ACAnton Chekhov

134 collected words

Anton Chekhov

Life dates: 1860 AD — 1904 AD

Chekhov’s The Bet puts a confident argument beside the consequences of a wager. Read the unnamed guest’s claim and the narrator’s image of desperate reading as different voices in Garnett’s English translation.

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Life and writing

The catalogue identifies Anton Pavlovich Chekhov and gives his lifetime as 1860–1904. It names Constance Garnett as translator and identifies the collection as volume nine of the Tales of Chekhov. The linked text confirms that volume and translation credit, and includes The Bet among its stories. James Rusk and David Widger receive the digital credits. The checked record does not establish its print publisher or an ISBN, so those fields remain unspecified. Lifetime and electronic dates do not supply composition dates for the existing archive extracts.

In section I of The Bet, an unnamed guest answers the banker’s comparison of execution and imprisonment by denying that the state may take what it cannot restore. That is the guest’s argument within the story, not legal advice or a statement attributed to every speaker. Later in the same section, the narrator compares the confined lawyer’s reading to someone grasping wreckage at sea. Both complete selected English extracts match the Garnett text under limited normalization. Read the change of voice and the wager’s consequences before treating either detached sentence as Chekhov’s personal instruction.

Reading this voice

Read The Bet through both sections, beginning with the gathering’s argument and following what the wager costs its participants. The two selected extracts come from different voices within section I: an unnamed guest and the narrator. Both match this Garnett text under punctuation, case and spacing comparison. The local matches do not establish every Chekhov-labelled attribution or the translation behind it.

Subjects to explore

freedom learning judgement responsibility

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1882 AD

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Anton Chekhov / quote

02c. 1882 AD

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

Anton Chekhov / quote

03c. 1882 AD

Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.

Anton Chekhov / quote

04c. 1882 AD

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Anton Chekhov / quote

05c. 1882 AD

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

Anton Chekhov / quote

06c. 1882 AD

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

Anton Chekhov / quote

07c. 1882 AD

And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.

Anton Chekhov / quote

08c. 1882 AD

Ivanov: And this whole romance of ours is commonplace and trite: he lost heart, and he lost his way. She came along, strong and brave in spirit, and gave him an helping hand. That's all very well and plausible in novels, but in life...Sasha: In life it's the same.Ivanov: I see you have a fine understanding of life!

Anton Chekhov / quote

09c. 1882 AD

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

Anton Chekhov / quote

10c. 1882 AD

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

Anton Chekhov / quote

11c. 1882 AD

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

Anton Chekhov / quote

12c. 1882 AD

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!", May 10, 1886)

Anton Chekhov / quote

13c. 1882 AD

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.", May 10, 1886)

Anton Chekhov / quote

14c. 1882 AD

If Makar Denisych was just a clerk or a junior manager, then no one would have dared talk to him in such a condescending, casual tone, but he is a 'writer', and a talentless mediocrity! returned a bad story to Makar recently is know to the whole district and has provoked mockery, long conversations and indignation, while Makar Denisych is already being referred to as old Makarka. If someone does not write the way required, they never try to explain what is wrong, but just say: 'That bastard has gone and written another load of rubbish!

Anton Chekhov / quote

15c. 1882 AD

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Anton Chekhov / quote

16c. 1882 AD

A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.

Anton Chekhov / quote

17c. 1882 AD

The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

Anton Chekhov / quote

18c. 1882 AD

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

Anton Chekhov / quote

19c. 1882 AD

Science and art,... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities,... then they only complicate and encumber life.

Anton Chekhov / quote

20c. 1882 AD

Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.

Anton Chekhov / quote

21c. 1882 AD

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

Anton Chekhov / quote

22c. 1882 AD

Lebedev: France has a clear and defined policy... The French know what they want. They just want to wipe out the Krauts, finish, but Germany, my friend, is playing a very different tune. Germany has many more birds in her sights than just France...Shabelsky: Nonsense! ...In my view the German are cowards and the French are cowards... They're just thumbing their noses at each other. Believe me, things will stop there. They won't fight.Borkin: And as I see it, why fight? What's the point of these armaments, congresses, expenditures? You know what I'd do? I'd gather together dogs from all over the country, give them a good dose of rabies and let them loose in enemy country. In a month all my enemies would be running rabid.

Anton Chekhov / quote

23c. 1882 AD

Country life has its advantages,' he used to say. 'You sit on the veranda drinking tea and your ducklings swim on the pond, and everything smells good. . . and there are gooseberries.

Anton Chekhov / quote

24c. 1882 AD

It was hard and sour, but, as Poushkin said, the illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths. I saw a happy man, one whose dearest dream had come true, who had attained his goal in life, who had got what he wanted, and was pleased with his destiny and with himself.

Anton Chekhov / quote