Literary Cardroom

On poker and card games in literature — the cardroom scenes in Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Twain, and the contemporary literary writers who have used card games as cultural settings for fiction worth taking seriously on its own literary terms.

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Literary Cardroom

Dostoevsky's The Gambler, Pushkin's Queen of Spades, and the Russian Literary Cardroom of the 19th Century

The 19th-century Russian literary tradition treated the cardroom with substantial sustained attention. The major texts of the tradition merit closer reading than…

Eleanor Hartshorne May 15, 2026 7 min read