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1. THE BET -Anton Chekhov

1.1. Introduction
The short story ‘The bet’ is written by Anton Chekhov. Without his revolutionary
work, the short story as a literary genre would not exist today. Chekhov became
the father of the modern short story because of a key secret weapon. He wasn't
just a writer, but in fact was also a full-time practicing doctor, the smarty-pants.
Even after being a doctor be the secret ingredient to his special writing sauce?
Because Chekhov brought the same kind of detached, objective, non-judgmental
flavor to his fiction that he used when trying to get the bottom of his patients'
problems.
By taking out all the authorial heavy-handedness that was all the rage with
his fellow 19th-century realists, Chekhov made the short story a totally distinct
thing from the novel. Instead of being shown examples of what to do and what
not to do, Chekhov's readers got totally unbiased, straight-up slices of life instead.
And so, in 1889, he wrote "The Bet," a story about a banker and a lawyer who
make a totally loopy wager—whether one of them could stay in solitary
confinement for fifteen years in exchange for two million rubles. There is a twist
ending. It is all about life, death, consciousness, freedom, and all that jazz- most
pressing and least understood philosophical questions of all time.
Few thoughts for reflection:
 A thought long and hard about the difference between the death penalty and
life in prison.
 What it means to be a human being, and how much of our humanity comes
from belonging to the community of other human beings?
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 The line between rugged individualism and crazy isolationism.

 To think about these things to be a fully functioning and participatory person
in the world.
 Why we so deeply value the stories that stir up our little gray cells to consider
all those big ideas about life, the universe, and everything.
1.2. Summary
On a dark autumn night, the banker paces in his study hall and recalls a party he
hosted fifteen years before. In a flashback, he and several of his guests, many of
whom are journalists and scholars, discuss whether capital punishment is more
moral and humane than life imprisonment. While many, including the banker,
assert that imprisonment is crueler because it kills by degrees rather than
instantaneously, a young lawyer argues that life imprisonment is preferable
because it is better to live somehow than not at all.
The banker challenges him to be imprisoned in a cell for five years, and, not to be
outdone, the lawyer insists he could do it for fifteen. The wealthy banker stakes
two million rubles in exchange for the lawyer’s freedom. The banker goads then
the lawyer over dinner, telling him to back out while he still can, because three or
four years of the lawyer’s life (surely, the banker assumes, he will not stick it out
any longer than that) is more valuable than money that the banker can easily
afford to lose. He also reminds the lawyer that voluntary imprisonment will be
much harder psychologically than that which has been enforced.
The following evening, the lawyer is imprisoned in a garden wing of the banker’s
house. He is forbidden to leave, to interact with anyone or even hear human
voices, or to receive letters or newspapers. He is allowed to write letters,
read books, play the piano, drink, and smoke. As the years go by, the lawyer
negotiates different stages of coping with what is essentially solitary confinement.
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At first, he is terribly lonely and bored, playing the piano, rejecting wine and
tobacco, and reading only novels “of a light character.” Then, in the second year
of his imprisonment, he reads only classics. By the fifth year, he has stopped
playing music and refuses to read. He writes letters but tears them up, often
weeping, and often drinks and smokes. Next, he voraciously studies philosophy
and languages, becoming an expert on several. Then he reads the New
Testament, and, finally, in the last two years reads randomly, selecting everything
from Shakespeare to the natural sciences.
The day before the lawyer is to be released, the banker is desperate–his fortunes
have completely reversed, and he is now so deeply in debt that he cannot afford
to pay the lawyer the two million rubles. The banker decides the only solution is
to kill the lawyer. He sneaks out to the garden, where it is pouring rain, and
deduces that the watchman is gone from his post because of the weather. He
sneaks into the lawyer’s room and discovers the man asleep, completely
emaciated and sickly thanks to his imprisonment, aged far beyond his forty years,
and seeming like a “half-dead thing.”
The banker reads the note the lawyer has written and left on the table, which is a
long treatise that declares how he despises “freedom, life, health and all that your
books call the blessings of the world.” He has learned a staggering amount from
all that he has read, and feels he has traveled all over the world, seen beautiful
things, been with beautiful women, learned about the wonders of nature, and
become immensely clever. He finds all of that meaningless, however, because it is
temporary, and is bewildered by those whom he believes “have bartered heaven
for earth.” As such, he renounces the two million rubles and declares that he will
leave five hours early so as to lose the bet.
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The banker begins to weep and kisses the sleeping lawyer on the head, wracked
with contempt for himself. The next morning, the watchman informs him that the
lawyer has escaped. The banker goes to the garden wing to confirm the
departure. He takes the note “to avoid unnecessary rumors” and locks it in his
safe.
1.3. Analysis of the story
“The Bet” was written during a period when Anton Chekhov was greatly
influenced by Leo Tolstoy, whose simple, didactic tales were popular during the
1880’s. The theme of “The Bet” is clearly the vanity of human wishes. Before his
imprisonment, the young lawyer believes that life on any terms is better than
death. He thinks that he can find the inner resources to live in solitude for fifteen
years, and that the promise of a fortune will sustain him during the period of
complete leisure in comfortable surroundings. Like the eighteenth century
travelers in search of truth—Chekhov’s captive moves from one enthusiasm to
another, discarding one by one those sources of human happiness that he is
permitted under the terms of his agreement.
It is interesting that the lawyer alternates between self-indulgence and disciplined
study, moving from light books and music to classical literature, then back to
escape through music and wine, then to intense study, first of the human world
and then of the divine. At the end, Chekhov’s banker observes, he has no
direction but strikes out erratically, obviously searching for something, anything,
to give meaning to his life.
Unlike most truth-seekers in literature, the lawyer is deprived of human contact,
love, family ties, friendship, and companionship. During the first year, Chekhov
writes, the captive is lonely; evidently, solitude is less depressing during the later
years. It might be said, however, that his exploration of all human possibilities is
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incomplete without an experience of personal relationships. Chekhov is aware of

that omission and deals with it in the letter written by the lawyer at the end of his
fifteen years alone. Through books, he says, he has experienced all human
pleasures, from human love and the enjoyment of natural beauty to the exercise
of tyrannical power, and though his emotional involvements have been vicarious,
he believes that he can reject them on the basis of what he has learned.
The grounds of the lawyer’s contempt for life, as expressed in the final letter, are
several.
1. Everything is empty. Various interests last for various lengths of time, but
none can justify a life.
2. All that man considers beautiful is ugly, and all that he considers true is
false; in other words, man can like this world only if he sees it as it is not,
and the captive has lost the capacity for illusion.
3. Nothing endures; death destroys everything and everyone.
4. All is vanity, then, empty, illusory, and doomed.
It is significant that after he sees the shrunken, miserable captive whom he had
intended to kill, after he reads the letter denouncing human existence, the banker
feels contempt not for the world but for himself. He doesn’t feel guilt because he
has destroyed a life. He doesn’t feel shame because he was ready to commit
murder rather than lose his money. He doesn’t feel that the captive has higher
ideals than he. Chekhov leaves the banker’s reaction unexplained. The banker,
however, is not ready to renounce life; he locks the note in his safe as insurance
against possible accusations.
One of the problems with this story is that the author seems uncertain as to his
theme. Surely Chekhov does not agree with the captive that nothing is
worthwhile, although he does realize that no enthusiasm in life seems to be
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permanent. The fact that Chekhov concludes “The Bet” with the banker’s self-
protective gesture suggests that the world is not ready to agree with the lawyer.
Furthermore, the unnatural appearance of the captive leads readers to believe
either that life has worn him down much faster than usual or that his life has been
much harsher than the lives of most people. Again, Chekhov doesn’t speak about
whether the captive is wise or have fifteen years of solitary confinement warped
his judgment.
That Chekhov was uncertain about what he intended to prove in the story, other
than the fact that human reactions are unpredictable, is indicated by the third
section of the story, which he omitted in his collected works. In it, at a party a
year after the prisoner’s escape, the banker is expressing his admiration for the
lawyer, the one man of principle whom he has ever encountered. Suddenly the
lawyer appears, announces his love of life, declares books a poor substitute, and
asks for a considerable sum of money, threatening suicide if he does not receive
it. The banker agrees and then is overcome by the desire himself to renounce life,
but realizing that his life is no longer happy enough to make the gesture
meaningful, he rejects the impulse and declares the lawyer the winner of the bet.
1.4. Themes
Wisdom and Knowledge
The final twist in "The Bet" hinges on the idea that the lawyer took all the
knowledge he could get from the many, many books he read in the prison, and
turned it into wisdom. In other words, he claims that the second-hand
information he gets from reading is pretty much the same thing as lived
experience, so he's been there, done all of that. But he's not done. He also relies
on this version of experience to decide that… experience kind of sucks. What
hangs in the balance of this weird transformation is whether the reader buys it—
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which means we've just met a modern-day ascetic—which means that solitary
confinement has robbed this sad man of his humanity.
The main point of the story is that knowledge cannot be separated from
experience, and that the world cannot be understood by someone not actually
living in it.
Life, Consciousness, and Existence
"The Bet" tests the convictions of a lawyer who claims that any kind of life is
better than no life at all by subjecting him to fifteen years of subhuman existence,
trapped in a house with nothing but books for company. Although physically
comfortable, the lawyer is deprived of one of the standard markers of being
human—being part of a community of other humans. As time goes by, the lawyer
is slowly driven to reject the rest of his human existence as well. When he forfeits
victory in the bet for a life of spirituality or perhaps even suicide, the story seems
to point to the idea that without interaction with others, our humanity cannot
survive.
The story ends up showing that the quest for knowledge has a damaging effect on
living life. It shows that the only way to get to the true essence of life is to toss
out every other aspect of existence.
Sacrifice
As soon as one of the party people argues that a government that can't restore
human life shouldn't have the right to take it away." Sacrifice turns out to be the
most plausible way for the banker to view the actions of the lawyer—and for the
lawyer himself to describe his own reaction to his voluntary imprisonment. He
agrees to throw a part of his life away, to sacrifice his connection to the rest of
humanity in order to find some other level of existence. But the story refuses to
answer the obvious question—does he succeed?
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The only person who is truly facing a great sacrifice in the story is the banker, for
whom the two million has come to mean the difference between being successful
and being a complete failure.The lawyer's final rejection of the world is totally of a
piece with his adding an extra ten years to his sentence, and both sacrifices mark
him as a new kind of spiritual hermit.
Isolation
"The Bet" might not actually have anything to say about the death penalty, but it
can certainly be read as an experiment in solitary confinement. Most prisoners
are fairly deprived, but we can’t figure out the effects of total isolation, rather
than plain old confinement. Here, a prisoner has all the physical and intellectual
comforts that he could want, but he's cut off from any and all human contact.
What follows is the psychological transformation of an already slightly
unbalanced man into a being that loses all touch with his own humanity.
The story shows that isolation is the one surefire way to get someone to shed
most of their humanity. True isolation—no books—would have actually been
better for the lawyer in the long run. He would have missed and sought out
human companionship instead of just rejecting the world outright.
Competition
By setting the action up as a bet, this story necessarily ends up being a contest
between the two men involved. The one-upmanship is the reason for the bet, the
reason for the raised confinement length and the reason for the banker almost
committing murder, and may be even the reason for the lawyer's final twist of an
escape. In the end, though, "The Bet" refuses to in any way rule on the wager at
its center, leaving the reader to decide whether anyone won or lost, and whether
the competition between the banker and the lawyer was the strongest motivator
for the actions of each.
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The story's ending is an elegant solution in which both men emerge from the bet
victorious. The entire competitive aspect of the story is purely in the banker's
mind—the lawyer couldn't care less about the banker and has no interest in any
of the jockeying for position that the banker seems to be obsessed with.
1.5. Characters in the story
The Banker
 The host of the party where the death penalty vs. life imprisonment debate
happens, the banker bets the lawyer two million dollars to stay in solitary
confinement for fifteen years.
Maybe it's just us, but it seems pretty clear that any story about two people
making some kind of complicated and crazy bet would be at least somewhat
about a power struggle between them.
Sure enough, as soon as the banker and the lawyer are introduced they seem
ready to claw each other's faces off. It makes you wonder why the banker would
have invited someone over that he hates so much. And it's probably also spite
that makes the banker not just get "delighted" at the "senseless bet" but also
"make fun of the young man" as the party goes on. So if the whole thing is a
power struggle between the two of them, what we can make of what the banker
represents.
That Guy
First, let's take a look at his personality. We don't have a ton of insight into it, but
there are a few pretty giant honking clues that he's not the nicest guy in town. No,
he's the kind of guy who would let the person he is betting against raise his own
stakes (from five years to fifteen years) without anteing up any extra dough. He is
also the kind of guy who would mock someone that he plans on locking up just to
prove a point—and the kind of guy who would take a hypothetical argument and
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immediately turn it into a demand for physical proof. Basically, he likes to be in a

position of authority and likes to wield power over others, especially those who
happen to disagree with him.
The Man
Second, his more symbolic appearance in the story-shift from thinking about the
banker as a person, and instead try to see him as a category.
Even though Chekhov doesn't give us too many clues, if we try to just pick out
what we can from the sparse description, we get the sense that the banker is
basically The Man. He stands for money—he's described as having "millions
beyond his reckoning", so much money that to him "two millions are a trifle" . For
another, the banker is also on the side of pleasure, hedonism, and material goods.
After all, he's the one giving the party, and he clearly has some kind of super fancy
estate with a guesthouse he can use as a prison for fifteen years.
Also, in the tiny world of the story, he is the agent of governmental or
authoritarian control. He's a walking, talking representation of the idea that
humans can impose rules and power on other humans. Not only is he the lawyer's
jailer, not only does he hire a guard to keep watch outside the guest house prison,
not only does he constantly keep tabs on everything the lawyer is doing by
watching him Big Brother-style—but also he is the only one shown arguing against
the one random guest who says that "the State is not God" and shouldn't have
the right to execute people . He doesn't feel any moral qualms about executing
the lawyer, almost as if he just feels like he has the authority to do that kind of
thing. Which brings us back to the idea that the banker functions like "the State."
The Lawyer
A young guest at the party, the lawyer bets that he can spend fifteen years in
voluntary solitary confinement to prove that any kind of life is better than death.
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If the banker is on the side of government, surveillance, and generally has The
Man-like characteristics, then what we make of the lawyer. It's actually
intentionally woven into the story itself. After all, we have virtually zero access to
the lawyer's thoughts, feelings, or ideas, so everything figured out about him has
our own interpretations on his somewhat mysterious and confusing actions.
1: Wise Guy Hermit
The lawyer—a guy who voluntarily takes himself out of the world to really get
some time to think about things.
After all, when the banker proposes his crazy bet, the lawyer jumps on that thing
like it's the last rowboat off the Titanic: "'If you mean that in earnest,' said the
young man, 'I'll take the bet, but I would stay not five but fifteen years'" .
Only someone who already has monastic or ascetic tendencies, we say. And of
course, a crazed, deeply spiritual hermit is exactly what the lawyer turns into. His
conclusions about life at the end of his letter to the banker:
"I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting,
illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. … I marvel at you who exchange heaven for
earth. I don't want to understand you." 
He doesn't just reject the money—he rejects all of human life.
2: He's Gone 'Round the Bend
If we examine the evidence again, we get a totally different sense of what the
lawyer's driving motivation might actually be. What kind of person would sign up
for a fifteen-year term of total isolation? Maybe not the most mentally balanced
kind.
But the kicker for this second theory is the lawyer's assertion that by reading a lot
of books he's experienced everything that a man ever could:
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"For fifteen years I have been intently studying earthly life. It is true I have not
seen the earth nor men, but in your books I have drunk fragrant wine, I have sung
songs, I have hunted stags and wild boars in the forests, have loved women. . . .
Beauties as ethereal as clouds, created by the magic of your poets and geniuses,
have visited me at night, and have whispered in my ears wonderful tales that have
set my brain in a whirl. … In your books I have flung myself into the bottomless pit,
performed miracles, slain, burned towns, preached new religions, conquered
whole kingdoms. . . . " 

1.6. Model question answers:

1.“And this wild, senseless bet was carried out!” How did the ‘bet’ come about?
What were the terms and conditions of the bet? (A short answer question)
The short story ‘The bet’ is written by Anton Chekhov in 1889. Without his
revolutionary work, the short story as a literary genre would not exist today.
Chekhov became the father of the modern short story because of a key secret
weapon. In this story Anton Chekhov beautifully and dramatically brings out the
significance of the story by depicting about life and reality.
A very wealthy banker gave a party fifteen years ago. The party was graced by
many notable personalities. The major topic of conversation was capital
punishment which was not supported by many because they preferred
imprisonment for life. A twenty five years old lawyer stated that if he were to
choose between the two, He would go for life-imprisonment because to live
anyhow is better than not at all. The exuberant banker wagered a bet for two
millions if the lawyer could stay in solitary confinement for five years. The latter
agreed not for five but fifteen years.Thus the bet took place.
It was decided that the lawyer must undergo his imprisonment under the strictest
observation, in a garden wing of the banker’s house. It was agreed that during the
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period he would be deprived of the right to cross the threshold, to see living
people, to hear human voices and to receive letters and newspapers. He was
permitted to have musical instruments, to read books, to write letters, to drink
wine and smoke tobacco. By the agreement he could communicate, but only in
silence, with the outside world through a little window specially constructed for
this purpose. Everything necessary, books ,music, wine could be received in any
quantity by sending a note through the window. He was to remain confined
exactly fifteen years, not a minute less, any slightest violation would free the
banker from paying him the money.
2. Justify the title of the Story ‘The bet’ (Model Descriptive question)
The short story ‘The bet’ is written by Anton Chekhov in 1889. Without his
revolutionary work, the short story as a literary genre would not exist today.
Chekhov became the father of the modern short story because of a key secret
weapon. In this story Anton Chekhov beautifully and dramatically brings out the
significance of the story by depicting about life and reality.
Chekhov had to justify the bet itself. It seems like an implausible bet that any man
would undertake to spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. But Chekhov had
the idea and he must have liked it. He knew he had to make the reader believe
the whole incident really occurred. So he attacked the problem head-on of
making his premise believable. He started right with the title. He established that
the two bettors, the banker and the lawyer, made the bet in front of a group of
important men. It would be hard for either of them to back out. Chekhov very
conspicuously does not mention liquor. But at such a gathering of men there must
have been a lot of drinking being done--vodka before and after the meal and wine
with the food. This is the sort of bet a couple of men might make while they were
drunk. But Chekhov wants to assure the reader that the bet was made in earnest
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and that neither of the men could call it off on the grounds that they had been
drinking too much. So the author has the banker speak to the lawyer in private
when both characters are apparently clear-headed.
"Think better of it, young man, while there is still time. To me two million is a
trifle, but you are losing three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or
four, because you won't stay longer. Don't forget either, you unhappy man, that
voluntary confinement is a great deal harder to bear than compulsory. The
thought that you have the right to step out in liberty at any moment will poison
your whole existence in prison. I am sorry for you."
The banker doesn't like the bet. He is sorry he made it. He would like to call it off,
but he prefers to try to get the lawyer to change his mind. What the banker says
to him in private is a clear but guarded invitation to call off the bet. The banker is
clearly indicating that he will be glad to do so if the younger man wishes. There is
nothing in it for the banker. He doesn't like the idea of keeping someone a
prisoner. Furthermore, the banker will be at the expense of providing everything
his prisoner asks for, including some hundreds of books, many of which are very
hard to find. 
Chekhov succeeds in convincing the reader that this preposterous bet was
actually honored by both parties for fifteen long years. His title for the story, "The
Bet," shows that he knew his biggest problem was with verisimilitude--making the
reader believe in this bizarre, preposterous bet. The story is an anomalous one
for Anton Chekhov, almost an aberration. Franz Kafka wrote about it, “Most of
Chekhov's stories are pure realism.”
There is no more appropriate title than "The Bet" for Chekhov's story because the
bet, or wager, between the young man and the banker is central to the plot as
well as to the psychological changes in the characters. In effect, the bet is both
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the cause and the result of what occurs with the main characters; moreover, this
wager between the two men even involves the readers in their predictions, or
"betting on" what the outcome of the story will be.
The act of betting is one that involves much of the psychological state of those
who wager, their initial viewpoints, and the subsequent development of their
states of mind. With respect to the young lawyer, his impulsiveness drives him to
make the initial wager with the banker, and his egotism and rash youth cause him
to "up the bet" to fifteen rather than five years, perhaps believing that the banker
will not take this bet. However, the banker, equally confident, does accept the
wager. Then, during this extensive period of fifteen years' confinement, the young
man moves from self-indulgence to disciplined study as he matures, but regresses
to escape as he is overcome by a factor upon which he has not figured--loneliness
and alienation and their consequent hopelessness. These mental and emotional
changes are not unlike the various mental states that one who bets goes
through--although much more swiftly.
As the banker, who is the more passive participant in the wager, watches the
lawyer survive his confinement, he, too, moves from confidence to despair, an
inner death-in-life not unlike that of the younger man. In effect, the bet has
endangered the sanity of both the men. For, while the lawyer writes
"I despise freedom and life and health and all that in your books is called the good
thing of the world,"
The banker is dominated by the selfish urge to protect himself financially and
contemplates murder when he discovers the lawyer asleep and "half-dead" from
his despair. Thus, both men have, in the lawyer's words, "exchanged heaven for
earth" in the quick, impulsive act of making a bet.
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Since the story revolves around the ‘Bet’ that took place in the story, the title is
apt and appropriate. The story is all about what provoked to carry out this
senseless bet and what were its terms and after effects.

1.7. Extra (University) questions :

1. What did the young lawyer learn during his fifth year of his confinement?

Why did he leave his ‘cell’ five minutes before the time previously fixed?
2. Describe how the banker makes a bet to pay two million dollars to the

young lawyer. Show how Anton Chekhov in this story depicts the gradual
and progressive understanding about life and reality?
3. Why was the bet called ridiculous?

4. Why did the banker feel contemptuous towards his own behavior? Why did

he regret making the bet?

5. Briefly describe how the lawyer spent his fifteen years of his solitary

confinement?
6. What is the banker’s opinion about capital punishment?