The Bet
Complete textAt a gathering, a banker and a young lawyer dispute whether lifelong imprisonment is worse than death. Their argument becomes a wager involving years of voluntary confinement and a large payment. As the term approaches its end, the banker revisits a promise whose consequences have radically changed.
Continue readingAbout The Bet
The wager gives abstract debate a literal cost in time, money, and isolation. The two participants do not remain fixed while the agreement runs, making its apparent clarity increasingly unstable. Read the contrast between public confidence at the party and private calculation afterward, especially where knowledge and wealth cease to have the meanings each man originally assigned them.
Reading focus
Trace how years of isolation and changing wealth alter the stakes of a wager first made as an argument.
This reading edition contains 2,688 words in 2 original sections. Read the text online with adjustable type and three colour themes, or keep a printable PDF.
Author: Anton Chekhov. Language: English. Reading edition: 28 October 2026.
Opening excerpt
It was a dark autumn night. The old banker was pacing from corner to corner of his study, recalling to his mind the party he gave in the autumn fifteen years ago. There were many clever people at the party and much interesting conversation. They talked among other things of capital punishment. The guests, among them not a few scholars and journalists, for the most part disapproved of capital punishment. They found it obsolete as a means of punishment, unfitted to a Christian State and immoral. Some of them thought that capital punishment should be replaced universally by life-imprisonment.
Contents
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Is this the complete The Bet?
This edition contains the complete English literary text, with 2 sections and 2,688 words. This reading edition preserves the checked English text and its section order. No study notes have been added.
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