(a) Short story as premature existential challenge:
For years, I was convinced this story was by Guy de Maupassant. As it is, it’s the only Chekhov I’ve ever read, and it turns out I haven’t read any Maupassant at all.
A rich and arrogant banker bets an idealistic young lawyer a small fortune that he, the lawyer, can’t spend fifteen years in solitary confinement. This is at a party, you understand: there was rich food, plentiful alcohol, hijinks of manifold sorts, and a dangerously sloshed intellectual argument about whether capital punishment or life imprisonment was the more (or less) humane judicial sentence. We’ve all been to a party like that, right? The lawyer says that to “live somehow is better than not to live at all” and the banker says, basically, prove it mate, and here’s two million roubles on the table. “‘I accept!’ says the lawyer. ‘You stake your millions, and I stake my freedom!’” Which is a little rash of him, considering.
It doesn’t go well. The banker spends fifteen years losing enough of his fortune that paying out the two million will ruin him. The lawyer spends his time cut off from contemporary human contact, but has access to books, musical instruments, writing materials, and alcohol and tobacco. He drifts in and out of madness, learns half a dozen languages, alternately sates himself and goes on hunger strike; spends a year playing the piano constantly, another talking to himself, another in silence.
He reads everything.
The night before the final day, the banker is desperate. He only has one option. But, it turns out, so does the lawyer, who has made a final, modest testament:
“‘I know that I am more intelligent than all of you. [Okay, not that modest.] And I scorn your books, I scorn all the world’s blessings and its wisdom. It is all paltry, fleeting, illusory, and as deceptive as a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and beautiful, but death will wipe you from the face of the earth the same as cellar mice, and your descendants, history, the immortality of your geniuses will freeze or burn along with the terrestrial globe.’”
To a book-loving fifteen year old who’d just lost his father to a random heart attack, this came as a cosmically chilling revelation. I mean, it’s like positing Chekhov as precursor to Lovecraft. Be smart and read all the books, sure; just don’t read all the books or this existentially abyssal plain will open up and lose you in its heart forever. I felt so small reading that, and yet somehow so absolutely powerful.
It wasn’t till reading it again recently that I fully appreciated the subtle ironies that perfuse, or perhaps irradiate, ‘The Bet’s ending. Bankers are, after all, bankers. And yes, you short story purists who blanched at the first paragraph of this section, I am now reading more Chekhov.
First published in Russian as ‘Пари’ in Novoye Vremya, January, 1889. Collected in Fifty-Two Stories, Penguin Classics, 2020. Available to read on Project Gutenberg in an earlier translation
A Personal Anthology 