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The years in Europe were not easy for Dostoevsky. He was beginning The Idiot and collecting impressions for later novels. But he would face great challenges in his financial and emotional lives. The most persistent challenge would prove to be Dostoevsky’s addiction to gambling. Dostoevsky was obsessed with games, particularly roulette. In gambling, he found the terrific thrill of staking his fortunes, but he also felt great shame in not being able to stop himself. For Dostoevsky, gambling was high spiritual drama. In it he found expression of the soul’s despair and its twin hope for redemption. But gambling was also a source of marital tension. While Anna insisted that she never scolded her husband for his losses, certainly they were a great strain on them both. Dostoevsky, for his part, did not hide his strain, his losses at the table left him crazy with despair. Dostoevsky lost such large sums that he regularly had to pawn his wife’s jewelry—generally with no hope of retrieving it.Dostoevsky’s gambling losses were perhaps chief among the reasons that he stayed in Europe for so long. He simply could not afford to make the expensive journey back home. He didn’t like Europe—in fact, he felt an extreme loathing for the Germans and the Swiss. Though he avoided his fellow countrymen living abroad, finding them irritating, he missed Russia very much. He began to believe more passionately in the superiority of the Russian soul over the European intellect. He quarreled with the great writer (and his former friend) Turgenev, because Turgenev had turned his back on Russia and considered himself a German. Dostoevsky yearned to return to Russia—he in fact felt that the future of his writing depended on it.On March 5, 1868, when Dostoevsky was in his later forties, his daughter Sonya was born. Perhaps because parenthood had come so late in life, Dostoevsky was an especially attentive father. He was consumed by tenderness he felt for his child. He found joy in every one of her gestures. Unfortunately, Sonya died in early infancy. On September 14, 1869, Anna gave birth to their second daughter, Lyubov. This child would survive and bring Dostoevsky much happiness. But when Anna became pregnant for a third time, the writer decided that in was, indeed, time to come home. The Dostoevsky scraped together the money by turning to family and friends. Even though he had abused their generosity throughout his gambling bouts, many believed in his talent, and he was able to secure the funds. He arrived in St Petersburg in the spring of 1871, ready to begin his life as a truly Russian writer.1. We learn from the passage that Dostoevsky was ________.2. Dostoevsky found in gambling ________.3. Dostoevsky stayed in Europe for a very long time mainly because ______.4. Judging from the context, the quarrel between Dostoevsky and Turgenev was most probably caused by ______.5. Why did Dostoevsky’s relatives and friends give him money for his journey home?

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