This is not the kind of thing you expect Chekhov to write. Or at least it’s not the kind of thing I expect him to write.
The story, briefly:
After a conversation about the death penalty and life imprisonment, a banker bets a lawyer that he (the lawyer) could not withstand five years of solitary confinement. The lawyer takes the bet and even ups the time to 15 years. To serve his time, he imprisons himself in an outbuilding on the banker’s estate. He spends his days improving himself: Playing the piano, reading the classics, teaching himself foreign languages, etc.
Hmm, maybe I can’t describe the story as briefly as I would have liked to… Anyway to continue:
As the years pass, the banker makes some bad investments and finds himself broke and unable to honor the terms of the bet, should he lose. What can he do? He realizes that he could sneak into the jail-hut when nobody is looking and kill the lawyer.
In the dark of the night, he creeps into the hut and finds the lawyer, no longer young, asleep. At his side is a note, in which the lawyer declares, first of all, that he renounces the bet and does not wish to take the money from the banker, and in fact he will be leaving the hut a few hours early, so as to lose the bet; secondly that he has gained great earthly knowledge from the books he has read during his imprisonment; and finally, that despite the wisdom gained from those books, he despises the books, as indeed he despises all the material pleasures of the world.
He has gone mad.
The banker creeps out of the hut; later that night, the lawyer does indeed sneak off. The banker, feeling like a louse, stashes the note so no one will ever see it. (Why???)
This story reads like a fractured fairy tale, except the moral of the story seems rather odd: Solitary confinement is a terrible thing that will make you crazy. Not that I disagree with that, but if that were a lesson I wanted to teach, I’m pretty sure I could come up with a better way to teach it. (I say that with all due humility, of course!)
Anway, this is one of the clunkier of Chekhov’s stories. It has served as the inspiration for an (recently composed) opera, which makes a certain amount of sense; it’s highly dramatic, like a tale told round the campfire (or in a concert hall), with a distinct philosophical bent.
Generally, though, blah.
READ THIS? READ THAT!
Chekhov wrote several of these stylized, philosophical tales. One that particularly reminds me of “The Bet” is “A Story Without a Title.” Unlike a typical Chekhov tale–unlike the best of Chekhov’s tales–these two stories are reliant on plot, setting out the details step by step, and then closing with a little bang at the end. So you could read that if you wanted. (Or you could take my word on it that neither of them are terribly interesting, and jump to some other, better story in the collected works!)
A Chekhov Circus 