Canadian Slavonic Papers: High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth

Ian M. Helfant. The High Stakes of Identity: Gambling in the Life and Literature of Nineteenth-Century Russia. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002. xxv, 211 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $79.95.

Ian Helfant's new study of gambling in nineteenth-century Russia makes a significant contribution to a subject that has not previously received this kind of extensive scrutiny. Helfant acknowledges the earlier work by other scholars, most notably Iu.M. Lotman and V. V. Vinogradov, but goes beyond the texts analyzed by these and most others to attempt a much broader picture of gambling's significance in the life and thought of Russia's elite, especially in the early decades of the nineteenth century. His aim, as he explains it in the introduction, is to focus on the interaction of real-life and literary gambling experiences in order to "elucidate the significance of gambling as an index of character in nineteenthcentury Russia and to trace its role in the fate of the gentry over the course of the century" (p. xxii). To do this, he emphasizes the "eclectic" nature of his approach as he attempts "to transcend disciplinary boundaries in order to examine the deeply influential myths and discursive formations that underlie the cultural construction of identity" (pp. xxi-xxii).

Helfant starts with an overview that catalogues numerous works which feature gambling themes, and also describes the gambling-related cultural codes that governed the upper-class response to gambling as an institution. He notes that he views his task as "both reconstruction and deconstruction," first presenting the "performance" of gambling and then interpreting the way this performance influenced lives and literature (p. xv). He begins the body of the study with a look at the way Russian aristocrats reflected on their own and others' gambling experiences in memoirs, and traces the mythological underpinnings of these attitudes before looking at the confrontational nature of card play as an alternative but parallel behavior to dueling or battle (pp. 10-11).

In the second and third chapters, Helfant shifts to a more intensive look at the way gambling entered into the personal lives of several influential Russian nobles, including Alexander Pushkin and the flamboyant cardsharp F.I. Tolstoy. The final chapters move from "life" to "literature," and examine texts that range from well-known works like Lermontov's Masquerade and Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades," to a relative unknown like Begichev's The Kholmsky Family. In his "Afterword," Helfant extends the discussion beyond the eight-year period into which most of his texts fall ( 1828-1836), drawing in later literary and personal gambling texts (Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky) to show how attitudes changed later in the century.

Perhaps one of the greatest contributions Helfant makes is precisely his decision to move beyond some of the most "obvious" literary texts (like Dostoevsky's The Gambler, or Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time) and examine works that have been almost completely forgotten (The Kholmsky Family) or have almost disappeared entirely (Life of a Gambler, an 1826 work of which only one copy is known to exist). This conscious attempt to look broadly allows Helfant to base his evaluations on a more representative body of cultural specimens, and certainly helps lend increased credibility to his findings. Unfortunately, Helfant's explanation of his methodology comes only in the "Afterword," where he writes that his exclusion of better known works is based on his desire to situate a text within its cultural context, including the social and historical factors that may have influenced both its creation and its reception, and it "seemed more advantageous to pursue this sort of analysis on a small group of lesser-known texts [...] than to add to the scholarship on [...] better-known works" (p. 117). This also helps to explain the relatively narrow chronological range of the primary texts Helfant examines, since the bulk of the analysis pertains to about a decade from the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s. Applying Helfant's approach to a much broader time span would provide material for multiple volumes, and the narrow focus proves quite useful. What would have been more helpful, however, would be to have the rationale for this selection appear in the "Introduction," rather than in the "Afterword," where Helfant notes that his approach has imposed "limitations" that "[narrow] the range of literature" considerably (p. 1 16). Within this context Helfant's attempt in the "Afterword" to extend the study's range is quite logical, but without an understanding of his methodology it might seem like a belated attempt to cover the rest of the chronological span promised in the book's subtitle.

Overall, Helfant's study is well-structured, clearly written and provides an excellent broad overview of gambling's cultural and literary relevance in the lives of Russia's upper classes, especially in the early part of the nineteenth century. The book features the typical excellent production values of Northwestern's Studies in Russian Literature and Theory series, but several features deserve additional comment. The chapter length is somewhat uneven, ranging from the twenty-eight page Chapter One, to the twelve-page Chapter Five, where some additional focus on the relationship between the two works discussed there (Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades," and Shakhovskoy's Moneymadness) would have been welcome. The book's 211 pages include 129 pages for the main text, followed by a twenty-six page Appendix containing the original texts of all prose quotations in the main text, and then Notes, Bibliography, and Index.

Donald Loewen, Binghamton University (SUNY)