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 Times, Washington 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 Times, Understanding 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.
NEWS FLASH
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The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky named Finalist for 2022 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography, for a "biography of exceptional literary, narrative, and artistic merit, based on scrupulous research."
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Andy was interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-SPAN's Booknotes+ podcast, where he discussed how reading Tolstoy can help us understand Putin's Russia and his war in Ukraine.
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Books Behind Bars tops the list of courses from around the world featured in international education expert Ken Bain’s Super Courses: The Future of Teaching and Learning.
Andrew on the Today Show
Andrew on PBS
Andrew's TEDx Talk
Andrew on CSPAN Book TV
BOOKS BEHIND BARS
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: