THE GAMBLER WIFE

A fresh look at a spirited woman who played a significant role in literary history.

Kaufman, a scholar of Slavic languages and literature, especially Russian, creates a sympathetic portrait of Anna Snitkina (1846-1918), who married Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1867 and kept his legacy alive until her death. Drawing on letters, Anna’s diaries (including her secret diary from the turbulent first year of their marriage), memoir, and others’ recollections of her, Kaufman contextualizes his subject’s life in a period of roiling social and political unrest, including the rise of Russia’s first feminist movement. Anna was a “tangle of contradictions.” She was “a social progressive with conservative values, a Russian patriot who happened to be half Swedish, a serious student prone to infectious laughter, a decisive young woman with nerves of steel who nevertheless suffered bouts of mania, a pragmatist and a mystic.” Hired to be Dostoevsky’s stenographer, she came to the job already enamored of the novelist’s characters; when Dostoevsky proposed, she readily accepted. During their 14-year marriage, Anna bore the burden of her husband’s narcissism, misogyny, and infidelity; the “destructive mania” of his gambling addiction; his unpredictable epileptic seizures; and the deaths of two of their four children. Their finances were so precarious that they frequently had to pawn their possessions. At times, Anna pushed him to gamble—once even joining him at roulette, leading him to call her his “gambler wife”—apparently because she believed that gambling fueled his creative spirit. They desperately needed the money from his writing. Kaufman interprets Anna’s behavior toward her husband as shrewd and strategic, although he concedes that contemporary readers may see their relationship “as an unhealthy codependency between a volatile artist and submissive peacekeeper.” Certainly she showed considerable strength when she took control of the production and sale of her husband’s works. As one of Russia’s first female publishers, she proved an astounding success, and she defiantly burnished Dostoevsky’s posthumous reputation.

A deeply researched, informative literary biography.