Dostoyevsky, Fyodor Mikhailovich

Writer

born: 11.11.1821 in Moscow

died: 09.02.1881 in St. Petersburg

In the summer of 1862, the Russian writer Dostoyevsky undertook a major trip abroad, traveling to Wiesbaden for the first time in June and visiting the local casino. He returned on his second trip to Europe in 1863 and stayed for four days in August. It was in Wiesbaden that his gambling addiction began, which dominated Dostoyevsky for ten years, repeatedly getting him into financial difficulties, but also fostering his creativity as a writer. Even in Baden-Baden and Bad Homburg, he lost all his winnings.

Wiesbaden was the only German stop on his third trip to Europe in 1865, as he was stuck here for two months from August 2nd after gambling away his entire travel funds. At the Hotel Viktoria, he no longer received anything to eat, only tea, and the staff no longer served him, as he reported in a letter to Polina Suslowa on August 10, 1865. He asked friends from abroad, such as the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883), for remittances, with which he was only able to pay off accumulated debts.

He received the money, which he used to flee the hotel, the city of Wiesbaden and Germany at the end of September, from the priest of the Russian Orthodox Church of St. Elisabeth in Wiesbaden, Ivan Leontyevich Yanyshev (1826-1910). He was only able to pay him back months later. Yanyshev, rector of the Spiritual Academy in St. Petersburg since 1866, delivered the eulogy at Dostoyevsky's funeral in 1881.

While Dostoyevsky waited for money at the Hotel Viktoria, he began the first of his great novels, "Crime and Punishment" (title of older German translations "Schuld und Sühne"). As he wrote in a letter in 1868, the idea came to him after a loss in the game. The life situation of the main character Rodion Raskolnikov, who is unable to pay his rent and avoids the landlady, reflects Dostoyevsky's experiences in Wiesbaden. The novel was published in 1866.

After returning to Russia in 1866, Dostoyevsky wrote the short novel "The Gambler" within 26 days. The background to this text is Dostoyevsky's passion for gambling, set in a fictitious German spa town called Roulettenburg. As Karla Hielscher has discovered, Dostoyevsky probably took this name from the Russian translation of a text by the English author William Thackeray (1811-1863). It has long been debated whether Roulettenburg refers to Baden-Baden, Bad Homburg or Wiesbaden. The topography of the location - the Kurhaus as the seat of the casino, the "square" in front of it and the avenue leading to the hotel where the protagonists lived - certainly speaks in favor of Wiesbaden. However, the author was not interested in a specific place, but in a small German town with excursion destinations such as mountains and ruins nearby; he does not describe the town, but depicts the types of people who frequent it and the symptoms of a passion for gambling.

In February 1867, Dostoyevsky married the stenographer Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, to whom he had dictated "The Gambler". In April 1867, the couple fled abroad to escape creditors, which turned into a four-year stay, mainly in Germany. Dostoyevsky once again frequented the casinos of Bad Homburg and Baden-Baden. In April 1871, Dostoyevsky left his wife in Dresden with their daughter, born in 1869, and traveled to Wiesbaden to play roulette. This time he stayed at the Taunus Hotel at Rheinstraße 3 (demolished in 1975, new building).

After another loss, he tried again to get help from the Russian priest, Janyschew's successor, but got lost and decided not to ask the priest again. In a desperate letter dated April 28, 1871, he asked his wife for the money for the return journey and promised not to gamble this money away again, because: "Something great has happened to me, the vicious fantasy that plagued me for almost 10 years has disappeared. For ten years (...) I always dreamed of winning at gambling. ... Now it's all over! That really was the very last time!" This self-statement proved to be true, and he never returned to the roulette table, even on subsequent visits to Germany. Wiesbaden thus also became the place where Dostoyevsky overcame his gambling addiction.