About the work
Die Spieler (The Gamblers, Игроки) is a comedy by Nikolai Gogol, reworked several times between the early 1830s and the early 1840s and published in 1842. It premiered on 5 February 1843 at the Maly Theatre in Moscow, with the celebrated actor Mikhail Shchepkin as Uteshitelny.
Plot
The card sharp Ikharev meets a gang of three fellow cheats at a provincial inn, who appear to help him swindle a young landowner's son out of his fortune. When Ikharev reveals his own cheating method in return and trades his winnings for a promissory note worth 200,000 roubles, it turns out that the whole scheme was staged by the three swindlers themselves, leaving Ikharev the one who has been fleeced.
Cultural significance
Because Ikharev cannot expose the fraud without incriminating himself, the swindle goes unpunished — a characteristically bitter twist for Gogol. Dmitri Shostakovich began an operatic setting of the play in 1941/42 that remained unfinished and was premiered posthumously as a fragment only in 1978.