| Abstract: | My article contends that Dostoevsky’s short novel, The Gambler, is marked by a fundamental conflict of temporalities. While the novel seems to embrace bourgeois optimism and the hopeful narrative temporality that serves as its most resourceful literary embodiment, it also seems to adhere to a strikingly anti-teleological and circular narrative structure. This affirmation and denial of temporality as linear, purposive movement is the appropriate narrative emblem of the peculiar world of Roulettenburg and its inhabitants, a world where beginning and end continually risk equivalence and where the parameters of structure have therefore begun to dissolve. What emerges is an acceptance of inevitable boredom, of permanent failure to resolve conflict, that is both constricting and liberating. As an artistic principle of form, this failure declares a “poetics” of hesitation whose temporal dimensions brilliantly reflect the fundamentally ambivalent eros of the gambler, the latter’s inability to accept or escape from a debilitating presentness. In creating this kind of narrative conflict, Dostoevsky reverses the characteristic romantic obsession with the allure of pregnant immediacy that is an illusion of god-like vision to which only a most ungod-like being could succumb. |
