The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky

**FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PEN AMERICA JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY**

A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky’s life—and became a pioneer in Russian literary history

In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described “emancipated girl of the sixties,” Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky—a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist—had impressed the young woman with his enlightened and visionary fiction.

Seats at the Table

Books Behind Bars is now the subject of the acclaimed documentary, Seats at the Table, which has aired nationally on PBS.

ABOUT ANDREW

Andrew D. Kaufman is an author, speaker,  educational entrepreneur, and Russian literature scholar whose work has been featured on The Today Show, NPR, PBS, and Oprah.com as well as in the New York TimesWashington Post, and the Moscow Times.

He is the author of The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, which was a finalist for the 2022 PEN America Literary Award in Biography and is being adapted into a film. He is also the author of Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled TimesUnderstanding Tolstoy, and a coauthor of Russian for Dummies.

In addition to his Russian expertise, Dr. Kaufman is a nationally recognized expert on teaching innovation and service-learning. He created Books Behind Bars: Life, Literature and Leadership, a program in which college students meet with incarcerated youth and adults to explore questions of meaning, value, and social justice through conversations about Russian literature.

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NEWS FLASH

Andrew on the Today Show

Andrew on PBS

Andrew's TEDx Talk

Andrew on CSPAN Book TV

BOOKS BEHIND BARS

Books Behind Bars Hero Background

Books Behind Bars: Life, Literature, and Leadership is an internationally recognized program that brings together incarcerated youth and university students and transforms both groups through the power of conversation about great Russian literature. READ MORE

Also by Andrew

SPEAKING

Andrew Kaufman is an in-demand keynote speaker and workshop facilitator available to speak on:

Making Social Change and Combatting Mass Incarceration in and out of the Classroom 
The Five Critical Skills Students Need to Create Social Change 

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