Hell looks pretty, baroque: fountains with gilded ducks, lots of putti, walls covered with silk.

So why hell?

The woman who called this casino, this spa town that, had to know: Anna Snitkina was trapped in Baden-Baden for seven weeks.

Because her husband was an addict, he gambled away her wedding ring, jewelry, her clothes.

Who was her husband?

The epileptic and hypochondriac, the leftist who later became the right, the anti-Semite and the genius Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky.

The first time he came to the spa without Anna and as an editor, he had to pick up a story for his magazine from the superstar writer Ivan Turgenev.

He did that too, but returned it unread.

Roulette got in the way.

Anna Prizkau

Editor in the features section.

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On him !, I say silently to myself, slip a token on the eleven, because on November 11th he will be two hundred years old.

And a token for twenty-two, because he was born again on December 22nd, he wrote that himself. It was the day of his execution.

At that time Dostoevsky was on the way in circles of Tsar criticism and therefore sentenced to death, but was pardoned and came to Siberia.

That was in 1849.

Maybe an anti-German

In 2021 the croupier says: “Nothing works anymore.” He makes his proud croupier arm movement. The ball rolls bravely. The six wins - and I don't feel anything. Except that it has to go on. Therefore twenty euros on red. Red wins. So forty euros on red. Red wins. Everything is turning. Therefore, on and on. The profit is suddenly three digits. I do arithmetic and arithmetic - and I feel sick. The throat becomes hot, the stomach contracts, fuzzy points dance in front of the eyes. Then on the painful happiness champagne. In the casino restaurant, the gentlemen are gray and French. Some are gray, but German. The ladies wear subtle things, not large jewelry. The rich, famous Russians are not there. Damn it, actually it should be like in “The Player”, I was hoping. Yes, like in the tough, short novelin which the unhappy Alexej searches for love and yet only finds gambling addiction. “Tomorrow, tomorrow everything will end well!” Is the most famous sentence of the novel and the last. Tonight it will be mine. Because after the champagne comes bad luck. Everything and more than everything is playful and lost at midnight. But the misfortune doesn't feel as numbing and stinging as the luck before it. Tomorrow, tomorrow !, I think like Alexei. Go.But the misfortune doesn't feel as numbing and stinging as the luck before it. Tomorrow, tomorrow !, I think like Alexei. Go.But the misfortune doesn't feel as numbing and stinging as the luck before it. Tomorrow, tomorrow !, I think like Alexei. Go.

In the morning there is a Jack Wolfskin jacket delegation at the casino entrance, tourists, over 60s. It's a guided tour, so the dress code doesn't matter. In the Florentine Hall, the woman who guides us speaks of Dostoyevsky, the junkie, and says: “It was tragic!” - “Who was this gentleman?” Asks a windbreaker gentleman. The casino woman's face slips slightly as a result. And the face of the questioner suddenly looks like that of the baron in the "player": "... just like usual with Germans, crooked and streaked with a thousand small wrinkles (...) in the facial expression something like a sheep". Perhaps Dostoevsky was an anti-German. He certainly wrote very badly about Germany: Berlin made a “sour impression” on him, he had never seen anything “more repulsive than the type of Dresden women” before,and the Cologne Cathedral looked to him “like something like that that has to be put on a desk as a paperweight”. The windbreaker doesn't know any of that. The casino woman determines, but keeps it to herself and now explains the world writer in two sentences.

And who is reading it today?

Do you know Dostoevsky? I ask two maybe thirteen-year-olds at noon.

You sit between the Corinthian pump room columns.

“No,” says the brunette.

"My brother had it at school," says her ash-blonde friend.

But what does it say when nobody really knows who Dostoevsky is, not the young and not the old?

That his novels are no longer up to date?

Is it even allowed to think of such a thing?

"No! Of course I know him, ”says a young man in town. He wants to buy baklava - in the house where the writer lived for two months. There is now the “Hüfay” café, “German and Turkish specialties” is on the door. The young Baklava buyer points to a balcony: "He's up there," he says. There are two disguised mannequins, Fyodor and Anna, tasteless and Disneyland-like. “Nice!” Says the young man. Yeah i'm lying

The casino only opens in the evening.

So what to do

To stroll.

To the Dostoevsky monument.

There he stands in a park, looking in the direction of the casino, in bronze and barefoot on a globe.

Why is he not wearing shoes?

And who is reading it today? I think, but then I think: How much longer?

Only one hour left!

“I have a premonition, and it has to, it has to come like this,” Alexej still believes in the end - and so do I.

Every player understands how up-to-date Dostoevsky novels are.

So back to the casino!

Nothing works anymore!

On him!