Later, he begins to study history, philosophy, and languages. In the fifth year, he starts drinking, stops reading books, and talks to himself in anger. In the second year, he stops playing music and reads only classics.
He reads literature of “light content” (338). He plays the piano and rejects wine and tobacco. In the first year, he suffers “from solitude and boredom” (338). The narrator goes on to describe the years the lawyer spends in confinement. If he stayed in the cottage for 15 years, the banker would give him 2 million rubles. And he could write letters but not receive them. He could have a musical instrument, books, wine, and cigarettes. The lawyer increased the length, declaring that he would spend not five but 15 years in confinement.Īs the banker recalls the details of the agreement: the lawyer was to live in a cottage in the banker’s garden without going outside or seeing anyone. The banker bet the lawyer two million rubles that he wouldn’t last five years in prison. A young lawyer at the party said that both options were immoral but, if presented with the choice, he would choose life in prison because “to live somehow is better than not to live at all” (337). The guests found capital punishment outdated and immoral, whereas the banker thought it is morally preferable because it is quick. At a party the banker hosted, he and other men discussed whether life in prison or capital punishment is more moral and humane. The story opens with an old banker recalling a bet he made with a young lawyer almost 15 years earlier. This guide refers to 52 Short-Stories: 1883-1898, a collection of Chekhov’s works translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Knopf, 2020).
Chekov’s unnamed characters embark on a wager in which they each stand to lose a great deal. “The Bet” is a complex moral tale that follows a banker and a lawyer who enter a bet to prove their beliefs about which is worse, life in prison or the death penalty. Considered a master of short fiction and, along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, a founder of Modernist theater, Chekov is one of the late-19th-century writers who have reached 21st-century readers and audiences most powerfully and widely.
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