The Double and the Gambler (Vintage Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky (EPUB)

Description

The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have given us the definitive version of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s strikingly original short novels, The Double and The Gambler.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.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐So… these are my first of Dostoevsky’s novellas outside of, I suppose, Notes…. it was really nice to feel the power of his prose in such a confined space, and it was quite enlightening to read two stories that were so separated chronologically. It seemed obvious to me that The Double was the product of a mind not yet fully comfortable with its abilities and direction while The Gambler had every bit of the assured philosophical weight I’ve come to expect from Dostoevsky. So while I fully enjoyed The Double it never affected me in quite the same way the rest of his catalog has while The Gambler felt like rejoining a conversation with an old friend.The Double allowed me, I believe for the very first time, to actually guess the ending before I got there. The story itself was a fairly straight-forward dream within a dream sort of tale that definitely disorients the reader but is also very clear in its direction. Dostoevsky made it incredibly easy to (if not impossible not to) put myself squarely in the shoes of Mr. Goliadkin from the moment he chose to attempt to enter society sans invitation. His pain, his loneliness, his fear, and his desperation were all palpable, pointed, and poignant. I can’t count the number of times I’ve put myself in similar situations and desperately wanted nothing more than to fade into the walls of the hallway or squeeze into the mouse hole in the wood pile. I am incredibly jealous that such a young author could evoke such emotion from simple words on a page in only his second attempt at his craft…Dammit.Because I too wonder why “I do not possess the secret of a lofty, powerful style, a solemn style, so as to portray all these beautiful and instructive moments of human life, arranged as if on purpose to prove how virtue sometimes triumphs over ill intention, freethinking, vice, and envy!”Instead, I shall remain envious and hope that it is true that “everything will come in its turn if you have the gumption to wait.”And I shall wait. Which is sometimes what I felt I was doing during the delirium phase of this book. It felt like the ending was such a foregone conclusion that it was often difficult to observe poor Mr. Goliadkin walking through the fire. The language kept me on the edge of my seat hoping and praying that something magical would happen, but mostly I was just frustrated. In a way it felt a lot like reading Flowers for Algernon watching someone slowly slip into a madness from which there was obviously no escape. The faces all eventually fade away…And then there is The Gambler. While it was mildly difficult to go into this without considering the metacontext in which this story was created, I tried my best to allow these characters to stand on their own and outside the existence of their creator. I think it is a testament to Dostoevsky’s abilities that it was incredibly easy to get sucked into this story while leaving whatever I knew of the author behind…So if this isn’t a story about the author, who is it about? Who is the eponymous Gambler and what are the stakes? Ostensibly Alexei Ivanovich is the gambler… and he is simply gambling for money or perhaps for the thrill. This notion of the gambler’s identity is quickly challenged when we learn that Alexei sits down to the table for the first time only at the behest of Polina, the object of his unrequited love. Shortly thereafter it seems we are to believe that it is in fact the Grandmother who inspires the title of the story only, in the end, to be shown again that it is Alexei. One of the primary reasons I love Dostoevsky is his ability to make *me* the main character in his stories though, and that holds true here as well… Given that, I have to believe that the gambler is universal, it is you, and it is me.Yet I don’t particularly care for the thrill of winning or losing money or possessions on bets, and it is here that I found the depth in this story through the eyes of Alexei as the gambler. As prominent as the idea of money was throughout the story, it was not central to Alexei’s existence – his true gamble was on Polina, his ability to love her, and his belief that she could or would also love him. This is why I needed to get outside of Dostoevsky’s world and into the world of the story… I do not know that I could have seen this so clearly with the specter of his own gambling problems looming over my interpretations of the book. Alexei gambled that Polina would not take advantage of his offer to prostrate himself to whatever her wishes may be. And he was wrong. He gambled that she would see his love for her in his continued trips back and forth to the gambling hall for her. He was wrong. He gambled that he could buy her love in one grand gesture as threw everything he had at her feet… and he was wrong.Eventually, as I suppose is inevitable, he succumbed to the emotional debts he accumulated at fortune’s wheel and lost himself in the “…champagne quite often, because [he] was very sad and extremely bored all the time.” In giving up, Alexei gambled again. This time he gambled that the ball would never land on zero and that his heart was fated to remain in solitude. And he was wrong again. Although it seems as though he was too far gone by the time Astley finally showed him Polina’s true feelings, his number did come up. Alexei, too late, arrived at his conclusion that, “one turn of the wheel, and everything changes.”My optimistic side wants to say that the takeaway is to never stop betting on your heart, but I know that can lead to ruin and you must, at some point, change your bet if you are ever to win. I want to be as fatalistic as Alexei who, “loves without hope” and “loves [Polina] more every day” despite the “unbearable pain of being without [her].” In reality, however, the wheel only turns a finite number of times for each of us. Red or black, high or low, even or odd, the only thing we can know for sure is that the wheel will eventually stop spinning.But we are emotional creatures. So as long as the payoff is out there, I’d rather keep betting on my heart and betting *for* people and *for* love and *for* the things I feel fated to have or to be. Gamble often, gamble wisely, but always bet on the thing you love.

⭐Dostoevsky is my favorite author, and I’ve read all his post-Siberia books numerous times. Until recently The Double was the only book of his I’d read from his pre-prison days. So I’ve decided to make a project of reading/rereading all his books, novellas, and short stories in order. First up was Poor Folk, which was structurally ridiculous and overall mediocre at best. Next was a reread of The Double (I’ll get to a reread oof The Gambler in a while), which was a massive step up in quality,confirming why it seems to be the only pre-Siberia work that is held up with the great later novels. It’s crazy that Poor Folk and The Double were actually released in the same month in 1846, so great is the gap in quality between the two. It’s even crazier that the fashionable literary critics of the time loved the former and hated the latter. They were incompetent idiots.Goliadkin, the hero of The Double, is an amazing character. Dostoevsky puts us inside his head for the entirety of the book, and he is completely insane. He is apparently a paranoid schizophrenic (although I don’t think such a diagnosis actually existed yet in Dostoevsky’s time). He has a constant, hyper-active interior monologue about all his various “enemies” who are wearing masks to try to hide their true characters, while the pure-hearted Goliadkin never wears masks and is always true. These phony enemies are all around Goliadkin and out to destroy him. Several times he gets so worked up about this thinking about this while talking to other characters that he suddenly bursts into tears. He keeps trying to break into his boss’ house and having to be thrown out of the place by force.The actual Double is the apotheosis of the various enemies he perceives. Goliadkin is apparently seeing hallucinations at times and having trouble distinguishing betweens dreams and reality, but is the Double of him real or an hallucination? Both somehow seem to be true at the same time — other characters at times have no idea what Goliadkin is talking about when he complains about the Double’s treachery, but at other times the Double plainly does actually interact in real ways with other characters and is referenced in letters written by others — which adds to the book’s generally disorienting tone.The book is also very funny at times in a dark way. We the readers hear Goliadkin’s crazy interior monologue repeatedly, so we get the idea of how he perceives this conspiracy against him, even though we can see it’s insanity. But sometimes he switches from going on about this in his head to saying it out loud in bits and pieces to other characters, and they of course have no idea what he’s talking about and sometimes think he’s accusing them of being these dishonest schemers and get insulted. So I think maybe five times in the books he has a conversation with another character that leaves them “in extreme astonishment.” A line like that comes up repeatedly after his various bizarre encounters with his co-workers and other people and always made me laugh out loud. Goliadkin also has a bizarre style of talking to other people (besides the insane contents of his paranoid ramblings) that I found really funny, specifically he feels the need to repeat the other person’s name in every sentence or more than once in the same sentence during these incoherent rants.

⭐At school our sixth form was split into maths/science and arts. One day in the library I saw a fellow on the arts side looking at this sentence: “La Vie avec un grand V,” which he’d translated as, “Life with a big V.” I tapped him on the shoulder. “It’s ‘Life with a capital L’.” But he wasn’t having it, especially not from a maths/science man. “It says V, not L, Morris.”And that’s how I felt about this translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era, according to The New Yorker. Award-winning, it says here. But they had me struggling through The Double, and maybe it’s my maths/science background, but I found lines like this confusing:”Announce me, my friend, say, thus and so, to explain. And I’ll thank you well, my dear…”Compare that to the Constance Garnett translation:”Announce me, my friend, say something or other to explain. I’ll reward you, my good man – ”At other times we’re told that Mr Goliadkin fled “from the shower of flicks hanging over him”. Mrs Garnett’s translation may have been less precisely accurate, but it wouldn’t leave the brain in palpitations.In spite of that the brilliance of the novelette is undimmed. You might even argue (I’m not) that rendering Goliadkin’s experiences in something that is close to but not quite comprehensible English enhances the sense of nightmare. At any rate, right up to the curiously translated final paragraph (for which, in the absence of a footnote, you’ll need a degree in Russian social history) it’s a completely spellbinding piece of work.I was less captivated by The Gambler. Dostoevsky knocked it off in a month to satisfy a rapacious businessman who otherwise would have owned everything he wrote for the next nine years. I was amused by the narrator’s explanations of why, when a particular number comes up at roulette a couple of times, it therefore can’t come up again for a while – until I discovered that Dostoevsky was for a long time a gambling addict himself and probably believed that. So: a reliable narrator without much self-awareness fails to recognize his true love in life. It does capture a sense of addiction and panic, which probably was helped by the thought of what would happen if Dostoevsky didn’t meet his deadline. The Gambler doesn’t really deserve to stand alongside The Double, but there it is, bringing the average for the book down to 4 stars.

⭐I’ve read most of Dostoevsky and I like the versions by Pevear and Volokhonsky, but I found both of these novellas a bit dull. The Double is based on a nice enough idea – being forced out of your own life by a nastier and more successful version of yourself – but it lacks the psychological intensity and angst which characterise most of his novels. The Gambler is much more accomplished and has its moments of dark humour, but I’ve read it twice (different translations) and both times it just failed to grip me.

⭐I saw ‘The Double’ as a play at the Theatre Royal Bath. It was a very wordy production and prompted me to read the shortish novel by way of comparison.The story is essentially a descent into madness by ‘our hero’ Goliadkin, a lower-middle class office functionary in 1840’s St Petersburg. In today’s terms we would probably see this as a description of schizophrenia as ‘our hero’ tries to work out in his own mind,’…who is the fowler here and who is the bird?’. The reader questions whether ‘Goliadkin Junior’ (his ‘Double’) actually exists. Do other characters see him and interract with him or does ‘our hero’ merely imagine they do so in his own damaged mind?Such a synopsis has an appeal, yet this short story felt like an eternity.1.The writing is turgid and flat. Quite simply due to the fact that Dostoevsky isn’t on very good form with this work.2. There have got to be question marks against the translation. There were many examples, but what was meant by the repeated use of the word ‘flicks’?3. There were some, but not that many, transcription errors. (Actually this kindle version was better than average).How else can one explain away such literary gems as ‘He was driven by fate. Mr Goliadkin felt it himself, that it was fate he was driven by.’ There is more of this gubbins but space here prevents further exposition.Good value that ‘The Gambler’ comes at the inclusive price but some time is needed to restore my faith before attempting it.

⭐Excellent. Good packing

⭐Readers will have widely different views on this story for it depends greatly on the persons believe system about “duality”. The outcome can range from a psychiatric view where the protagonist should be locked up in an insane asylum to an amusing inner debate. Since the writer seem to believe in Cartesian duality of mind & body it is an inner battle where the mind says different things from bodily needs or wants.However, the body does not get a vote, so what I see is a deception of the mind trying to convince me, or Dostoyevsky that all those bizarre wants or needs are coming from the body/brain and as such are responsible since only they can MANIFEST effects we can see or react to.The gambler is clear and well presented, all the more so, since he himself was effected by this addiction, but to bring it in line with the above I would remove any implied projection on the protagonist body, being responsible for what in those days was considered, like all bodily pleasures, a sin. It too is a deception.

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