The Bet and Other Stories

The Bet and Other Stories is an English collection of thirteen stories by Anton Chekhov, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and John Middleton Murry and first published in 1915. It brings thirteen stories into one volume.

In the title story, a banker and a young lawyer wager two million roubles on fifteen years of voluntary confinement, turning a debate about capital punishment into a test of knowledge and value. “A Tedious Story” and “The Fit” extend the volume's concern with mortality and moral exhaustion.

“Misfortune,” “After the Theatre,” “Enemies,” and the shorter comic pieces examine desire, shame, grief, vanity, education, and money. Chekhov repeatedly finds private crisis inside ordinary life, allowing a gesture or failed conversation to unsettle a whole social role.

The collection moves from philosophical premises to intimate scenes without forcing them into one conclusion. Its changing tones—bleak, ironic, compassionate, absurd—show how compressed observation unifies it without a shared cast or continuous plot.

"So indignant was her insulted modesty at this weakness that she called herself all the bad names that she knew and she related to herself many insulting, degrading truths. Thus she told herself that she never was moral, and she had not fallen before only because there was no pretext, that her day-long struggle had been nothing but a game and a comedy...."

The local EPUB's navigation lists all thirteen stories, but its body begins near the end of “Misfortune” and omits the collection's opening texts; the passage above is a literal sustained passage near the beginning of the downloadable body file.