| Review: Ian M. Helfant. «The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia» |
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| Volume 06-07 (2003-04) - Vols. 6-7: Reviews / Рецензии | |||
| Written by Finke, Michael | |||
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Ian M. Helfant. The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. xxv + 211 pp. 0810118637. Cloth.
Now that Ian Helfant's volume on gambling in nineteenth-century Russian culture has appeared, one cannot help wondering how the topic remained unaddressed by a monograph in English until this point: gambling is without question one of the master themes of Russian literature of the period. It is central to many of the liveliest episodes in the biographies and texts of its great authors, and it certainly deserves treatment alongside such others as apocalyptic thinking, suicide, holy foolishness, dueling, nihilism—we could all complete such a list, and though contents might vary somewhat, gambling is sure to be present. Helfant's book has two particular merits: his approach follows the pattern of cultural studies in ranging beyond canonical literary texts to memoirs, popular literature, anti-gambling tracts, the historical record, and what can be reconstructed of common behavioral codes among the noble class; and his interpretive framework is very sharply defined and productive. In a fairly slim study he manages to put before the reader a wide variety of material, setting familial masterpieces beside rather obscure but fascinating sources, and he applies an interpretative lens that makes this material cohere remarkably well.
Gambling is understood here as a highly encoded arena of social behavior, where players enact social identities; in one of the blunter formulations, “Gambling was a primary means for young gentlemen in nineteenth-century Russia to express their identity" (64). Equanimity in the face of losses at the gaming table demonstrates one's nobility—in a manner similar to facing fire in the ritualized situation of a duel, or on the field of battle. But Helfant demonstrates how this rather simple aspect of the semiotics of gambling operates in surprising, subtle, and often contradictory ways. In the case of young Pushkin, for instance, anxieties regarding his not entirely noble "first commercial acts" as an author are assuaged by speaking offhandedly of having gambled away a manuscript, when in fact he had received payment for that manuscript, whose value exceeded the debt it was used to settle (50). And like dueling in the treatment of Irina Reyfman, engaging in "forbidden games of chance" that are highly codified—and connected, moreover, with the nobility's code of honorable conduct—becomes an act of "empowerment and self-liberation" in the face of an oppressive tsarist regime; all the more so when losses are grand (64-65, 171n).[1]
Helfant demonstrates his interpretation of gambling most persuasively by exploring the areas where it threatens to break down. Such is the case with card-sharping, and in the remarkable career of Fyodor Tolstoy, who could cheat at cards but retain his noble identity through recourse to the trump card of dueling: An ardent gambler with a reputation for cheating, such as F. L Tolstoy, could portray his cheating not as a brazen and dishonorable attempt to make money off his peers, but rather as one facet of the insolence that was accepted by many as part of the bretteur's conduct. Readiness to duel if accused of cheating was a necessary ingredient in this performance. (42) Such is also the case in his treatment of the theme in a text from later in the century: in Dostoevsky's The Gambler, money “plays a much more concrete role than in many previous depictions of gambling in nineteenth-century Russian literature," and the "myth of the beau joueur and the idea of gambling as a noble pursuit" that had sustained the literary and behavioral codes earlier in the century are mocked (127, 128). But even here gambling remains a powerful sign of identity, for The Gambler advances "the notion of Russians as desperate gamblers" (129). Whereas early in his book Helfant speaks of Russia's importation of card play, gambling, and the mythology surrounding it from Western Europe, in his treatment of Dostoevsky's Russian gamblers abroad gambling "performs" a distinctively Russian national identity. And though a rather circumscribed socio-psychological understanding of gambling defines the book, here (and in instances elsewhere) Helfant suggests corresponding individual psychological motivations: Dostoevsky's characterization of gambling as a Russian trait helps him cope with his individual failures as a gambler (129).
Helfant's juxtaposition of canonical literary texts with memoirs, popular literature, and works by lesser authors makes a strong case for the usefulness of less creative treatments of the theme, which tend to manifest rather clearly and unambiguously the fundamental cultural codes surrounding gambling. In his nuanced interpretations of the works of "high" literature (and in the artful lives of men like Pushkin and F. L. Tolstoy), by contrast, these codes are almost always deployed in complicated and contradictory ways. Thus Prince A. A. Shakhovskoy's stage adaptation of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades," Moneymadness (Krizomaniia, 1836), which tends to reduce Pushkin's story about gambling to stereotypical conventions, can shed light on Pushkin's subtle and ambiguous manipulations of these same codes.
In addition to the texts mentioned above, the book offers readings of Lermontov's Masquerade, the six·volume didactic novel of D. M. Begichev, The Kholmsky Family, memoiristic anecdotes of the gambling practices of Pushkin and Lermontov, and memoirs and letters by such figures as Nikolai Grech, Petr Viazemsky, Faddei Bulgarin, and many others, both well-known and obscure. The volume includes a twenty-five page appendix listing the original texts in French and Russian of all lengthy quotes (and some shorter ones) translated in the volume's body—a remarkable luxury afforded by the press, and one which ought in principle to be praised, but here appears questionable, given the nature of the material and the kind of reading undertaken by the author.
The overriding interpretation of gambling as "performing" a noble class identity necessarily limits the scope of the book; rather than refer to all of nineteenth-century Russia in his title, Helfant may have done better to refer to Romantic Russia of the first half of the century. But this is a quibble with the title only, and by no means suggests a failing of the book, which is utterly convincing regarding the material it addresses. Here in St. Louis in recent years, no fewer than five riverboat casinos have opened within a half-hour's drive from where I sit. Billboards entice with luxury cars awaiting their winners, and every few months the local news tells the story of some unfortunate—usually a middle-aged woman—who has been arrested for embezzling impressive sums from her employer to cover gambling expenses. In the face of such sordid tales, one could only wish for the kind of semiotic density Helfant excavates in stories about gambling in the first part of Russia's nineteenth century.
Michael Finke
Citation:
Download: [1] Irina Reyfman. Ritualized Violence Russian Style: The Duel in Russian Culture and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
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