Tracing Dostoyevsky’s Wayward Path Through Three German Spa Towns

25.09.2024 - 10:07 / nytimes.com

“I have been five days in Wiesbaden and already I have lost everything, the whole lot, even my watch,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in the fall of 1863 to a fellow Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev. It had been only a few months since Dostoyevsky had played his first round of roulette at the casino in Wiesbaden, Germany, and already he had cycled several times through a sequence known to gamblers everywhere: Win big, and then lose bigger.

In the years that followed, Dostoyevsky traveled frequently between the flourishing German spa towns of Baden-Baden, Bad Homburg and Wiesbaden, trying his luck again and again in their opulent casinos, a stomping ground for Europe’s aristocracy. By 1866, he had entered into a perilous wager with his publisher to avoid debtor’s prison: Deliver a new novel by Nov. 1 or lose the publishing rights to his entire catalog.

The result was “The Gambler,” dictated in three weeks to the stenographer who would become Dostoyevsky’s second wife, Anna Grigoryevna. The novel follows Alexei Ivanovich, a young Russian tutor who travels with an imperious general to the fictitious German town of Roulettenburg and spirals into compulsive gambling.

His only book set primarily in Germany, “The Gambler” is in many ways a repository for the acerbic disparagements of a writer who had a love-hate relationship with the country. “I sit brooding in this melancholy little town,” says Alexei, the book’s narrator, “and how melancholy the little towns of Germany can be!”

Though modeled most closely on Wiesbaden, Roulettenburg is most likely a composite of the three spa towns where Dostoyevsky gambled — and lost. Baden-Baden is still a tourist destination, but none of them are the hot spots they once were. Although they long remained popular with Russians, that all changed when Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 led to increased travel restrictions.