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In the title story, a young lawyer accepts a banker's bet of two million roubles that he cannot endure fifteen years of solitary confinement. Locked in a…
In the title story, a young lawyer accepts a banker's bet of two million roubles that he cannot endure fifteen years of solitary confinement. Locked in a lodge in the banker's garden with books, he reads everything, from novels to languages, philosophy and the Gospels, and as the end of the term approaches the banker, now ruined, plans to kill him, but finds that the prisoner has come to his own conclusion about the money. The volume adds other stories by Anton Chekhov.
Context and significance
Chekhov wrote 'The Bet' in 1889. This translation, by S. S. Koteliansky and John Middleton Murry, the husband of Katherine Mansfield, was published in 1915. Read Chekhov's The Darling and his last plays.
About the author
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was the grandson of a serf who bought his family's freedom. He studied medicine in Moscow and paid for his studies and his family's keep by writing hundreds of humorous sketches for magazines. 'Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress,' he once wrote, and he practised both all his life.
In 1890 he crossed Siberia to study the prison island of Sakhalin. His short stories, like The Lady with the Dog, and his plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, like Uncle Vanya, transformed both forms with their quiet, open endings. He died of tuberculosis in Germany at forty-four.