The banker decides the only solution is to kill the lawyer. The day before the lawyer is to be released, the banker is desperate–his fortunes have completely reversed, and he is now so deeply in debt that he cannot afford to pay the lawyer the two million rubles. Then he reads the New Testament, and, finally, in the last two years reads randomly, selecting everything from Shakespeare to the natural sciences. Next, he voraciously studies philosophy and languages, becoming an expert on several. He writes letters but tears them up, often weeping, and often drinks and smokes. By the fifth year, he has stopped playing music and refuses to read. At first, he is terribly lonely and bored, playing the piano, rejecting wine and tobacco, and reading only novels “of a light character.” Then, in the second year of his imprisonment, he reads only classics. As the years go by, the lawyer negotiates different stages of coping with what is essentially solitary confinement. He is allowed to write letters, read books, play the piano, drink, and smoke.

He is forbidden to leave, to interact with anyone or even hear human voices, or to receive letters or newspapers. The following evening, the lawyer is imprisoned in a garden wing of the banker’s house. He also reminds the lawyer that voluntary imprisonment will be much harder psychologically than that which has been enforced. The banker goads then the lawyer over dinner, telling him to back out while he still can, because three or four years of the lawyer’s life (surely, the banker assumes, he will not stick it out any longer than that) is more valuable than money that the banker can easily afford to lose. The wealthy banker stakes two million rubles in exchange for the lawyer’s freedom.

The banker challenges him to be imprisoned in a cell for five years, and, not to be outdone, the lawyer insists he could do it for fifteen. While many, including the banker, assert that imprisonment is crueler because it kills by degrees rather than instantaneously, a young lawyer argues that life imprisonment is preferable because it is better to live somehow than not at all.

In a flashback, he and several of his guests, many of whom are journalists and scholars, discuss whether capital punishment is more moral and humane than life imprisonment. On a dark autumn night, the banker paces in his study and recalls a party he hosted fifteen years before.

The bet by anton chekhov