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The Bet and Other Stories

By Anton Pavlovich Chekhov & Constance Garnett
The Bet and Other Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov & Constance Garnett digital book - Fable

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Publisher Description

Unique Elements


  • About the Author
  • About the Translator


A Literary Classic by ANTON CHEKHOV.


The Bet and Other Stories by RUSSIAN author ANTON CHEKHOV is a collection of short stories first published in 1899 in RUSSIA.


The title story of this collection, "The Bet," tells of a banker and a lawyer who, while debating the merits of capital punishment or life imprisonment, enter into a strange contractual arrangement. The banker will pay $2 million if the lawyer can endure 15 years of imprisonment, and the banker is the jailer.


Sneak Peak


"I don't agree with you," said the host. "I myself have experienced neither capital punishment nor life-imprisonment, but if one may judge a priori, then in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and more humane than imprisonment. Execution kills instantly, life-imprisonment kills by degrees. Who is the more humane executioner, one who kills you in a few seconds or one who draws the life out of you incessantly, for years?"


Synopsis


Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), a Russian playwright and short story writer, is  considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. He was a key figure of early modernism in the theatre and also wrote hundreds of short stories, while working in his profession as a medical doctor.  


Title Details


  • Translation by Constance C. Garnett, 1901
  • Short stories


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About Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860-1904) was a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Along with Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg, Chekhov is often referred to as one of the three seminal figures in the birth of early modernism in the theatre.

Constance Garnett

Constance Clara Garnett (née Black; 1861-1946) was an English translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature. She was the first English translator to render numerous volumes of Anton Chekhov's work into English and the first to translate almost all of Fyodor Dostoevsky's fiction into English. She also rendered works by Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov, Alexander Ostrovsky, and Alexander Herzen into English. Altogether, she translated 71 volumes of Russian literature, many of which are still in print today.

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