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

Warmest salutations to our friends nearby and around the world,

We had the great honor of hosting a talk sponsored by the UNESCO/UNITWIN Crossing Institute, welcoming author and scholar Andrew D. Kaufman to speak about his new book: The Gambler Wife: a True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky (published by Riverhead Books, 2021). The book earned a glowing review in a Sunday book review published in the New York Times. The UNESCO Chair also provided a book review describing the following:

In The Gambler Wife, Andrew Kaufman paints a gripping portrait of Anna Grigorievna Dostoevskaya, the great writer’s second wife, twenty-two years his junior, who had such a powerful influence on the shape and substance of her husband’s literary career and legacy. Anna had a self-effacing toughness that shunned the limelight, so it’s high time that we’ve been given the opportunity to discover just how remarkable a person she was in her own right. The book is a page-turner, especially for those with an interest in Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky was a notoriously difficult person – passionate, brilliant, opinionated (with some pretty ugly opinions, especially about Jews), and, in part because of his terrible gambling addiction, often impulsive and downright unreliable. It is sometimes hard to like the man. The genius of the book is that it tells the story of Dostoevsky’s amazing literary career, and of the man behind it, from the perspective of a formidable woman who truly loved her husband in spite of – and in full awareness of – his foibles and imperfections. The result, for me, is a renewed and heightened empathy for Dostoevsky the human being, as well as an empathy for Anna and for how she, as a woman in a male-dominated society, took some necessary gambles of her own in order to ensure the survival and success of her husband’s and her family’s fortunes in an almost unbelievably tumultuous era in Russian history.

– – Dr. Steven Shankman, author of Turned Inside Out: Reading the Russian Novel in Prison and UNESCO Chair in Transcultural Studies, Interreligious Dialogue, and Peace at the University of Oregon

This event took place on Zoom, November 18th, at 5:00 PM (PST).

If you would like to purchase the book in hardcopy and prefer to buy local (if you are residing in Eugene, Oregon), please visit J Michaels Bookstore’s website.

We have posted a video recording of the event up on Youtube for anyone interested in viewing the event! Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wE8wKtNbUQ

Thank you, sincerely.