Thus, they entered into a bet wherein the lawyer had to live in a small guest room at the banker’s property in solitary confinement for a period of fifteen years, at the completion of which the banker would have to pay him two million rubles. While the banker believed that capital punishment was better, the lawyer thought that life imprisonment was the better choice. The argument was about the better way of punishment. The story begins with the banker recalling the incidents of the past and how after a heated argument at a party he had thrown, he had entered this bet with the lawyer. 6’, ‘The Wife and Other Stories’, ‘Gooseberries’, ‘The Complete Short Novels’, ‘About Love’ and ‘The Plays of Anton Chekhov’.

Some of Chekhov’s famous works include ‘Ward no. He is also counted among the likes of Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg to have introduced early modernism in theatre. Just as the lawyer’s time of imprisonment is about to end, the banker decides to kill his prisoner but when he goes sin to do so, something changes his decision.īorn on 29th January, 1860 Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian playwright and short story writer, considered to be one of the greatest writers of short-fiction. Years pass by and the banker goes bankrupt. The banker believes that the death penalty is better because it doesn’t drag on the pain of the gruesome punishment and is over in a splash but the lawyer thinks the opposite.įollowing a heated argument at a dinner party about which mode of punishment is better life imprisonment or death penalty, a young lawyer and a banker enter a bet wherein the lawyer would have to stay in solitary confinement on the banker’s property for fifteen years, at the completion of which he would get two million dollars. One of Chekhov’s many remarkable literary pieces, ‘The Bet’ is the story of a banker and a lawyer who enter a bet in order to prove their own belief about death penalty and life in prison.

We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.”

The bet by anton chekhov