The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

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 "emancipated girl of the sixties," Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky — a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist — had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction. Yet in person she found the writer "terribly unhappy, broken, tormented," weakened by epilepsy, and yoked to a ruinous gambling addiction. Anna became his trusted first reader and confidante, then his wife, and finally his business manager — launching one of literature’s most turbulent and fascinating marriages.

The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who reversed the novelist’s freefall and cleared the way for two of the most notable careers in Russian letters — her husband’s 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. And 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. This is a story that challenges ideas of empowerment, sacrifice, and female agency in nineteenth-century Russia — and a welcome new appraisal of an indomitable woman whose legacy has been nearly lost to literary history.

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