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The idea of something is different from its reality.
The lawyer and the banker decide to make their bet largely based on abstractions that don’t hold up in reality. In the lawyer’s mind, fifteen years without human contact seems doable. Presumably he believes that he’ll be able to live vicariously through novels, entertain himself with music, and perhaps even improve himself through reading nonfiction. The reality of solitary confinement proves to be soul-crushing, turning him into a misanthrope. His drinking in the second year suggests that the days are so painful, he attempts to distract himself with drunken numbness. Ironically, even though he claims to hate humanity by the end of his confinement, by that point he bases his assessment of other people both through his memory of them and his idea of them forged through books. He claims that he has lived many lives vicariously through the books he reads in captivity, but these lives are by definition an abstraction, an approximation. He has lost touch with the reality of being around other people, and his new idea of them is as warped as his initial idea of confinement.
On the other hand, the banker, when he believes himself to be losing the bet, takes a rosy view of the lawyer’s captivity. His initial confusion that the lawyer would want to read the New Testament after having read so many complex books on so many subjects suggests that instead of seeing desperation in the lawyer’s search for meaning, he imagines the lawyer having fun improving his mind. He assumes the lawyer is gleefully looking forward to the end of his captivity, smug and eager for his two million rubles. When the banker initially tries to talk the twenty-five-year-old lawyer out of the bet, he warns the lawyer that he will be wasting his youth. But having lived those fifteen years, the banker realizes there is still much life to live after forty. For both men, their imagination of something does not match the real, lived experience.
Gambling always involves more risk than one imagines.
The entire social drama of “The Bet” stems from gambling. The plot of the story hinges on a wager, and the stakes rise because of the banker gambling away his fortune on the stock market. In both cases, the serious implications behind the wagers are obscured by the prospect of winning money. In the case of the titular bet, once money becomes involved, neither the banker nor the lawyer are seriously thinking about the philosophical issue of capital punishment anymore. The conditions of the lawyer’s captivity bear no resemblance to a criminal jail, and the banker later admits that the bet will prove nothing. Furthermore, the idea of two million rubles distracts the lawyer from thinking seriously about what fifteen years of his life means. Gambling distracts from the heart of the issue, tempting the Lawyer to wager years of his life in a bet made on a whim. Similarly, the banker simply throws the two million rubles into the bet casually in what he later describes as “the caprice of a well-fed man,” not treating it as a serious amount of money. He appears to invest his money with as much callousness, distracted by the promise of large returns on his investment. Like the lawyer, he sacrifices his money as if it were a game, resulting in grave consequences.
Isolation is poisonous to the spirit.
The lawyer abdicates the bet claiming an understanding of deeper truths, but he is also inflicted with a terrible existential rage and misanthropy grown out of his loneliness during captivity. He states that he despises “freedom, life, health, and all that your books call the blessings of the world” because they are impermanent in comparison with heaven. Chekhov doesn’t moralize, allowing the reader to decide for themself whether they agree with the lawyer’s assessment of society and all of human history as shallow or trivial. However, what is clear is that by living vicariously through books instead of experiencing life amongst people, the lawyer is unhappier. He can no longer appreciate beauty, find community with others, or take advantage of his eventual freedom. Isolation may have given him the opportunity to deeply consider the transient nature of life, but this philosophy has come at a great spiritual cost. The banker, similarly, seems isolated at the end of the story. He is completely alone with his thoughts when he resolves to kill the lawyer. Being trapped in his own mind, without the voices of others, leads him down poisonous, selfish paths, nearly leading him to become a murderer.
