• Paperback
• Condition: Fair
• 238 pages
• Fiction: Classics, Omnibus

Dostoyevsky wrote The Gambler in three weeks in 1866 (whilst at work on Crime and Punishment) to fulfil a contract and raise the wind. No great writer has ever been so obsessed with the despairing possibilities of roulette and the details of the story are entirely authentic.

It also records his passion for Apollinaria Suslova, whose cruelty had totally subdued his imagination.

There were other morbid strands in Dostoyevsky's genius. Bobok is a macabre, satirical conversation-piece in a graveyard, and A Nasty Story, one of his earliest and best, is a nightmare of good intentions gone bad.