“I have been five days in Wiesbaden and already I have lost everything, the whole lot, even my watch,” Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote in autumn of 1863 to a fellow Russian novelist, Ivan Turgenev. It had been only a few months since Dostoyevsky had played his first round of roulette at the casino in Wiesbaden, Germany, and already he had cycled several times through a sequence known to gamblers everywhere: Win big, and then lose bigger.
In the years that followed, Dostoyevsky travelled frequently between the flourishing German spa towns of Baden-Baden, Bad Homburg and Wiesbaden, trying his luck again and again in their opulent casinos, a stomping ground for Europe’s aristocracy. By 1866, he had entered into a perilous wager with his publisher to avoid debtor’s prison: Deliver a new novel by Nov 1 or lose the publishing rights to his entire catalogue.
