The Gambler

Alexei Ivanovich, a young tutor in the household of a Russian general, follows the family to the German spa town of Roulettenburg, where everyone is waiting — for an inheritance, for a proposal, for luck. He loves the general's stepdaughter Polina, and discovers that the roulette table gives him something love does not: a feeling of control, and then of nothing else at all.

Dostoevsky wrote it in under a month in 1866 to meet a contract deadline, dictating the text to a young stenographer, Anna Snitkina — who a few months later became his wife. He knew the subject well: he struggled with gambling himself.