Dostoyevsky, Fyodor

New York. 1966. Penguin Books. Reprinted Penguin Classic Paperback Edition. Very Good in Wrappers. 0140441794. Translated from the Russian & With An Introduction by Jessie Coulson. 238 pages. paperback. The cover shows a detail of 'The Salon d'Or' by W. P. Frith in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. keywords: Penguin Classic Paperback Russia Literature Translated 19th Century. FROM THE PUBLISHER - Executed at speed in under four weeks, THE GAMBLER (1866) conveys all the intensity and futility of an obsession. Dostoyevsky was writing from first-hand experience. Only a few years before, hurrying to meet Apollinaria Suslova in Paris, he had stopped at Wiesbaden on impulse and begun to play roulette. He had been completely seduced. Among the characters caught up in this account of life around the gambling tables, ‘Grandmamma' and silly, mercenary Mademoiselle Blanche are unforgettable cameos. The novel's hero - gripped by exhilaration and despair, ‘a poet in his own way' - is drawn with the concentrated force of memory; while in Polina Dostoyevsky bequeaths his most tender portrait of the proud young woman who had captured his imagination and came to haunt his later novels. This Penguin Classic also contains two of Dostoyevsky's best blackly comic stories: BOBOK and A NASTY STORY. inventory #29006 ISBN: 0140441794.