The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

by Andrew D. Kaufman

A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky’s life—and 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 “emancipated girl of the sixties,” Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky—a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist—had 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 manager—launching one of literature’s most turbulent and fascinating marriages.

The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist’s freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters—her husband’s and her own. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman reveals how Anna warded off creditors, family members, and her greatest romantic rival, keeping the young family afloat through years of penury and exile. In a series of dramatic set pieces, we watch as she navigates the writer’s self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe—even hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herself—until 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 Russia—and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Russia, Biography Memoir, Literature, Russian Literature

400 pages, Hardcover

First published August 31, 2021

About the author

An innovative, award-winning teacher of Russian language, literature, and culture, Dr. Andrew D. Kaufman holds a Ph.D. in Slavic languages and literatures from Stanford University and has spent the last twenty years bringing alive the Russian classics to Americans young and old. Dr. Kaufman, whose titles include Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times (Simon & Schuster, May 2014), Understanding Tolstoy and Russian for Dummies (coauthor), is a featured Tolstoy expert on Oprah.com, and he is frequently invited to discuss Russian literature and culture on national and international television and radio programs.

An internationally recognized Tolstoy scholar, Dr. Kaufman has lectured at the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and at the Leo Tolstoy Museum and Estate at Yasnaya Polyana.

Dr. Kaufman also trained and worked as a professional actor for close to a decade. He helps people appreciate the rich tradition of Russian literature, and draws on his acting skills to create captivating and enlightening talks, as well as inspirational readings from the Russian classics.

Currently he is a Lecturer and Faculty Fellow at the University of Virginia, where he founded and teaches a community-based literature course, “Books Behind Bars: Life, Literature, and Leadership,” in which students lead discussions about Russian literature with incarcerated youth at juvenile correctional centers in Virginia.

Reviews

[Jennifer ~ TarHeelReader · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really, really loved this.

When I was in high school, I was scared to read Crime and Punishment. It was one one of those books that was supposed to intimidate. I remember the experience of reading it, and while it was dense, I was swept up.

So, reading a book about Dostoyevsky’s wife, Anna, who led a most fascinating life; well, it was a shining experience. Anna and Fyodor met when she applied to be a stenographer for him, an author she already thought walked on water. Keep in mind that the time period was the 1860s, and Anna describes herself as a feminist.

Fyodor is not exactly who Anna thought he would be… The man behind the books is addicted to gambling and sick with untreated epilepsy. With Anna’s help, steadfast commitment, and sheer tenacity, both of their lives change for the better. She even founds a publishing house as she works to get her husband out from under contracts where he was taken advantage.

I’m so grateful I read this. This is a page-turner of a biography, and Anna’s story leaves a mark.

I received a gifted copy.

Many of my reviews can also be found on my blog: www.jennifertarheelreader.com and instagram: www.instagram.com/tarheelreader

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book provides a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s second wife, Anna (1846-1916). Of course readers of this book also learn much about Fyodor himself and their relationship. The reader of this book doesn’t need to read far to learn that Anna filled a role in Fyodor’s life that went well beyond the usual role of wife.

It could be argued that without the support and influence of Anna, all books written by Fyodor after “Crime and Punishment” could not have been written, and if they had been written they wouldn’t have been the same books. Additionally it is possible that after Fyodor’s death, without Anna's extensive efforts to promote and publish Fyodor’s writing and memorialize his legacy, we today would not consider Dostoevsky to be a great writer, let alone having ever heard of his name.

Fyodor first met Anna as a hired stenographer to help him meet a deadline with draconian deadline terms. Years earlier Fyodor in dire need of money had accepted a monetary advance for writing a novel. Several years had passed, it was 30 days from deadline, and he hadn’t done any work on the book. With the heroic help of his newly hired stenographer he was able to dictate the novel, The Gambler, and meet the deadline.

So he asked her to marry him. I can understand why he wanted to marry her. She was over twenty years younger than him, and she obviously could be helpful in his getting books written. It is less clear as to why she was willing to marry him. Apparently she recognized his genius abilities, and she decided to take him on as her life’s project.

Their marriage had a very rough first four years. They took a honeymoon to Europe, fell into serious debt due to gambling, borrowed more money and lost it, and thus ended up so seriously in debt that they couldn’t return to Russia for fear of ending up in debtors prison. Their only way out was to write and sell more novels, but Fyodor had a compulsion to gamble monetary advances away.

It was painful to read about Fyodor’s gambling addiction. At points it appeared that the self loathing created by the addiction was part of his creative process. It seemed as though they were doomed in a spiral from which there was no exit. The cycle eventually was broken and they returned to Russia, and apparently Fyodor never gambled with money again. This dramatic change in behavior seems to have occurred partly as a result of a change in the nature of their relationship. Fyodor became dependence on his wife in an almost spiritual way—she became Fyodor’s confessor. I have placed a portion of the author's discussion of the change in their relationship in this .

Dostoyevsky may have given Anna an education in life, but it was she who brought him back from the brink. “You alone are my savior,” he told her in that frantic letter. She rescued him from bouts of despair, salvaged his career, and saved his life on more than one occasion, cupping his head in her hands during his epileptic seizures, taking care to place her body between him and the floor to protect him from injury. As he acknowledged, “you have pawned everything of yours for me in these four years and roamed after me, homesick for your native land,” losing their beloved child and jeopardizing her own health along the way.

It was Anna who gave Dostoyevsky permission to end his crazed quest for acceptance, to let go of the roulette table—the last of his mistresses, that psychological security blanket he had clung to against the day when Anna’s love might suddenly dry up. The steadiness of that love was altogether new in his life, and this more than anything emboldened him to undertake the risk of being fully vulnerable before another human being. “No, now I’m yours, inseparably, entirely yours,” he wrote her from Wiesbaden, and he was.

For much of his life, Dostoyevsky had experienced love as a matter of either domination or submission. Anna helped him to rewrite that script into a new narrative that was more like a kind of profound interdependence. It would take months, even years, for this new understanding to change his behavior—and their relationship would never entirely shed its volatile power dynamic—but the germ of the fresh narrative emerged clearly, as if in a flash, on the evening he fled that Wiesbaden casino.

After their return to Russia Anna was very much involved in her husband’s writing career. She set up their own publishing company, the first operated by a woman in Russia. Fyodor did not make contractual agreements without her approval—unusual for that era.

After Fyodor died Anna ramped up the publishing business and managed to earn more money than they ever did while Fyodor was alive. Anna ended up spending much of her money on memorials, museums, colleges, scholarships, and libraries dedicated to remembering Fyodor’s legacy. Unfortunately, her philanthropic expenditures led to an economic pinch when an economic recession occurred, and she was force to sell all rights to Fyodor’s writing.

She lived to see the Russian Communist Revolution, and survived one harrowing encounter with a revolutionary mob. It wasn't certain how the mob would respond since she was a capitalistic businesswoman. As it turned out in this particular encounter they respected her because of her husband's cultural legacy.

[Micah Cummins · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Gambler Wife Kaufman presents a fantastic analysis of Dostoevsky's stenographer turned wife, turned ultimate savior, Anna Snitkin. From her first days working for the great Russian writer to her last years fighting for the preservation of his legacy, Anna Dostoevskaya was a woman of immense fortitude, intelligence, and grace.

During Dostoevsky's darker years, often spent betting away the family's money on the green felt tables of German roulette houses and casinos, Anna was forced to find ways to keep the family afloat, and her husband out of debtors prison upon return to his native land. Born with an incredible inclination towards business and enterprise, as well as harboring a strong passion for independence, Anna was often the one who pushed Dostoevsky in the right direction when it came to his business dealing, saving him, more than once, from misleading, or even disastrous contract deals with publishing houses.

Anna also became the first woman to start a publishing house of her own and became the first female in Russia to own such an enterprise. Everything he knows about Dostoevsky, and the fact that we even still have access to his works, is all because of his wife Anna. She fought for the preservation of his name and works, as well as for the ability for the copyright to be kept in the family to ensure his works continued publication and distribution. A fabulous book, and one that any reader of Dostoevsky must not pass up on. Five stars.

[Marietta McCarty · Rating 5 out of 5]

“On the cold, clear morning of October 4, 1866, a slender twenty-year-old stenography student in a black cotton dress left her mother’s apartment in Petersburg.” From that first line of The Gambler Wife to the tender last sentence, Kaufman's rendering of flinty, complex Anna Snitkina hits the jackpot. We walk, shiver, warm, calculate, cook, panic, write, scrounge, imagine, withdraw, flower, and love with this young woman for the rest of her life. Long-hidden behind her literary husband Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anna now basks in a new light.

A sensitive scholar, Kaufman writes in graceful, clear, robust language, while taking us on an intimate journey not only to nineteenth-century Russia, but to Germany and Switzerland, as well. Fluent in Russian, he excavates sources revealed for the first time. The thunderstorm in Dresden, catching hiking Anna by surprise, drenched me, too. Kaufman quotes from her diary: “The sight was truly marvelous, and took me right out of myself. I trembled, but not so much from fear as from being carried away with awe before the inexorable powers of nature.” His intuition that this storm was for her an epiphany, that “she would blaze a path of her own,” propels her and the reader. Until Kaufman's dogged research, “…standing quietly in the shade of the giant, Anna is often erased from the historical record.” No more.

The roulette wheel spins. The Gambler Wife runs the table.

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely account of Anna Dostoevskaya and her role in her husband's life and work—as well in Russian history and literature more generally.

As I will be reviewing The Gambler Wife for The Household Words, I will only leave this brief note here (for the time being).

A special thanks to my girlfriend for giving me the book.

[Dawnny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrew D Kaufman shines the light and history on a woman who most might not know anything about. I certainly didn't. The life of Anna Snitkina, who was a courageous woman behind the scene in her husband Fydor Dostoyevsky writing career. This book goes into his life, his writings, his gambling addiction and epilepsy. This shines the light on Anna, and her life who became the first woman in Russian history to start her own publishing company. I'm a big history buff and I'm so glad I read this and learned so much about both of them. I really enjoyed this.

Dawnny Ruby
Novels N Latte
Hudson Valley NY

[Rich Yavorsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 19th-century Russian Eliza Hamilton: TGW is satisfyingly well-researched, vivid, and seemingly complete (40% of the book is notes/biblio). It's fitting that Dostoyevsky's real-life wife Anna would be a memorable, complex character in the canon of Russian literature. Loving wife to a gambling addict, or independent feminist? Dostoyevskaya lived to demonstrate that a question like that is a fool's choice.

“If he thinks I am his slave, there to obey his every whim, he makes a great mistake,” she told her diary. “It’s time he abandoned this delusion of his."

Kaufman places many of FD's novels in context of Anna's timeline, which gives each title an added dimension for the familiar reader. (Kaufman also provides full plot summaries for FD's four major titles--an upcoming spoiler is somewhat predictable if you want to skip ahead.) TGW starts out a little slow by necessity, but by the time Fydor and Anna marry early in the book I was all-in.

“I cannot live without you, Anya,” he told her while kissing her good night late one evening in Geneva. “It was for those like you that Christ came. I say this not because I love you, but because I know you.”

TGW is must-read for any Russian lit fan, and also stands on its own for the uninitiated. Favorite highlights below.



-----SPOILERS BELOW-----




“Well, then, we’ll see how it works out,” Dostoyevsky muttered vaguely. “We’ll give it a try.” “Sure, why don’t we try it,” she said.

“Life is everywhere,” he wrote to his brother Mikhail on that day, “life is in ourselves, not in the exterior.”

He discouraged her from “frivolous novels” and insisted that she limit her theatergoing to plays that “convey high and noble impressions to the spectators,” not “empty triviality.”

“So it follows,” he gushed, “that I took you by surprise and extracted your consent by force! Now I see that the novel I told you was better than any I ever wrote—it had an instant success and produced the desired effect!”

Dostoyevsky was capable of astounding insensitivity to his wife’s travails, and he often demonstrated this same inability to read people and situations in other aspects of his life—most notably in his gambling sprees and business dealings. But his failure to come to his wife’s aid when she most needed him put their young marriage at risk, leading us to wonder how this writer, who captured human failings and their conseuences so vividly in his art, could so callously disregard the needs of the person closest to him in real life.

On one occasion, Dostoyevsky pawned Anna’s wedding ring, and within hours he had gambled away the money he’d received for it.

“If he thinks I am his slave, there to obey his every whim, he makes a great mistake,” she told her diary. “It’s time he abandoned this delusion of his.” And so, audaciously and in secret, Anna herself went to gamble.

Just as he needed to feel that voluptuous vertigo of watching the roulette wheel spin, he needed to feel the danger inherent in artistic creation—the danger of staking everything on an idea without knowing if it can be achieved.

“I cannot live without you, Anya,” he told her while kissing her good night late one evening in Geneva. “It was for those like you that Christ came. I say this not because I love you, but because I know you.”

“People living in such complete solitude and isolation might, in the final analysis, either come to hate each other or else draw close together for the rest of their lives,” she reflected many years later. “Fortunately, it was the latter which happened to us.”

In her European exile she was forging a path uniuely her own, one defined by neither the feminist nor the traditional narratives of her past, but rather by a creative synthesis of the two, a kind of radical traditionalism.

Dostoyevsky, almost in spite of himself, was discovering that his “gambler wife,” as he had once teasingly called Anna, was proving just as bold at gambling as an entrepreneur as he had been at the roulette tables—and far more adept.

There was a core irony to their arrangement, with Anna playing the part of the very sort of capitalist her husband so derided, yoking them to the image of the “materialistic” Jews, even as she worked to promote his message that such “foreign” values as ambition and enterprise were abhorrent.

the cold hush of the cemetery, the writer said, “When I die, Anya, bury me here or wherever, but mind, don’t bury me in the writers’ section of the Volkov Cemetery. I don’t want to lie among my enemies—I suffered enough from them while I was alive!”

Anna viewed his message as one of reconciliation and resilience, a necessary inspiration for a Russian people in the throes of social and spiritual chaos and searching for a positive ideal to live by. And in those trying months following the death of her son, it was a message that Anna herself must have welcomed.

Upon learning during one such visit that Kuznetsov gambled at cards, Dostoyevsky sternly chided the lad, “You’re not to play cards any more. You will read books.”

This honest mistake speaks volumes about the implicit bias readers and scholars alike have brought to their understanding of the Dostoyevskys’ relationship. Indeed, Anna’s presence can be felt everywhere in these final years of Dostoyevsky’s life—in his writings, in his speeches, in the very fact of his physical survival—and yet, standing uietly in the shade of the giant, she is often erased from the historical record.

Dostoyevsky argued the exact opposite: perhaps, he said, “a southern woman or some Frenchwoman” (a possible allusion to Turgenev’s longtime affair with Pauline García-Viardot) would have left her husband and gone with Eugene, but the Russian woman would always refuse to build her happiness on the unhappiness of others.

Not only had she made Dostoyevsky’s creations possible; in a way, Anna was the ideal behind his creations. She was the living embodiment of the principles of Russian courage, moral integrity, and active love that had become central to his worldview, that he celebrated in his Pushkin speech—which would be remembered as one of the greatest in Russian literary history.

I finally became desperate and said to myself, “My God, how they torture me! What is it to me, ‘what Russia has lost’? What do I care about Russia now? Can’t you understand what I’ve lost? I’ve lost the best person in my life, my sun, my god! Take pity on me, take pity on me as a person, and don’t tell me at this time about Russia’s loss.’ ”

In that moment of unrest after the assassination, it became clear to most Russians that the era of potential reconciliation between the state and the people had ended and another, far bloodier one had begun. And no one felt this more acutely than Anna, for whom the implacable march of history compounded her sense of personal loss. “I was clearly aware of one thing only,” she later recalled: that from that moment on, my personal life filled with immeasurable happiness was finished, and that I was orphaned in my heart forever. For me, who loved my husband so passionately, so utterly, who reveled in the love, friendship and respect of this man of such rare noble spirit, the loss was irretrievable. In those dreadful moments of parting I thought I could not survive my husband’s passing, that my heart would burst any minute.

And from her struggles—with an addict husband, with their yearslong exile, with crushing poverty, with the loss of two children and finally a husband, all by the age of thirty-four—she had learned to view compassion as the highest human value. “There’s nothing in life more valuable than love,” Anna told an acuaintance who cared for her in the weeks before her death in 1918. “One should forgive more often—assume guilt in oneself and soften the edges in others. Choose your god once and for all and without looking back serve him over the course of your entire life.”

In a letter to one scholar, she insisted that her husband was to literature what the physicist Röntgen, who discovered the X-ray, was to the human body—the inventor of a wholly new means of peering inside the human soul. “To judge Dostoyevsky on the basis of his political (and other) views would be the same as judging Röntgen on a similar basis.” The novelist’s real contribution, Anna argued, was that he depicted “abysses and depths” of the human soul “that remained hidden from even Shakespeare and Tolstoy.”

Despite warnings from her doctors, she sprang immediately into action, using her connections to lobby government officials to change the law. Against all odds, her efforts proved successful: Russia’s legislative assembly reconsidered the matter, making a number of changes to the law that would protect the families of Russian artists, including reverting to the original limit of fifty years. It was a victory, on behalf of intellectual property rights for artists’ families everywhere, for which Anna has never received proper credit.
!!!While the new generation of revolutionary feminists was seeking to uproot the past and replace it, Anna was trying desperately to preserve it. “I live not in the twentieth century, I have remained in the seventies of the nineteenth,” she told Leonid Grossman, a prominent Dostoyevsky scholar and biographer, in the winter of 1916.

Anna Snitkina Dostoyevskaya found a purpose to guide her life: to honor her own experiences and potential while celebrating the work of the artist, the man, she loved. In so doing, she created a model of female agency that still has the power to inspire those of us—women and men alike—who seek meaning and fulfillment in our own troubled times.

“I’d give a lot, Anyechka, to find out what it is you’re writing in those little suiggles of yours,” Dostoyevsky said one evening early in their honeymoon. “You’re saying bad things about me, no doubt?” Indeed she was, along with other, more touching and poignant things—almost all of it in shorthand, to ensure that her personal diary would remain hers alone.

[Susan Ballard (subakkabookstuff) · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my reading goals has been to tackle a Dostoyevsky novel, particularly 𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. I haven’t accomplished that yet. 📘 Have you read any of his books?

Some of you may know that Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a Russian author in the 1800s, had an unhappy and hard life. He lost his father; Fyodor was imprisoned and sent to a Siberian labor camp; he suffered from epilepsy and had a gambling addiction. I am told his pain and misery are evident in his writing.

In 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐚𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐫 𝐖𝐢𝐟𝐞, Andrew Kaufman brilliantly shifts the focus onto Anna Snitkina, a young woman who in 1866 applied to be Dostoyevsky’s stenographer. Anna considered herself a “feminist, a girl of the sixties.” She wanted to be financially independent and forward-thinking. She had been in awe of Dostoyevsky’s writing and his visions but found him to be depressed and irritable when she first met him.

Anna becomes Dostoyevsky’s employee, his trusted reader, and eventually his wife. While she may have given up some of her freedoms, and some would say her feminist idealisms to help her husband, Anna would go on to be one of the first female publishers in Russian history.

This is such a well-researched biography, yet it’s not dry; it reads more like a novel. And I love learning about the strong, intelligent women behind famous men throughout history!

“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

Thank you to @suzyapprovedbooktours and @andrewd.kaufman for a spot on tour and a gifted copy.

[Linda Zagon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew D. Kaufman, the author of “The Gambler Wife A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky” has written a complex and intense Biography of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his wife Anna, The genres for this novel are Biography, Literary Biography, Russian History, and Russian Literature.

Anna Snitkina, as a young girl would read Dostoyevsky’s articles, and was quite an enthusiastic fan of his. Anna took a stenography course, and when the author was looking for help, Anna would help by taking notes. There was a big age difference, and Dostoyevsky, not only had Epilepsy but other challenging problems.

The author started to “court” Anna, and they did marry. Dostoyevsky felt he had an obligation to his brother’s widow and stepson to financially support them. Dostoyevsky and Anna were constantly living on the edge when it came to surviving. Anna would pawn things to survive, and Dostoyevsky was obsessed with gambling. Often, Anna would have to ask her mother for money.

The author was flawed, but he was a creative man, and the political times in Russia often influenced how the couple lived. They did live in Europe for a while. Anna was a “modern” woman of the 1860s, but was more moderate. As she matured, she managed to learn how to deal with her husband’s lapses and problems. Anna wanted to understand his obsession with gambling and went to the gambling tables to see how this would make her feel.

Anna was intelligent and became intrigued with publishing her husband’s books, which would open the doors to many opportunities, but women were often not given the same privileges, nor respect as men,

Andrew D. Kaufman has done tremendous research and provides new insight into the dynamics of Dostoyevsky and his wife. I would recommend this biography to those readers, who enjoy Russian History and Literature.

[Michele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a fascinating book! Despite all the Russian lit I've read over the years, I knew very little about Dostoevsky as a person, and nothing at all about his wife. Spoiler alert: Dostoevsky was a real piece of work, and extremely bad at handling the realities of life. He was a heavy gambler and often in huge debt, but he was also expected to support his extended family, including a horrible stepson from his first marriage. Thankfully, along came Anna Snitkina and straightened his s**t right out. Despite having no experience and no money, she figured out how to get the family on a path to stability and solvency, allowing Dostoevsky to focus on his greatest work, The Brothers Karamazov. She was an honest-to-God disruptor of Russian publishing in the 1870s, but I won't say any more. read the book
: )

[NewPages]

Usually, reading a biographical book is not as enjoyable and exciting as this impressive one by Andrew D. Kaufman. The Gambler Wife is the life story of a brilliant woman who played a huge role in her husband’s writing career, their love story marking the Russian literary history of the 19th century. The interesting life of Anna Snitkina, a successful Russian feminist, and her husband Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the famous writer of all time, will be remembered for many decades.

Guest Post by Joyce Bou Charaa.

Read the full review at the NewPages blog.

[Kellyn Kemmerer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imagine meeting your fave author but then you marry him and then you find out he’s addicted to that sweet sweet roulette wheel

For real though a very fascinating portrait of Anna and her husband that made a lot of the themes of his books make so luck more sense. Was also interesting to be given more context about what life looked like at the time.

[Becky Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book, and it gave me a lot of insight into the life of one of the most brilliant literary minds to ever live

[Sandeep Chandran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leo Tolstoy to Anna: many Russian writers would feel better if they had wives like Dostoevsky's

An absolute read to all ardent followers of dostoevsky
Situations that triggered the plot of his future works and how the love and strong character of Anna Snitkina saved and motivated a once political prisoner into an all admiring personality worldwide through his works

[Tammy Snead · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating biography of Anna Dostoyevskaya. Anna met Fyodor Dostoyevsky when she was a stenographer in 1866. Anna worked for Fyodor while he was writing his book, The Gambler. Anna became one of his biggest fans and in spite of the twenty plus years age difference they married in 1867. Fyodor was a conservative and Anna considered herself a “feminist”. She was an independent woman who in the beginning was infatuated with Dostoyevsky’s writings. However, she learned that Fyodor had a depressive nature, gambling addiction,and suffered from untreated epilepsy.
Anna was a forward thinker and despite her husband’s belief that women were not fit to work, she became the first Russian woman to become the first female publisher.

This was a very interesting book! I really enjoyed learning about Anna. The book reads like a fiction book although it’s a biography.

[Rajul Jain · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I got back to reading in 2021, I adopted an approach of picking books at random and on each of my #libraryruns I would whimsically pick out from varied genres. This unplanned manner of getting books has exposed me to newer and interesting subjects. I believe that I have grown as a reader over the last 6 months more than ever.

The Gambler Wife was such a book. Leisurely scrolling through the #mcklenburgcoutrylibrary I stumbled upon this book with a very interesting description and without further ado I must mention that it totally lives upto the expectations I had.

👉The book is a non fictional account of Dostoyevsky's marriage to Anna Snitkina. Anna who joined the great Russian author as a stenographer ends up being married to him and their marital alliance though rife with monetary troubles and family drama gives Anna an opportunity to go down in the history as an entrepreneur.

👉 The book documents the couple's journey through Dostoyevsky's gambling bouts, Anna's grit to stand by him through thick and thin and her sharp acumen which led them to not only tide over financial woes but also put Dostoyevsky in limelight in his final years.

👉I really like the narrative in the book as despite being non fiction it is able to hold your attention. The author has also done a good job of relating the actual life of Dostoyevsky to his literary works. It provides a sneak peek into the Russian way of life in 1800s and was thus very educative for me.

👉The most beautiful part is the way in which Anna's life, who is a dedicated wife but knows how to get her way is captured. She was a woman of substance and is truly inspiring in many ways. 👍⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

[Chelsie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve not read a lot of novels about Russia, so this was an interesting read. It did read a bit more like a textbook and would at times flip between a storyline and facts. This novel is based on the life of the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the young wife Anna, who helped him become a somewhat respected author of his time.

Anna had idolized Dostoyevsky and so when she got offered an opportunity to work as his stenographer, she could hardly turn down the offer. Over twenty years her senior they did not start out quite on the right foot and often Dostoyevsky would forget her name and act rash, but with time he realized that Anna was not like the other women of the time and she had intelligence and absorbed her surroundings.

The two had quite a tumultuous life and often it was Anna who got them through whatever life threw their way. The two were always righting an uphill battle and many were waiting at their door, palms open wanting a payout of some sort. Dostoyevsky himself was not innocent and caused a lot of the hardships they had through life but Anna always found a way and would steer him back.

A previous marriage with a step-son, gambling, a previous lover and now her family and the family they had created – there was always someone needing something or something needing to be paid. Reading this novel, and the way they lived I often wondered how they made it. I cannot even imagine how Anna got through each day knowing there’d be something to handle. She was unlike most Russian women of her time and many thought Dostoyevsky a fool for how he allowed her control and to run things, including his writings.

This family was interesting to read about, and the author did a great job of incorporating a lot of the historical events that were also happening in Russia during this time. Thank you to Suzy Approved Book Tours for the invite and to the author and Riverhead Books for the free novel.

[Zuly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This presents a fuller picture of the marriage than the Reminiscences of Anna. It's difficult to forgive Dostoyevsky of his gambling, but it was on occasion sanctioned by his wife as a creative jump-start. And when he gave it up forever, he becomes more human. His wife was extraordinary in starting her own publishing company to get them out of debt and in ensuring that her husband be fairly represented in history and the literary world. I will return to a couple of his works to see how they affect me now that I know the story and the politics behind the creation.

Russia
Switzerland
Germany

[Andrew Canfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman who Saved Dostoyevsky contains top notch prose and is an excellent example of historical writing at its finest.

Historian Andrew D. Kaufman told the story of Anna Snitkina, the stenographer-turned wife of Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The book is a sort of biography of these two (with the heavier emphasis, as the title and subtitle indicate, on Anna) and uses their life story as the backdrop for commentary on Russia in the mid-to-late nineteenth century.

The story kicks off with twenty-year-old Anna, who had been recommended by Professor Olkhin, her stenography instructor, interviewing with Fyodor at his St. Petersburg home on the corner of Malaya Meshchanskaya Ulitsa and Stolyarny Pereulok.

She had been a fan of his writing up to that point, which by 1866 had included Notes from the House of the Dead and The Insulted and Injured.

Anna would get the job, and before long her new employer would begin dictating his next work, The Gambler, to her. The book indicates that it must have seemed surreal to Anna that she had gone from an admirer of his work from afar to employed by and married to him within one year.

Fyodor had by that point in his life (he was twenty-five years Anna's senior) been through a lot.

He had been banished to a Siberian work camp by Czar Nicholas I, but even this awful fate had to be viewed as luck. Prior to this, he and others convicted of participating in the anti-government Petrashevsky Circle had been sentenced to die by firing squad in 1849 only to be pardoned moments before the triggers were pulled.

There had been less public difficulties as well, as Fyodor and his first wife Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva had divorced two years earlier.

The book is a master class in blending the lives of Anna and Fyodor, who would marry in 1867, into an immensely readable romp through the late nineteenth century.

Fyodor himself had gone from a bit of an intellectual radical in his Petrashevsky Circle days to a defender, through his writings, of a more centrist view of Russia's "civilizing" mission in the world. Kaufman makes clear that Dostoyevsky viewed himself as possessing a pro-Slavic viewpoint toward Russia's role in bringing about a more improved world.

In this, he supposedly rejected the materialism of the West and Europe in favor of a sort of Orthodox Christian mystic viewpoint that he felt would ensure Russia took the lead in bringing about a better society.

These views would find their way into the themes of his various books like The Brother Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.

Fyodor's writings would often appear The Citizen and The Russian Messenger, and Anna became adept at managing the sort of renumeration her husband would receive for what often were serials prior to becoming novels.

Ivan Turgenev was a Russian writer whose pro-Westernizing views were a sharp counterpoint to Dostoyevsky. The book recounts a pair of dueling speeches these two writers gave at the 1880 Moscow unveiling of a monument to Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.

Apparently Fyodor's pro-Slavic, anti-Westernizing speech was a success. To hear The Gambler tell it, the "impact of the speech was overwhelming. When Dostoyevsky finished, he was answered by applause that lasted half an hour. Women fell before him and kissed his feet; some actually passed out in front of him. Enemies embraced and wept in one another's arms, telling (him) 'It's your who reconciled us, you, our saint, our prophet!"'

What role did Anna play in all this?

While The Gambler holds her up as certainly being a feminist relative to her era, she seemed to reject those who pushed too hard for changes in Russian women's rights. In this, she mirrored her husband's uneasiness with the Russian radicals who tried to use extreme means to bring about the downfall of Romanov czardom.

She instead asserted her agency by proactively selling rights to her husband's books to interested parties, placing ads for new editions of his works, and eventually becoming one of the first Russian women to set up a publishing house in her own right to publicize Fyodor's novels.

Her penchant for business ensured the family did not starve, something made more challenging by the money Fyodor would frequently lose in casino resort towns like Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden.

She also had to deal with Fyodor's sister-in-law (the wife of his late brother Mikhail) and stepson Pasha from the failed marriage to Maria Nechayeva, two family members constantly hitting Fyodor up for money and, in Pasha's case, doing their best to sabotage the relationship between him and Anna.

Literary journal editors like Mikhail Katkov frequently owed Fyodor money for his installments to their journals and would drag their feet when it came to payments; it was Anna's tough-minded skills that often had to be recruited to see that these much-needed payments were forwarded.

The gambling reference in the title is not by accident.

Over and over again, the book details Fyodor's trips to Germany, detours and getaways he often takes in order to satiate his need for the roulette table. Kaufman indicates that the Russian writer would have been diagnosed with gambling addiction in today's day and age, noting how he and Anna would often pawn needed items in order to generate the necessary funds to keep his gambling (at which he had a mixed record) going.

Although a staunch Russian nationalist, Fyodor was an opponent of the anarchist groups of the sort Vera Figner might have been inclined to join. These groups carried out assassinations and attempts on the lives of Russia's czars, circles which one day would become the spearheads of the 1917 Soviet uprisings. Fyodor spoke ill of their methods and was critical of the usage of violence and over-the-top means to create social changes best brought about through a process of evolution.

The Gambler: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman who Saved Dostoyevsky paints a portrait of a marriage which in many ways was ahead of its time. Anna was a strong-willed wife with a penchant for business not often seen in the late nineteenth century; she was a stenographer turned wife turned promoter of the business side of her husband's literary talents.

The relationship between her and Fyodor was a loving one, although she struggled to shake her fears that he was renewing a fling he had previously had with Polina Suslova. (These fears were unfounded.) As unlikely as it might have seemed, she also saw his gambling addiction to a successful conclusion. He quit cold turkey in an almost religious-like conversion experience when it dawned on him just how much self-inflicted damage his lack of self-control at the roulette wheel was causing.

This book made for a really fantastic read. It is sure to fill readers in on its contemporary Russian era while at the same time deeply humanizing Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Anna Snitkina.

The Gambler should be commended for the richness and the depths it plumbs to bring out the inner motivations of its two main characters, and for this it earns a four bordering on five star rating.

-Andrew Canfield Denver, Colorado

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anna Snitkin was hired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky to be a stenographer for his book The Gambler. Anna became more than a stenographer. She became his second wife, editor, muse, and savior. Fyodor had a gambling problem that kept them in debt and relied on loans and contracts to publish his books.

Anna protected her family from creditors and for a time they left Russia in fear of debtors prison. They pawned their belongings to survive. Returning to their beloved Russia, Anna becomes the first woman in Russian history to found her own publishing house so she can publish her husband's books and pay their debts.

This book is a biography of a woman who was ahead of her time . It is a love story of a strong woman who was the back bone of her family. The Gambler Wife is well researched and well written. I am now interested in picking up one of Dostoyevsky's books.

[Debbie Rozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m going to be honest and tell you that I’m not much of a Russian literary aficionado. I’ve never read CRIME AND PUNISHMENT or any other works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. (I have since reading this biography downloaded THE GAMBLER and am listening to it.)

I tell you all this to say that even though I don’t know anything about Dostoyevsky I absolutely loved this biography about Dostoyevsky’s second wife, Anna.

The author does a wonderful job of setting the stage by telling about the author, his works and both Dostoyevsky’s and Anna’s lives not only up to the point they meet but also through their married life. The book finishes up telling about Anna’s life as a widow once Dostoyevsky dies in 1881.

The background of Russia and the cultural shift of how women were being thought of and how they were perceiving themselves was explained clearly and helped me understand exactly what was going on during that place and time of the late 1860s through the end of the 19th century in Russia.

Anna met Dostoyevsky when she took a job working for him as a stenographer as he dictated his novel THE GAMBLER to her. There was a 24 year age gap between Anna and Dostoyevsky.

Dostoyevsky suffered from a gambling addiction as well as epilepsy and had constant financial woes. This biography does a beautiful job telling about Anna’s strength and her fortitude as she runs her home and starts her own publishing house featuring her husband’s works.

This was an easy to understand biography that showcases an impressive woman who took care of family, home, and business.

[Marianne G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intéressant d'en apprendre plus sur la vie de Dostoïevski mais surtout de sa femme qui a vraiment fait en sorte qu'il devienne la légende littéraire qu'il a été. Par contre un peu long par moment.

[Klissia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography about Anna  Snitkina ,wife  of the famous  russian  writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky is really a page - turner book  with  a entertaining and outstanding clear narrative  ,who  throw the  light  in the life of  a really interesting  woman of her time, a “girl of the sixties,” almost  one of the suffering  characters  of fiction works of his  husband. Here she is real ,flash and blood and shines in the eyes of the reader, in her  imperfect but life changing ,ambigue decisions like  a woman, a wife , a mother and a businesswoman. I felt uneasy in starting reading this  book: if my admiration to the writer  work  lessed after have  read   the relates  of his  inner  life? Good thing this dont  occur. Dostoievsky  was  a troubled person, a narcissist like almost  every "artist ",but her redemption and humanity was present here  and  all his  life and legacy. Preserved  and saved  thanks  to his equaly  genius wife Anna ,who deserves accolades,recognition of being a great and resilient human, a feminist, a entrepeneur, who stand  for herself  and for her beloved  husband. She  confronted a life  of misery,harsh judgements (even today) about  herself with  a obstinate will and love.
Overall  a good work that  embroided the public and intimacy  life  of Anna Dostoyevsky  with  the  turmoils of Russian society, well written and researched , a example on a non fiction book   that proposes reflections, entertains and still managed to being informative about russian literature.

[Alex | reader_mama · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1866, Anna, a young stenographer, meets a famous Russian author, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The two strike up a business partnership, then friendship, and eventual romance which sees highs and lows for many years to come.

This was a super informative book. If you are interested in the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, I would highly recommend this. And even if you aren’t, you should give this a try. I was super interested in the life of the author and his wife, Anna, who is credited with “saving Dostoyevsky”. An immense amount of research went into this book, and while it was packed with hard facts, it read seamlessly like a novel about two people who find each other, despite the odds against them.

[Julie]

I've always been curious about Dostoyevsky, but quite frankly haven't connected with his titles I've read. I thought it might be Russian authors in general, but I love Chekov, Tolstoy, Turgenev. I've just never made connection with Dostoyevsky. So, that's an even a higher level of accomplishment by Andrew Kaufman, he made it interesting even though I hadn't read Dostoyevsky's body of work, and wasn't particularly interested in him. His writing style made it even more interesting. As I read it I kept thinking this is every bit as good as an Erik Larson title or Nathaniel Philbrick.

[Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gambler Wife is a thoroughly-researched and well-told story of Anna Snitkina, the wife of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It provides insight into the author's life, exposes the story of a woman who was a fierce business woman, and allows the reader to better understand how he was able to succeed. Kaufman presents a woman who is real, highlighting all aspects of her life, including the difficulties of working for and living with the famous author -- a a narcissist who often took her for granted. But he isn't the focus here. She is, and she was a genius, feminist, intelligent woman.

[Saskia Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was such a great read. With impeccable research and a lot of empathy, Kaufman paints a vivid portrait of the oft-forgotten character in the story of Dostoevsky's life. I was so inspired by Anna's quiet yet fearless trailblazing, and grateful to Kaufman for finally bringing her to life on the page.

I also learned a lot about her husband's life as a writer, the Russia they called home, and the impact that literature had on culture and politics at the time. I ordered the Brothers Karamazov right away, eager for more!

Highly recommend this book 👍

[Lisa Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fascinating look at marriage and the relationship between Anna and Dostoyevsky. I love that she was able to contribute so much to their success privately and publicly, and I found it surprising that I knew nothing about her before reading this book. It's very well-researched and well-written, and I would love to see it made into a movie. This is a story that deserves to be told across more than one medium to reach a broader audience.

I received a gifted copy in exchange for an honest review.

[Larry · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good read. So much I did not know about Dostoevsky who led a fascinating life. The better story is that of his wife, Anna. I feel she is represented from the inside out. She suffers so much on the outside the reader cannot imagine her strengths, her sorrows, her love and ambition. But inside she knows that the pain and suffering is an expression of her love which makes her “roller coaster” of a life she would not have traded for all the world.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t know much about the life of author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but found this book that focused on his wife Anna incredible. I loved the writing style and found the book almost poetic in a way. Anna found a way to straighten Dostoyevsky’s life out, and make something out of nothing so he could concentrate on his writing. Very well written book and I definitely recommend it.