Dostoevskij's Use of Manon Lescaut in the Gambler

Abstract

tD OSTOEVSKIJ'S NARRATORS are notoriously unreliable. Aleksej Ivanovic, who tells his own story in The Gambler (1866), makes the following remark about his sojourn in Paris: Actually, there is no need to get into all this here: it all might make a separate story, with a different coloring, which I do not want to insert into the present novel.' The fact is, however, that he has already been applying this different coloring (kolorit) for quite a few pages and will continue to do so to the end of the Parisian episode in his tale. His protestation to the contrary is designed solely to draw attention to the change in his mode of narration. This different coloring-one of the salient features of the novel's structure-is used from the middle of Chapter XV to the end of Chapter XVI, after which the original mode of narration is resumed. The event that leads to the change is the breakdown of Aleksej's relationship with Polina. Up to that point the narrative is tense, the colors stark, the characters shrouded in mystery. Chapter I is a textbook model of an opening in medias res: not only is Aleksej writing his diary solely for himself, taking no trouble to explain to the reader who the dramatis personae are, but he himself has just come back to Roulettenburg from a two-week trip and finds himself puzzled by the changes that have occurred in the relations of his associ-