entric member of the Russian aristocracy known as Granny. The 75-year-old exposes the sham and artifice of the aristocracy at the same time she becomes addicted to roulette with Alexei. Alexei plays to win Polina and a ticket into the upper-class, while Granny plays to thwart the motives of her grandson the General who wishes her dead to get his hands on her money. It is during their cyclical gambling patterns that Dostoyevsky most lets us enter the mind of the pathological gambler. We see both chase their losses by getting involved in the inevitable cycle of winning, losing, desperation, and exhaustion. We also see that Granny becomes joyous when she wins but throws tantrums when she loses. Still she cannot help but succumb to the lure of chasing bad money with good in pursuit of another big win. This is demonstrated in the following exchange between her and Alexei after she loses big:
“To think that that accursed zero should have turned up NOW!” she sobbed. “The accursed, accursed
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