One of the most significant of Dostoyevsky’s existential classics, The Gambler offers a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which Dostoyevsky explores a young man’s exhilarating (and destructive) addiction to gambling. In the disastrous love affairs that follow his misfortunes, Alexei Ivanovich lives and breathes the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk he believes is an essential ingredient of his life.

FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY (1821-1881), one of the greatest of Russian authors, transformed the art of fiction. Author of numerous novels and short stories, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov, he is considered to be a literary colossus, and a central figure in the development of the modern novel.