New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk and signing with author and UVA professor Andrew Kaufman on Saturday, September 10, at 4 p.m.
Kaufman will be speaking about his recent book, The Gambler Wife: A True Story of Love, Risk, and the Woman Who Saved Dostoyevsky, which will be released in paperback from Riverhead in late August.
This event will be free to attend and open to the public.
The book introduces readers to a 20-year-old stenographer In the fall of 1866 named Anna Snitkina who applies for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Drawing on diaries, letters, and other little-known archival sources, Andrew Kaufman tells the story of Snitkina, who had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoyevsky, a notorious radical turned acclaimed novelist. Snitkina gains his trust and later becomes his wife and business manager, launching one of literature’s most fascinating marriages.
The Gambler Wife offers a fresh and captivating portrait of Anna Dostoyevskaya, who warded off creditors, family members, and her greatest romantic rival, keeping their young family afloat through years of penury and exile. In a series of dramatic set pieces, we watch as she navigates the writer’s self-destructive binges in the casinos of Europe, and we watch as Anna frees her husband from predatory publishers by founding her own publishing house, making Anna the first solo female publisher in Russian history.
Kaufman is an associate professor, general faculty, and lecturer in Slavic Languages and Literatures, and assistant director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Virginia.
The Gambler Wife was a finalist for the 2022 PEN America Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and has been optioned for a film adaptation.
Kaufman is also the author of Give War and Peace a Chance: Tolstoyan Wisdom for Troubled Times and Understanding Tolstoy, and co-author of Russian for Dummies.
His work has been featured on Today, NPR, and PBS, and in The Washington Post, and he has served as a Russian literature expert for Oprah’s Book Club.
He is also the creator of Books Behind Bars, introducing incarcerated youth to the writings of Dostoyevsky and other authors.
New Dominion Bookshop is located at 404 E. Main Street on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville.
For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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Crystal Graham
