The Bet

In his notes for “The Bet,” Chekhov referred to the story as a fairy tale. The characters have no proper names, which allows them to function as stock characters like the princes, goblins, and dragons of classic fairy tales. Furthermore, wagers, imprisonment, long passages of time, sleeping, and surprise endings are traditional devices in moral fables. The kiss the banker gives the lawyer near the end of the story mirrors the magical kisses that end many such fables.

Unlike fairy tales, however, “The Bet” has no clear moral. It is too character-centered and contains too much ambiguity to be seen merely as a parable designed to teach a lesson. The narrator doesn’t cast judgment on the wager, and the story has no obvious hero or villain. The argument about the death penalty becomes secondary to the psychological punishment the two men put themselves through. Rather than being under the spell of a cruel monster or stepmother, the two men are their own jailors. And the sorrows they face are of their own making—with no clear benefit to either of them.

The omniscient third-person narrator establishes the gloomy and suspenseful mood of the story from the opening line, “It was a dark autumn night” (336). Chekhov’s story, while a clear example of Literary Realism, also recalls the Gothic tales of his predecessor Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). In the climactic scene of the story, when the banker visits the lawyer to murder him, Chekhov writes, “everyone in the house was asleep and he could feel the rustling of the chilled trees,” “in the garden it was dark and cold,” “a sharp, damp wind was howling,” “he felt for the steps and the door in the darkness,” “not a soul was there,” “a candle was burning dimly in the prisoner’s room,” and “the rusty lock produced a rasping sound as the door creaked” (340-41). Like Poe, Chekhov uses desolate settings, mysterious incidents, and bizarre plot twists to build suspense and tension from beginning to end. In “The Bet,” Chekhov’s world of a highly eccentric Russian professional class slips seamlessly from Realism into Gothic horror.

In Three Sisters, one of Chekhov’s later plays, the characters repeat the phrase “what does it matter,” or variants of it, in response to different events. Some critics point out that this response suggests the nihilistic premise that life is meaningless. Nihilism took shape in Russia in the mid-19th century and the term was made popular by Russian author Ivan Turgenev in his 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. It is not surprising this notion is present in Chekhov’s plays and stories. “The Bet” hints at this absurdity in the negotiation between the banker and lawyer. When the banker bets 2 million rubles that the lawyer will not be able to sit in a cell for five years, the lawyer counters by committing to 15 years. The lawyer’s response defies the logical progression of negotiation, as he is bargaining against himself. The passage emphasizes the absurdity of his move and, by extension, of many human decisions—as if to say that life in prison and out are equally meaningless. Critics have remarked that Chekhov’s plays were precursors to the Theatre of the Absurd, a group of post-World War II dramatic works that followed the French writer and philosopher Albert Camus’s belief that human life is absurd and devoid of purpose.

Yet, while nihilism rejects all moral and religious values, the lawyer’s derision toward ordinary life at the end of “The Bet” includes God as a moral compass. The human desire to experience the mystery of life through faith and spirituality permeates Chekhov’s works more thoroughly than nihilism. His characters sometimes experience a lack of meaning, and yet the tone of his stories is far from nihilistic. He shows an unwavering interest and belief in the value of the human spirit and the intricacies of human motivation.