“The Gambler” occupies an important place among Dostoevsky’s novels: an adventurous plot based on the writer’s personal experience—his many years of fascination with roulette. Excitement, the destructive passion for gambling, and love entanglements draw the novel’s characters into a mad and endless whirlpool of events unfolding at a fashionable resort. The book also includes the well-known satirical novellas and stories “Uncle’s Dream,” “The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants,” “Another Man’s Wife and a Husband Under the Bed,” known from numerous film and stage adaptations beloved by audiences, as well as “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”—literary sketches in which travel impressions are combined with descriptions of various aspects of life in European countries, chiefly France and England, and the author’s reflections on the destinies of the West and Russia.