The Gambler

There was a time when the name of the sprawling Union of Soviet Socialists Republics raised memories of reading classic Russian literature such as novels by Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. They are authors of the 19th century, and early 20th in Tolstoy’s case. I read many of their works decades ago, but recently I acquired a copy of Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler,” to remind myself that there once might have been a better Russia, if you can redact its pogroms from memory and think only of its literary heritage. Why “The Gambler”? Because the title also reminds me of the adult neighborhood men that I knew in childhood, almost all of whom engaged in gambling in some way(s) on a daily basis, some of it legal and some of it not. Legal was thoroughbred horse racing when atte…