The Double and The Gambler

available here: https://www.amazon.com/Double-Gambler-Vintage-Classics/dp/0375719016. As mentioned in our discussion of The Nose yesterday, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare – foreshadowing Kafka and Sartre–in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger, a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues.  The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction to gambling, a compulsion that Dostoevsky – who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring – knew intimately from his own experience. In chronicling the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character. Because we have 4 weeks to do the reading we are aiming to have it all done and to discuss both on the 17th.  Happy reading! Waleed, Sean, and George