Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

Kaufman, Andrew D.

Paperback

Biographies GeneralLiterary FiguresRussian History

ISBN10: 0525537155
ISBN13: 9780525537151
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: Aug 30 2022
Pages: 400
Weight: 0.78
Height: 1.09 Width: 5.48 Depth: 8.11
Language: English
FINALIST FOR THE PEN JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY

Feminism, history, literature, politics--this tale has all of that, and a heroine worthy of her own turn in the spotlight. --Therese Anne Fowler, bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky's life--and became a pioneer in Russian literary history

In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described girl of the sixties, Snitkina had come of age during Russia's first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky--a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist--had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction. Yet in person she found the writer terribly unhappy, broken, tormented, weakened by epilepsy, and yoked to a ruinous gambling addiction. Alarmed by his condition, Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business manager--launching one of literature's most turbulent and fascinating marriages.

The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist's freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters--her husband's and her own. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman reveals how Anna protected her family from creditors, demanding in-laws, and her greatest romantic rival, through years of penury and exile. We watch as she navigates the writer's self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe--even hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herself--until his addiction is conquered. And, finally, we watch as Anna frees her husband from predatory contracts by founding her own publishing house, making Anna the first solo female publisher in Russian history.

The result is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russia--and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.

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