The Gambler Wife

1.

The Decent Thing to Do

Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina was born in Petersburg on August 30, 1846, the balmy feast day of the thirteenth-century warrior-prince Saint Alexander Nevsky, amid the sonorous ringing of monastery bells and the solemn strains of a military band. Later in life, she would say that the timing and ceremonial spirit of her arrival in the world were no coincidence. For like her patron saint, who repelled foreign invaders and united the far-flung tribes of the Great Rus', Anna Dostoyevskaya would become a Russian warrior after her own fashion.

She would begin that journey, paradoxically, in the most westernized of Russian cities, the famed capital built by Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century as part of his project to modernize what he considered a backward society. Peter designed his "window to the West" with charming Venetian-style canals and an orderly grid of narrow streets lined by two- and three-story classical buildings. Adorning the city's center, along the embankment of the Neva River, was the tsar's stately Winter Palace. From here one could see, on the other shore of the Neva, the magnificent Stock Exchange, flanked by two rostral columns and a granite embankment descending to the river, and the Peter and Paul Fortress, the city's original citadel, which by Anna's time had been adapted into a prison for political convicts. (Dostoyevsky himself would be held here for several months in 1849 while awaiting his sentence.) The farther one traveled from the city's center, the seat of its political and cultural power, the dingier the streets and buildings became. It was here, in the cramped, poorly ventilated apartments situated in Petersburg's back alleys, that many of Dostoyevsky's own tormented characters dwelled.

Anna Snitkina enjoyed a comfortable girlhood in her family's two-story brick home not far from the city's center, on a nearly five-acre plot of land at the corner of Kostromskaya and Yaroslavskaya

Andrew D. Kaufman is an associate professor, General Faculty, lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures, and assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia. A PhD in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University, Kaufman is the author of Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times and Understanding Tolstoy, and a coauthor of Russian for Dummies. His work has been featured on Today, NPR, and PBS, and in The Washington Post, and he has served as a Russian literature expert for Oprah s Book Club. Kaufman is the creator of Books Behind Bars, introducing incarcerated youth to the writings of Dostoyevsky and other authors.

Praise for The Gambler Wife:
 
Recounts Anna s agony in scenes as gut-wrenching as any we might encounter in her husband s novels. New York Times Book Review

The Gambler Wife is not only a much-needed act of justice; it is also profoundly entertaining, sometimes funny, and sometimes intolerably sad.   A. N. Wilson, The Times Literary Supplement

Fascinating [and] colorful . . . Kaufman successfully corrects biographical accounts that have 'erased' Snitkina s flair. Highly readable, this page-turning narrative will appeal to Dostoyevsky fans and literature-lovers in general.   Publishers Weekly

Deeply researched [and] informative . . . A fresh look at a spirited woman who played a significant role in literary history. Kirkus Reviews

The story of an intriguing, impressive woman who has too long been treated as a footnote in her husband s story. . . . Feminism, history, literature, politics this tale has all of that, and a heroine worthy of her own turn in the spotlight.   Therese Anne Fowler, bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

With enlightening research and engaging prose, The Gambler Wife recounts the improbable and profoundly influential relationship that lay at the heart of Fyodor Dostoevsky s literary enterprise: his marriage to Anna Snitkina. Hers is an inspiring, unexpectedly modern story of partnership, ambition, and achievement, and Andrew Kaufman tells it brilliantly.
Caroline Weber, author of Proust s Duchess
 
Dostoevsky called her 'the little diamond,' and Anna Snitkina was just that at once brilliant and entrancing, yet rock-hard and indestructible. Andrew D. Kaufman s captivating book restores Anna to her rightful place and opens a window onto a dizzyingly complex relationship that helped to give us some of the world s greatest novels.
Douglas Smith, author of The Russian Job and Rasputin
 
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