A tutor in the household of a bankrupt Russian general plays roulette at a German spa on behalf of people who despise him, and discovers that the wheel is the only honest thing in his life. Dostoevsky wrote it in twenty-six days to beat a contract that would have cost him the rights to everything he had written; he hired a young stenographer to do it, and married her. He was himself in ruinous debt to the tables. Sixty plates of painting from 1836 to 1911, among them Leibl and Spitzweg, gather the period's gamblers, servants and quiet interiors, the same ordinary lives staked at Dostoevsky's table.
