BARCELONA, THE CITY BUILT OVER HIDDEN STREAMS

After spending a few days in Lyon visiting old friends and enjoying an entertaining football match, yesterday, Joseph de Ca'th Lon returned to Genève, while Claire Fontaine and The Grandma headed back to Barcelona, ​​where a massive storm was awaiting them, just a day before their planned trip to Tarragona for the Concurs de Castells this afternoon.

Sudden, rain-heavy storms -featuring lightning and intense localized downpours- are common in the Mediterranean region during late August and September. They didn't appear this summer, but they have arrived this autumn, bringing a difficult weekend for many Catalan towns -especially those that expanded by burying streams and torrents, building over wetlands, or encroaching on rivers that had been artificially canalized.

Nature is, after all, unpredictable and uncontrollable; water always finds its way back to its natural paths, even if those paths have been altered -with varying degrees of ingenuity- by human hands.

After a night of record-breaking rainfall in the city -particularly in the Sants and Les Corts districts- The Grandma wants to talk about Barcelona and how it grew over dozens of river basins. While these are no longer visible as they once were, local place names remind us that they have always been here and remain so today: Riera Blanca, Riera Escuder, Riera d'Horta, Riera de Vallcarca, Riera de Cassoles, Torrent de l'Olla, Torrent de les Flors...

Barcelona is usually imagined as a Mediterranean city of stone, streets and avenues, lying between the mountains and the sea. Yet beneath this familiar urban landscape lies another Barcelona: a city shaped by water.

The map of its old streams and watercourses reveals a geography that has almost disappeared from sight but has never entirely ceased to exist.

Barcelona grew on a plain enclosed by four great geographical boundaries: the Mediterranean Sea, the Collserola range, the River Llobregat to the southwest and the River Besòs to the northeast. Between those two rivers, however, water followed countless smaller paths.

For centuries, rain falling on Collserola descended towards the sea through a dense network of streams, torrents and seasonal watercourses. Some were relatively important, such as the Riera d'Horta or the Riera Blanca; others were much smaller. Together, they carved shallow depressions into the Barcelona plain and carried sediments from the mountains towards the coast. They also helped create the land on which the city would eventually grow.

Long before Barcelona became an enormous urban landscape, water was one of the reasons why humans settled here. The prehistoric plain contained streams, wetlands and lagoons, while fresh water could be found relatively close to the Mediterranean. Later inhabitants exploited springs, wells and underground water, gradually transforming the natural hydrological system into an increasingly human landscape.

Then the city expanded. Streams were diverted, channelled, covered or incorporated into the urban drainage system. Roads and buildings occupied their former courses. The visible geography of water slowly disappeared beneath another geography made of streets. But it left traces. Some survive in place names. Others can still be recognised in the shape and slope of certain streets. And sometimes, during episodes of exceptionally heavy Mediterranean rain, water seems to remember paths that the modern city has forgotten. That is perhaps what makes maps of Barcelona's ancient streams so fascinating. They show us that the apparently orderly grid of the modern city was superimposed upon a much older landscape.

Before streets, there were streams. Before neighbourhoods, there were valleys, wetlands and torrents. Before the city organised the water, the water had already organised the land.

Barcelona has always lived with a geographical contradiction. It is squeezed between mountain and sea, yet protected and nourished by two rivers. Collserola collects the rain; gravity sends it towards the Mediterranean; and the urban plain lies directly in its path. For centuries, people adapted to that geography. Later, engineering attempted to control it. Yet geography never completely disappears.

The extraordinary rainfall that occasionally falls over Barcelona reminds us that a modern city is not separate from the landscape on which it was built. Asphalt can cover a stream, buildings can hide a valley and sewers can channel the rain underground, but the logic of the terrain remains. Perhaps that is the most beautiful lesson contained in this old hydrological map.

Barcelona is not simply a city between the Llobregat and the Besòs. It is a city born from the sea, the mountains, the rivers -and hundreds of forgotten paths of water running between them. A hidden blue Barcelona still exists beneath our feet.

This hidden geography is particularly meaningful to The Grandma because she lives between two names that preserve the memory of Barcelona's ancient waters: Riera Blanca and Riera Escuder.

But these were not simply two neighbouring streams. They belonged to the same hydrological landscape. The Torrent d'Escuder fed the Riera Blanca, which collected water descending from the slopes of Collserola before continuing across the plain and eventually reaching the Mediterranean west of Montjuïc.

Today, water has been replaced by streets, buildings and an administrative boundary. Riera Blanca (next to the Camp Nou) still separates Barcelona from L'Hospitalet, while Riera Escuder survives in the urban fabric of Sants. Yet the old landscape has not completely disappeared. It remains in street names, irregular plots, unexpected slopes and the shape of the neighbourhood itself.

The streams may have disappeared from sight, but they have survived in the language -and even in the geometry- of the city.

Perhaps Barcelona has not forgotten its water after all.

More information: Meet Barcelona

D'eix cavall de la riera
prenc la brida barroera,
i als torrents i a la ribera
vaig dient: pas al raier!

I seize the rough bridle

of this river's wild horse,

and to the torrents and the riverbanks

I cry: Make way for the raftsman!

Jacint Verdaguer

DE SER I SER DEL TOT, PLENAMENT: UN INSTINT DE PÀTRIA

No puc dir el teu nom.
O el dic negligentment.
No puc dir el teu nom.

Certs dies, certes nits, em passen certes coses.
Tinc el desig de tu.
Esdevens, aleshores, la meua sola pàtria.

No puc dir el teu nom.
Esvelta, tendra, càlida.
Terriblement esvelta, dempeus, com una pàtria.

No puc dir el teu nom.
Car, si el dic, l'he de dir amb una certa negligència.

No puc dir el teu nom.
No és un desig tan sols sexual, conjugal.
És el desig del riu, i el llençol, i la brossa.
És un instint de pàtria.
És el desig de l'arbre, i del cel, i del cànter, i el pitxer, i l'argila.

De ser i ser del tot, plenament: tenir pàtria.
I una pàtria lliure, i lluminosa, i alta.

I cannot say your name.

Or I say it carelessly.

I cannot say your name.

On certain days, certain nights, certain things happen to me.

I desire you.

You become, then, my only homeland.

I cannot say your name.

Slender, tender, warm.

Terribly slender, standing tall, like a homeland.

I cannot say your name.

For if I say it, I must say it with a certain carelessness.

I cannot say your name.

It is not merely a sexual or conjugal desire.

It is the desire of the river, and the sheet, and the brushwood.

It is an instinct for a homeland.

It is the desire of the tree, and the sky, and the water jar, and the pitcher, and the clay.

To be, and to be wholly, fully: to have a homeland.

And a homeland free, and luminous, and lofty.

More information: UNIR

De ser i ser del tot, plenament: tenir pàtria.
I una pàtria lliure, i lluminosa, i alta.

To be, and to be wholly, fully: to have a homeland.
And a homeland free, and luminous, and lofty.

Vicent Andrés Esteller

'LA MARCHE DES CANUTS', A PEOPLE SINGS ITS ROOTS

Joseph de Cath Lon, Claire Fontaine, and The Grandma are still in Lyon. Today, they will decide whether to head back to Genève and Barcelona or stay another day in the City of Light. It all depends on a sporting event.

Lyon is an amazing city nestled in a region that seems endless to explore; yet, beyond the scenery, a city is defined by its people -and they have many ways of preserving their cultural heritage, one of which is music.

Today, The Grandma wants to talk about Lyonnais folk music -a wonderful, beautiful music that tells the story of how the people of Lyon have shaped the city as it exists today.

Lyonnais folk music is vast and varied, but perhaps one of the most significant songs is La Marche des Canuts.

There are many ways to tell the history of a city. We can read its monuments, walk along its streets, visit its museums or study the names engraved on its buildings. But sometimes, to understand a city, we simply have to listen to it.

Lyon has its own sounds. Among them is the rhythmic noise of the looms that once filled the workshops of the Croix-Rousse: the bistanclaque-pan evoked in one of the best-known songs of Lyon's popular tradition, La Marche des Canuts.

The canuts were Lyon's silk weavers. During the nineteenth century, thousands of men and women worked in the silk industry, particularly on the slopes and the hill of the Croix-Rousse. Their work produced some of the most luxurious fabrics in Europe, yet the people who made them often lived precarious lives. This contradiction would become one of the defining episodes in Lyon's social history.

In 1831, Lyon's silk workers rose in revolt after a dispute over the establishment of a minimum tariff for their work. Their motto was striking: Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant. Live working or die fighting.

Further uprisings followed, particularly in 1834. The Canut revolts would eventually occupy an important place in the history of the European labour movement. They were not merely protests against poverty: they expressed an emerging consciousness that workers shared interests, problems and the possibility of collective action. But history is not preserved only in political documents. It survives in language, gestures, neighbourhoods -and songs. 

La Marche des Canuts appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century. Its words are attributed to the Lyonnais performers Ambroise Girier and Louis Chavat, while the music was composed by another Lyonnais, Hermand Brun.

The song became particularly popular in the Croix-Rousse in the early twentieth century. Rather than describing the uprisings directly, it gives a voice to the everyday Canut. The singer tells us that he is a weaver from Lyon and that his wife is a dévideuse, a woman involved in preparing silk thread. He mentions familiar Lyonnais places -the Gourguillon, the Montée, the Pierres Plantées, Saint-Just and the Croix-Rousse.

The geography of Lyon becomes part of the song. So does its language. And so does its work. Its  famous refrain imitates the sound of the loom: Et bistanclaque-pan! La navette et l'battant!

Bistanclaque-pan is more than an amusing expression. It transforms labour into rhythm. The shuttle and the beater of the loom become percussion instruments, and the sound that once filled the workshops of the Croix-Rousse enters popular memory.

The song speaks about checking the fabric, watching for damaged threads, handling bobbins and working continuously at the loom. It preserves words belonging to the vocabulary of the Canuts and to the Lyonnais way of speaking.

In this sense, the song is almost an oral archive.

There is another song that inevitably accompanies the memory of Lyon's silk workers: Aristide Bruant's Le Chant des Canuts, written decades after the first uprising and performed in Lyon in 1894. Its tone is considerably darker.

Bruant contrasts the luxury produced by the workers with their own poverty. The Canuts weave golden vestments for the Church and fine clothes for the powerful, while they themselves lack even the most basic necessities.

The image is brutally simple: those who create wealth do not necessarily share in it.

That contradiction turns the Canut into something larger than a nineteenth-century Lyonnais silk worker. He becomes a symbol of labour itself -of the anonymous hands behind beautiful objects, prosperous industries and comfortable societies.

This is why the memory of the Canuts survived. Their struggle belonged to Lyon, but the questions behind it were universal: What is a worker's labour worth? Who benefits from it? What does dignity at work mean? And what happens when those who produce wealth discover that they can act together?

This is perhaps what makes folk music so important. Official history traditionally remembers kings, generals, politicians and battles. Folk songs remember something else. They remember how people worked. How they spoke. Where they lived. What they feared. What made them laugh. What they protested against. And what they hoped for.

Every culture has songs like these. Their melodies may be simple and their authors sometimes forgotten, but they carry something extraordinarily valuable: collective memory.

A folk song can preserve a dialect after words have disappeared from everyday speech. It can preserve the name of a street, an occupation that no longer exists, an old grievance or a forgotten way of understanding the world. It can even preserve a sound.

In La Marche des Canuts, we can still hear the loom: Bistanclaque-pan.

The workshops have largely fallen silent. The great age of the Lyonnais silk weavers belongs to history. But every time the song is sung, the shuttle moves again, the loom beats again, and somewhere on the Croix-Rousse a Canut returns to work.

Perhaps that is the real power of folk music. It does not simply tell us where we come from. It allows our ancestors to speak again.

More information: Maison des Canuts

Le nez sur la façure,
Faut soigner sans repos.

With your eyes fixed on the fabric,
you must tend it without rest.

La Marche des Canuts

...ALÇAT [...] HOME SALVAT EN POBLE, CONTRA EL VENT

Nosaltres sabíem

d'un únic senyor

i vèiem com

esdevenia

gos.

Envilit pel ventre,

per l'afalac al ventre,

per la por,

s'ajup sota el fuet

amb foll oblit

de la raó

que té.

Arnat, menjat

de plagues,

aquest trist

número de baratilli,

saldo al circ

de la mort,

sense parar llepava

l'aspra mà

que l'ha fermat

des de tant temps

al fang.

Li hauria estat

senzill de fer

del seu silenci mur

impenetrable, altíssim:

va triar

la gran vergonya mansa

dels lladrucs.

Mai no hem pogut,

però, desesperar

del vell vençut

i elevem en la nit

un cant a crits,

car les paraules vessen

de sentit.

L'aigua, la terra,

l'aire, el foc

són seus,

si s'arrisca d'un cop

a ser qui és.

Caldrà que digui

de seguida prou,

que vulgui ara

caminar de nou,

alçat, sense repòs,

per sempre més

home salvat en poble,

contra el vent.

Salvat en poble,

ja l'amo de tot,

no gos mesell,

sinó l'únic senyor.

We knew

of a single master

and watched as he

became

a dog.

Debased by the belly,

by the pampering of the belly,

by fear,

he cringes beneath the whip,

madly forgetting

the reason

he possesses.

Moth-eaten, consumed

by vermin,

this sad

cheap sideshow act,

a bargain-bin item in the circus

of death-

ceaselessly he licked

the rough hand

that has bound him

for so long

to the mud.

It would have been

simple for him

to turn his silence into a wall,

impenetrable and towering:

instead, he chose

the great, meek shame

of barking.

Yet we have never

been able to despair

of the defeated old man;

we raise a song into the night-

a shout-

for words are overflowing

with meaning.

Water, earth,

air, and fire

are his,

if he dares, at last,

to be who he is.

He must say

"enough" right now,

must choose to

walk again,

upright, unceasingly,

forevermore

a man redeemed within the people,

facing the wind.

Redeemed within the people,

master of all at last-

no longer a cowering dog,

but the sole master.

Salvador Espriu, Les Cançons d'Ariadna

Indesinenter...

ASTÉRIX AND THE SOOTHSAYER IN DÉCINES-CHARPIEU

Today, Joseph de Ca'th Lon, Claire Fontaine and The Grandma are in Décines-Charpieu, Lyon where this afternoon the Northern Star has an important match. 

Claire has just arrived by train to join her friends. During the trip, she has been reading a new adventure of the most famous Gaul, Astérix and the Soothsayer.

Astérix and the Soothsayer, in French Le Devin, is the nineteenth volume of the Astérix comic book series, by René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo (illustrations). It was originally serialized in Pilote issues 652-673 in 1972.

In this story, Prolix the soothsayer claims that the village of the Gauls will become polluted by a divine curse. Astérix thinks that the man is a charlatan, and his fellow villagers are concerned about sacrilege.

With a more adult-theme which started with Astérix and the Roman Agent, the story revolves around the superstitions of the people at the time (Gauls and Romans alike) and of today, and parodies the general gullibility of humanity.

The story includes an illustration of the Roman and Gaulish pantheon of gods. In that illustration, Uderzo includes a drawing of his own country home, and a soothsayer's fantastical prediction of the future is illustrated by a photograph of La Défense, the modern district of skyscrapers outside Paris.

An Augur tells Caesar that as long as Brutus is near you...you will have nothing to fear, in the authors' reference to Caesar's murder by his hands.

Key Lessons From Astérix and the Soothsayer

-Skepticism over Superstition. The story teaches us to apply critical thinking rather than blindly believing charismatic charlatans who prey on fear and the desire to know the future.

-The Danger of Gullibility. Even sensible people can fall for scams when a fraudster tells them what they want to hear or plays effectively on their anxieties.

-Common Sense Defeats Fraud. Astérix demonstrates that calm logic and observational proof are far more powerful weapons against manipulation than panic or belief in curses.

-Unity and Resilience. The village overcomes outside infiltration and manipulation because community solidarity and collective action ultimately restore order.

Download Astérix and the Soothsayer by R. Goscinny & A. Uderzo

Après la pluie viendra le beau temps.

After the rain, the fine weather will come.

Prolix

FOURVIÈRE, LUGDUNUM. TWO WOMEN & 2000 YEARS

Today, The Grandma is in Lyon (Liyon). She has come to see the Northern Star, who has a very special match tomorrow. She hasn't come alone; Joseph de Ca'th Lon is accompanying her. He lives 158 km from Lyon -an hour away by train. The Grandma lives 639 km away -an hour by plane. Such are the realities of modern transport and communication routes; they seem very modern to us, yet they are nothing more than the roads built by the Romans -routes that, centuries ago, already connected major cities like Genava (Gallia Narbonensis), Lugdunum (Gallia Lugdunensis), and Barcino (Tarraconensis).

It makes no difference how many times you visit Lyon, or -as is the case for The Grandma -whether you have had the chance to live there because your job took you there, no matter how often you visit the city, a trip to Fourvière is a must, for that is where it all began.

The Grandma has wondered what the life of a woman like her would have been like in the Fourvière of Lugdunum, and how many things have remained completely unchanged over the two thousand years of history of this beautiful city -now one of the most important in Europe. In fact, she has wanted to think about Lugdunum through the eyes of two women separated by almost two thousand years.

More information: Fourvière

From Fourvière, she has closed her eyes and has begun to imagine...

She stands on the hill and looks down at the city. Her name is Julia. It is the second century AD, and nobody calls this place Lyon. The city beneath her is Lugdunum, one of the great cities of Roman Gaul.

Julia does not know that she is living in what future historians will call Antiquity. She does not know that archaeologists will one day uncover the stones beneath her feet, carefully catalogue fragments of pottery, reconstruct buildings and try to imagine people like her.

For Julia, this is simply home. And from the heights of Fourvière, her world seems enormous.

The first thing she notices is probably movement. Lugdunum is not silent. People walk along its streets. Carts carry goods. Merchants negotiate. Artisans work in their workshops. Officials discuss matters of administration. Travellers arrive from distant parts of the Empire. Down below flow the Saône and the Rhône.

Julia has seen boats carrying wine, oil, pottery and countless other goods. She has heard accents that do not sound like hers. Lugdunum lies at an extraordinary crossroads between the Mediterranean world and the northern territories of Gaul. 

Rome may be far away, but Rome is everywhere. Its laws, its gods, its administration, its coins and its architecture have shaped the city. And yet Lugdunum is not simply Rome transplanted to Gaul. It has its own rhythm. Its own landscape. Its own people. 

What might Julia's day be like? That would depend enormously on who Julia was. A wealthy Roman matron and an enslaved woman could inhabit the same city while experiencing two radically different worlds. Roman society was profoundly unequal, and women's lives were shaped by wealth, family status and legal position. 

Let us imagine that Julia belongs to a reasonably prosperous household. She knows the shops and markets of the city. She buys food and household goods. She visits relatives and neighbours. She knows which streets become crowded at particular times of day. Perhaps she visits the baths. Roman baths are not merely places for washing. They are places where the city meets itself: people talk, exchange news and maintain social relationships. Water itself is one of Lugdunum's great achievements. Bringing sufficient water to a city built high above the rivers requires extraordinary engineering.

Julia does not need to understand the calculations behind an aqueduct. She only needs to turn towards a fountain and watch the water flow. Sometimes the most sophisticated technology becomes invisible precisely because it works.

And then there is entertainment. Not far from Julia stands the great theatre. Thousands of people can gather there to watch performances, particularly comedies and dances. Nearby, the smaller odeon welcomes music and public recitations. Imagine Julia among the audience. Imagine the conversations before the performance begins, the clothes, the laughter, the impatience of the spectators.

For a few hours, thousands of inhabitants of Lugdunum look towards the same stage.

Almost two thousand years later, people will gather on this very hill once again to watch performances. The actors will change. The language will change. The music will change. But people will still sit together beneath the Lyon sky waiting for a story to begin. Perhaps Julia would understand that perfectly.

Lugdunum is powerful. It is an administrative centre and an important mint produces coins here. Roads connect the city with the rest of Gaul and the Roman world. Materials and objects arrive from astonishing distances. Marble comes from different parts of the Mediterranean. Wine and food travel along commercial routes. Merchants follow the rivers. Julia may never travel to Egypt, Greece or Asia Minor. Yet pieces of those worlds can reach her city.

Lugdunum teaches her something every great city eventually learns: you do not need to travel everywhere for the world to arrive at your door.

Now another woman stands on Fourvière. Nearly two thousand years have passed. She does not call the city Lugdunum. She calls it Lyon. 

The landscape before her would be almost incomprehensible to Julia. Bridges cross the rivers. Cars move through the streets. Trains arrive and depart. Electric lights illuminate the city at night. Buildings cover areas that Julia would have known as countryside. The modern woman can communicate instantly with someone thousands of kilometres away. She can travel in a few hours distances that would have required Julia days or weeks. She knows what lies beyond the horizon.

Julia could only imagine it. And yet...

The modern woman looks down from Fourvière and sees movement. People are going to work. Others are meeting friends. Someone is buying food. Someone is complaining about politics. Someone is falling in love. Someone is late. Someone is worried about money. Someone is watching a performance. Someone has just arrived in Lyon and hears a language they do not understand. Someone else has lived here all their life and cannot imagine calling anywhere else home.

Suddenly, Julia's world does not seem quite so distant.

If Julia could stand beside that modern woman, they would probably understand very little about each other's lives. Their ideas about religion, family, citizenship, freedom, medicine and the position of women would reveal an enormous distance between their societies.

Julia might consider some aspects of our world miraculous. We would consider others in hers profoundly unjust. But perhaps they would eventually stop looking at each other and turn towards the city. That might be the moment when they finally understood one another.

Because cities are not only buildings. They are habits. They are noises. They are journeys repeated every morning. They are markets and conversations, celebrations and arguments. They are strangers arriving and inhabitants staying. They are memories accumulated in the same streets. 

Julia looks at Lugdunum. The modern woman looks at Lyon. Both see home.

Fourvière has watched the city change for more than two thousand years. Empires disappeared. Religions changed. Languages evolved. Buildings rose, vanished and rose again. 

Lugdunum became Lyon.

But down below, between the Rhône and the Saône, human beings continued doing what human beings have always done. Living. Working. Meeting. Loving. Remembering. Perhaps that is what Fourvière really teaches us. Cities change enormously. Life changes with them.

And yet the essential reasons why we need cities -to meet, exchange, create, belong and remember- may have changed much less than we think.

More information: The Collector

Αὐτὸ μὲν δὴ τὸ Λούγδουνον 

ἐκτισμένον ὑπὸ λόφῳ κατὰ τὴν συμβολὴν τοῦ τε Ἄραρος

 τοῦ ποταμοῦ καὶ τοῦ Ῥοδανοῦ κατέχουσι Ῥωμαῖοι. 

εὐανδρεῖ δὲ μάλιστα τῶν ἄλλων πλὴν Νάρβωνος· 

καὶ γὰρ ἐμπορίῳ χρῶνται καὶ τὸ νόμισμα χαράττουσιν ἐνταῦθα τό τε ἀργυροῦν 

καὶ τὸ χρυσοῦν οἱ τῶν Ῥωμαίων ἡγεμόνες.

Lugdunum itself, 

built beneath a hill at the confluence of the Arar

 and the Rhône, is occupied by the Romans. 

It is the most populous of the cities except Narbo; 

for they use it as a trading centre, 

and here the Roman governors mint both silver and gold coinage.

Strabo, Geographica, IV.3.2

'SPELAREN', GAMBLING & THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADDICTION

Claire Fontaine and The Grandma share many interests -among them, a love of literature- and if there is one author they both consider pivotal, it is Fjodor Dostojevskij.

Claire is a linguistic prodigy and an accomplished polyglot; today, she has decided to reread Spelaren, the Swedish version of The Gambler.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's Spelaren is a novel about roulette, but gambling is only its most visible subject. Beneath the spinning wheel, the money won and lost, and the feverish calculations of its characters lies something much more disturbing: an exploration of desire, obsession, self-deception and the human attraction to risk.

Its protagonist, Alexei Ivanovich, does not simply want to win. He wants to experience the possibility of winning. That distinction is essential. For Alexei, gambling gradually ceases to be a rational attempt to obtain money. The roulette table becomes a psychological space where ordinary life disappears. For a few seconds, everything depends on a number, a colour, a movement of the wheel. Past and future become irrelevant. There is only expectation. And expectation itself becomes addictive.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Spelaren is Alexei's conviction that he can somehow understand the logic of chance. He observes patterns. He develops theories. He remembers previous results. He convinces himself that discipline, intuition or intelligence may allow him to dominate the roulette wheel. But roulette has no memory. The wheel does not know what happened before. This is one of the fundamental psychological traps of gambling: the human mind desperately searches for patterns even where none exist. Randomness is uncomfortable because it reminds us that some things cannot be predicted or controlled. Alexei therefore tries to transform chance into destiny. And destiny into something he believes he can master.

Paradoxically, the most dangerous moment for a gambler is not always defeat. Sometimes it is victory. A loss can create frustration, but a spectacular win creates something far more powerful: proof. Suddenly, the impossible has happened. The gambler can now tell himself: I knew it. And once chance has rewarded that belief, abandoning it becomes much more difficult.

Dostoevsky understood this mechanism with extraordinary psychological intuition. Alexei's victories do not liberate him from gambling. They bind him more closely to it. The money becomes secondary. What matters is the possibility of repeating the miracle.

There is also a remarkable parallel between Alexei's relationship with gambling and his relationship with Polina. Both are based on uncertainty. Both alternate hope and humiliation. Both offer the possibility of an extraordinary reward while constantly threatening rejection and loss. Alexei does not seem attracted to emotional stability. He is attracted to intensity. With Polina, as at the roulette table, certainty would almost destroy the fascination. He waits. He suffers. He hopes. He risks everything. And then he begins again.

Love and gambling become two versions of the same psychological mechanism: the obsessive pursuit of an uncertain reward. 

There is an even darker possibility in Dostoevsky's novel. Perhaps Alexei does not only want to win. Perhaps part of him also wants to lose. There is something strangely liberating about catastrophe. If everything is lost, responsibility disappears with it. There are no longer decisions to make, plans to maintain or futures to protect. Destruction can become a form of escape. This is why Alexei's behaviour sometimes seems less like greed than self-sabotage. He repeatedly approaches the edge and then deliberately takes another step. The roulette table allows him to surrender responsibility while maintaining the illusion that he is exercising absolute freedom.

The psychological power of Spelaren becomes even greater when we remember that Dostoevsky himself knew the world he was describing. He had experienced the compulsive attraction of roulette and the cycle of hope, victory, loss and desperation. The novel therefore has an uncomfortable intimacy. Dostoevsky is not observing his gambler safely from outside. In some respects, he is looking into a mirror. Perhaps that is why the novel contains so little moral judgement. Alexei is neither simply condemned nor excused. Dostoevsky does something more interesting. He allows us to enter his reasoning. And once we are inside it, irrational behaviour begins to acquire its own terrible logic.

Spelaren was published in 1866, but psychologically it feels remarkably modern. Its world could easily be translated into today's casinos, betting apps, online games or financial speculation. Technology changes; the psychological mechanisms do not. The promise remains essentially the same: Perhaps the next one will change everything. And that may be the most disturbing idea in Dostoevsky's novel.

The gambler is not addicted merely to money. He is addicted to possibility. To the few seconds before the wheel stops. To the future before it becomes the present. To the eternal, irresistible thought that next time might be different.

The tragedy is that while the gambler waits for his life to change with the next turn of the wheel, life itself continues to pass. And the wheel keeps turning.

More information: Gutenberg

Eftersom jag själv i hög grad var besatt av önskan att vinna...

Since I myself was deeply obsessed with the desire to win...

Fjodor Dostojevskij