Dostoevsky's vice was gambling, especially roulette, which ruined him in German casinos for almost a decade. He began to gamble in the 1860s, on his trips to Europe, and he played for the last time in April 1871, never returning to the roulette table.
The episodes are on record. In 1865, in Wiesbaden, he lost what little he had and, with no money even to pay the hotel, it was from there that he proposed to the magazine The Russian Messenger the story of a student who kills a moneylender, the future Crime and Punishment. In 1867, newly married to Anna, he went alone to Homburg, where he spent ten days gambling, having planned four, and lost everything, until he pawned his watch. In Baden-Baden the pattern repeated for weeks: Anna pawned his jewelry and coat, he returned to the casino, lost, wept, promised to stop, and went back to playing.
The debt also produced work. To fulfill the contract with the publisher Stellovsky, he dictated The Gambler to the stenographer Anna in less than a month, in October 1866, and handed in the manuscript with two hours to spare. In the novel, gambling is an almost poetic Russian passion, set against the calculation of the Europeans; in his letters to Anna, however, Dostoevsky himself said he acted in a stupid and weak way. It was she, and not he, who held the family's finances.