When he wasn’t busy writing some of the world’s finest classic literature, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was busy touring European gambling halls. Like many gamblers, he lost a lot of francs. And, like many gamblers, he seemed to love riding the edge of luck and ruin. In fact, The Gambler was written as the result of a bizarre wager in which Dostoyevsky promised someone that if he didn’t deliver a novel by a date certain, that person would have the right to publish Dostoyevsky’s novels for nine […]