In August 1867, Dostoevsky and his new wife, Anna, arrived from Dresden. She was the young stenographer to whom he had dictated The Gambler and Crime and Punishment (which had not long been published), and who had rescued him from his dead brother’s predatory family and from the son of his first wife who had encumbered him with debts to the tune of 20,000 roubles. With the money of her own dowry and with the help of his publisher, she had got him out of Russia and into Europe, where they were to travel for four years while he entered on his long struggle to write The Idiot. After the misery of his imprisonment in Siberia, the death of his first wife and his destructive affair with Polina Suslova, Dostoevsky was entering on the finest creative period of his life. He had been in Europe before and, like so many Russians, had taken to roulette at the German gambling tables. He was at the height of the gambling fever when he reached Baden-Baden, where he had come solely to play. He had lost every penny: Anna had been obliged to pawn her wedding ring and her earrings, her furs and a lot of her clothes.
What do You think about The Gentle Barbarian (1977)?
