The Bet and Other Stories

The Bet and Other Stories is a collection of 12 stories and a novella. Eleven were written between 1885 and 1889 when Chekhov was in his twenties. These are book-ended in time between “That Wretched Boy” (1883) and “After the Theatre (1892)”.  The title story, “The Bet”, is considered one of Chekhov’s finest and involves a bet between a banker and a lawyer about whether capital punishment or life imprisonment is more humane. Others in this collection also rank high in the Chekhov canon. In “A Living Calendar” a State Councilor sits by the fire with his wife and complains of the lack of culture in their town and recalls the past visits of stars, marking time by the ages of their four children.  “A Tedious Story”, the novella also known as “A Dreary Story”, “A Boring Story”, and “A Dull Story”, was influenced by the death of Chekhov’s brother Nikolay and chronicles the alienation and confusion of a renowned professor of medicine during his physical decline from an unspecified illness. “A Gentleman Friend” depicts the dilemma of a beautiful young woman who finds herself penniless upon discharge from a hospital and her stratagems to recover her good fortune. Throughout this collection we see a master at work, showing life as it is in all its messy and inconclusive details, in a style that Nabokov described as “writing the way one person relates to another the most important things in his life, slowly and yet without a break, in a slightly subdued voice”.