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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

freedomlearningjudgementresponsibility

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1882 AD
He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people.
Anton Chekhov / quote
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08c. 1882 AD
If only you would go to the university," he said. "Only enlightened and holy people are interesting, it's only they who are wanted. The more of such people there are, the sooner the Kingdom of God will come on earth. Of your town then not one stone will be left, everything will he blown up from the foundations, everything will be changed as though by magic. And then there will be immense, magnificent houses here, wonderful gardens, marvellous fountains, remarkable people.... But that's not what matters most. What matters most is that the crowd, in our sense of the word, in the sense in which it exists now -- that evil will not exist then, because every man will believe and every man will know what he is living for and no one will seek moral support in the crowd. Dear Nadya, darling girl, go away! Show them all that you are sick of this stagnant, grey, sinful life. Prove it to yourself at least!
Anton Chekhov / quote
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18c. 1882 AD
You're not content in your position as a factory owner and a rich heiress, you don't believe in your right to it, and now you can't sleep, which, of course, is certainly better than if you were content, slept soundly, and thought everything was fine. Your insomnia is respectable; in any event, it's a good sign. In fact, for our parents such a conversation as we're having now would have been unthinkable; they didn't talk at night, they slept soundly, but we, our generation, sleep badly, are anguished, talk a lot, and keep trying to decide if we're right or not.- A Medical Case
Anton Chekhov / quote
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19c. 1882 AD
Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'Having written this, she laughed.She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.("After The Theatre")
Anton Chekhov / quote
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