Unfinished Rant - The Gambler and Apollinaria Suslova
PREFACE - this was an angry rough draft, I haven’t fixed it yet, I don’t feel as strongly at the moment, I had my own stuff going on - YOU’VE BEEN PREFACED!
First the introduction by Edward Wasiolek. He describes Apollinaria’s relationship with Dostoevsky as turbulent and destructive.. She was twenty, a young enthusiastic student aspiring a literary career. He was over forty with a long, successful publishing career. In the intro to The Gambler Wasiolek describes FD as “far more generous about his relationship with her than was Polina about hers with him. Her accounts are self-serving and insensitive to any part of Dostoevsky’s character and actions that do not bare directly on her own feelings and needs.” Her accounts are from her diary. Is she only supposed to write about FD’s feelings in her diary, he can write his own diary and maybe he could learn to handle his emotions better instead of only “feasting on the sufferings and tears of others” as Apollinaria’s sister Nadezhda describes FD’s motivation.
Wasiolek writes that FD version of Apolina in The Gambler is a “more attractive and complex than the living prototype.” Did he know her? Raised a serf among nobles, one of the few free and emancipated women in Europe in the 1860s, her story is one of the most interesting and unique stories of a young women I have ever encountered. This guy must be an idiot.
Anna Grigorievna Snitkina FD’s 2nd wife, the one he married after transcribing The Gambler, is the only "good woman” in FD’s life according to Wasiolek. She was faithful, loyal, sacrificing, a devoted servant in life and after death, a tireless worker dedicated to protecting his name and fame. Men Take Women Give.
“You’re a little late” is what Apolina said to FD after arriving in Paris several months later than expected. Part of the delay was because he stopped in Wiesbaden for some gambling eventually winning 10,400 francs. Some he sent home to cover debts, some he kept, but traveled on to Baden-Baden where he lost it all. Meanwhile in Paris, Apolina met someone else a medical student. FD wants to know all the details, he wants her to be happy, he says “you are the only women who does not demand of a man that he obligate himself in any way, but at what price: a man and a women are not one and the same. He takes, she gives.”
eyeroll. The way Wasiolek describes her, “Polina manipulated with determined and unrelenting cunningness the arousal of Dostoevsky’s passions and the spectacle of his suffering. I can’t read anymore.
(NOTE FROM EDITER: she did read it all, she just hasn’t got around to re-reading it and finishing this summary. Maybe one day she will. Or not)
