A Letter to My Gambler Friend

Lake Geneva, Switzerland; Andrew Kaufman, 2018

Dear Andy,

Do you remember our first fireside chat after your 2018 return from Geneva? We reveled in a chocolate afternoon. I appreciated tales of insights gleaned as you strolled Lake Geneva’s shores, but it was your cache of Swiss chocolates that would sweeten our monthly get-togethers.

I relived your journey, closely and personally, this week. You took me with you not only to Switzerland, but also to Germany and Russia, and we time-traveled into the nineteenth century. “On the cold, clear morning of October 4, 1866, a slender twenty-year-old stenography student in a black cotton dress left her mother’s apartment in Petersburg.” From that first line of The Gambler Wife to the tender last sentence, your rendering of flinty, complex Anna Snitkina hits the jackpot. We walk, shiver, warm, calculate, cook, panic, write, scrounge, imagine, withdraw, flower, and love with this young woman for the rest of her life. Long-hidden behind her literary husband Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anna now basks in your light.

Unforgettable, that recent morning we spent together…. We pull up chairs on my back patio. Slowly, slowly you hand me my very own copy of your new book. Look at Anna, The Gambler Wife! We sit, two tea-sipping friends, tears pooling atop our cheekbones. A band should be playing, but we hear birdsong. I sit still. You lie down, stretch, talk fast, leapfrog among topics—reliable Andy, the tempest in our teapot. Ten years…two books apiece…my mother’s and your father’s deaths…twisty roads…raucous celebrations…fireside and mountainside conversations, our safe space a guarantor of creativity…and, as we sort of settle in the garden, unspoken agony as your prize of a book releases into pandemic tumult.

After you left that morning, I missed the glee that comes with a book’s release. Then, I read The Gambler Wife. Glee hastens your way, Andy. Your labor of love rises.

Only you, a sensitive scholar, could pen this beauty. Graceful, clear, robust language. Fluent in Russian, excavator of sources revealed for the first time—you, a wide-eyed, open-hearted explorer. “Manic lurches,” such an on-the-mark descriptor of Dostoevsky, and very much every month you! The thunderstorm in Dresden, catching hiking Anna by surprise, drenched me, too. You quote from her diary: “The sight was truly marvelous, and took me right out of myself. I trembled, but not so much from fear as from being carried away with awe before the inexorable powers of nature.” Your intuition that this storm was for her an epiphany, that “she would blaze a path of her own,” propels her and the reader. Until your dogged research, “…standing quietly in the shade of the giant, she is often erased from the historical record.” No more. Anna makes her debut on August 31, 2021.

Baden-Baden Casino; Andrew Kaufman, 2018

The roulette wheel spins. The Gambler Wife runs the table.

That irascible Dostoevsky. I’m a rising senior in high school. It’s August, feet in the sand and ocean-spray on my face, and I stare at the last book on my summer reading list. The Brothers Karamazov. My bookmark and I creep along, frowning at every word of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. Smerdyakov—can’t pronounce it, can’t stand him. Years later, my frightened college students listen as I (secretly scared) assume the philosopher’s role—the toothache-loving, crystal-smasher in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. “I shall never have readers,” the underground man lies, and we wish it were so. But you will.

Time to wipe away tears. You entered the past and set the record straight. You dove into personal chaos, tangled in political upheaval, and strove to understand humanity. And when you uncovered loveliness, you captured it. Isn’t this the cure-all? Uncovering loveliness as we choose how we spend our time…honor what we value… give life our all. And sometimes, oh those glory days, loveliness boomerangs right back.

So, fireside pacer, two congratulatory songs your way. Vladmir Horowitz giftwraps his fingers around Shastokovich’s “Polka.” Mavis Staples and Ben Harper toast your tome. Yes, they laugh, “We’ll Get By.” How? “Day by day, line by line.”

Lyubov,

Marietta

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