Fifty-Two Stories

“I disagree with you,” said the banker-host. “I have never experienced either capital punishment or life imprisonment, but if one may judge a priori, in my opinion capital punishment is more moral and humane than imprisonment. Capital punishment kills at once, and life imprisonment slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few moments, or the one who draws life out of you over the course of many years?”

“Both are equally immoral,” observed one of the guests, “because they have one and the same goal—to take away life. The state isn’t God. It has no right to take away what it cannot give back if it wants to.”

Among the guests was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five. When asked his opinion, he said:

“Capital punishment and life imprisonment are equally immoral, but if I were offered the choice between execution and life in prison, I would of course choose the second. To live somehow is better than not to live at all.”

An animated discussion followed. The banker, who was then younger and more high-strung, suddenly lost his temper, pounded his fist on the table, and shouted at the young lawyer:

“That’s not true! I’ll bet two million roubles that you couldn’t sit out even five years in a prison cell.”

“If you’re serious,” said the lawyer, “I’ll bet I can sit out not five but fifteen.”

“Fifteen? You’re on!” shouted the banker. “Gentlemen, I stake two million!”

“I accept! You stake your millions, and I stake my freedom!” said the lawyer.

And this wild, senseless bet was made! The banker, who back then had untold millions, a spoiled and light-minded man, was delighted with the bet. At supper he made fun of the lawyer and said:

“Come to your senses, young man, before it’s too late. For me two million is a trifle, but you risk losing three or four of the best years of your life. I say three or four, because you won’t sit it out longer. And also don’t forget, poor fellow, that voluntary confinement is much harder than compulsory. The thought that you have the right every moment to go out into freedom will poison your whole existence in the cell. I pity you!”

And now the banker, pacing up and down, recalled it all and asked himself:

“Why this bet? What’s the use of the lawyer losing fifteen years of his life and me throwing away two million? Can it prove to people that capital punishment is worse or better than life imprisonment? No, no. Stuff and nonsense. It was the whim of a satiated man on my part, and on the lawyer’s part a simple lust for money.”

Then he recalled what happened after that evening. It was decided that the lawyer would serve his confinement under strict surveillance in a cottage built in the banker’s garden. It was agreed that in the course of fifteen years he would be deprived of the right to cross the threshold of the cottage, to see living people, to hear human voices, to receive letters and newspapers. He was allowed to have a musical instrument, to read books, to write letters, drink wine, and smoke. With the outside world, by agreement, he could make contact only silently, through a small window made especially for that purpose. He could obtain everything he needed—books, scores, wine, and so on—in any quantities, by means of notes, but only through that window. The contract specified all the small details that made the confinement strictly solitary, and it obliged the lawyer to sit out exactly fifteen years, from twelve noon on November 14, 1870, to twelve noon on November 14, 1885. The slightest attempt on the lawyer’s part to break the contract, even two minutes before the term was up, would free the banker of the obligation to pay him the two million.

In his first year of confinement the lawyer, judging by his brief notes, suffered greatly from solitude and boredom. The sounds of the piano were heard coming from the cottage constantly day and night! He renounced wine and tobacco. Wine, he wrote, awakens desires, and desires are a prisoner’s worst enemies; besides, nothing is more boring than drinking good wine and seeing nobody. And tobacco befouled the air in his room. In the first year the lawyer was predominantly sent books of light content: novels with complex love plots, crime or fantastic stories, comedies, and so on.

In the second year the music in the shed fell silent, and the lawyer requested only classics in his notes. In the fifth year music was heard again, and the prisoner requested wine. Those who kept watch on him through the window said that all that year he only ate, drank, and lay in bed, yawned frequently, and talked angrily to himself. He did not read books. Sometimes during the night he sat down to write, wrote for a long time, and in the morning tore up everything he had written. More than once they heard him weep.