Martingal (1846) di V. F. Odoevskij e il tema del gioco delle carte nella prosa russa della prima metà dell’Ottocento

Vladimir Odoevsky’s story The Martingale, edited by N. Nekrasov in the celebrated Petersburg Collection (1846), is a tale which takes its inspiration from one of the most characteristic themes of 19th century Russian literature, namely gambling (in fact a martingale is a specific betting strategy). The tale did not receive great critical acclaim at the time, and indeed, over time it was all but forgotten. However, the story, which is the author’s last work of fiction, gives rise to multiple considerations regarding this particular genre and how this topic had been dealt with previously. While it belongs, at least in part, to the fantastical genre (one cannot but acknowledge that it follows on from Pushkin’s The Queen of Spades), The Martingale is written with a bitter and biting realism which rejects all those mythological interpretations of gambling which characterised many works of the preceding literary period.