his work and published numerous other short stories over the next several years—“The Landlady,” “The Jealous Husband,” “White Nights”—it was never enough to keep up with his daily expenses and the money he owed. As a result, he got into the habit of requesting advances on work that he had yet to complete, putting him in chronic debt to his publishers. His letters to family and friends include constant pleas for cash, sometimes peppered with apologies, other times blunt. “I need money,” he writes to Mikhail at one point. “I have to live, brother.”

In the late 1840s, Dostoevsky encountered professional turbulence as well. The early accolades for
Poor Folk
went to his head; his overwhelming egotism irked St. Petersburg's inner literary circle, which mocked and alienated him. He was also swept up in feuds with publishers about where his works would appear. But nothing could beat the events of 1849, when the writer, who by then belonged to a progressive literary group that opposed the tsarist autocracy, was arrested for alleged political crimes. He endured a terrifying mock execution—tied to the stake, rifles aimed—only to be spared by a last-minute pardon from the tsar and exiled to Siberia, where he was sentenced to four years of hard labor in a prison camp and five additional years in the Siberian regiment. At the camp, Dostoevsky slept on bare boards, ate boiled cabbage, endured hard labor in freezing temperatures, and began to experience his first severe bouts of epilepsy, which would plague him for the rest of his life. His harrowing experience gave him
extraordinary access to the human psyche and provided fodder for his 1862 novel,
The House of the Dead
. It also heightened his underlying anxiety. At one point, Dostoevsky described himself as “devoured by gloom.”

Gambling when feeling distressed is a key criterion for a gambling disorder diagnosis—and this was clearly a motivating factor for Dostoevsky's nonstop gambling spree in the 1860s. During his military service in Siberia, Dostoevsky had met and married Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, a widow with a child. But by the time he returned to St. Petersburg in 1859, their relationship was falling apart. Dostoevsky's epilepsy, anxiety, and powerful irritability could not have been easy for his wife, and she was not a source of comfort for him. Known to be capricious and jealous, she was also sick with tuberculosis. By 1862, the 40-year-old writer was seeking solace elsewhere, and made the fateful decision to visit a casino in Germany. Right away, he got lucky at the roulette table, landing himself a hefty sum of 11,000 francs.

Big wins early on can lead amateur gamblers to mistakenly believe that they know how to beat the system, inspiring follow-up trips to the tables. One year later, Dostoevsky returned to Germany to try his hand again. At this point, he was still technically married to Maria, but the two lived apart, and Dostoevsky had struck up an affair with Polina Suslova, an aspiring writer 20 years his junior. In the spring of 1863, the two planned an illicit rendezvous in Paris. Suslova had arrived earlier and was waiting for Dostoevsky when he decided to make a four-day detour to the picturesque German gambling town of Wiesbaden. Once again, he did well, winning 10,400 francs. This trip, Frank notes, marked “the true beginning of the gambling mania that invariably swept over Dostoevsky whenever he came to Europe during the 1860s.”

Roulette, the game that consumed Dostoevsky, is based on pure chance. Players bet money on red or black numbers, the croupier spins the wheel, the ball falls where it may. But in what is considered a classic early stage of gambling addiction, Dostoevsky deluded himself into thinking that he had figured out a foolproof betting system, which he described in a letter to his wife's sister after his visit to Wiesbaden. “Please do not think that in my joy over not having lost, I am showing off by saying that I possess the secret of how to win instead of losing,” he wrote. “I really do know the secret—it is terribly silly and simple, merely a matter of keeping oneself under constant control and never getting excited, no matter how the game shifts. That's all there is to it—you just can't lose that way and are sure to win.” In the same letter, Dostoevsky notes that he had initially locked his 10,400-franc win in his suitcase, but then succumbed to temptation, played again, and lost half of it.

With their intoxicating mix of money, bright lights, camaraderie, competition, risk, and thrill, casinos provide gamblers with a dramatic escape from the demands and traumas of everyday existence. Over the course of one year in 1864, Dostoevsky's life read like the Book of Job. The writer was sick with epilepsy and other illnesses, including a bladder infection. In February, his brother Mikhail's youngest daughter succumbed to scarlet fever; in April, the tuberculosis his wife had been battling finally took her life; in July, Mikhail died suddenly from a liver ailment. All of this devastated Dostoevsky and had a crippling effect on his already weak finances. He was now responsible for helping to support his stepson, Pasha, the surviving child of his late wife, Maria, as well as Mikhail's widow and her four children. In addition, his brother had taken on enormous debts to help him co-finance a literary magazine,
Epoch
, that was now floundering. With Mikhail's death, Dostoevsky made yet another unwise financial decision. Rather
than shut down the journal, he tried to keep it alive—taking on not only an enormous professional responsibility but the prodigious financial burden his brother had left behind. It turned out to be a futile and costly error; in early 1865, less than a year after Mikhail's death,
Epoch
published its final issue.

This is the mess that Dostoevsky found himself in when he was presented with the seemingly impossible task of writing a novel in little more than a year. By then, he was well established as a writer, having published about a dozen short stories and a handful of novels, including his highly influential
Notes From Underground
, considered to be a precursor to the existential novel. Dostoevsky was also busy finishing up his first major narrative,
Crime and Punishment
, which initially appeared in monthly installments in a literary journal; this effort, according to biographer Frank, secured him a place in the elite literary ranks of novelists Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy. The shady publisher who proposed the deal to Dostoevsky offered 3,000 rubles up front for the new novel, plus the right to publish his entire set of past works. The stakes were dire: If Dostoevsky failed to meet his deadline, any future writing would be published for free over the course of nine years—without a ruble going to the author himself.

Dostoevsky struggled without success to produce under pressure, and by early October 1866, just weeks before his November 1 cutoff, he had no words on paper. In a panic, Dostoevsky disclosed his predicament to a friend, who arranged to have a stenographer take dictation to speed up the writing process. The young stenographer who showed up, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, had read the author's works and eagerly took on the job. Dostoevsky talked, Anna typed, and
The Gambler
made it to the publisher just two hours before deadline. The short novel, considered to be highly autobiographical, has it all: a window into Russian
society, a tale of tortured romance (a character named Polina mirrors Dostoevsky's own tumultuous affair with Polina Suslova, who ultimately declined to marry him). It is also a quintessential account of the delusional thought processes that drive people with gambling disorder.

Through Alexey Ivanovich, his protagonist, Dostoevsky documents many of the features of gambling addiction that he struggled with himself—and that gamblers from Las Vegas to Monte Carlo battle today. Alexey Ivanovich was “possessed by an intense craving for risk,” as Dostoevsky explained in the novel. “Perhaps passing through so many sensations, my soul was not satisfied but only irritated by them, and craved still more sensation—and stronger and stronger ones—till utterly exhausted.” Even now, 150 years after its publication, gambling experts and literary critics alike continue to marvel at the novel's insightful depictions of the gambler's mind. Dr. Richard Rosenthal, a psychiatrist and co-director of the UCLA Gambling Studies Program, considers
The Gambler
a psychological masterpiece and “the best case of a compulsive gambler in or out of the professional literature.”

Much of the thrill for gamblers, then and now, comes from the unpredictability of the game—those moments between laying down a bet and finding out whether you will win or lose. Some gamblers feel they must achieve a mastery over the challenge, no matter the costs. “They're flirting with the idea of disaster, and seeing how close they come to the line,” says Rosenthal. Gamblers are also vulnerable to self-deception, a theme that runs through both the novel and Dostoevsky's own gambling experience. Although Dostoevsky had startling insight into the thought patterns of compulsive gamblers, he continued to buy in to the delusions that snare them. Even though every turn of the wheel is an independent event, with a roughly equal chance of red or black turning
up, Dostoevsky and Alexey Ivanovich both put their faith in the illogical notion that previous results can predict the next spin. If red has won ten times in a row on the roulette wheel, for example, the gambler wagers that black is sure to win next. This is known as the “gambler's fallacy” or the “Monte Carlo fallacy,” named after an infamous incident in 1913 when black won 26 times in a row and gamblers lost millions of francs betting on red.

Why did he do it? Financially, Dostoevsky needed the money. But his mind got caught up in the game. Compulsive gamblers often head for casinos when they are feeling anxious, depressed, helpless, or guilty. Guilt, especially, has emerged as a prominent theme in Dostoevsky's life, and experts have long theorized about where it came from and how profoundly it contributed to his addiction. Even Freud weighed in, arguing in a 1928 essay that Dostoevsky's excessive gambling was a form of self-inflicted punishment. But for what? Possibly his father's death. Just a week or two after writing to his son about the hardships at home, Dr. Dostoevsky was found dead by the roadside. Doctors reported that he'd suffered a stroke; the family believed that his own serfs murdered him. Whatever happened, experts have speculated that Dostoevsky felt deep remorse. Not only had he resisted the career his father set out for him, he had taken advantage of him by asking for money when there was little to spare.

Rosenthal, the UCLA gambling expert, believes that the author's guilt more likely stemmed from circumstances surrounding his birth. While his mother was pregnant with him, she developed a respiratory infection, which may have left her vulnerable to the tuberculosis that ultimately killed her. Viewed through this lens, Dostoevsky's very existence would have led to his mother's downfall and her death. Rosenthal points out that Dostoevsky's gambling began around the time that his first wife, Maria, became
terminally ill with tuberculosis—a development that mirrored his mother's own suffering and early death. This gambling pattern could be viewed as a “defense against enormous feelings of loss and, especially, of guilt,” says Rosenthal. Whatever the underlying triggers, the psychological payoff from gambling is an escape from the pain of negative feelings and the harsh realities of life. Immersed in noise, alcohol, anticipatory excitement, and the spin of the wheel, it's almost impossible to focus on anything else.

Writing
The Gambler
had an unexpected payoff: Forty-five-year-old Dostoevsky fell in love with his 20-year-old stenographer. Between dictations, the two talked about Russian literature, and Dostoevsky confided in Anna about his past, including the terrifying experience after his arrest when he thought he was going to be executed. Anna listened sympathetically, and over the course of just a few weeks in October 1866, the two developed a deeply personal relationship. Dostoevsky, eager to remarry, proposed just one month after they met. “I would answer that I love you and will love you all my life,” she replied.

The couple was married in February 1867. It soon became clear that their new life would be far more challenging than the whirlwind weeks of their early romance. Among other issues, Dostoevsky's stepson resented Anna's presence in his stepfather's life, and Dostoevsky suffered two severe back-to-back epileptic attacks. Dostoevsky was often irritable, and the two had little quality time together. To alleviate the stress and in part to seek “some respite from the constant harassment of his creditors,” Frank notes, the couple planned a trip to Europe that spring. Anna, who believed the trip was vital to the future of their marriage, pawned her wedding dowry to finance the initial part of their travel. In the end, they stayed away much longer than expected. Their journey, which took them to numerous cities (Dresden, Milan, Geneva, Prague,
Florence), turned into four years; much of the time, they barely managed to stay afloat. Anna's mother supplied some money, and Dostoevsky also pawned clothing and other belongings. As usual, he turned to friends for loans and to his editors for advances on his writing. Throughout it all, he paid frequent visits to the casinos.

By then, Dostoevsky was exhibiting many of the symptoms that constitute a gambling disorder diagnosis today: a preoccupation with how to get back to the tables; “chasing” losses to get even; relying on others to provide money lost at the casinos; and unsuccessful attempts to control, cut back, or stop gambling altogether. He articulated these thought patterns, behaviors, and self-deceptions in letters he wrote to Anna, his “sweet angel,” who was far more patient and understanding of his incessant gambling than anyone else. In one correspondence written the year they were married, he told his new wife that if one gambles “coolly, calmly and with calculation,
it is quite impossible to lose
!” Then he went on to describe his elation over winning, his “maddening urge” to win more, and, as always, his ultimate demise and self-deception. “[I] lost
everything, the whole lot
, down to the last kopek,” he wrote, but “if I could give myself just four more days … I surely could win everything back.”