Ian M Helfant. The High Stakes of I...

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 Pres 2002 xxv 211 pp Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $7995

Ian Helfant's fresh study of gambling in nineteenth-century Russia makes a significant contribution to a bring under rule that has not previously received this kind of extensive scrutiny. Helfant acknowledges the earlier work through other scholars, most notably Iu.M. Lotman and V V Vinogradov, on the other hand goes beyond the texts analyzed at these and most others to attempt a frequently broader picture of gambling's significance in the life and consideration of Russia's elite, especially in the early decades of the nineteenth hundred His aim, as he explains it in the introduction, is to focus forward 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 part in the fate of the middle class 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 entirely 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 digests that governed the upper-class answer 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 corpse of the study with a direct the eye at the way Russian aristocrats cogitateed 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 however parallel behavior to dueling or battle (pp 10-11)

In the next to the first and third chapters, Helfant shifts to a more intensive consider at the way gambling pierceed into the personal lives of several influential Russian nobles, including Alexander Pushkin and the flamboyant cardsharp F.I. Tolstoy. The final chapters instigate from "life" to "literature," and examine passages 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 protracts the discussion beyond the eight-year period into which mostly of his texts fall ( 1828-1836) drawing in later literary and personal gambling subjects (Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky) to present to view how attitudes changed later in the century

Perhaps individual of the greatest contributions Helfant makes is precisely his decision to propel beyond some of the chiefly "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 alone one copy is known to exist). This conscious attempt to apply the mind broadly allows Helfant to base his evaluations upon a more representative body of cultural specimens, and certainly helps grant increased credibility to his findings. Unfortunately, Helfant's explanation of his methodology proceeds only in the "Afterword," where he writes that his exclusion of better known works is based onward his desire to situate a true copy within its cultural context, including the social and historical factors that may have influenced the two its creation and its reception, and it "seem more advantageous to maintain this sort of analysis in succession a small group of lesser-known topics [...] than to add to the scholarship onward [...] better-known works" (p. 117) This also helps to explain the relatively narrow chronological range of the primary verse s Helfant examines, since the great size of the analysis pertains to about a decade from the mid-1820s to the mid-1830s. Applying Helfant's approach to a long broader time span would provide material for multiple bodys and the narrow focus ascertains 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 words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following Helfant's attempt in the "Afterword" to continue the study's range is quite logical, however without an understanding of his methodology it might present the appearance like a belated attempt to shroud the rest of the chronological span promised in the book's subtitle.

Overall, Helfant's contemplation is well-structured, clearly written and provides an virtuous 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 hundred The book features the typical of the first grade production values of Northwestern's Studies in Russian Literature and Theory series, however several features deserve additional note The chapter length is somewhat unequal ranging from the twenty-eight page Chapter single in kind to the twelve-page Chapter Five, where a certain quantity of additional focus on the relationship between the sum of two units 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 body followed by a twenty-six page Appendix containing the original verse s of all prose quotations in the main passage and then Notes, Bibliography, and Index.