In nineteenth-century Russia, gambling at cards was a favorite leisure activity of military officers, and casinos in Germany and France became magnetic destinations for the landed gentry. Gambling was a way to test one’s nerve and courage, to risk honor, property, and status. Fueled by alcohol, the pleasurable distraction and means to stave off boredom often turned into an uncontrollable addiction. Obsessive gambling became reckless self-destruction, a form of suicide, which often followed total ruin. Like warfare and dueling, gambling was a high-risk and sometimes deadly activity, where greed and crime could flourish. When connected to love, it made a perfect literary subject.

Dostoyevsky believed that Russians, torn between extremes of behavior, were fatally attracted to risk. Chekhov’s biographer writes that “Pushkin gambled away his poetry, Tolstoy gambled away his house, and Dostoyevsky gambled away everything he had.” Dostoyevsky quarreled bitterly with Turgenev after the former had borrowed money for gambling debts and failed to repay it. Even the cautious Chekhov tried his luck in Monte Carlo and placed a few modest bets on le rouge et le noir. Pushkin and Lermontov took the ultimate risks and were killed in duels.

These writers portrayed their experiences in fiction, and the psychological motivation of gamblers became the central subject of five representative works published within three decades: Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades” (1834), Gogol’s play The Gamblers (1836), Lermontov’s story “The Fatalist” in A Hero of Our Time(1840), Tolstoy’s story “Two Hussars” (1856), and Dostoyevsky’s