40 pages • 1 hour read
Fyodor DostoevskyThe Gambler
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1866A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Alexey Ivanovich
Alexey Ivanovich is the novel’s protagonist and narrator. After assisting Grandmother at the roulette tables where she first wins, Alexey reflects on his situation in Roulettenburg: “I was far away from home in a foreign land, without a job and without the means for existence, without hopes” (207). He has limited funds and prospects, and he is also toward the bottom of an elaborate social hierarchy in a world where this matters deeply. However, as he says, “I wasn’t worried at all” (207) and retains a vital and distinctive relation to the world. This is because, despite all his external circumstances, of his love for Polina. As he says, “I want to fathom her secrets […] all I want is to be in her presence, in her light, in her radiance, for ever, always, my whole life” (207). Alexey’s passion for Polina gives his life meaning and pushes him to think and to act. He first gambles because Polina needs him to. Despite his anxieties about his place in a society that values hierarchy and status deeply, Alexey defies social propriety and insults the baroness to prove a point to her and to make her laugh. He is even willing to challenge des Grieux to a duel for her sake.
However, the unifying purpose that Polina gives Alexey runs aground when he starts gambling for himself. Ironically inspired by the desire to save Polina’s honor, Alexey becomes addicted to gambling, and his decline begins. Seduced by the thrill and risk of the game and the money he wins, Alexey quickly forgets about Polina. As he says, “…from the moment I touched the gaming table yesterday and started raking in packets of money—my love seemed to have retreated into the background” (250). Polina senses that his passions and priorities have changed and, feeling that he no longer truly loves her, she leaves him for Astley, plunging Alexey deeper into despair and addiction. The time he spends in Paris with Blanche only deepens his sense of despondency and pushes him to gamble full time, between stints in prison and working as a lackey. When Astley finds him over a year later, he discovers that Alexey is a lost and apathetic man. His old vibrancy has disappeared, and his life and dreams have been narrowed to a singular focus on the roulette wheel. Even the news that Polina still loves him after all is not enough to free him from his life of addiction.
Polina Alexandrovna
Toward the novel’s start, Alexey describes the moment when he fell in love with Polina. As he says, “one evening about four months ago, when I had just come here, she was talking heatedly with des Grieux. And she looked at him in such a way… that later when I went to my room to go to bed, I could imagine that she had given him a slap” (159). While Alexey has a somewhat warped view of Polina’s personality, her independence and her defiance attract him to her. Subverting the traditional stereotype of female passivity and submissiveness, Polina is assertive and combative and willing to speak her mind. She also has a sense of humor and irony. When Alexey is waxing lyrical about being her “slave” and being willing to do anything for her, she calls his bluff, telling him to insult the baroness in French. As she says to Alexey, “instead of all these killings and tragedies I just want to have a laugh” (157).
In this way, Polina wants to be more than just a conventional love interest. She wants to be loved for her distinctive and subversive character, and as an equal, and not merely as a male fantasy or a “good marriage prospect.” This is why she is so disillusioned by the behavior of des Grieux. Although she was attracted to des Grieux at first, seduced by his superficial charm and elegance, she comes to loathe him when she realizes that he only wants her because of her possible inheritance. She understands that he views her only in purely conventional terms. The same is eventually true with Alexey. Though it is well intentioned, Alexey’s offering her 50,000 francs again makes her feel like she is being reduced to a conventional “prospect“ whose love can be bought and bargained for. This is why she chooses Astley in the end. While she continues to love Alexey for the connection they had, and what he recognized in her, she also sees how he has become corrupted by economic thinking. As Alexey’s gambling addiction worsens, she comes to see that Alexey has also been corrupted by the idea he can win love or happiness with enough money.
The General
At the beginning of The Gambler, Alexey remarks on how if the general started talking about something “more significant than the usual everyday conversation, then he never finished saying what he had to say” (149). This is in the context of Alexey’s remarks about the German method of accumulating capital. Thus, from the start, the general, nominally the head of the family and group to which Alexey is attached, is portrayed as having a declining sense of mental acuity and composure. However, this decline accelerates rapidly due to the general’s involvement with the young French woman, Mlle Blanche. The general is in love with Blanche, and she wants to marry him for the status his title as “general” confers. However, she will only do so on the condition that he receives Grandmother’s inheritance as well. As such, when Grandmother shows up in Roulettenburg the general is anxious. Not only is Grandmother far from dead, but she proceeds to gamble away most of the inheritance that the general was counting on. The stress of this leads to a fraying of the general’s sanity. For example, in response to these events, he threatens to have Grandmother arrested and even begs Alexey to help win back Blanche.
When Blanche finally leaves the general for Paris with Alexey, this process of decline is then completed. Surprisingly, Blanche allows the general to join them in Paris when he follows her there. She even has him “follow her around everywhere” in public, “on the boulevard, riding in the carriage, to the theatre, to visit acquaintances” (238). This is because the still distinguished-looking general lends Blanche a certain amount of social cache. However, behind the public presentation, the general is a broken man. As Alexey says, observing him in Paris, “there was a lot that he did not even remember; he had become dreadfully absent-minded and had adopted the habit of talking to himself” (258). The general lives for the attention of Blanche and enters a lifeless, vacant state whenever she is gone. In the end, when Grandmother’s inheritance finally comes through, Blanche does marry the general, but this is purely so that she “will get into a good circle” (261), and she has no intention of any romantic involvement with him. The general is by this stage too far gone to realize any of this. Indeed, he is so unobservant that he goes into their marriage “perfectly happy” (261), and does not even notice that Blanche’s real lover attends their wedding.
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