50% OFF! Hot items selling fast—Grab them before they're gone!
Unconditional Satisfaction GuaranteeNo Shipping Fees Above 302 Months to Decide. Returns Simplified.Trade Paperback
A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevskys lifeand became a pioneer in Russian literary history
In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described girl of the sixties, Snitkina had come of age during Russias first feminist movement, and Dostoyevskya notorious radical turned acclaimed novelisthad impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction. Yet in person she found the writer terribly unhappy, broken, tormented, weakened by epilepsy, and yoked to a ruinous gambling addiction. Alarmed by his condition, Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business managerlaunching one of literatures most turbulent and fascinating marriages.
The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelists freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian lettersher husbands and her own. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman reveals how Anna protected her family from creditors, demanding in-laws, and her greatest romantic rival, through years of penury and exile. We watch as she navigates the writers self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europeeven hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herselfuntil his addiction is conquered. And, finally, we watch as Anna frees her husband from predatory contracts by founding her own publishing house, making Anna the first solo female publisher in Russian history.
The result is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russiaand a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.
