DOSTOEVSKI AND PARRICIDE
543
guished elderly lady tells the author of an experience she had had
twenty years before. She had been left a widow when still young,
and was the mother of two sons, who no longer needed her. Expecting
nothing further from life, at the age of forty-two, on one of her aim–
less journeyings, she visited the Casino at Monte Carlo, where, among
all the remarkable sights of the place, she was soon fascinated by
two hands, which seemed to betray all the feelings of the unlucky
gambler with terrifying sincerity and intensity. These hands belonged
to a handsome young man- the author unintentionally makes him the
same age as the eldest son of the narrator- who, after having lost
everything, left the room in the depths of despair, evidently with the
intention of ending his hopeless life in the gardens. An inexplicable
feeling of sympathy compels her to follow him and make every effort
to save him. He takes her for one of the importunate women so com–
mon there, and tries to shake her off; but she stays with him and
finds herself obliged in the most natural way possible to share his
room at the hotel; and finally his bed. Mter this improvised night of
love, she exacts from the young man, now apparently calmed down,
a promise that he will never play again, provides him with money for
his journey home and undertakes to meet him at the station before
the departure of the train. Then she begins to feel a great tenderness
for him, wants to sacrifice everything to keep him, and makes up her
mind to go with him instead of saying good-bye. Various adverse
circumstances make her miss the train, and
in
her longing for the
lost one, she again visits the gaming rooms, and there, to her horror,
sees once more the hands which had first excited her sympathy: the
faithless boy had gone back to his gambling. She reminds him of his
promise, but, obsessed by his passion, he calls her a spoil-sport, tells
her to
~et
out, and flings down the money with which she had tried
to save him. She hurries away deeply mortified, and learns later that
she has not succeeded in rescuing him from suicide.
This brilliantly told, perfectly motivated story indeed exists in
its own right, and is certain of deeply affecting all readers. But psycho–
analysis shows us that its invention is based on the extinction of a
wish phantao.y belonging to the period of puberty, which many peo–
ple consciously remember. The phantasy embodies a wish that the
mother should herself initiate the boy into sexual life in order to save
him from the dreaded evils of onanism. All the "release" poetic in–
ventions which we find so frequently, have the same origin. The vice
of onanism is replaced by the passion for gambling; the emphasis laid
on the passionate activity of the hands betrays this derivation. The
gambling mania is actually an equivalent
o(
'the old onanism com-
