The Gambler
Fyodor Dostoevsky · first published 1867
Written in twenty-six days to escape a contract, and later made into an opera by Prokofiev.
6 versions · 1919–2016 · screen, stage
Dostoevsky had signed away the rights to everything he would ever write unless he delivered a new novel by a fixed date. He dictated this one to a stenographer, finished in time, and married her. The book is about a man who cannot stop gambling; it was written by a man who could not either, at a desk, against a clock.
Prokofiev set it as an opera, and film versions have arrived from 1919 to the present in half a dozen languages. None of them can reproduce the thing that makes the novel unbearable, which is the narrator’s voice explaining, quite reasonably, why this next spin is different.
Written in twenty-six days, 1866
Dostoevsky had signed a contract that would have handed a publisher the rights to everything he wrote for nine years if he missed a deadline. He hired a stenographer, dictated this novel in under a month, delivered it in time, and married her within the year.
The setting is a German spa town of the kind Russians of means went to for the season, where the casino was the point and the waters were the excuse. He knew them: he had lost heavily at Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden, and would go on losing for another five years.
On screen
5Film and television, earliest first.
- 1919 The Spinning Ball Rudolf Biebrach
- 1968 The Gambler
- 1977 The Gambler Karel Reisz
- 2007 The Gamblers Sebastian Bieniek
- 2016 El jugador Dan Gueller
On stage
1Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.
- 2000 The Gambler Sergei Prokofiev
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.