The Gambler

Madhatter and will be circulating an official poll to decide whether folks prefer to move permanently to a private room at The Madhatter. The next meetup will be a test run. Due to the length of The Double and The Gambler, it was decided at the meetup today to break the discussion into two and to discuss The Gambler at the next meetup. 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.