Gambling as a Psychological Compulsion: A Freudian Reading of Dostoevsky's The Gambler

Over the course of Dostoevsky's The Gambler (1866), Alexis Ivanovitch is transformed from a scornful spectator at the roulette table into its captive. A close reading of C. J. Hogarth's English translation is combined with four elements of Freudian theory: the tension between the pleasure and reality principles, the repetition compulsion and the death drive, the structural model of id, ego and superego, and moral masochism. "Dostoevsky and Parricide" is approached differently, its claims being tested against the novel and not used to explain it. A first result of the reading is a striking gap between what the narrator says and what he does, for his stated reasons keep changing even though his conduct at the table scarcely alters. The Grandmother's parallel downfall, unaccompanied by any of his motives, locates the source of attraction in the wheel itself. Within the oscillation of winning, squandering and losing, and in a rhetoric saturated with fate, death and resurrection, gratification and self-destruction become all but indistinguishable. The narrator's abject devotion to Polina binds his gambling to guilt and the demand for punishment, although her rejection of his winnings exposes the insufficiency of a purely intrapsychic explanation. The article concludes that Freud's concepts describe the novel's pattern more convincingly than his account of Dostoevsky's life describes the man, and that the novel's achievement lies in the self-excusing voice of its compulsive narrator. Keywords: Dostoevsky, The Gambler, Freud, repetition compulsion, moral masochism