The first two parts of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's…

The complete novel is also a success.

The critic Strakhov, generally satisfied with the novel, will later remark that "Only Crime and Punishment was read in 1866" and that Dostoyevsky had managed to portray, aptly and realistically, a Russian person. (Frank, Joseph (1997) [1995]. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871. Princeton: Princeton University Press.)

Initially, however, the novel receives a mixed reception from critics, with most of the negative responses coming from nihilists.

Grigory Eliseev of the radical magazine The Contemporary calls the novel a "fantasy according to which the entire student body is accused without exception of attempting murder and robbery".

In March 1866, Dostoyevsky moves with his brother-in-law Alexander Ivanov to a country house in Lyublino to escape the heat of Moscow.

He returns to St. Petersburg in mid-September and promises his editor, F. T. Stellovsky, that he will complete the novel The Gambler by November, although he has not yet written a single line.

Milyukov, one of Dostoyevsky's friends, advises him to hire a secretary.

Dostoyevsky contacts Pavel Olkhin, one of the best stenographers in St. Petersburg, who recommends his pupil Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina.

Dostoyevsky is the favorite author of Snitkina and her recently deceased father.

He hires Snitkina in October 1866, she registers his dictation in shorthand, and The Gambler, a short novel focused on gambling (a subject with which he is very familiar), is completed within twenty-six  days on October 30 (his birthday).

Dostoyevsky had become the lone parent of his stepson Pasha in 1864, after the successive deaths of his wife Maria and his brother, and, almost immediately afterwards, of Mikhail's family.

The failure of Epokha, the magazine he had founded with his brother after the suppression of Vremya, had worsened his financial situation.

But for the help of his relatives and friends, he would have gone bankrupt.