“I simply find it hard to believe,” a Moscow friend of mine yells into the telephone a respectable number of minutes before asking me to lend him some trifling sum just this once, “that, with everything going on in London, roulette is all you can write about!”  He is young, an actor, insubstantially hopeful as young actors are.  “What about the theater?  The books?  The movies?”  Calm yourself, my beloved Yegor.  As I write these lines, the receipt from Western Union is in the breast pocket of my Caraceni overcoat.

But the question remains, and the answer is not a trivial one.  Greatly abridged, it is that the poet player takes to the casinos out of epochal frustration, a kind of sadomasochistic yearning whose object is his contemporary civilization, which he regards as fundamentally alien, and particularly its culture, which he wants to reject before it inevitably rejects him.  Gambling is thus akin to prostitution, as in both cases what the sociopathic loner pays for is the chance to abase, strike out against, or laugh at the power of money, and, by extension, the society that establishes its supposedly objective value.  Killing money is the gambler’s aim and way of life, just as the killing of time can be imagined to be the sole preoccupation of a prisoner on death row.

Writing of the French aristocracy under Louis XIV in his splendid Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance, historian Thomas Kavanagh makes a statement which the poet player, obsessed as he is with the fetish of free will and hence the ritual of individual liberty, may gladly embrace as his own spiritual genealogy:

For this group, up until the time of its extinction, money, the token of mobile wealth independent of its holder, was regarded as a means, a pure instrument useful only for the duty of living nobly and of no real value in itself.  To make money seriously was to debase oneself, to subordinate one’s value as the biological continuation of a dynasty to the pseudo-value of ultimately meaningless pieces of metal prized only because of the cupidity of others unlike oneself.  From this point of view, the noble was noble precisely because he was beyond the power of money.

The rampant ugliness of the life around him, its formulaic venality and its oppressive rationalism, sits on the gambler’s chest like a succubus.  He is astonished by the plainness of the women he meets, their bad manners, their arithmetic shrewdness, and, still more obvious, their geometric unkindness; like the compulsive frequenter of prostitutes, he cannot but compare them to the impulsive, brilliant, by turns unaccountably cruel and just as unaccountably kind deportment of the eternal feminine that is his destiny.  O Fortuna!  Fascinating as the cleverest of the clever, unattainable as the grandest of the grand, yet also a sister and a mother, who will take sudden pity upon you when you are at your most dejected and lift you up in her arms, “like a Bacchante off amphorae,” before plunging you back into the cauldron of black despair where lovers are baptized.

And, if such are the women of his day, what of the culture?  Does anybody in his right mind suppose that what Voltaire, Richardson, Pushkin, Byron, Chopin, Stendhal, Balzac, Mahler, Proust, and Pasternak, or even Picasso or Hemingway, have produced could have been produced in the absence of a society—which, in Europe since at least the beginning of the 18th century, meant the women—whose cumulative brilliance, beauty, and unpredictability were commensurate with the depth of the individual artist’s spiritual aims?  It may be remembered that, among the nobility of the ancien régime, as Roger Mettam writes in his Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France, “the aristocratic disdain for money and for the debasing bourgeois world of commerce and trade” found practical expression “in the lavishness of the daily lives” of such personages as Madame de Guéménée, who owed 60,000 livres to her shoemaker; or Madame de Montmorin, who ran up a dressmaker’s bill of 180,000 livres; or Madame de Matignon, who paid her hairdresser 24,000 livres to create a different coiffure every day for an entire year, all “during a period when the average daily wage for an unskilled worker was approximately 1 livre.”

Well, reasons the poet player, why shouldn’t the hair of a modern society beauty worthy of her fame cost the equivalent of one million dollars per year?  Why shouldn’t a new book worth reading, or a ticket to a play worth seeing, or a chance to go to the opera, cost $100,000, or $200,000, or $300,000?  Are these not the prices one sees paid for motorcars, by personages with pithecanthropoid heads and fingers reminiscent of petrified worms?

To go to the theater, today, in New York or London!  My God!  He would do better to take his morning bath in the city sewers.  To see the same new film as a hundred million others around the world?  To share their values?  To laugh with them on cue?  Better to draw the curtains and sleep the rest of the day.  To read a magazine or a daily newspaper, filled with banal inventions and homespun paradoxes by people he knows socially and happens to loathe?  He may as well start asking them to dinner.  To read a new book by an unknown, knowing in advance that the author’s path from Boston to Yale to Oxford to the Washington Post Co. to Random House—or, alternatively, from Bombay to Cambridge to Harvard to the New York Times Inc. to Knopf—has been as axiomatic as a page of the Mercedes maintenance manual?  Nowadays one can no longer judge a book by its cover.

To meet a beautiful woman at last and take her out on a date to some suitably lavish restaurant and then perhaps to a nightclub?  Simple enough, but gruesome shadows lurk in every corner of what was once a brightly polished facet of social intercourse.  If she doesn’t stand you up, she’ll ask for her Dover sole off the bone and then proceed to prod the lifeless opacity in her plate with a knife.  She will flirt with the blond waiter, who will smirk in reply, and put her gloveless hand on the arm of the lilac Negro of a doorman, who will make no secret of having seen her there before with better tippers.  She will speak to people she seems to know well without bothering to introduce them, and when, at two in the morning, she stealthily vanishes, ambiguously yet forever, into the madding throng on the back of this or that percussion-driven horseman of the apocalypse, you will be nearly as relieved to be rid of her as you are the next day, when she doesn’t ring to thank you for the delightful evening she spent in your company.  Reject her, reject her before you ever lay eyes on her!

In the casino, one is ever conscious of the chasm.  And, on the basis of extensive personal observation, I can testify that no London prostitute—even one whose nightly fees, including the cost of a gram of cocaine and the taxi home to Bayswater, are more modest than any of the ordinary expenditures that thrust the average punter into the rapacious maw of the city’s night-life, such as an elaborate dinner in an expensive restaurant—in short, no social outcast, drunk or sober, would ever permit herself to behave in as coarse, ill-bred, and predictable a fashion as the young woman who, by virtue of her birth, education, and position, belongs to London society.  For so counterfeit are the values of this society—where imitation of others is the norm—that it no longer sees that the imitation of good manners is good manners, and that the imitation of love is more like love than absolute lovelessness.

Thus the poet player reacts and becomes a reactionary.  Everything in his soul is turned upside down, probably because the world around him stands on its head.