The weapon fails to fire, but when Vulič cocks the pistol again and aims it at a service cap hanging over the window, a shot rings out and smoke fills the room.

He then asks Grigory to throw a playing card in the air, and when the card lands, he pulls the trigger. 'Gentlemen! Who will pay 20 gold pieces for me?', Vulič asks, putting the muzzle of the pistol to his forehead. Nobody knows if the pistol is loaded or not. A lieutenant of the dragoons of the Tsar, Vulič, a man of Serbian origins with a passion for gambling, accepts the challenge and randomly takes one of a number of pistols of various calibres from its nail, cocks it and pours gunpowder onto the pan.

In the story, which is set in a Cossack village, the protagonist, Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, claims that there is no predestination and proposes a bet in order to prove it, laying about twenty gold pieces onto a table.

Russian refers to the supposed country of origin, and roulette to the element of risk-taking and the spinning of the revolver's cylinder, which is evocative of a roulette wheel.Īccording to Andrew Clarke, the first trace of Russian roulette can be found in the short story 'The Fatalist', which was written in 1840 and was part of the collection A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, a Russian poet and writer. If the loaded chamber aligns with the barrel, the weapon will fire, killing or severely injuring the player. Russian roulette ( Russian: Русская рулетка, romanized: Russkaya ruletka) is a potentially lethal game of chance in which a player places a single round in a revolver, spins the cylinder, places the muzzle against the head or body (of the opponent or themselves), and pulls the trigger. Cylinder is in the open (non-firing) position.

A revolver with a single round loaded in the cylinder. For other uses, see Russian roulette (disambiguation).Ĭharacters in the 1978 film The Deer Hunter engaging in a game of Russian roulette. For the similarly-named 1965 cartoon, see Rushing Roulette.

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