Professional paper
https://doi.org/10.20471.dec.2021.57.02.11
Review of “The Gambler” and F.M. Dostoevsky in the light of addiction inclination
Jasminka Matić
orcid.org/0000-0003-1591-4406
; Neuropsichiatric Hospital “Dr. Ivan Barbot”, Popovača, Croatia
Abstract
Dostoevsky’s spirit is broken by a difficult childhood, years of imprisonment and forced military service in the difficult conditions of remote Russia, and the shackles of married life with the “sick, hysterical widow ”. Wandering through dreamy Europe made him aware of the attachment to the Russian homeland and revealed love and allusion of peace; he falls in love with Ana by dictating the text of the “Gambler ”, which will provide them with bread and shelter in the days of losing the gambling luck and questionable existence. In his wandering through Europe as the “land of holy wonders”, Dostoevsky informs us through the confessions of the gambler Alexei about the temptations of the “world” addicted to the gambling table. The significance of divisive passions is questioned: those towards women, love and even more, gambling, destructive, demonic. In 27 days while he was presenting Ana with the thoughts of the main character of the “Gambler ”, and she was recording them in a transcript, the writer was going through his own agony. The novel will see the light of day, but unlike Alexei, a character waiting for a new tomorrow to decide on ending a life driven by an unhealthy addictive habit, Dostoevsky, after the novel ends, experiences catharsis and sails into economic security by taking royalties for this and subsequent novels. As when after a stormy night at sea, a sunny morning dawns, a hint of love, happiness and the desired family peace is prayed to the author. Ana will focus the writer, a gambler, on family life and caring for children, and abduct him from addiction by sailing with him to the next “storm”. The basic theme of the novel – the obsession with gambling – is the experience of Dostoevsky, a writer with “a heart in which God and Satan fight, and the pledge is human life.” In the days when in the hustle and bustle of modern life, COVID-19, complete human alienation and escalation of violence we turn to the spiritual, looking for a way out in the metaphysical, surreal, healing and nurturing, andrational and explainable does not offer a final answer, someone seeks a way out of addiction and someone in a classic, something familiar and valuable. Or in metaphysics that goes beyond the physical and the knowable, in an attempt to reach the higher, the spiritual. The return to the great connoisseur of the human psyche, Dostoevsky, in a return to the interest in man, the inspiration of the human and the humane, but also the space behind knowable and the “metaphysical drama”. The idea of the French writer Albarez that for Dostoevsky, “in contrast to most other novelists, man is primarily not a biological, social, economic, psychological, but a metaphysical being”, becomes understandable.
Keywords
Europe; temptations; hell of passion and demons; addiction; gambling; love; metaphysics
Hrčak ID:
257570
URI
Publication date:
1.6.2021.
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