A Vindication of Dostoevsky's Gambler Wife
Being the partner of a famous writer—of any person who enters the annals of history—means that public interest in you as an individual will be filtered and refracted through the other person. This is not necessarily tragic or unjust. After all, the reason that most people care about the life of a writer in the first place is because of, and through, their writing. Art is the starting point. One expects that knowing certain biographical details about a writer will offer insight into the meaning of that writer's art. One hopes that understanding the relations and connections, the comings and goings of the living being will reveal some of the enigmatic springs behind their artistic creations. However, just as not every aspect of a writer's life is relevant to their work, each of the writer's personal relationships is not automatically worth exploring.
Yet, some relationships—and certain people—are clearly significant. When a spouse contributes not only to the substance of a writer's art, but helps to ensure the very conditions for that writer to produce, sustain, and disseminate his writings, then we have good reason to make an honest effort to get to know her on her own terms. If it should turn out that the writer's wife has lived a fascinating life of her own—has made her own contributions to the fickle and frequently opaque annals of history—then doing justice to her individuality and agency becomes not merely an aesthetic and historical project, but also a moral one. It is a project of this kind that Andrew D. Kaufman undertakes in The Gambler Wife (2021)[1]—the first book-length treatment of Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, the nineteenth-century woman who decided to become a stenographer and, a little later, to marry Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
In The Gambler Wife, Andrew Kaufman follows all of the classic elements of a story arc, centering Anna as the indomitable protagonist. First, there is the exposition, which begins when, "[o]n the cold clear morning of October 4, 1866, a slender twenty-year-old stenography student in a black cotton dress left her mother's apartment in Petersburg" (ix). The budding stenographer ends up at the apartment of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a writer whom—through her father's influence—she already admires.
Then there is the rising action, as Anna and Fyodor become more intimate and Anna eventually decides to accept the marriage proposal of the already-famous writer. The writer is, unfortunately, impoverished and ill with epilepsy. To boot, he is also weak-willed: not only at the roulette table, or in confronting treacherous family members, but also in the face of a formidable woman and love-interest who goes by the name of Polina Suslova.
There are the various climaxes. Like when Anna assists, through her skill as a stenographer and with the power of her steadfast encouragement, in bringing the novel The Gambler (1866) into existence—just in time to satisfy the cutthroat terms set by the unscrupulous publisher Stellovsky. She thereby manages to save her husband Fyodor from the unhappy fate of losing all of the rights to his writing for the subsequent nine years.
Or, in perhaps the greatest achievement of all, when Anna takes on the role of steward for her husband's career and finds ingenious and unprecedented ways of disseminating his writing, thus "becoming herself the first solo female publisher in Russian history" (295).
Finally, there is the falling action and resolution, most notably when Anna's beloved Fyodor finally passes away. After her husband's death (she would outlive Fyodor for well over thirty years), Anna makes the "excruciating decision" (295) to sell the copyrights to Dostoevsky's works for a lump sum of 150,000 rubles. As difficult as this decision was for her, Anna made it unflinchingly and with her mind set on the larger goal: to secure and expand her husband's literary legacy. The money would allow her, for instance, to create and maintain a Bibliographic Index of Dostoevsky's works. I would also make it possible for her to found a memorial—the F. M. Dostoevsky Museum—within the Moscow Historical Museum. The memorial would allow her painstakingly preserved collection of everything connected to her husband to become the world's.
Kaufman recounts all of this and tells it beautifully and in great detail, without allowing the reader to lose sight of the overall story. The strong narrative arc makes for very compelling reading—one almost forgets that this is not fiction—while the book remains uncompromising in its academic rigor. That the tale of Anna's endeavors has emerged from an impressive body of research is evidenced by the endnotes, which constitute almost thirty pages, as well as by a general note on sources consulted by Kaufman, which adds another six pages. These notes document the claims throughout the main narrative meticulously, yet are easy to disregard for the reader who simply wishes to enjoy the story without getting into source-tracing distractions. Ignoring the notes does come at a cost, since they provide much additional value: Kaufman's additional commentary and careful afterthoughts will interest, if not surprise, even the weathered Dostoevsky enthusiast.
One of the book's recurring themes is that of risk. After all, Anna is characterized as the "gambler wife" for a reason. That Dostoevsky was a feverish gambler is well-known and well-documented, even if Kaufman manages to reconstruct a fresh and engaging narrative about the writer's turbulent relationship with the roulette table. For Dostoevsky, gambling always held the promise—the sickening lure—of breaking free from his many creditors and of finally achieving financial security. He thought that he could see, and somehow directly affect, the strings of fate through the swirling air of the gambling halls. One of Luigi Pirandello's acute observations about the psychology of gamblers in The Late Mattia Pascal (1904/2005) [2] comes to mind. It captures Dostoevsky's persistent state of mind:
"[Gamblers] want, in short, to extract a logic from chance, which is like saying, blood from stones; and they are convinced they'll succeed, today or at the latest, tomorrow.” (51)
While Dostoevsky never succeeded in gambling, his wife Anna did. She wagered in very different ways, as Kaufman shows throughout the book. She took risks when she married a poor, compulsive, epileptic writer; when she stayed with him throughout his many troubles and various betrayals; and, crucially, when she launched a publishing house that would finally provide her family with some actual financial stability. Dostoevsky sometimes won money at the roulette table, but he never transformed the ivory ball into anything truly worth having. It was Anna who was his real prize—the woman who, through her calculated gambles, extracted a livelihood and lifeline for her children, her husband, and herself.
While the bulk of the book is about Anna's life and relationship with Fyodor, as told primarily from the former's perspective—thereby endowing her with a full sense of agency that is often missing from other accounts—the literary and social criticism that is occasionally interjected in the story never feels out of place. To name but one example, Kaufman spends some time discussing Netochka Nezvanova (1849)—a work that Dostoevsky considered to be his first major novel, as well as his literary contribution to the deeply polarized social debates in Russia at the time about women's rights. As Kaufman writes, "Netochka Nezvanova is one of the first works of Russian literature to center, and take seriously, a woman's complex inner life" (75). Anna identified very strongly with this work, whose title translates to something like "uninvited nobody"—a nickname that Anna herself was given by her father, which she always "carried with pride" (11). Anna had devoured Dostoevsky's unfished novel years before she met the author, and Kaufman does an admirable job in drawing out the parallels between the themes of the story and Anna's own life as a woman who would play an increasingly significant role in shaping Russia's literary landscape.
Throughout the book, Kaufman is keen to defend Anna from criticism—particularly from the charges of those who would accuse her of not adhering to the feminist ideas and ideals that gained prominence in nineteenth-century Russia. Although Anna began her career as an "emancipated woman" by refusing a marriage suggested to her by her parents and by, instead, becoming employed as a stenographer, she opted against following through on the entirety of the course preached and pursued by more radical contemporaries (the so-called "female Nihilists" who scorned dominant social and moral norms). Anna married at a relatively young age; she had several children; and she spent a large part of her life championing her husband's person and art. One of Kaufman's major attempts is to show—very convincingly, I think—that Anna's life was in many ways just as radical as the lives of her more revolutionary-minded contemporaries. And not, in any way, less valuable.
Giving Anna her own voice to speak from the annals of history is a moral project not only because she deserves to be seen as more than a minor character in the larger story of her husband's life, but also because her own existence—the series of choices that she made—offers us a lesson, which Kaufman eloquently summarizes at the end of the book:
"Navigating the competing ideologies of her time, working through one misfortune after another, Anna discovered in the end perhaps the most consequential freedom of all: the freedom to choose one's own individual response to one's life circumstances." (310)
[1] Kaufman, Andrew D. 2021. The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoevsky. New York: Riverhead Books.
[2] Pirandello, Luigi. 1904/2005. The Late Mattia Pascal. Translated by William Weaver. New York: The New York Review of Books.