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The story opens with a banker pacing through his house, upset about a bet he made at a party fifteen years prior. He recalls the details of that night. At that party, the guests begin debating whether the death penalty or life in prison is the worse punishment. The banker believes that the death penalty is at least a quick death, whereas a life without liberty is a slow death. One of the guests, a lawyer, steadfastly believes that having any life at all is better than being killed. The banker bets him two million rubles that he wouldn’t last five years in prison. The lawyer ups the time to fifteen years.
The two men set parameters for the bet. The lawyer will stay in a garden-wing of the banker’s house without any company. He is allowed food, wine, and tobacco. He can have as many books as he wants and can play music, but he can only communicate with the outside world by letters slipped through a small window. With all this agreed, the lawyer begins his captivity in the small lodge. The lawyer at first devotes his time to music and novels, eschewing wine and tobacco. In later years, he asks for wine and stops reading. He then begins to study languages. At one point he asks for the banker to check his writing in six languages to see if he’s succeeded in mastering them. The banker signals that native speakers of those languages found no errors in his writing by having a gun shot off in the garden. Next, the lawyer turns his study to the New Testament, then theology, science, and philosophy. Despite these strange whims, he does not ask to be let out during the entire fifteen years.
