Episode 633: Andrew Kaufman - The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky
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A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky\\u2019s life\\u2014and 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 \\u201cemancipated girl of the sixties,\\u201d Snitkina had come of age during Russia\\u2019s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky\\u2014a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist\\u2014had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction. Yet in person she found the writer \\u201cterribly unhappy, broken, tormented,\\u201d 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\\u2014launching one of literature\\u2019s most turbulent and fascinating marriages.
The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist\\u2019s freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters\\u2014her husband\\u2019s 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\\u2019s self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe\\u2014even hazarding an audacious turn at roulette herself\\u2014until 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\\u2014and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.