jugador

A tutor to a Russian general's family in a German spa town descends into obsession in this volcanic short novel. Alexei Ivanovich is brilliant, bitter, and paralyzed by his own contradictions, desperate to prove himself, contemptuous of the wealthy circles he serves, and utterly captivated by Polina, the general's stepdaughter, whose own cruelty and allure drive him to madness. But it is the casino roulette that truly consumes him. In the space between a single spin of the wheel and the next, he experiences the full delirium of possibility: he could be saved, destroyed, reborn. Dostoevsky, writing from his own harrowing experience with gambling debt, transforms the green felt table into a theater of existential crisis. The prose pulses with neurotic energy, dialogue crackles with subtext, and every bet mirrors the character's fundamental inability to act with clarity in love or life. This is psychological fiction stripped to its most urgent form, a man watching himself unravel in real time.