Dostoevsky’s The Gambler

This volume considers Dostoevsky’s The Gambler from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on its psychological, cultural, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic aspects. Dostoevsky presents gambling as a fundamental problem of human existence, with implications in the realms of philosophy, religion, and aesthetics.

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Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Gambler is one of the most profound literary works to treat the phenomenon of gambling with a remarkable depth of psychological analysis and a wide-ranging cultural and philosophical exploration of obsessive behavior, from addictive gambling to erotic passion. This novel delves into the cultural, psychological, and philosophical issues surrounding games of chance such as temporality, freedom, rebellion, choice, uncertainty, determinism, and creativity. This is the first book in English dedicated to The Gambler. This volume considers the phenomenon of gambling from a broad interdisciplinary perspective, focusing not only on medical and psychological concepts of gambling as pathology, but also on the broader cultural, philosophical, religious, and aesthetic aspects of the problem. What triggers fascination with risk-taking and various aleatory activities? What are the relations between gambling, play, and creativity? Can gambling be seen as a form of social or existential rebellion and protest or even a quest for freedom? Scholars from a variety of fields, including psychiatry, psychology, philosophy, literary studies, and musicology, have contributed to this volume and analyzed Dostoevsky’s view of gambling as a fundamental problem of human existence, with implications in the realms of philosophy, religion, and aesthetics.