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.

▷ Play this voice Search these words ↗Place in time ↗truth wisdom learning death happiness life love time

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

freedom learning judgement responsibility

Words to begin with

Quotations and sayings

01c. 1882 AD

Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did... You stay in, we'll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we'll drive away your depression in a flash. I'll sing if you like. Or else let's go and sit in the dark in your study as we used to, and you'll tell me about your depression... You have such suffering eyes. I'll look into them and cry, and we'll both feel better.

Anton Chekhov / quote

02c. 1882 AD

Ivanov: With a heavy head, with a slothful spirit, exhausted, overstretched, broken, without faith, without love, without a goal, I roam like a shadow among men and I don't know who I am, why I'm alive, what I want. And I now think that love is nonsense, that embraces are cloying, that there's no sense in work, that song and passionate speeches are vulgar and outmoded. And everywhere I take with me depression, chill boredom, dissatisfaction, revulsion from life... I am destroyed, irretrievably!

Anton Chekhov / quote

03c. 1882 AD

Lebedev: A time has come of sorrow and sadness for you. Man, my dear friend, is like a samovar. It doesn't always stand on a shelf in the chill but sometimes they put hot coals in it and it goes psh... psh! This comparison is worthless but you won't think up a cleverer one.

Anton Chekhov / quote

04c. 1882 AD

A man who under the influence of mental pain or unbearably oppressive suffering sends a bullet through his own head is called a suicide; but for those who give freedom to their pitiful, soul-debasing passions in the holy days of spring and youth there is no name in man's vocabulary. After the bullet follows the peace of the grave: ruined youth is followed by years of grief and painful recollections. He who has profaned his spring will understand the present condition of my soul. I am not yet old, or grey, but I no longer live. Psychiaters tell us that a solider, who was wounded at Waterloo, went mad, and afterwards assured everybody - and believed it himself - that he had died at Waterloo, and that what was now considered to be him was only his shadow, a reflection of the past. I am now experiencing something resembling this semi-death..

Anton Chekhov / quote

05c. 1882 AD

Only one who loves can remember so well.

Anton Chekhov / quote

06c. 1882 AD

Ivanov: No, my clever young thing, it's not a question of romance. I say as before God that I will endure everything - depression and mental illness and ruin and the loss of my wife and premature old age and loneliness - but I cannot tolerate, cannot endure being ridiculous in my own eyes. I'm dying of shame at the thought that I, a healthy, strong man, have turned into some sort of Hamlet or Manfred, some sort of 'superfluous man'... devil knows precisely what! There are pitiful people who are flattered by being called Hamlet or superfluous men, but for me it's a disgrace! It stirs up my pride, I'm overcome by shame and I suffer...

Anton Chekhov / quote

07c. 1882 AD

But then there's loneliness. However you might philosophise about it, loneliness is a terrible thing, my dear fellow… Although in reality, of course, it's absolutely of no importance!

Anton Chekhov / quote

08c. 1882 AD

I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.

Anton Chekhov / quote

09c. 1882 AD

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

Anton Chekhov / quote

10c. 1882 AD

HELENA. What a fine day! Not too hot. [A pause.]VOITSKI. A fine day to hang oneself.

Anton Chekhov / quote

11c. 1882 AD

With total rapture and delight he talks about the birds which he can see from his prison window, and which he had never noticed before, when he was a minister. Now of course, after he's been released, he doesn't notice the birds anymore, just as beforehand. In the same way you won't notice Moscow, when you actually live there.

Anton Chekhov / quote

12c. 1882 AD

For God's sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.

Anton Chekhov / quote

13c. 1882 AD

Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?

Anton Chekhov / quote

14c. 1882 AD

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean — wherever my imagination ranges.

Anton Chekhov / quote

15c. 1882 AD

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man.

Anton Chekhov / quote

16c. 1882 AD

The geniuses of all ages and of all lands speak different languages but the same flame burns in them all. Oh, if you only knew what unearthly happiness my soul feels now from being able to understand them.

Anton Chekhov / quote

17c. 1882 AD

Going to see plays isn't what you people should do. Try looking at yourselves a little more often and see what gray lives you all lead. How much of what you say is unnecessary.

Anton Chekhov / quote

18c. 1882 AD

But if we reason it out simply and not try to be one bit fancy, then what sort of pride can you possibly take or what's the sense of ever having it, if man is poorly put together as a physiological type and if the enormous majority of the human race is brutal, stupid, and profoundly unhappy?

Anton Chekhov / quote

19c. 1882 AD

And the existence is tedious, anyway; it is a senseless, dirty business, this life.

Anton Chekhov / quote

20c. 1882 AD

True happiness is impossible without solitude. The fallen angel probably betrayed God because he longed for solitude, which angels do not know.

Anton Chekhov / quote

21c. 1882 AD

Shabelsky: O mind of genius, you think up things for everyone and teach everyone, but why not for once teach me... Teach me, great brain, show me the way out...

Anton Chekhov / quote

22c. 1882 AD

I understand that in our work - doesn't matter whether it's acting or writing - what's important isn't fame or glamour, none of the things I used to dream about, it's the ability to endure.

Anton Chekhov / quote

23c. 1882 AD

Ivanov: I am a bad, pathetic and worthless individual. One needs to be pathetic, too, worn out and drained by drink, like Pasha, to be still fond of me and to respect me. My God, how I despise myself! I so deeply loathe my voice, my walk, my hands, these clothes, my thoughts. Well, isn't that funny, isn't that shocking? Less than a year ago I was healthy and strong, I was cheerful, tireless, passionate, I worked with these very hands, I could speak to move even Philistines to tears, I could cry when I saw grief, I became indignant when I encountered evil. I knew inspiration, I knew the charm and poetry of quiet nights when from dusk to dawn you sit at your desk or indulge you mind with dreams. I believed, I looked into the future as into the eyes of my own mother... And now, my God, I am exhausted, I do not believe, I spend my days and nights in idleness.

Anton Chekhov / quote

24c. 1882 AD

They were tough and sour, but as Pushkin said, 'Dearer to us than a host of truths is an exalting illusion.' I saw a happy man, whose cherished dream had so obviously come true, who had attained his goal in life, had gotten what he wanted, who was content with his fate and with himself. For some reason there had always been something sad mixed with my thoughts about human happiness, but now, at the sight of a happy man, I was overcome by an oppressive feeling close to despair.- Gooseberries

Anton Chekhov / quote