‘The Bet’ is a short story by Anton Chekhov written in 1889 that revolves around a bet between a banker and a lawyer. The story is told from the perspective of the banker fifteen years after making the bet. During a party in the banker’s youth, a heated debate over the morality of corporal punishment (that is, the death penalty) broke out between the guests. The host asserts that the death penalty is the most moral solution since life imprisonment is essentially a very slow and arduous death penalty, and so corporal punishment saves the prisoner from a long life of agony. Some guests on the other hand decry corporal punishment as obsolete, immoral, and unchristian. As the debate spreads to involve more of the guests, a young lawyer suggests that while he believes that both the death penalty and life imprisonment are equally immoral, he himself would no doubt choose life imprisonment because a life lived imprisoned is better than not living a life at all. The banker immediately calls him out on this and says, “It’s a lie. I bet you two millions you wouldn’t stick in a cell even for five years.” The lawyer says in response, “If it’s that serious, then I bet I’ll stay not five, but fifteen.”

In this first introductory scene, Chekhov reduces a complex topic to a few paragraphs, while simultaneously setting up the rest of the story. He uses this springboard to launch into a exploration of the morality of imprisonment through the bet, taking the reader through the fifteen years of imprisonment the lawyer suffers. A man of his word, the lawyer agrees to remain imprisoned under watch within the banker’s estate. He may request food, wine, books, and a musical instrument, but cannot interact with anybody else in person or leave the garden in the estate that he is imprisoned within. A very lenient imprisonment all things considered. Over the years, the interests of the lawyer wax and wane, from music, to silent drinking, a voracious appetite for books, theology, medicine, and many other varied topics he consumes eagerly. To the banker’s absolute shock, the lawyer never leaves his imprisonment.

Fifteen years later, the banker, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is in a pickle. Soon he will have to make good on his bet of two million, but if he does, he will be completely destitute, and thrown out of his own house onto the street. Unable to accept this, he devises a plan to murder the lawyer the very night before his planned release. He creeps into the cell and finds the lawyer, a disturbing shell of a man, stick thin and unresponsive. He sits before a letter addressed to the banker, where he reveals he has grown to hate humanity and all it stands for during his imprisonment.

“And I despise your books, despise all worldly blessings and wisdom. Everything is void, frail, visionary and delusive like a mirage. Though you be proud and wise and beautiful, yet will death wipe you from the face of the Earth like the mice undergound ; and your posterity, your history, and the immortality of your men of genius will be as frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe.”

He goes on to say that all man has come to ‘take lies for truth and ugliness for beauty’ and that he does not want to understand ‘those who have bartered heaven for earth.’ Finally, to show his true contempt for the material gain that defines mankind, he announces his intention to escape the cell and void his owed two million. He simply does not want the money.

The banker is of course, ecstatic, and lets the lawyer make his escape. The story ends with banker being allowed to keep his two million.

What strikes me most about this story is Chekhov’s mastery of generating interest in what is ultimately a rather tedious prospect. Taking a moral debate that has been raging for years, and has raged ever since, and turning it into a fifteen year exploration of the sum of all mankind’s worldly interests, while also wrapping the entire story up in less than 3000 words is nothing short of incredible. The moral of the story is just as thought provoking as the initial debate that sparked the bet, though I’m not certain Chekhov determined that life imprisonment was any more moral than the death penalty or vice versa. By the end, the lawyer has lost all interest in the lives and beauty of his fellow man after consuming as much of their canon as possible. He has fully embraced a kind of hyper-cynicism toward our species, suggesting that imprisonment is perhaps more devastating than death because the prisoner comes to believe that not only is his life not worth living, but nobody else’s is either. Death would seem to be the more moral out in this case. On the other hand, it could be that Chekhov sees a rejection of all worldly things as enlightenment, and that life imprisonment is a means of attaining a higher level of existence. In contrast with the Banker, is who is willing to murder someone for money, the lawyer is certainly presented as the more enlightened person. Maybe the lawyer was right in saying that he believes a life lived in prison is better than none at all because he is able to come to his conclusions in the first place. I think these ideas of what the story could mean both have some truth to them, even though neither fully satisfies the initial debate. There are many, many more ways to interpret the fate of the prisoner of course, and that’s why this story is such a classic, but I wonder what Chekhov was really trying to say here. I suspect he felt the lawyer’s long sentence was akin to achieving heaven through suffering, a common theme in his works as I understand it, but the shocking audacity of the lawyer to denounce all beauty and wisdom in all others makes me feel his enlightenment was a false one. To say that the finite nature of human life makes it perfectly meaningless and futile, ‘frozen slag, burnt down together with the terrestrial globe,’ is missing the point in my opinion. I’ll have to do some more research to figure out what he meant with some certainty.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley