GAMBLING has fascinated Russian opera composers, from Tchaikovsky (“The Queen of Spades”) to Shostakovich (“The Gamblers”).

In between we have Sergei Prokofiev’s “The Gambler,” based, for a darker change, on Dostoevsky.

Seven years ago, the Metropolitan Opera and conductor Valery Gergiev took a gamble themselves by staging it with a Russian production team and cast largely drawn from Gergiev’s St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater.

And now, with almost all those usual suspects, it’s back.

This was Prokofiev’s first opera of substance, composed in 1916, and this is the version Gergiev uses rather than a later version performed in 1929.

Dostoevsky’s story, as I recall, seeks to analyze gambling and gamblers, cause and effect. Prokofiev’s version – in which almost every character has a gambling problem and it all ends badly – is less philosophically inclined.

Temur Chkheidze’s staging mixes George Tsypin’s skeletal, vaguely abstract sets with Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili’s 19th-century period costumes to suggest Dostoevsky’s craziness.

Of course, the final success depends on performance – and here, orchestra, chorus, the large and individualized vocal ensemble and the soloists give the impassioned Gergiev and the complex score their all.

In the fevered title role of the roulette-obsessed hero, powerhouse tenor Vladimir Galouzine is a dramatically apt and vocally perfect obsessed hero, while stalwart performances come from Olga Guryakova as the mysterious woman he loves; Sergei Aleksashkin as her stepfather, a retired general; and Larissa Diadkova, who provides a wickedly geriatric portrait of the woman’s grandmother.

It’s an operatic rarity – don’t miss it.

THE GAMBLER
Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center; (212) 362-6000. Through April 12.