Lev Shestov: The Philosophy and Works of a Tragic Thinker 9781644694688

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Lev Shestov

The Philosophy and Works of a Tragic Thinker

Lev Shestov

The Philosophy and Works of a Tragic Thinker A N D R E A O P P O

BOSTON 2020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Oppo, Andrea, author. Title: Lev Shestov : the philosophy and works of a tragic thinker / Andrea Oppo. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020030063 (print) | LCCN 2020030064 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644694671 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644694688 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644694695 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Shestov, Lev, 1866-1938. Classification: LCC B4259.S54 O67 2020 (print) | LCC B4259.S54 (ebook) | DDC 197--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030063 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030064 Copyright © 2020 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved. Book design by Kryon Publishing Services (P) Ltd. Cover design by Ivan Grave. Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Editorial Notes ix Introduction x Part One—Shestov in Russia Chapter I  The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905) 1.1  Introduction: The Birth of a Tragic Conscience 1.2  Shestov before Shestov: Shakespeare and Pushkin 1.3  Tolstoi’s Struggle between “Yasnaya Polyana” and “Astapovo” 1.4  Friedrich Nietzsche: Truth against Morality 1.5  Dostoevskii and Nietzsche as “Philosophers of the Underground” 1.6 Apotheosis of “Bespochvennostʹ”: Towards a Philosophy of Tragedy

1 2 2 11 26 35 47 56

Chapter II Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910) 2.1  Introduction: Shestov and the Philosophical Problem of Art 2.2  Aestheticism and Ideology: On Merezhkovskii and Turgenev 2.3  Creatio ex Nihilo: Chekhov’s Aesthetics 2.4  The “Oracular” Gratuity of Sologub’s Prose and Poetry 2.5  Ibsen and the Destiny of Art 2.6  Retracting Tragedy: Dostoevskii as an Essayist 2.7  The “Magnificent” Vyacheslav Ivanov

69 69 78 85 90 94 98 100

Part Two—Shestov in France

107

Chapter III  Wandering Through The Souls (1914–1929) 3.1  Introduction: The Events of History—Shestov’s Political Views

108 108

3.2  The Power of Keys: Faith and Church in Martin Luther 120 3.3  The Two Histories of Western Philosophy 126 3.4 The Fight against Self-Evidences: Dostoevskii, Pascal, and Spinoza 134 3.5  Philosophy’s Revolt against Itself: Plotinus’ Ecstasies 147 3.6  Audacities and Submissions: Shestov’s Intellectual World 156 3.7  Shestov and the Russian Philosophers 162 Chapter IV Athens and Jerusalem: The Logic and The Thunder (1930–1938) 4.1  Introduction: Shestov as a “Jewish Philosopher” 4.2  The Bible and the Original Sin: In Dialogue with Martin Buber 4.3  The Last Encounter: Kierkegaard 4.4  Étienne Gilson and the Spirit of Medieval Philosophy 4.5  Philosophers in Chains: At the Sources of Metaphysics

171 171 180 185 196 200

Conclusion 1.  Reception and Legacy of Shestov’s Philosophy 2.  The Question of Irrationalism and of “Antiphilosophy” 3.  The (Neo-)Platonic Paradigm: Shestov’s “Third Sailing” 4.  Afterword: Reading between the Lines

207 207 220 226 239

Appendices I.  Shestov and Husserl II.  Shestov and Berdyaev III.  Shestov and Fondane

242 243 262 280

Bibliography and Works Cited A.  Shestov’s Works A.1 Books A.2  Articles and Correspondence B.  Selected Studies on Shestov B.1  Biographies, Memoirs, Specific Journals, and Bibliographies B.2  Books on Shestov B.3  Articles and Book Chapters on Shestov C.  Further References

289 289 290 294 298 300 302 303 314

Index

320

Acknowledgments

I was a young man when my father gifted me a book by an author whose name I had never heard before—Lev Shestov (the book was In Job’s Balance, in Italian translation). “I thought you might appreciate it,” he said. My appreciation turned immediately into a desire to study Russian philosophy, learn the Russian language, and indeed to explore Shestov’s thought in depth. Suddenly, a whole Russian world I had not been aware of opened up to me—and Shestov was the key to this world. At the same time, I realized that despite the large number of translations of his works in foreign languages, full studies on him were considerably fewer and often incomplete. At that time, Shestov remained to all intents and purposes a mystery: up to the mid-1990s, for instance, his first work on Shakespeare had been read by only a few scholars and his prerevolutionary life in Russia was still largely unknown, especially outside the country. From that point on, I began my long and productive quest: my first trip to Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s to find materials in libraries; my studies at The Lev Shestov Archive at the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne in Paris; and many conversations with scholars who versed me in the complex and variegated context of Russian religious philosophy (in particular, I remember with gratitude an email exchange with James Scanlan). This work is the result of my long research on Shestov and of a “journey” extending over nearly thirty years. I should thank many people for this, but I will narrow down the list to some essential names: first of all, my father Bachisio, to whose memory I dedicate this work. Then, Ettore Marino, for our decisive conversations during long walks in Florence more than twenty years ago; Daniele Vinci and Massimiliano Spano, for their constant support; Anna Maiorova, for her precious help and for her wonderful generosity; and last, but not quite least, Karen Turnbull who revised my English throughout this book and, as always, was attentive and careful in helping me with this. I would also like to thank Igor Nemirovsky, the director of Academic Studies Press, for believing in this project from

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the very beginning, Irene Masing-Delic who always encouraged my studies, Kseniya Vorozhikhina and Sergei Polikin for their kindness and support, and the staff of the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne in Paris for their kind help in my research in The Lev Shestov Archive.

Editorial Notes

With few exceptions, all the quotations throughout this book have been made from the original Russian texts. All the translations from Russian and French are mine. Since Shestov loved to quote texts in the original language (mostly from German, Latin, and Greek) further translations from these languages, which are also mine, were sometimes required. For reasons of convenience and accessibility for readers, I decided to refer to the French edition of Natalʹya Baranova’s biography, while a smaller number of Shestovian texts have been quoted from the English translations made by Bernard Martin. Since the entire context of this book is set against the historical backdrop of emigration from Russia to Europe, the spelling of names may differ depending on the original language of the quoted book: for example, Shestov/Chestov, Baranova/Baranoff, Shlëtser/Schloezer, Zenʹkovskii/Zenkovsky, and so forth. But, luckily, these situations are limited. For the transliteration of Russian language into the Latin script, I adopted the BGN/ PCGN system, with the sole exception of names that are quoted from books that employed another system. For citations, I used the author-date system with some integration. Since the final bibliography is divided in three sections (A, B, C) and a number of subsections (A1, A2; B1, B2, B3), the quotation sequence will be the following: author (surname), year of the book/article (when needed), and section with subsection (e.g., B1) in which the author’s surname must be looked up. In sections A1 and A2, Shestov’s publications are listed in chronological order, for each a list number will precede the year of publication of the book (or article) that is indicated: for example, Shestov 8/1993 (A1) (in this case, one must consult the eighth entry on the list in section A1 and within that, among the various indicated editions or translations, the item published in 1993). I have faith this system will be intuitive enough to be easily followed: it has, in my view, the significant advantage of providing a final bibliography list that, since it is divided into thematic sections, is undoubtedly clearer and easier to consult than one single alphabetic list.

Introduction

One of the most eminent Russian historians of the arts, Dmitrii Likhachëv, once wrote that Russian painting is above all a painting of faces (see Likhachëv [C], 23). The same could perhaps be said about Russian philosophy as a philosophy that portrays the human soul: not mere objects of knowledge or “landscapes” of reason but living human problems. Shestov would fit such a definition perfectly. Many—if not all—of his writings concern “people”: they are works that indicate in their own titles the name of a personality (philosopher, writer, artist, intellectual). Shestov is primarily interested in people just as Russian painters were interested in faces. At the same time, he draws constant comparisons with the tradition of classic Western philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl) in a way that few other Russian philosophers do. In this regard, he is undoubtedly a philosopher. But he is also a deep scrutinizer of people, that is, of “philosophical souls” in the way just described. Lev Shestov (Lev Isaakovich Shvartsman), a Russian born in Kiev into a Jewish family, is mostly known in the Western world as a religious existential philosopher and also as one of the first philosophical interpreters of Dostoevskii, offering a fundamentally tragic reading of the author’s late oeuvre. Following Vasilii Rozanov’s lead, he identified Notes from the Underground as the turning point of, and key to, Dostoevskii’s works. Although he always retained a clearly philosophical approach, at the beginning of his career Shestov worked as a literary critic in the circle of Russian artists and intellectuals that gravitated toward Sergei Dyagilev and his journal Mir iskusstva [The World of Art]. During those years (1901–1910), he wrote a number of essays on Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Shakespeare, Turgenev, Chekhov, Sologub, Ibsen, and others. After leaving Russia in 1920 to escape the Bolshevik takeover and finally settling in France, Shestov’s interests increasingly turned away from moral philosophy and literature to focus on religion and theoretical philosophy instead. In the most

Introduction

famous of the works he wrote in France between 1921 and 1938—In Job’s Balance, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, and Athens and Jerusalem— he developed his predominant philosophical theme: the conflict between faith and reason. Using key notions such as “philosophy of tragedy” or “philosophy of the underground,” Shestov marks the impossibility of any reconciliation between reason and the tragedy of human existence. Nor could morality be considered a defense against the chaos of an existence ruled by absurdity. This impossibility of reconciling rationality with actuality represents the tragic nucleus of the philosopher’s thought, which was first presented in his second published book The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching (1900) and continued to evolve with remarkable consistency throughout his career, with a significant shift towards religious themes in the latter part of his life. In this respect, the final two works he conceived Athens and Jerusalem and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy can be considered as the summa and coherently conclusive point of that evolution. This study aims to analyze Shestov’s philosophical work in all its individual parts, even the smaller and lesser-known articles and writings. There is a precise reason for this choice. The paradox as far as Shestov studies are concerned is that, although his works were translated into many languages and already appreciated throughout the world during his lifetime as well as after his death, there has been a much lower output of comprehensive studies on his thought. Shestov’s style is always very clear and understandable. It should come as no surprise that Dmitrii Mirskii describes his as “the tidiest, the most elegant [ . . . ] in short, the most classical prose in the whole of modern Russian literature” (Mirsky [C], 175). This is one of the reasons why he had such extensive editorial success. But it could also be a red herring, as behind such misleading clarity the reader may be tempted to fall into overly easy interpretations. In fact, when it comes to writing a study or commentary on Shestov or his works, that is, in the case of specific “Shestovian scholarship,” it too often seems impossible to escape a general discourse on wider dichotomies such as “reason vs. faith,” “Athens vs. Jerusalem,” “absolute vs. singularity,” “logic vs. absurdity.” After this “battle” of categories, the reader is left with only one possible Shestovian conclusion, that is, that reason is deceptive and life coincides with absurdity. In many cases, the scholarship on Shestov involves a considerable theoretical effort to push philosophy to its limits, which are the very limits of reason, and thus to face the end of philosophy itself. This is perfectly understandable, as Shestov himself offers such keys to interpreting his thought. On many occasions, he gives the impression of applying the same categories to every author he discusses. His readings on

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the history of philosophy or on the history of literature appear anything but “unbiased.” Many commentators have observed this: Albert Camus described Shestov’s prose as “admirable monotony” (Camus 1991 [C], 23). Shestov’s lifelong friend, Berdyaev, famously defined him as “a person with a single idea” (Berdyaev 1992 [C], 249), which he applied systematically to each different author and problem. In conversations with his friend, the poet Benjamin Fondane, Shestov himself referred to having been accused of “Shestovizing” any author he commented on (cf. Fondane [B1], 87). It is, in many ways, true and undeniable that Shestov is “monotonous” and that he has perhaps one fundamental idea recurring through all of his writings. It is also indisputable that his arguments lead to a constant dead end of rationality, as in reasoning against reason he produces a sense of absurdity. But Shestov is also considerably more than this. In order to understand what that “absurdity” really means, beyond the appearance of a merely impracticable solution, one must look in a different direction, as it were, to uncover what Shestov himself strives to hide. Some of his closer friends, such as Benjamin Fondane and Boris de Schloezer, warned readers about the “traps” in Shestov’s writings: nothing is exactly what it seems. Where all seems hopeless, there is hope; where the discourse does not appear objective, it is in fact objective. In introducing his thought, Paul Rostenne—one of the most influential French scholars of Shestov—once affirmed that “it is absolutely necessary to learn to read between the lines” of Shestov’s philosophy, even of his repetitions or his apparent historical unreliability (Rostenne 1964 [B3], 340). Shestov’s intuitions were relevant not at a first level of reading but, as he used to say, in a “second dimension of thought,” that is, at an end point where things and facts are already beyond our consideration. (cf. Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 360-365) Thus, he does not read Tolstoi or Nietzsche in their actual texts but scrutinizes them at their deepest levels and discovers their ultimate results. Where did Tolstoi’s, or Nietzsche’s, or Dostoevskii’s thought end up? What were their underlying assumptions? These were Shestov’s questions, the only issues he was interested in—not the tangible level, but the often invisible or hidden “beginnings” and “ends.” Not the facts in themselves, but their hindmost limits. I have reason to believe that, within this second and ultimate level, he came to many correct conclusions. Many of his intuitions were confirmed by history as they often came true: I am mostly thinking of Dostoevskii’s and Nietzsche’s tragic interpretations—which were highly fecund and appreciated in the twentieth century—but it would be interesting to also review his portraits of Plotinus, Kierkegaard, Tolstoi, Rozanov, Solovˈëv, Buber, V. Ivanov, Ibsen, and

Introduction

many others in this light. Not to mention his ideas on Luther or St. Paul, or the possible development of a Jewish philosophy, as well as on the facts and revolutions of contemporary history. In this last case, his notorious detachment from historical facts or, as Dmitrii Mirskii would say, his well-rooted “common sense” (see Mirsky [C], 174), helped him to be more objective and stable than others in his, admittedly rare, consideration of politics and historical events. Shestov’s oeuvre is full of such little “jewels,” that is, small observations, details, and original quotations from the authors and people he describes. He was curious about the world around him, even or especially when he seemed uncaring of it. Each of his writings shows evidence of the same osnovnaya ideya [fundamental idea], as Berdyaev called it (Berdyaev 1938-39 [B3]), but it also conceals an original and often truthful vision of that specific author. Shestov was certainly an atypical thinker. No wonder that, although he had considerable publishing success throughout the world and extensive influence especially in the philosophical tradition of Dostoevskii interpretations, he was not widely quoted within the early histories of Russian philosophy or the studies concerning the Russian religious renaissance. He was there—he was with Dyagilev, Benois, Merezhkovskii, Berdyaev, V. Ivanov, and the other protagonists of the “Renaissance”; he took part in meetings, groups, societies; he followed political and social events—but, at the same time, he was not “there.” If any particular tendency or spirit of the time caught on, he usually took the opposite direction. As an intellectual, he was always idiosyncratic—he had his own way of dealing with historical and philosophical issues and situations, as if he were always “beyond” them. He could talk about Plotinus or Spinoza, or Dostoevskii, but in his analyses, he always flew above them as if their thought might be applicable to any time and any historical space. This is probably what he meant with the expression he liked so much: “to wander through the souls” [stranstvovatˈ po dusham]. Somehow, he believed there was a universal intuition that each of those authors had grasped—in different ways, the same intuition. But at the same time, he was able to identify specific differences among those authors and he had a gift for the relevant theoretical core of any given problem. For all these reasons, Shestov’s thought will be investigated in this work through all its individual explorations, giving importance to each of them. This study also intends to reveal Shestov from a number of less-considered aspects, including: an initial personal crisis; a defense of morality he sought to pursue at the beginning of his career; his first activity as a literary critic and his aesthetic thought; his relationship with the Russian philosophers; his political views; his studies on Greek philosophy; the experience of exile within the Russian émigré

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community; the crucial role of Plotinus within his thought; his relationship with psychoanalysis; the shift towards a more religiously committed philosophy and a sort of return to Judaism; the heritage of his “only disciple” Fondane; the relevance of his meetings with Husserl; and finally the legacy of his thought in Europe. Aside from its nature as an intellectual biography and an analysis of all of Shestov’s works, this book also advances two main theses: one is of a more historical nature and the other is essentially philosophical. The first concerns the fact that Shestov’s renown as a “lonely thinker” did not fully acknowledge the decisive influence he had on the development of a specifically tragic “Nietzschean-Dostoevskian conscience” within post-Solov’ëvian Russian religious philosophy and, later, within French and world existential philosophy. This idea is discussed in particular in chapters 1–3 as well as in the conclusion. The second thesis—which is dealt with in chapters 3 and 4, and in the concluding section—questions the idea that Shestov’s philosophy is ultimately directed towards building an irrational thought or rather a religious-fideistic thought. As I aim to demonstrate, Shestov still remains firmly within the boundaries of Western philosophy (probably more than other—apparently less irrational—Russian religious philosophers do), albeit at its very edge and in a constant questioning of that “edge,” just as the Neoplatonic tradition classically did from its beginnings. In this respect, he needs to rely upon those Western philosophers who can offer him the support for such a goal (i.e., remaining within a limit so as to question that limit). These philosophers are mainly Nietzsche, Pascal, Kierkegaard and, most significantly, Plotinus.1 In a way—although a reversed and paradoxical one—Husserl also helps Shestov to define his quest for the ultimate limit of Western philosophy.2 Such a quest—as is another implicit hypothesis of this book—lies within a wider paradigm of a “Russian (Neo-)Platonism” for which, at a certain point, the logos itself is called into question as an image of the true reality. Consequently, despite logos being the only “image,” that is, the only way at disposal to reach that reality, it 1 The other nonexplicitly philosophical authors he relies on in a positive way (mainly, Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, and Luther) are however read through very strong Nietzschean and Neoplatonic/Augustinian lenses, that is, either as moral rebels in search of the real truth (e.g., some of Shakespeare’s and Dostoevskii’s heroes) or as those who are skeptical towards the full power of logos (Luther). 2 As is shown in appendix 1 of this book, Shestov sees Husserl as both the highest peak of rational-scientific thought in modern times, and also the one who pointed out the ultimate borders of that same rationality.

Introduction

is also an unreliable tool in the search for the same truth. It is from this contradiction (in many ways of a Plotinian derivation) of a logos that is at the same time necessary and deceitful, that the main core of Shestov’s “philosophy of tragedy” originates. The analysis of Shestov’s thought will follow a chronological order, although some leaps are not excluded where necessary, and later works may be anticipated from time to time solely to offer a better understanding of the issue under consideration. There are also sections that are not intended as analyses of specific books or essays but are, as it were, more theoretical or intertextual. They aim, in fact, to explain some crucial passages of his thought or to give some deeper hints as to how to interpret it. Where necessary, biographical and historical information will be provided. There is a hidden line of development following the events of Shestov’s life: for this reason, the book is divided into four main chapters corresponding to the four epochal changes in his life and thought, and it is split in accordance with the two main parts of his biography—the Russian years (1866–1920) and the French years (1921–1938). Chapter one deals with the early period of Shestov’s activity, including his first four books (Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, 1898; The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, 1900; Dostoevskii and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, 1903; The Apotheosis of Groundlessness [An Experiment in Adogmatic Thought], 1905) and the general development of a “philosophy of tragedy,” mostly following and commenting on Shakespeare’s, Nietzsche’s, and Dostoevskii’s works. In this phase, Shestov is rather a skeptical philosopher (although he refused such a label) and he is mainly interested in the philosophical opposition between morality and truth. Chapter two considers the years (1901–1910) in which Shestov worked mainly on the philosophical interpretation of literary works with a number of articles on Merezhkovskii, Shakespeare, Chekhov, Sologub, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Ibsen, and an unpublished work on Turgenev. All these articles, except for the one on Turgenev, were eventually included in the two works Beginnings and Endings (1908) and The Great Vigils (1911). Through these essays Shestov was able to express his idea of art as a privileged place of truth— albeit a tragic truth, which eventually reveals its original bond with nothingness (see his article on Chekhov) but also the risk of taking the place of life itself (cf. his article on Ibsen). Chapter three is concerned with a long transitional epoch of Shestov’s life that started around 1911 and eventually ended up with his definitive exile from Russia (1920) and his early years in France. During this whole period,

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he worked on a couple of projects that were published only after his death (a study on the history of Greek philosophy and a book on Luther), on a collection of articles that appeared in 1923 with the title Potestas Clavium [The Power of Keys], and on another collection of essays (In Job’s Balance: Peregrinations Through the Souls, 1929) with some of his most famous readings of Dostoevskii, Plotinus, Pascal, Spinoza, and Tolstoi. In this part of his life, the discoveries of Luther, of some biblical themes, and of Greek philosophy are crucial to him in better defining his subsequent path. In chapter four, finally, Shestov’s last and more mature works are investigated (Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, 1936; Athens and Jerusalem, 1938; and Speculation and Revelation, 1964). These works strongly reflect Shestov’s more marked interest in the Bible and in Jewish thought as relevant philosophical sources, but also in the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. In this original synthesis of an uncompromising Jewish consciousness with some distinctively Christian “tragic” traits (deriving mainly from Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard) lies one of the most peculiar results of his religious philosophy. A concluding chapter is dedicated to a brief analysis and discussion on the historical results of Shestov’s philosophy both in Russia and abroad; but also to an evaluation of some possible interpretations of his thought in terms of irrationalism and of “antiphilosophy”; and to a personal examination of his “quest for the limit” within a general paradigm of a Russian Neoplatonism. Finally, the three appendices at the end of the book are aimed at describing the three intellectual relationships that held the most significance for Shestov, and thus involved his entire life and thought, or a good part of them. These are the cases of his relationships with Edmund Husserl, the “master,” with Nikolai Berdyaev, the “friend,” and with Benjamin Fondane, the “disciple.” At the end of the book, the reader will find a reasoned bibliography that considers works by and on Shestov in three languages: Russian, French, and English. The bibliography is divided into three main sections and further subsections, which include Shestov’s books but also his articles and edited correspondence; studies on Shestov (divided into biographies, memoirs, specific journals, and bibliographies; monographs on Shestov; journal articles and book chapters dedicated to him); and further references.

CHAPTER I

The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

1.1 Introduction: The Birth of a Tragic Conscience

L

ev Shestov’s thought originates in the domain of the tragic and is directed toward the tragic. This affirmation, which can be easily ascribed to one of the purest Nietzschean motifs, is unquestionably true for a thinker like Shestov, whose philosophy stems from the concept of tragedy but, most of all, remains in it as if it were in a repetitive, inward-turned, often convoluted but still consistent process of self-development. Shestov is a tragic thinker and he reads everything through the lens of tragedy. Unlike the labels of “existentialist,” “irrationalist,” “nihilist,” or “fideist,” which Shestov never willingly tolerated for himself, the category of “tragic” à la Nietzsche—which he borrowed from the German philosopher and developed throughout his life—seems to perfectly fit the inner nature of his entire oeuvre.1 Some of his most important achievements—in 1 This category indicates, even more explicitly than the aforementioned definitions do, the “aporetic nature” of a belief, that is, the “active impossibility” of something—the logical disjunction (or paradox) of a theoretical structure or of a practical situation. Existentialism, irrationalism, or nihilism are normally, in their own way (be it positive or negative), feasible fields or active possibilities for the thought itself. Less frequently, they are intended as aporias or irresolvable self-contradictions, as a “tragic thought” is meant to be. Not by chance, the first article that Shestov’s “faithful disciple” Benjamin Fondane dedicated to him, in 1929, put the emphasis on this definition: “Un philosophe tragique: Léon Chestov” (see Fondane 1929a [B3]). In this text, Fondane insists on the aspect of profound “impasse” and “bankruptcy” of the Shestovian thought, which, as he explains, is a different concept than mere irrationality (147–150).

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

many ways some of the most recognizable marks he left on Russian and world thought—lie precisely in his tragic interpretations of Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, as well as in his criticism of whoever and whatever did not recognize or deliberately ignored the truth of the tragic, whether in philosophy or in other fields. Therefore, answering the question “What, for Shestov, is the tragic?” would probably mean answering Shestov’s most fundamental question—the one to which he devoted his whole life. Although the question of the term “tragedy” is explicitly posed only in the first chapter of this book in terms of Shestov’s initial quest for a “philosophy of tragedy” in his first four books (largely, but not exclusively, intended as a critique of morality), the subsequent years of his life would be no less concerned with the same problem. Shestov’s philosophical search would turn, in fact, to the quest for the tragic in art and literature (chapter two); in the personal lives and thought of the “souls” he was considering and interpreting at various times (chapter three); and, finally, in religious faith itself (chapter four), which to him is the pinnacle of tragedy. This is the development of his research as it is set out in this work, which closely follows the chronological events of his life and the publication of his works. The answer to the question of Shestov’s definition of tragic will thus be dispersed throughout this book, although there will be a special focus on it in the last and concluding section. But when did all this start? When did Shestov begin to be a philosopher? As he stated more than once (cf. Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 271; Fondane [B1], 148), his “first teacher of philosophy” was Shakespeare. By saying this, he meant of course that reading Shakespeare’s tragedies raised in him some troubling questions and a deep crisis, in particular regarding the nature of morality. This happened, as we know from many sources,2 around the mid-1890s, when Shestov was about thirty years old. In a rare and equally precious autobiographical note written in 1911 (Shestov 8/1911 [A2], 173–176), Shestov lists for the first time his earliest publications from those years, which appeared in the main literary journals of Kiev—although some of these works would

2 The first essential source is the biography of Lev Shestov, in two volumes, written by Shestov’s second daughter Natalʹya Baranova (Natalʹya Lʹvovna Baranova-Shestova [1900– 1993]), which was published first in Russian (1983) and then was translated in French (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991, 1993 [B1]). Natalʹya Baranova also published a complete bibliography of Shestov’s works and a bibliography of studies on Shestov up to 1978 (see BaranoffChestov 1975 and 1978 [B1]).

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Part One    Shestov in Russia

remain virtually unknown up to present times.3 But even before those early essayistic writings on Shakespeare, on Solov'ëv, but also on jurisprudential and financial issues—which were marked by a certain attraction towards the biggest questions on morality, justice, and the defense of human rights4—there 3 “In 1895, I wrote some articles (it seems to me, three) concerning literary and philosophical topics. These articles were not big; at that time, I was living in Kiev and for this reason, of course, I tried to get them to the Kievan journals. At the time, in Kiev, there were three journals: ‘Kievlyanin,’ ‘Kievskoe slovo,’ and ‘Zhiznˈ i iskusstvo’” (Shestov 8/1911 [A2], 173). The first article that Shestov mentioned was published in Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo, with the title “Voprosy sovesti” [Questions of Conscience], while the second article “Georg Brandes o Gamlete” [Georg Brandes on Hamlet] appeared in Kievskoe slovo, and the third, “Zhurnalʹnoe obozrenie (O Vl. Solovʹëve)” [ Journal Review (On Vl. Solovʹëv)], again in Zhiznˈ i iskusstvo (see Shestov 1/1895, Shestov 2/1895, and Shestov 3/1896 [A2]). Shestov did not sign these articles with his own name, however, but with pseudonyms or initials. As he explains in a somewhat polemical tone, the pseudonyms were due to the substantial changes made by Zhiznˈ i iskusstvo to his two articles, which eventually were not acknowledged as entirely his own (cf. Shestov 8/1911 [A2], 174). Also from 1896 is another text (Ms. 2110-1, file 91, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris) entitled “Idealizm i simvolizm ‘Severnogo vestnika’” [Idealism and Symbolism of the Severnyi vestnik], which appeared in Zhiznˈ i iskusstvo (see Shestov 4/1896 [A2]) and was republished in 1979 in Russian Literature Triquarterly (see Shestov 21/1979 [A2]), in which Shestov reviews numbers 11 and 12 (1895) and number 1 (1896) of the journal Severnyi vestnik. Here, as Natal'ya Baranova also remarks, Shestov shows an “admiration for the people of the 1860s and for the positive preaching of Tolstoi” that he would later recant (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 29). For a general analysis of this earliest production by Shestov, see in particular Vorozhikhina 2019 (B3) and Ermichëv (B3). 4 In a recent study (2019), Kseniya Vorozhikhina discovered a whole unknown essayistic output that Shestov produced between 1895 and 1900 for the Kievan journals Zhiznˈ i iskusstvo and Kievskoe slovo (see Vorozhikhina 2019 [B3]). During this time, Shestov repeatedly collaborated with these journals and he was probably looking for a columnist position with them. The articles written and published within this lapse of time are seemingly much more numerous than the four mentioned by Shestov and by Natal'ya Baranova (see previous note). In her analyses of these texts, Kseniya Vorozhikhina points out their general populist character, which followed the main trend of Zhiznˈ i iskusstvo in particular. They deal with various topics ranging from literary criticism to the defense of human rights in various forms (e.g., by supporting liberal reforms, such as the introduction of jury trials and softer forms of crime prevention), but they also deal with financial issues, in which he fought for a more equitable distribution of the tax burden. Shestov often discusses what the truest justice is and the difference between human and divine justice. According to Vorozhikhina, in these texts, “the future religious thinker appears to us from an unexpected perspective, that is, as a progressive populist and a literary critic, scourging decadents and symbolists, as a liberal-minded publicist and a lawyer, reflecting on possible ways to improve criminal law and the penitentiary system” (68). This humanitarian and even populist aspect of Shestov, which continues up to 1900, might seem strange considering the amoralistic and skeptical character of his writings starting precisely from 1900 onwards, in which he never tackled any of these subjects. As Vorozhikhina argues, their general tone and content reveal a

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

was “another” Shestov, with different interests and a different background. In this case, life and thought are intertwined and linked in a mutual and deeply significant bond.5 Shestov was born in Kiev, on February 12 (Old Style January 31) 1866, the first child of a large Jewish family (his real name was Yehuda Leib [Lev Isaakovich] Shvartsman). Unlike his father—a deeply committed Jewish observant who developed a shop into a huge textile manufacturing business— Shestov preferred the world of ideas and contemplation. At that time, like the most of his generation, Shestov was interested in politics and considered himself a revolutionary.6 In 1883, for political reasons, he had to quit his secondary studies in Kiev and move to Moscow. After he concluded his studies, he began university in Moscow first in Mathematics and then in Law, which he continued to study also in Berlin for a whole semester. After returning to Moscow, he still had problems with authorities and was obliged to return to Kiev where he concluded his degree in 1889—not without some difficulties, since his thesis was precluded from publication by tsarist censorship with the judgment that if it were issued “it would be the revolution” (Fondane [B1], 86).7 The detachment from Marxism and an adherence to more general principles of nonviolence and of humanitarianism, for—as it seems—Shestov “did not pass from ‘Marxism to idealism,’ but from populism to religious philosophy” (60). There are over twenty of these articles, all signed with the initials “L. S.” or the pseudonym “Reader,” although not all of them can be definitively ascribed to Shestov. For a complete list of these works, see Vorozhikhina 2019 (B3). 5 In her remarkable monograph in French on Shestov (2010), Geneviève Piron dealt with his thought from exactly such a perspective: that is, through an “approche génétique” (as she defines it) of Shestov’s works, Piron managed to find a number of mutual connections between his texts and his life (also by means of a complete reading of his manuscripts and letters). In this way, proceeding as it were with a “spiral direction”—that is, not chronological, not thematic—this study pointed out Shestov’s “subjective critique” to the authors he commented on so as to finally display a sort of “archaeology of experience,” in Piron’s terms, which would reconstruct Shestov’s “book of life” (see Piron [B2]. On Shestov’s “subjective critique” see also Piron 2003 [B3]). In a different way but also with similar premises, Tatˈyana Morozova’s 2007 work seeks to establish a direct relationship between Shestov’s life and thought: see Morozova (B2). 6 “I was a revolutionary from the age of 8, to the great despair of my father. I stopped being one much later, when the ‘scientific,’ Marxist socialism appeared” (Fondane [B1], 116). Shestov’s revolutionary attitude found expression mostly in his difficult relationship with paternal authority. “As a matter of fact,” Geneviève Piron writes, “the distinguishing element of Shestov’s biography is that his ‘radical’ phase seems to have been in his childhood rather than in his university years” (Piron [B2], 100). 7 The thesis’ title was probably “The Industrial Legislation in Russia,” while the article deriving from it that the censorship council of Moscow prevented from being published was

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prohibited publication of his thesis did not prevent Shestov’s inscription in the list of lawyers in St. Petersburg (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 22). In 1890, he attended military service and then began an internship as a lawyer in Moscow. However, he soon realized he was not interested in such a career. He therefore returned to Kiev where he started to work in the family firm although his real interest turned to writing a number of literary texts and tales with an autobiographical character. But once again, he understood that it was not his real aptitude.8 In his short autobiography, Shestov admits he unsuccessfully tried to get his literary works published but that even his friends seemed not to appreciate them (cf. Shestov 8/1911 [A2], 173). He had also a beautiful voice as a singer: singing was one of his most important passions and, as he once recalled, he missed out on a career as a singer because of an accident to his vocal chords.9 During this time (1890–1894), Shestov was mostly trying to steer away from paternal authority and from Jewish tradition: following a secret liaison with a Russian Orthodox girl who worked in his father’s house, Anna Listopadova, a son, Sergei Listopadov, was born in 1892. As Natal'ya Baranova affirms, Shestov was always very attached to his boy and took care of him until his early death, in 1917, in the Great War (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 33). For this and many other reasons, the relationship with his father became more and more difficult: Shestov had to keep his life secret from him. Yet the troubling quest for his true vocation—in which he swung from anarchist to lawyer, from literary writer to singer, and that somehow explains why Shestov began his “philosophical activity” only at the age of thirty—was not the main issue of his youth. Even though his family situation provided a wealthy and comfortable upbringing, his early life was not easy. From 1870 up to the assassination of entitled “The Situation of the Working Class in Russia” (cf. Shestov 8/1911 [A2], 173, and Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 21–22). Shestov’s dissertations and works from his time at university have been lost. But their subjects were clear: they dealt with the new industrial legislation and the extreme poverty of workers (cf. Fondane [B1], 86). 8 Speaking to Benjamin Fondane in 1935, Shestov recognized that his unpublished prose stories were, in the end, “just bad” (see Fondane [B1], 86). Nevertheless, Natal'ya Baranova largely uses them to reconstruct Shestov’s early life because, she writes, “they are interesting as they undoubtedly contain some autobiographical element” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 24–27). These mostly unfinished early texts (103 paper sheets in total for ten different draft stories) are held at The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris (Ms. 2110, files 102–111, possibly dated 1890–1896). 9 Cf., on this, Malakhieva-Mirovich 2011 (B1), 139; Gertsyk (B1), 101; and BaranoffChestov 1991 (B1), 27.

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

Emperor Aleksandr II in 1881, the political situation in Russia was very unstable and many anti-Jewish pogroms flared up. In Kiev, entire Jewish neighborhoods were plundered and Shestov’s father’s business was constantly at risk.10 Within this context, while still a young boy, Shestov was kidnapped, probably in 1878 and in uncertain circumstances,11 by a clandestine political organization—an episode he never cared to comment on, as Natal'ya Baranova writes in the biography of her father (19).12 Then at the age of twenty-nine a tragic event marked his life, decisively influencing also his interests and the subjects of his later writings. For years, the only mention of it was contained in a short and enigmatic passage he wrote in his 1920 publication Journal of Thoughts.13 Due to this fact, which even Natal'ya Baranova, in her biography, seems to ignore, he apparently suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to move to Switzerland for some time to receive treatment. 10 In a commemorative article after Shestov’s death in 1938, Sergei Bulgakov—who was also from Kiev—recalled the problems that Shestov’s family had encountered because of the anti-Jewish pogroms, especially after 1905 (cf. S. Bulgakov, “Nekotorye cherty religioznogo mirovozzreniya L. I. Shestova,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 441). Shestov himself talks about the problem of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Russia in a letter of 1919 to Mikhail Gershenzon (see Shestov 24/1992 [A2], 103–104). 11 From a letter Shestov sent to Aleksei Remizov in 1906 (see Shestov 25/1992 [3] [A2], 171) and thanks to other solid documentation she provides, Geneviève Piron deduces a different date for the kidnapping (1881) than the one advanced by Natal'ya Baranova (1878). This would also change the entire context of this event, which for Piron should be ascribed to Shestov’s general rebellion against his father, as well as to his adhesion to a revolutionary clandestine movement, since he basically “se fait kidnapper.” See Piron’s reconstruction of this event in Piron (B2), 99–100. 12 His father, perhaps interdicted by the government, did not pay the ransom for his liberation. However, Shestov was freed “safe and sound” after six months (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 19). In reconstructing this time of Shestov’s life, Natal'ya Baranova quotes testimonies by Shestov’s brother-in-law German Lovtskii and by Stanley Grean (son of Shestov’s cousin): cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 17–27 and Lovtskii 1960-1961 (B1). 13 “В этом году исполняется двадцатипятилетие как ‘распалась связь времен’ или, вернее, исполнится—ранней осенью, в начале сентября. Записываю, чтобы не забыть: самые крупные события жизни—о них же никто, кроме тебя, ничего не знает—легко забываются.” [This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary since “time went out of joint,” or, to be more exact, it will be early this autumn, at the beginning of September. I am writing this down not to forget: the biggest events in life—those no one knows about except you—are easily forgettable] (Shestov 20/1976 [A2], 252). Further references to this fact can be found in the memoirs of Shestov’s friend and admirer Evgeniya Gertsyk (Gertsyk [B1], 106), in Shestov’s friend Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich’s diaries (Malakhieva-Mirovich 2011 [B1], 138–139; and 2016 [B1], 30, 100–101), and in Natal'ya Baranova’s biography (BaranoffChestov 1991 [B1], 35–36). Shestov’s friends Adol'f Lazarev and Sergei Bulgakov also mentioned this tragic event (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 36).

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The mystery of Shestov’s deep crisis, which to a large extents lies at the origin of his very desire to “search for the truth” in a philosophical way, has been partly clarified only in recent times thanks to the publication of Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich’s diaries (cf. Malakhieva-Mirovich 2011 and 2016 [B1]), which also shed a new light on a number of letters that Varvara and Shestov exchanged around those years: 1895–1896.14 Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich (1869–1954) was a young girl from Kiev who, at the beginning, worked as a governess at the house of Daniil Balakhovskii and his wife Sofiya—Shestov’s sister. At that time, around 1894–1895, she met Shestov and the two started an intense friendship and a relationship that was interrupted by Varvara’s incapacity to make a final decision between Lev and another of her former loves. At that point, Shestov made a proposal to Varvara’s sister, Anastasiya, who had also manifested her love to him as he probably, as Varvara writes, “felt a sense of fault towards her as if it were towards a girl to whom he gave false hopes with his excessively tender and careful behavior” (Malakhieva-Mirovich 2016 [B1], 100–101).15 But at this point, Shestov’s parents opposed the marriage because Anastasiya was not Jewish.16 Anastasiya, a very sensitive and already mentally 14 Cf. Ms. 2111–1, files 42–46, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris. By reading only the remaining correspondence between Shestov and Varvara MalakhievaMirovich, the exact nature of Shestov’s crisis would not have been made entirely clear. This would explain why Natal'ya Baranova, who had access to the correspondence but not to Varvara’s diaries, was evasive or incomplete about this point of Shestov’s life and also about his relationship with Varvara (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 31–32, 36). The fact that Shestov kept the reason for his crisis secret from even his closest friends is also demonstrated by an article Boris de Schloezer wrote in his memory, immediately after his death, in which Schloezer (who was unquestionably one of Shestov’s most intimate friends) appeared to be clearly and sincerely unaware of the nature of this crisis although he sensed that something must have happened in Shestov’s early life that marked all his subsequent reflection (cf. Boris Schloezer [Shlëtser], “Pamyati L. I. Shestova” 1939a [B3], in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 438). 15 Varvara recounts that there was an evident conflict going on between herself and her sister Anastasiya about Shestov, but she (Varvara) was not yet ready to accept Shestov’s proposal (Malakhieva-Mirovich 2016 [B1], 101). From Shestov’s correspondence and from the testimonies of those who were close to him—it has to be said—it becomes clear that he did want to marry Anastasiya (see Ms. 2111/1, file 68; letter dated April 13, 1896). Interestingly, the two sisters adopted as a pseudonym—following their family name Malakhiev—the second name, “Mirovich,” the latter being a sort of “literary alter ego” of Shestov, that is, a character—perhaps the most significant—of one of his unpublished autobiographical stories from early 1890s. This would prove Shestov’s importance for the two and his charismatic presence in their lives. 16 This, actually crucial, point of Shestov’s life is dealt with more deeply in Piron’s analysis of Shestov’s early correspondence with his father and mother than in Baranova’s biography (see Piron [B2], 187–195). Shestov begged his parents to accept Anastasiya and he also pro-

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

fragile girl, experienced a terrible shock from this and she was committed to a psychiatric hospital, with a diagnosis of mental illness, and remained there until her death eighteen years later.17 As a consequence of Anastasiya’s illness, Shestov also had a nervous breakdown, and he left Russia in March 1896 to seek treatment abroad. He first went to Vienna, then to Germany (where he stayed mostly in Berlin to be treated for his sickness), to Paris and later, in 1897, to Rome, Italy, where he met a Russian Orthodox girl, a student of medicine, Anna Eleazarovna Berezovskaya (1870–1962), whom he married probably in February 1897, keeping it secret from his parents.18 At the beginning of 1898, after the birth of their first daughter, Tat'yana, they moved to Berne, in Switzerland, where Anna resumed her studies and Shestov worked on his second book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche. In the early months of 1899, he went back to Russia, as a guest of his sister Fanya and her husband German Lovtskii in Saint Petersburg. This episode concerning Shestov’s relationship with the two sisters, along with his sickness, was kept secret even from his closest friends and relatives, since there is no full trace of it other than in Varvara’s writings. In her memoirs, Evgeniya Gertsyk—another friend and admirer of Shestov who knew him very well—is not able to fully explain this crisis of his. The same can be said for his siblings and friends. After he left for Europe, Shestov carried on writing letters to Varvara, although mostly on professional and intellectual topics. In subsequent years, he helped her to find a job as an editor of the literary section of vided medical arguments, both for him and for her, in support of his request. Nonetheless, they continued to resolutely oppose the marriage. Among the letters from Shestov Archive, see in particular: Ms. 2111/1, files 67-68-69, 73–74 (letters dated 1896). 17 All these facts are described in detail in Varvara Malakhieva’s diaries (originally, 180 notebooks written from 1930 to 1954): see Malakhieva-Mirovich 2011 and 2016 (B1). The manuscripts of the diaries were discovered at the house of Dmitrii Shakhovskoi, Varvara’s godson. On this dramatic episode of Shestov’s life, see also Ramona Fotiade’s biography: Fotiade (B1), 27–31. Shestov’s name is a constant presence in Varvara Malakhieva’s writings, which sometimes reveal private and unknown details about him. Varvara’s style, however, is always very emphatic and poetic so to make it difficult to separate her Romanticism from the facts she tells. She herself was described by Evgeniya Gertsyk, who met her at Shestov’s in Moscow, as “a girl full of tragedy” (Gertsyk [B1], 103). For an analysis of Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich’s thought and works, see Vorozhikhina (C). On her biography, see Tatˈyana Neshumova’s essay “Zhiznˈ Varvary Grigorˈevny Malakhievoi-Mirovich” in Malakhieva-Mirovich (C), 434–481. 18 Natal'ya Baranova explains this secrecy by the fact that Anna came from an Orthodox family and this was unacceptable to his father (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 37). She also says that the two had to live separate for many years in order to avoid giving Shestov’s father such sorrow. The same thing is confirmed by Evgeniya Gertsyk (Gertsyk [B1], 105).

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the St. Petersburg’s journal Russkaya mysl' and he generally acted as a sort of cultural mentor to her. Having begun her career in publishing in this way, years later, in 1910, it was her turn to help Shestov to fulfill one of his dreams, that is, to meet Lev Tolstoi in person. The period between 1895 and 1897, marked by his nervous breakdown and his travels to Switzerland and Italy, represented for Shestov his personal “tragic turn,” along with his interest in Shakespeare and the “discovery” of Nietzsche, which happened precisely on that occasion. The Shestov we know, the inner tragic dimension of his thought, was born in this moment. He read Shakespeare and Dostoevskii from a “Nietzschean point of view” to find a solution to his crisis. At the same time, he found a new start for his life, with his marriage and his two daughters, Tat'yana and Natal'ya, born in 1897 and 1900. Throughout his youth and early adulthood, Shestov developed an inner sense of tragedy. He felt deeply the fallacy of ideals and disenchantment of time: in fact, he borrowed Shakespeare’s words “The time is out of joint” as his lifelong motto, as if something were irreparably broken within the laws of nature and morality, and nobody could ever fix it. From then on, the only problem for Shestov would be how to deal with this irreversible and unsolvable fact. No easy solutions could be accepted. The “absolute tragedy” was his definitive arrival point. But however despairing and convoluted he may have been with his “theory,” Shestov was entirely different with his relationships in daily life. As most people who knew him testified, he was overall a very generous and warmhearted man.19 His friend Evgeniya Gertsyk writes that there was not a shade of a pose or of moralization in his attitude to people close to him (which, for those years, was extraordinary); only kindness and professional care. He helped get someone out of prison and send them to study to Germany [ . . . ]. He found an editor for a writer in need of one, when he himself was unknown; he helped out another one with money, he helped to sort out family dramas. (Gertsyk [B1], 103)

“It was impossible not to love him,” Sergei Bulgakov says, “this is probably due to an amazing gift of his heart, its charming kindness and benevolence [ . . . ] and the absence of personal competition (which is so rare in our literary 19 “Throughout his entire life, he helped his friends: some financially, some by helping them out of a difficult situation, and some others by interceding for them” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 32).

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

world).” At the same time, Bulgakov adds, “it was strange to think that a restless heart, a soul that had not found its last limit, was hidden under this cover” (Bulgakov [B3] in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 441). Shestov lived his whole life with these two parallel dimensions, concreteness, warmth, and care for people in his actions, on the one hand, and an extreme tragic tension within his soul, on the other.

1.2 Shestov before Shestov: Shakespeare and Pushkin 1. For nearly a century, and until recently, Lev Shestov’s first published book remained virtually unknown, not only to general readers of Russian philosophy but—given its very limited availability—even to scholars.20 The author himself hardly ever mentioned this first publication in his subsequent works, and many other “clues” intimate that he may have regretted publishing his maiden work. For these reasons, this first book by Shestov was always wrapped in an aura of mystery. Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes [Shekspir i ego kritik Brandes] was published in 1898 (probably in December) with the publisher Mendelevich in St. Petersburg,21 in a limited number of copies at the author’s own expense, under the pseudonym “Lev Shestov,” which he would continue to use for all his subsequent publications.22 The author’s youngest daughter and his first biographer, Natal'ya Baranova-Shestova, writes that the book “did not attract much attention from contemporary critics” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 43)—a few reviews appeared in the years immediately after the book was published, but apparently later it was forgotten.23 Shestov himself, in a short autobiographical 20 A first critical edition appeared only in 1996, in Tomsk (see Lev I. Shestov. Sochineniya v dvukh tomakh. Tom I [Tomsk: Izdatel'stvo “Vodolei,” 1996], 3–212). 21 When quoting from this book I used a reprinted edition included in a collection of Shestov’s works: Shestov 1/2000 (A1), 7–206. All the translations from Russian and from French, here and in the rest of the book, are mine. 22 On the curious and nearly cabalistic reasons for the choice of this pen name—largely connected to a need for independence from and a rebellion against his father—see the explanation given by his friend Aaron Shteinberg (Shteinberg 1991 [B1], 256–258), which coincides with the one given by another of Shestov’s good friends, the writer Aleksei Remizov (Remizov [B1], 220, 561). Cf. also Ramona Fotiade’s introduction to Chestov 34/2015 (A2), 22–23. 23 Some of these reviews (by Yu. I. Aikhenvalˈd, R. Gebgard, Z. A. Vengerova, and N. K. Mikhailovskii) have been recently reprinted in Tatˈyana Shchedrina’s L. I. Shestov: Pro et contra (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 17–35). The general tone of the first two reviews, with regard to Shestov’s work, is not enthusiastic as they raise objections to many points in Shestov’s argumentation, especially from a strictly literary aspect. But the third and fourth

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note from 1911, just briefly mentioned his book on Shakespeare and Brandes stating that he had conceived and written it during a long stay in Italy and Germany between 1896 and 1898 (cf. Shestov 8/1911 [A2], 173–176). He also wrote about the refusal of several publishers in St. Petersburg to consider it for publication and about other difficulties that led to his decision to self-publish it (ibid.). Apart from this short note, there is hardly any mention of this first work of his in the rest of his output consisting—in Natal'ya Baranova’s classification—of twelve books and numerous articles. There is none even in 1903, when he returned to the topic of Shakespeare in an article dedicated to the tragedy Julius Caesar.24 Even when he was already famous and most of his oeuvre had already been translated into French, Shestov still never wanted to republish this work,25 nor reutilize any part of it in subsequent books. For him, as well as for others, this book never seems to have been more than a just an item on his list of publications. The reason for this neglect became clearer many years after Shestov’s death, when an apparently previously unpublished manuscript of his was printed in the United States. It was an article on Pushkin which marked the centenary of the Russian poet’s birth26 and it was one Shestov wrote at the same time as he was working on his book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche. The general tone actually evaluate the book quite positively. Vengerova acknowledges Shestov’s analysis to be original especially in linking Nietzsche’s thought to Shakespeare; and, most notably, the famous critic Nikolai Mikhailovskii agrees with Shestov, in particular, with his attacks on Brandes’ positivism and recognizes that Shestov is not, in fact, interested in literary criticism per se but “in moral philosophy and in a protest against rationalism” (35). As Mikhailovskii argues, it is a book on Shestov rather than on Shakespeare: “It contains errors, because it does not remain in one spot, but stretches upwards and is always searching” (ibid.). 24 Cf. Lev I. Shestov, “‘Yulii Tsezar'’ Shekspira” [Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar], in Shestov 1/2000 (A1), 584–594. This essay was first published as an introduction to volume 3 of Shakespeare’s collected works (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, 1903) and then included as an appendix to Shestov’s fourth book Apofeoz bespochvennosti. Opyt adogmaticheskogo myshleniya [The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: An Experiment in Adogmatic Thought] (see Shestov 4/1905 [A1]). 25 In 1911, a second edition of this work was actually produced by the publishing house Shipovnik (St. Petersburg), in connection with the publication of a collected works edition of Shestov’s writings. 26 The article, contrary to what Natal'ya Baranova reports in her bibliography, appeared in Zhizn' i iskusstvo 144, May 26, 1899, 1–2, with the title “Znachenie Pushkina dlya nashego vremeni” [The Meaning of Pushkin for Our Time] (see Shestov 5/1899 [A2]), but remained virtually unknown until 1960 when it was published with the title “Pushkin” (Lev I. Shestov, “Pushkin,” Vozdushnye puti 1 [1960]: 51–66). A few years later, the same article was included in the collection of Shestov’s essays entitled Umozrenie i otkrovenie [Speculation and Revelation]: cf. Shestov 11/1964 (A1). For a comment on this, see Ermichëv (B3).

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

of that article—written on the occasion of the centenary of Pushkin’s birth— seemed to completely contradict the better known notions of Shestov’s philosophy of anti-moralism, but it did express very similar notions to those found in the book on Brandes and Shakespeare published in 1898. While engaging in direct comparison with the famous “Pushkin Speech” that Dostoevskii held in Moscow in 1880,27 in this text Shestov deals with the meaning and “duty” of art, and he does so by reviving well-known Slavophile motifs. For Shestov, unlike Gogolˈ and Lermontov, Pushkin was capable of reconciling the horrors of life with a superior and universal principle of good and of humanity. In all his tragedies—as he affirms while recalling old idealistic arguments of Russian populism—Pushkin always found a way towards piety, without need for any illusory effect. In this way, according to Shestov, Pushkin introduced idealism in Russian literature and, at the same time, he founded realism. His genius lay in such an apparently contradictory task.28 This article reveals a Shestov who still tried to reconcile the tragic with the ideal, the possibility of a mission for the poet and artist to transform evil into good, lie into truth. In his introduction to the French edition of this text, the translator Boris de Schloezer states that the interest of this text lies precisely in the fact that it represents the last (chronological) demarcation between Shestov’s early idealistic phase and his mature and definitive thought.29 Since it was written at the very end of the century, this text confirmed that a sudden change of mind had occurred in Shestov’s thought within the space of just a year; between 1898 and 1899, to 27 On this crucial event for the Russian intellectual history, see Marcus C. Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 122–146. 28 Shestov’s mature position on Pushkin is actually quite an enigma. He would never write an entire essay on him, and this early text from 1899 remains the only attempt. Since then, only scattered comments or aphorisms can be found in the Shestovian oeuvre. In these fragments, Shestov never referred to “Pushkin’s crisis” as a possibility or to his personal “underground,” as he generally did with all the authors he dealt with, but he always maintained that Pushkin achieved a harmony, which is not however a false harmony, nor is it in any way moralistic or “preaching.” He explained the reason for this “exception” in an aphorism (no. 15, first part) from his 1905 book The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: “Pushkin was capable of crying, and anyone who is capable of crying is also capable of hoping [ . . . ]. Pushkin could have said with his old hero: ‘The peril is dangerous for others, not for me.’ Here lies the mystery of his harmonious state of mind” (Shestov 4/2000 [A1], 469). 29 From this moment, Schloezer says, Shestov “sets out along his own path, which he would henceforth follow alone” (Boris de Schloezer 1966b [B3], 10). Schloezer considers this article on Pushkin “close to the spirit that animated Shestov’s first book Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes” (9).

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be specific.30 In fact, the fundamental concept that the article on Pushkin proclaimed, that is, that a true literary work should reconcile the reader with the injustices and suffering of life, largely resembled the substance of his book on Brandes and Shakespeare, thus adding to the first part of the interpretative diptych that Shestov would soon dismiss. A few years after its appearance in 1898, the critic Ivanov-Razumnik rightly labeled the Shakespeare book an “apology of tragedy” (Ivanov-Razumnik [B3], 178).31 In these two works of 1898 and 1899, respectively, Shestov, the subsequent anti-moralist par excellence (in a Nietzschean vein), seemed to posit an ultimate meaning to tragedy in Pushkin’s and Shakespeare’s works—a meaning that justified tragedy. While this notion contradicts his later “existentialist” stance in which tragedy has no moral purpose, it is also a key to understanding why he eventually opted for the path of antirationalism and antimoralism. Not only did the later Shestov oppose those who defended the necessity and universally valid rationale of morality, but he also battled against his previous self that had once championed that very necessity and rationale.32 These two works—the book on Brandes and Shakespeare 30 Shestov’s change of mind is as sudden as it is radical. Everything seemingly happened in a few months, between 1898 and 1899, or more probably for some time he held different opinions within himself. Natal'ya Baranova is also unable to explain this significant change in such a short lapse of time (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 58). It is indisputable, however, that there are irreconcilable differences both in style and in content between the enthusiastic Slavophile tone of the article on Pushkin (1899), as well as the humanitarian concerns of his articles written for Zhizn' i iskusstvo between 1895 and 1900, and the total skepticism of the book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche (published in 1900, but whose last manuscript, on its last page, is dated “December 1898” [cf. Ms. 2101-1, file 4, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris]) as well as the subsequent Shestovian output. One striking example of such change is Shestov’s opinion of Lermontov: in the Pushkin article Shestov maintains that Lermontov’s art is a “sickness” that Pushkin cured; yet in his book on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche (1903), Shestov hails the same author, Lermontov, and his hero Pechorin as a remedy and way of salvation for Russian literature,—as a writer in the same league as Dostoevskii and the creator of similar antiheroes (cf. Shestov 3/2000 [A1], 313–314). The same can be said about Dostoevskii’s “Pushkin Speech,” whose positive value, strongly affirmed in Shestov’s text on Pushkin, is completely overturned and recanted in his 1903 book (cf. Shestov 3/2000 [A1], 321, 334, 382), where he defines the Pushkin Speech as “the dark apotheosis of the whole of Dostoevskii’s oeuvre” (321). 31 Razumnik V. Ivanov-Razumnik (1878–1946) was an eminent Russian writer and literary critic of his time, particularly famous for his work History of Russian Social Thought of 1907 (in two volumes). In 1908, he wrote the most important critical study ever dedicated to Shestov during his stay in Russia: O smysle zhizni. F. Sologub, L. Andreev, L. Shestov [On the Meaning of Life: F. Sologub, L. Andreev, L. Shestov]. 32 Significantly, in chapter 7 of his subsequent book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche Shestov addresses with a “we” the generation of Russian intellectuals of the 1880s who believed in the power of

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

and the article on Pushkin—have many points in common, and when viewed in conjunction demonstrate clearly the radical change of opinion that took place in Shestov’s thought right after writing them.33 As already stated, Shestov wrote Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes around 1896 during a stay in Berlin, when he had the opportunity to read many of Nietzsche’s works in German. As I have argued in two previous publications on this issue, it was the impact of Nietzsche that soon after writing his “pro-morality” works led Shestov to his sudden change of philosophical direction toward a more markedly tragic thought in the year 1898–1899.34 In this regard, Shestov’s entire oeuvre may also be considered as split into two unequal parts with the first consisting of the book on Shakespeare and Brandes, the article on Pushkin, and a number of other minor articles from before 1900; and the second, made up of the rest of his output.35 It is the latter which created morality, thus including himself among those who, following Pisarev’s ideas, tried to find the right to negate any art in the name of people’s material needs. 33 A large number of Shestovian texts should be actually added to this earliest “dogmatic phase” (see Kseniya Vorozhikhina’s bibliography in Vorozhikhina 2019 [B3]). Among these, in particular, his two articles on Solovˈëv (both appeared in Zhizn' i iskusstvo, in 1895 and 1896), his article “Georg Brandes o Gamlete” and his literary review of Severnyi vestnik. In all these writings, Shestov takes on dogmatic and often moralistic positions against Solovˈëv’s acceptance of war, against Hamlet’s passivity (which was, on the contrary, praised by Brandes) and against the decadence and indifference to social problems of the authors published in Severnyi vestnik. This latter position will later be overturned in an article of 1905, “Literaturnyi setsession,” in which Shestov would affirm the opposite. As Aleksandr Ermichëv writes about this: “In 1905, Shestov—the real Shestov!—would differently evaluate Severnyi vestnik as the predecessor of Voprosy zhizni, which embarked on the dangerous experience of uniting the forces of the ‘Renaissance’” (Ermichëv [B3]). 34 For an interpretation of Shestov’s early phase of thought and his “change of convictions,” see my two articles: Oppo 2006 and 2014 (B3). A good part of this section originates from the latter article. The fact that Shestov later recanted his early idealism, becoming instead an explicit “philosopher of tragedy,” is also mentioned by Paul Rostenne ([B3], 333–335), as well as by Shestov’s best friend and disciple, Benjamin Fondane ([B1], 85), and by the French translator of his work, Boris de Schloezer (1959 [B3], 360). More recently, Aleksandr Ermichëv has discussed this point and he concludes that in that year (1897) of “deepest despair” for Shestov, everything brusquely changed for him, although he may have taken some time to accept it. The man “educated in the traditions of the Sixties with their love for the person [ . . . ] unpretentious aesthetic tastes, no nihilistic sharpness and the sobriety of a realist whose parameters were given by the ‘masters of minds’ Dobrolyubov, Lavrov, and Mikhailovskii [ . . . ] with cultural patriotism [ . . . ] Slavophile and Dostoevskii roots”—that man changed into the Shestov we know, who constantly “warns the reader from being seduced by such simple and pleasant benefits of existence as truth and goodness” (Ermichëv [B3]). 35 Already in 1908, Ivanov-Razumnik observed this: “From now on, in the works of L. Shestov, a new, second, and so far last period begins; this fracture of creativity occurred between his

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his reputation of a “single-minded man” (as Berdyaev famously stated),36 of a philosopher upholding the notion of an absolute fideism with no need for any justification or rationale.37 Why exactly did Shestov change his mind? Beyond the impact of Nietzsche’s philosophy already mentioned, what other factors can we discern? And what specific position did he defend in Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes that he would subsequently dismiss, beyond the notion that Shakespeare advocated a lofty morality? The reasons that led Shestov to write a book entirely dedicated to Brandes’ interpretation of Shakespeare—having already written a short article on the Danish critic as an interpreter of Hamlet38—were explained first and his second book. Shestov’s second and subsequent books are closely intertwined with only one idea; the book on Shakespeare stands alone, but it constitutes a natural preface ‘e contrario’ to all his subsequent works” (Ivanov-Razumnik, [B3], 201). 36 On the occasion of Shestov’s death, Nikolai Berdyaev wrote an article whose title emphasized this “man of one idea” position: “Osnovnaya ideya filosofii L'va Shestova” [The Fundamental Idea of the Philosophy of Lev Shestov] (Berdyaev 1938–1939 [B3]). But on other occasions he had defined Shestov in that way. On the controversial relationship between Shestov and Berdyaev, see appendix 2 of this book. The fact that Shestov had a single philosophical theme, which he applied to the most diverse subjects and authors, was actually a common perception among many Shestovian scholars and readers. 37 Boris de Schloezer suggests a more even division in Shestov’s thought: the first phase, until 1910, in which the author’s interests were more focused on literary criticism and moral philosophy and the second phase, from that date until his death, which was marked by an ongoing interest in religious themes and their connection to philosophy. According to Schloezer, it was the discovery of Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (“événement capital dans la vie spirituelle de Chestov,” he writes) that determined this change (see Schloezer 1966 [B3], 18). Boris de Schloezer [Boris Fëdorovich Shlëtser] (1881–1969), a Russian descended from a German noble family, grew up in musical surroundings (his sister married A. N. Skryabin) and as a musical critic was author of various monographs and essays on Bach, Stravinskii, and his brother-in-law Skryabin. He probably met Shestov in Kiev. For further details on the start of their friendship and their exile to Paris, please see the special edition of the journal Europe devoted to Shestov: Europe 960 (April 2009): 163–164. Later on, they met again in Paris and from that moment on Schloezer was to become the main French translator of Shestov’s works as well as an expert of his thought and a close friend. For further details on the start of their friendship and their exile to Paris, please see the special edition of the journal Europe devoted to Shestov (Fotiade 2009b [B3], 163–164). 38 See Shestov 2/1895 (A2). Some information on this article can also be found in Fondane (B1), 85. Recently, Kseniya Vorozhikhina reedited and analyzed this article for the first time (see Shestov 2/2017 [A2]). According to Vorozhikhina, while Shestov expresses here an idea that is “contrary to everything that he later said” (i.e., a moralistic position against Hamlet, whose fault is that of refusing to obey his father), this position is also different from the one he maintained in his subsequent book on Shakespeare. In this book, Vorozhikhina writes, “Hamlet is still perceived by Shestov as a person of a weak moral will, as a child of doubt, incapable of action; however, Shestov no longer expects him to simply fulfill the will of his father, he no longer wants to see the hero only as an instrument in the hands

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

by the author himself in an interview he gave to his friend, the Romanian poet Benjamin Fondane.39 He quotes Shestov as saying: I was in Europe [ . . . ]. One day I happened to see Brandes’ book on Shakespeare in a bookshop. I bought it, and while reading through those pages I lost my temper [ . . . ]. At that time, Brandes was a notable personality: he had discovered Nietzsche and had some [level of] relationship with Stuart Mill, etc. But he was a sort of under-Taine, with some talent who nonetheless read superficially and skimmed over the surface of things. (Fondane [B1], 85)

It was not only Brandes’ “superficiality” that prompted Shestov to react so negatively, however. In Baranova’s biography we find a statement to the effect that it was Brandes’ moral relativism that moved Shestov to engage in his polemics with the famous critic: In the book Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, Shestov takes a stand against Taine’s positivism and Brandes’ skepticism, in the name of idealism and of morals. It is Shestov’s only dogmatic work (and also the only one that has never been translated).40 At the time, the Danish critic had a great following and many people disapproved of young Shestov’s furious attack against him. (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 43)

of tribal duty to revenge” (ibid.). Regarding the circumstances that led Shestov to write another study on Brandes and Shakespeare, Natal'ya Baranova writes: “It was probably reading Brandes’ book that convinced Shestov to write a second work on Shakespeare and Brandes. Two manuscripts relating to this work are kept in Shestov’s archives. The first is dated September 10, 1896 [ . . . ]. The second is dated ‘Berlin, November 8, 1896,’ and contains parts of certain chapters. Shestov intended at first to write an article, but as he wrote, he realized that the abundance of material required he write a book. He finished this book in Rome, in March 1897” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 40). 39 Benjamin Fondane (1898–1944) was a Romanian-Jewish poet and author of several studies on French literature and thought (in particular on Rimbaud and Baudelaire). In 1923, he moved to Paris where, the following year, he met Shestov at meetings organized by Jules de Gaultier. He wrote a work on Shestov containing a collection of letters and testimonials on the Russian philosopher’s life and work (see Fondane [B1]). On Fondane and his friendship with Shestov, see appendix 3 of this book. 40 The first translations into foreign languages, first in Italian and then in French, occurred in 2010 and 2017.

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In his conversations with Fondane, Shestov comments on the crucial change of conviction he underwent after finishing his Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes in which he so strongly criticized the Danish critic for his allegations that Shakespeare lacked morality: In that [first work] I still believed in the point of view of morality, which I would abandon a little later [ . . . ]. You will probably remember the [Shakespearean] lines: “The time is out of joint.” [ . . . ] Yes! At that time, I tried to realign time. It was only later that I understood it was necessary to leave time out of joint. And that this joint is shattered to smithereens! (Fondane [B1], 85)

Shestov was, in his own words, making his last attempt to put “time” back on its right track in this work, seeing the “laws of the world” as still intact and traditional morality as still valid.41 It was the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values [Umwertung aller Werte] that would soon radically modify his previous notions. As he said himself, his “defense” of Shakespeare against Brandes and Taine was still conducted “from the point of view of morality.” 2. In Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, Shestov launches a sharp criticism against the positivistic reading of Shakespeare that Taine initiated and a host of literary critics took over from him, even such a talented one as Brandes. Shakespeare, as Shestov observes, is too complex to be analyzed in positivist terms and to be confined to a unitary and scientifically coherent vision, but Taine sees nothing but a “machine of nerves” [nervnaya mashina] in the character Hamlet, for example. This is an explanation of this character’s complexities that, in Shestov’s view, does not explain much, however. Shestov repudiates Taine’s conclusion that Shakespeare’s entire “anthropology” is based on the notion that, just like Hamlet, “man is a machine of nerves” (Shestov 1/2000 [A1], 20) and states that the science-based rationalist mind cannot go “very far” in explaining such an irrational mind as Hamlet’s, or even that of a more ordinary human being. For Shestov, there is an even more dangerous kind of literary critic than the type Taine personifies, however—one who in some ways is an “evolved version” of the French positivist. It is here that he introduces 41 Strange as it may seem, as Geneviève Piron notes, in this very moment the thirty-year-old Shestov “is closer to the ‘fathers,’ the politically committed defenders of moral traditions, than to the ‘sons’ with their maîtres à penser, like Rozanov, who refuses moral obligation and the role of a writer as an ‘intercessor’ and a ‘master’” (Piron [B2], 115).

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Georg Brandes who had just published his book, William Shakespeare, in German (see Brandes [C]), which Shestov had come across during his stay in Germany in 1896. In this large, comprehensive study of more than one thousand pages, the Danish critic, according to Shestov, aims at extending Taine’s work to a more comprehensive level, especially in trying to establish a necessary connection between Shakespeare’s life and his works that would offer an indisputable conclusive meaning to his entire oeuvre. To do this, as Shestov observes, “Brandes dedicates a good third of his book to investigating various aspects of the poet’s biography offering conjectures, reflections and numerous hypotheses” (Shestov 1/2000 [A1], 27). In the end, Brandes’ answer to the “supreme and terrible question” [velikii i strashnyi vopros]: “Why?”—the question of the final meaning of Shakespeare’s tragedies—is simple: there is no meaning except that “a blind and cruel fate ruins both good and bad people alike” (35). In his analysis of Brandes’ thought, Shestov often underlines and quotes this sentence, and he adds that the Brandesian expression “blind fate” means nothing other than “brutal chance.” Chance [sluchai] is a key word in Shestov’s discussion. In his Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, he uses it to show disdain for Taine’s and Brandes’ answer to the velikii vopros “zachem,” to the “big why” of Shakespeare’s dramatic horrors that so often befall innocent victims. For both Taine and Brandes, in Shestov’s opinion, the only valid answer to “why” is that chance wreaks tragedy (36). The fate of humankind is consequently one of “wandering in darkness, finding our way at random, or even more probably always remaining caught in the same place, distressingly aware that for us there is not, and can never be, a guide” (36). This, Shestov writes, is, according to Brandes, Shakespeare’s ultimate philosophical stance. To refute Brandes’ opinion of Shakespeare’s philosophical stance, Shestov turns his attention to Hamlet, not only because he is the “most representative of the Shakespearean characters” but also because the eponymous play, more than any other, “moves contemporary critics to depict the English poet as a disoriented philosopher” (37). In a long and often tortuous analysis (37–69), in which Shestov follows Brandes’ comments at great length and quotes long excerpts from Hamlet, the Russian philosopher’s position towards Shakespeare’s poetics is clearly expressed for the first time. It is evident, for Shestov, that in Hamlet “life is paralyzed” [zhizn' zastyla] and tragedy is necessary for him to wake up. For Brandes, Hamlet’s paralysis of will is the only significant point, but for Shestov it is necessary to understand the deeper meaning of that paralysis. Here he advances his personal interpretation, that is, the view that Shakespeare offered Hamlet an opportunity to put time back into joint, but that Hamlet did

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not take it, as he preferred the realm of thought to the reality of life. “Hamlet sees clearly that there is a ‘good,’ but he is not able to integrate it, making it his own; he is not capable of loving it” (52). Shestov adds: “He has a conscience— but it does not inspire him, it actually only torments him” (52). Although Shestov declared that he disliked Kant (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 40), he uses a readapted Kantian moral to explain Hamlet’s dilemma.42 In Shestov’s view, Hamlet has a conscience capable of directing him towards authentic good, and it would suffice to put it into practice by obeying its “categorical imperative.” Hamlet refuses to obey his inner voice, however, and the rest of his destiny is the consequence of this choice. Opposing thought to life, Shestov nonetheless posits “willpower” as a mediating factor between the two, and as a path to salvation when serving ethically valid goals. Shakespeare is a great poet who reconciles us with the worst pains of life precisely because he offers an exit from tragedy by showing tragedy itself as the inevitable result of “moral passivity” [nravstvennaya passivnost'] (Shestov 1/2000 [A1], 67). Clearly, this is not the familiar Shestovian position with regard to morality as it emerges in subsequent years. In his reasoning throughout this work, Shestov nonetheless confirms Berdyaev’s image of him as a “philosopher who fights against philosophy.”43 He consistently uses rational arguments to demonstrate a fundamentally anti-rational primacy of life over thought, that is, life’s “right” to exist on its own, without being controlled by philosophies based on the “irrefutable truth” of the exact sciences. In this case, he opposes Taine’s and Brandes’ scientific and historical approach to Shakespeare’s tragedies and tries to defend the autonomous aspects of the playwright’s art against materialistic and socio-historical explanations of it. Shestov is as yet unwilling to accept a vision of Shakespeare’s irrational tragedies that offers no solutions to undeserved suffering, but struggles to find a justification for it. He finds it in the need for morality and in the existence of a conscience, which, in a vaguely Kantian way, tends towards good and is able to opt for it. Suffering ensues as a result of not heeding the “categorical imperative.” In this phase, Shestov states

42 Many years later, Shestov admitted to having “turned” to Kant to solve the apparent absence of a moral in Shakespeare’s tragedies (cf. Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 271). His interest in Kant from this time is also substantiated by the presence in The Lev Shestov Archive of an unfinished manuscript from 1895 entitled “Sketches on Transcendental Ethics and on Space and Time” (Ms. 2110-1, file 90, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). 43 Berdyaev expressed this idea in an article on the occasion of Shestov’s seventieth birthday (Berdyaev 1936a [B3], 50–52).

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clearly: Hamlet is the question, Brutus is the answer (70). What is tragically opened up in Hamlet is logically closed in the essay Julius Caesar. A good part of the second half of Shestov’s book Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes is dedicated to a passionate apology for Brutus. This apology is introduced by an unequivocal statement: “There is no other choice: either we refuse Shakespeare’s view of the world or we admit that in Julius Caesar he has condemned Hamlet’s philosophy in all its aspects” (71). In describing Brutus’ monologue in Julius Caesar, Shestov highlights and celebrates his firmness, his not allowing himself to be overwhelmed by his “inner struggle” or by any “Hamletic thought” that might eventually lead him to a stalemate. This strength and this will are, for Shestov, a “different kind of philosophy” (81) and “Brutus is a true philosopher” (84) in that he links his thought to life and to good: “for the good of Rome he killed his best friend, and this was not a murder but an undertaking of the highest morality” (88). Throughout his book Shestov firmly defends Shakespeare against an accusatory portrayal of him as a brutal realist, as was typical for the “third stage of Russian Shakespeareanism” in the nineteenth century.44 He discusses three more of Shakespeare’s works: Coriolanus (111–147), King Lear (147–179) and Macbeth (179–204), and in each he perceives a character45 that is capable of epitomizing the moral meaning of those works as well as representing Shakespeare’s true intentions in creating them. Thoroughly analyzing those characters46 and still in consistent opposition to Brandes, Shestov insists on highlighting the authentic reasons that led Shakespeare to depict human life 44 Cf. Yuri D. Levin, “Shakespeare and Russian Literature: Nineteenth-Century Attitudes” (see Parfenov-Price 1998 [C], 78). As Levin puts it, after the great age of the Russian reception of Shakespeare, with Pushkin, and after a second phase in which Russians sought and found in Shakespeare an affinity with their own tragic perception of the world (Belinskii, Herzen, Turgenev), there followed a third stage, this time of rejection. It came from the radical liberation movement of the 1860s until the end of the century and “Tolstoi’s disparaging assessment of Shakespeare” (94) published in 1906. Shakespeare was then labeled “an ‘art for art’s sake’ writer” (93) and rejected as such. Shestov seems to have been well aware of this re-evaluation of the playwright when writing his work. As he was opposed to such a rejection, he harked back to the ideals of the years 1840–1860, the cult of Brutus as a “man of action,” and the mission for a universal preaching that was attributed to the Shakespearean works, for instance by Herzen and Chernyshevskii. See, on this, also Piron (B2), 107–115. 45 This character is Martius in Coriolanus, Lear in King Lear—once he has seen his errors— and Macbeth in Macbeth. 46 Although Shestov pays much less attention to Lear and Macbeth than he did to Brutus, he feels obliged to offer an extended justification for why tragedy for the former and murder for the latter are not what they seem, but have a moral dimension.

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not only as a result of “chance, which brings people to folly, murder and death,” as positivist “scientific criticism” sought to demonstrate (146). On the contrary, Shakespeare, as Shestov reads him at this stage of his thought, is capable of seeing, in even his most cruel and senseless tragedies, a “humanly, comprehensible meaning” (146). To Brandes’ vision of Shakespeare as a proponent of “chance,” he opposes “the law of our inner world” [zakon nashego vnutrennego mira] (146) as Shakespeare’s guiding idea. Shestov uses this very term, “law” [zakon], which he will denigrate in his later works. Already his second book condemned Tolstoi’s “laws of morality” and opposed them to Nietzsche’s philosophy of “real life” [nastoyashchaya zhizn']. In 1898, however, Shestov still embraced the view of morality as a value, and for him the solution to “bringing time back into joint” lay in seeing in Shakespeare’s tragedies as demonstrating a sort of law of human existence that worked in a double way. On the one hand, it would keep the individual striving for his freedom and maintaining his moral values; on the other hand, it would have the power of reconciling humanity with the horrors of reality. Yet, even then, he saw this process solely as an individual one. It is something that happens within the human soul and not by external imposition, as the “positivists” saw it. Significantly, in the last analysis of Shakespeare’s tragedies (see sections 28–32 of Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes) which deals with Macbeth, even Kant’s categorical imperative is no longer valid. As a general law of morality, it condemns Macbeth for the murder of Duncan. Shakespeare, on the contrary, “does not speak of a crime, but of a criminal whose motives we should be able to understand so as to return his own [Macbeth’s] image to God. For this reason, Kant is against Macbeth, and Shakespeare is with Macbeth” (202). Shakespeare, as Shestov explicitly puts it, reinterprets the Kantian imperative by turning it into an individual mode of morality. Good, for Shakespeare, does exist, as it does for Kant, but it must be sought in sympathy and empathy for the evildoer and found within the individual: morality itself “cannot be measured by one’s willingness to obey norms, but rather by the ability to put oneself in the place of one’s neighbor, to feel that Duncan is like one’s own father” (202). In so doing, the reader also sympathizes with the horrible situation Macbeth has put himself in. This shift from exteriority (norms) to interiority (personal empathy), from a concept enunciated in general [v obshchem] to a singular act of free will is decisive for the early Shestov. It offers the only hope that a suffering and evil world might be redeemed. To this end, he affirms that Shakespeare “corrected” Kant’s mistaken notion of the categorical imperative by pointing

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

his moral philosophy in the right—individual—direction. In this regard, as Igor' Evlampiev daringly affirms, Mikhail Bakhtin’s renowned interpretation of Dostoevskii’s novels as essentially dialogical and polyphonic—that is, made up of “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices” (cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984], 6)—may even be directly “borrowed” from Shestov’s reading of Shakespeare’s works. At the same time, Evlampiev adds, “Shestov attributed to Dostoevskii exactly the opposite direction in literature, arguing that all his novels are extremely monologic, and all the heroes say only what the author himself thinks” (Evlampiev [B3], 271). 3. Less than two years after writing his book on Brandes and Shakespeare, Shestov would again refer to Macbeth, this time in his book on The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche. Here, in a few brief pages, we find a significant change in his views on morality. While in the book on Brandes and Shakespeare, Shestov was still searching for a place for good and a new interpretation of the categorical imperative within the inner world of each human being, he now sees Macbeth’s tragedy solely in terms of the primacy of tragedy itself over any possible morality. For this new Shestov, the role of morality in condemning or justifying any human action is totally extraneous to Shakespeare’s intentions when writing his tragedies.47 In his book of 1900, Shestov likens such a reading of Shakespeare to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In 1903 he published the article “Julius Caesar,”48 which marks a re-evaluation of his previous work on Shakespeare. Five years after his first book, Shestov repudiates and overturns the main thesis that constituted the positive part of his argumentation in Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes. In the article “Julius Caesar,” Brutus is no longer the hero who acts in accordance with his convictions but a victim of delusion. What was previously the nravstvennoe velichie, the “moral greatness,” of Brutus, is now no more than pokornost', “submission” to a general law that cancels out the singularity of the human being. 47 “[In Shakespeare’s Macbeth] the problem of knowing whether or not it is a good thing to be murderers ourselves [ . . . ] is not an issue [ . . . ]. And, Shakespeare clearly is unconcerned that, in taking such a stance, he might encourage a murderer or incite a murder” (Lev Shestov, Dobro v uchenii grafa Tolstogo i Fr. Nitsshe. Filosofiya i propoved' [The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching], in Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 242–243). On Shestov’s Macbeth, see also Desmond 2006 (B3). 48 Lev I. Shestov, “‘Yulii Tsezar'’ Shekspira” (in Shestov 1/2000 [A1], 584–594). For a comment on this article, see Motroshilova 2017 (B3).

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Brutus is now an inhuman figure to Shestov because he never stumbles and never loses his determination when it comes to fulfilling his “duty.” As the philosopher remarks with bitter irony, Mark Anthony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar “deservedly glorifies” Brutus’ sense of justice and makes of him an authentic “hero of virtue” (Shestov 1/2000 [A1], 593); in other words, he is no longer a hero in Shestov’s opinion. Only Brutus’ last words before his suicide49 mark a redeeming feature as they reveal his understanding of the tragic truth: he finally sees the absurdity of having followed a moral law all his life, as opposed to an intuitive insight. Quite ironically, at this stage Shestov’s “new” opinion on Shakespeare seems similar to that of Brandes, at least with regard to the general idea of the meaninglessness of Shakespeare’s tragic oeuvre. Of course, the similarity is superficial in that Brandes condemns “lack of meaning” as a flaw in the playwright’s vision of the world, whereas Shestov praises this very “lack” as an insight of great depth. In 1903, Shestov makes Shakespeare the very epitome of his own tragic and “groundless” view of life, one he would first fully express in Dostoevskii and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903), and then in his highly controversial work of 1905: The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: An Experiment in Adogmatic Thought. It has been noted that Shestov’s first book on Shakespeare had no effect on his career and left few traces in his oeuvre. Nonetheless, he put great effort into it and delivered a work that, according to Ivanov-ik, is “unique for its power of feelings and depth of thought in all our Russian literature about Shakespeare after Belinskii’s articles” (Ivanov-Razumnik [B3], 179). But very soon, as Ivanov-Razumnik argued, “Shestov saw his mistake; he realized that no Shakespeare could comprehend that which has no meaning [ .  .  . ]. Shakespeare did not have that full ‘justification of life’ that L. Shestov attributed to him” (197).50 He had to make a new beginning and it was his second book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche that became his “passport” to the world of intellectuals in St. Petersburg. Shestov’s “official” thought was thus born under the 49 “Caesar, now be still: / I kill’d not thee with half so good a will” (Julius Caesar, 5.2.50–51). 50 Eventually, Shestov produced three different opinions about Shakespeare: the first, a totally moralizing one, is contained in his article “Georg Brandes on Hamlet” (1895); the second, in which he seeks a meaningful compromise between tragedy and morality, can be found in this book on Shakespeare (1898); and the last one, characterized by a completely antimoral position, is from his 1903 article on Julius Caesar. The first two still try to defend a dogmatic point of view, whereas the third one—which would ultimately become his definitive stance on Shakespeare—is skeptical or, better, “fully tragic.”

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influence of Nietzsche,51 whose works he began reading at the very time he was finishing his book on Shakespeare and Brandes (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 45–46).52 Shakespeare’s place was taken by the German philosopher and Dostoevskii. In his later writings, including his use of quotation, one finds fewer remarks on the English playwright. This is understandable if one considers that Shakespeare’s impact is found at the very beginning of Shestov’s conception of the tragic which then still was an “open question” to him. Shakespeare’s world raised the “tragic issue” in its entirety for Shestov, but it was through the prism of Nietzschean and Dostoevskian existential views that he would formulate his answers to the questions Shakespeare had raised. The philosopher had not forgotten Shakespeare, however, as evidenced by an autobiographical note that Shestov included in an article he wrote on the death of his friend Edmund Husserl53 in 1938 (and a few months before he himself would die). In this note we find the following statement: Strange as it may seem to some people, my first teacher of philosophy was Shakespeare, with his enigmatic, incomprehensible, threatening, and melancholy words: “The time is out of joint.” What can one do, how can one act, when the time is out of joint, when being reveals its horrors? From Shakespeare I turned eagerly to Kant [ . . . ]. but Kant had no answers for my problems. I next turned to a different source—the Scriptures. (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 271)

In a way Shestov could not have imagined when writing his earliest book, Shakespeare was indeed “his first teacher of philosophy” and it was Hamlet’s words about the time being “out of joint” (Hamlet, 1.4.188) that conveyed to him the “tragic absurdity” [nelepyi tragizm] at the core of human life which no philosophy can rationally justify. From the moment these words fully impacted him, Shestov would follow only those thinkers (from Nietzsche to Dostoevskii, to Kierkegaard) who had deliberately accepted the existence of a groundless truth of time perennially out of joint. 51 According to Berdyaev, Nietzsche influenced Shestov more than any other philosopher, although he was not “Nietzschean” in the standard sense of the term (cf. Berdyaev 1936a [B3], 51). On this see also Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, “Shestov’s Interpretation of Nietzsche,” in Fotiade 2006 (B2), 133–142. 52 Nevertheless, the epigraph of this book is dedicated to Nietzsche. 53 Lev I. Shestov, “Pamiati velikogo filosofa. Edmund Gusserl'” [In Memory of a Great Philosopher], in Umozrenie i otkrovenie [Speculation and Revelation] 11/1964 (A1), 300–327.

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1.3 Tolstoi’s Struggle between “Yasnaya Polyana” and “Astapovo” 1. The impossibility of reconciling rationality with real life, which in many ways is the tragic nucleus of Shestov’s thought, was fully presented in his book The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching [Dobro v uchenii grafa Tolstogo i Fr. Nitsshe. Filosofiya i propoved', 1900]. This notion is one that later would evolve with remarkable consistency throughout his career. Officially, this was Shestov’s second published book, as it appeared two years after his first work Shakespeare and his Critic Brandes (1898). However, as explained in the previous section, the book on Shakespeare was nearly unknown in Russia at that time, so this new work could with good reason be considered as the real beginning of Shestov’s philosophy. The book received, in fact, a lot of attention from critics and specialized journals and even attracted the interest of two huge intellectual Russian figures: Vladimir Solovˈëv and Nikolai Mikhailovskii.54 Its style, simple and direct, also attracted nonintellectuals as well as the young and curious student Evgeniya Gertsyk, who described it as “a living spring” [zhivoi rodnik], “the most necessary, with the simplest words” (Gertsyk [B1], 99). Shestov’s engagement with Tolstoi must be seen in the more general context of Russia’s fin de siècle intellectual atmosphere. This is true not only because of the criticism Shestov expresses about “Tolstoism” and the moral ideas of Tolstoi’s doctrine—a criticism that was à la mode at that time—but also because in the same debate he brings in (as the counter of Tolstoi) Friedrich Nietzsche, whose thought had a sudden and “contagious” reception in Russia precisely at the end of the nineteenth century.55 Thus, before the many crucial events that were about to happen in Russia at the dawn of the new century, topics like the “overturning of all moral values” as well as the need for a new view of morality and spirituality were regarded as decisive in the Russian conscience. At that time, a philosophical dichotomy like “Nietzsche vs. Tolstoi” was particularly beguiling from many points of view (cf., on this, Clowes 2018 [C], 67–69), and Shestov provided more than a simple occasion for this comparison: his text depicts Tolstoi’s personal crisis as the crisis of an entire century, as it drew to a close. 54 For an analysis on the initial difficulties in publishing this work and the subsequent success, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 56–60. 55 For a first approach to this complex subject, see the two, always illuminating, works by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche in Russia (Rosenthal 1986 [C]) and by Edith Clowes, The Revolution of Moral Consciousness. Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890–1914 (Clowes 2018 [C] [1st ed. 1988]).

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

Significantly, at the beginning of his book, in a long analysis—which is more like a reprimand—on the deep nature of Tolstoi’s personal convictions, Shestov starts with a linchpin of nineteenth-century Russian realism, Belinskii, as if by speaking of Tolstoi he is in fact referring to a specific spirit that permeated the past century. In the same way, by “unmasking” Belinskii, he is also unmasking fifty years of Russian intellectual history, running through Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, Chernyshevskii, and all the other radical intelligenty of the second half of the century. To do this, Shestov “must” take on a “private Belinskii,” that is, a letter of his that was addressed to his friend Vasilii Botkin (March 1, 1841), in which, while explaining his views on Hegel’s philosophy, he reveals with tragic tones all his doubts concerning the ultimate meaningfulness of history. “Disharmony,” Belinskii writes, “is the condition of harmony” (Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 207; see also Belinsky [C], 150). Shestov would quote this sentence more than once. Here for the first time, as Ivanov-Razumnik observed, Shestov (like Belinskii) gave up the search for a “reasonable reality” [razumnaya deistvitelˈnostˈ] that he had pursued during all his interpretations of Shakespeare, and instead “he called to account, from life and from philosophy, all the victims of life conditions and of history” (Ivanov-Razumnik [B3], 202). There is nothing reasonable in reality. We come from an abyss of horror and tragedy—Shestov seems to say—and science, literature, arts have done no more than cover this abyss by providing a number of consistent and harmonic theories: for example, the nice appearance of a semblance or the divine harmony of a verse. Even Belinskii, in his innermost thoughts, acknowledged this. But Tolstoi does not. In fact, in his maturity he seems to go backwards. Tolstoi who was, according to Shestov, the “masterly painter of all the horrors of 1812” (Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 225), suddenly “finds out” that poor people exist and that only a certain kind of faith in morality and highest hopes (not novels like his War and Peace, which indulge too much in depicting the reality of things) can save them. This happened—Shestov observes—after he entered his fifties and precisely after he made his trip to Moscow and before he finished his work on the population census.56 In that moment and in that work—Thoughts Evoked by the 56 In his review of this book, Nikolai Mikhailovskii actually observes that many of Shestov’s references to Tolstoi’s life and works, in this exact context, are simply incorrect: for example, the fact that Tolstoi turned to “peasant labor” thirty years earlier than the date Shestov had indicated, i.e. after writing his Thoughts on the Census; or the fact that those Thoughts were not Tolstoi’s first significant work of freelance journalism (cf. Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, “Lev Shestov o gr. L. N. Tolstom,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 46–55).

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Census of Moscow [1884–85] (Mysli, vyzvannye perepis'yu v Moskve)—“with the worst timing in history,” as Shestov implies (a Russian history that, at the beginning of the 1880s, was starting precisely to forget and go beyond humanitarianism)—he began his personal path toward morality and the “laws” of religion (228–230). The world needed to be saved (his Thoughts Evoked by the Census began with this sentence: “And the people asked him [ Jesus] saying: ‘What shall we do then?’”) and those moral hopes seemed to him the only possible answers. For Shestov, in that moment he officially becomes a “prophet” and a “master of morality” to everybody. But, as an old man, he knows he is lying. In his argumentation, Shestov maintains that What is Art?, along with all of Tolstoi’s other essayistic writings, is a lie. Even the postscriptum to War and Peace, which he defines as “the bad foundation of a wonderful building” (245), was a lie. But from the Census of Moscow onwards his lie becomes the faith into which he puts all his efforts. As Tolstoi attacks unproductive art he also revisits the old “question of art” from the 1860s: “He wants to complete that same mission we had hoped a new Pisarev would accomplish” (252)—Shestov writes. In this way, he shifts “from art to philosophy” (245), as Shestov puts it. However, despite being brilliant as an artist, he was only mediocre as a philosopher. Because to Tolstoi, philosophy is no other than propoved', “preaching.”57 Why does Tolstoi believe in such a lie? According to Shestov, it was perhaps because for the first time in his life, he felt fear: the fear of losing everything he had, that is, a sense of radical emptiness (pustota). In other words, he could not stand the truth of his art, for he started to “philosophize.” But, as Shestov adds, just like art, philosophy must also take its inspiration from the tragic nature of life. In this regard, the only authentic philosophy is that of Nietzsche, who did not hide—like Tolstoi did—his fears and doubts. In this context—while nonetheless devoting entire sections of the book to describing the long process he would refer to as the “transformation of convictions” of the two authors—it was a simple task for Shestov to compare Nietzsche’s story to Tolstoi’s. Shestov calls Nietzsche “the antipode of Tolstoi” (257). At the time of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche too was fascinated by the “subtle appeal” of good and of harmony. But then, unlike Tolstoi, he found out that “art that embellishes human pain was of no use to him” (258). Thus, he 57 Shestov, however, wants to make it clear that the Tolstoi of War and Peace “is a philosopher in the highest meaning of the word, as he talks about life and reveals its most mysterious and enigmatic aspects” (Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 246). The problem, in fact, for Shestov, is when Tolstoi turns away from the philosophical truths he was able to see in his art.

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refused to believe in such an “honest lie” (chestnaya lozh') of morality (268). Hence, his turn toward the “transvaluation of all values,” according to which the “values” become “valued,” so that, in such an overturning, it is morality that must be put on trial. The whole meaning of this book is weighted in favor of Nietzsche. The fundamental duality expressed by Shestov is one between a “Nietzschean philosophy” that is meant to give voice to a “thought of disharmony” and a “Tolstoian preaching” that tries to tack every lack of meaning onto a general harmonic and moral principle. 2. Given the ruthlessness of Shestov’s tones, Solovˈëv’s skepticism with regard to the possibility of publishing this book becomes quite understandable: he was generally concerned with the effect it could have on Tolstoi and his followers (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 57). In a way, only two years before he finished writing his book, Shestov himself was one of those followers, since in 1896 he wrote an article in defense of Tolstoi’s “moral doctrine” against the “decadent” poets and critics who attacked him (see Shestov 4/1896 [A2]).58 But in the space of two years, between 1896 and 1898, many things changed for Shestov (his 1897 crisis, his travels in Europe, the reading of Nietzsche’s works) and also for the Russian intellectual audience. The book had a better reception than Solovˈëv could have imagined because of its clear style and, most of all, because it fostered much discussion. Curiously enough, there is a report—related by Maksim Gorʹkii—that Tolstoi read this book. The reaction he had is interesting and even amusing, as it testifies to Tolstoi’s polemic spirit.59 Ten years later, another episode would confirm the difficult relationship 58 For a comment on this, see Piron (B2), 115–118. 59 “I remember, in Gaspra—Gorʹkii writes—he read Leo Shestov’s book Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, and when Anton Chekhov remarked he did not like the book, Tolstoy said: ‘I thought it amusing. It’s written swaggeringly, but it’s all right and interesting. I am sure I like cynics when they are sincere.’ Then he said: ‘Truth is not wanted; quite true, what should he want truth for? For he will die all the same.’ And evidently seeing that his words had not been understood, he added with a quick smile: ‘If a man has learnt to think, no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death. All philosophers were like that. And what truths can there be, if there is death?’ After lunch, on the terrace he took up Shestov’s book again and finding the passage: ‘Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche could not live without an answer to their questions, and for them any answer was better than none,’ he laughed and said: ‘What a daring coiffeur, he says straight out that I deceived myself, and that means that I deceived others too. That is the obvious conclusion. . . .’ ‘Why coiffeur?’ asked Suler. ‘Well,’ he answered thoughtfully, ‘it just came into my mind that he is fashionable, chic, and I remembered the coiffeur from Moscow at a wedding of his peasant uncle in the village. He has the finest manners and he dances fashionably, and so he despises every-

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between the two, but also Shestov’s strong urge to meet and talk with Tolstoi. For many years, he had wanted to meet him in person, but his wish was fulfilled only on March 2, 1910, when he obtained an appointment at Yasnaya Polyana, thanks to Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich. There are few witnesses to this meeting (all gathered in Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 126–131),60 and they are actually not very consistent among themselves—but all show the uneasiness of that conversation. After all, since Shestov had harshly attacked Tolstoi in his book, it could scarcely be otherwise. They talked for ten hours straight. Shestov tried to convince Tolstoi of Nietzsche’s true reasons, but Tolstoi did not like Nietzsche and was not interested in his thought. Although their conversation was marked by a general incomprehension—except for the fact that they both agreed on a negative judgment about Merzezhkovskii’s book Tolstoi and Dostoevskii (129)—Tolstoi insisted on two things about Shestov that, in hindsight, are quite illuminating. Firstly, he could not believe that, as a Jew, Shestov would not be interested in God, for he stressed that the only time Shestov quoted the name “God” in a positive way was right at the end of the book. Secondly, when Shestov was trying to explain to him Nietzsche’s reasons against morality, Tolstoi responded by saying: “But all this he [Nietzsche] said is highly moral!” (128). Given what happened in the following decades, one might deduce that those two insights were not without an effect on the development of Shestov’s conscience. As observed before, in 1900, attacking Tolstoism was apparently “easy prey” for Shestov, as he was certainly not the first to do this,61 even though his ingenious idea was to pit it against the philosophy of Nietzsche, and in so doing challenging the argumentation Nikolai Grot proposed a few years

one.’ But to return to Shestov. ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘to live looking at horrible ghosts, but how does he know whether it’s horrible or not? If he knew, if he saw ghosts, he would not write this nonsense, but would do something serious, what Buddha did all his life’. Someone remarked that Shestov was a Jew. ‘Hardly,’ said Leo Nikolaevich doubtfully. ‘No, he is not a Jew; there are no disbelieving Jews, you can’t name one . . . no’” (Gorky [C], 45–48). 60 Shestov himself briefly recalled this meeting during his conversations with Fondane (cf. Fondane [B1], 96–97). 61 This would happen, most notably, with Solovˈëv’s last work Three Conversations (1900). Yet, at the turn of the century in Russia there was a general sense that the main trends of the last two or three decades, populism, economic materialism and Tolstoi’s abstract moralism, had exhausted their power. The same situation prepared the terrain for a sudden and equally decisive infatuation with the thought of Nietzsche. See, on this, Clowes 2018 (C), 15–41; Motroshilova-Sineokaya 1999 (C), 7–45; and Rosenthal 1986 (C), 3–68.

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earlier in a famous article.62 But, of course, “Tolstoism” is one thing, “Tolstoi” is another—and Shestov was thinking in particular of the latter. Moreover, quite often with Shestov nothing is what it seems at first glance.63 In this case, in fact, a closer reading of The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche overturns one of the first impressions this work gives, that is, that the author stands firmly on the German philosopher’s side against Tolstoi’s highly moralistic pretenses. This is certainly true, but not completely true. As a matter of fact, at the end of the book Shestov expresses a very critical opinion on the “late Nietzschean turn” and, in particular, on his Übermensch theory, which becomes—according to Shestov—a new way for the German philosopher to avoid the meaninglessness of life and find an ultimate ethical point to lean on at the end of his life (cf. the book’s last chapter: Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 303–307). Interestingly, a commentator as well as a “disciple” of Shestov, Rachel Bespaloff, in her book Cheminements et carrefours (1938), would even compare Nietzsche and Shestov—although, according to Shestov, with a general misunderstanding of his thought—as two radically antithetic philosophical figures (cf. the study “Chestov devant Nietzsche,” in Bespaloff [B3], 201–250).64 I am not going to examine this here, but Shestov’s critique of 62 Nikolai Ya. Grot (1852–1899) was an outstanding figure of academic philosophy in Russia, a professor at the University of Moscow and the founder of the journal Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii. In 1893, he wrote an article “Nranvstvennye idealy nashego vremeni: Fridrikh Nitsshe i Lev Tolstoi” [The Moral Ideals of Our Time: Friedrich Nietzsche and Lev Tolstoi] (Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 16 [1893], 129–154), in which he maintained Nietzsche’s anti-Christian individualism and Tolstoi’s Christian moralism were the two extreme poles of a modern crisis of morality. In labelling Nietzsche as a “representative of Western European decadence” (141), Grot defends the dogmatic teaching of the Church as the wise middle way, between Tolstoi and Nietzsche, to which it is necessary to refer. 63 Boris de Schloezer dealt with this issue of Shestov’s “ambiguity” in an article on him. As Schloezer argues, the reader should never trust the apparent clarity of Shestov’s language: its real meaning always lies beyond that clarity (Schloezer 1966a [B3], 7–8). 64 Shestov, obviously, did not approve such an interpretation, which at some point is also very critical towards his thought: in fact, he was very disappointed about it especially considering the affection he had for her (cf. Fondane [B1], 144–145, 148). See also Jean Wahl’s comment on this book (Wahl [C]) and an interesting analysis on the epistolary discussion between Bespaloff and Fondane about her position against Shestov in the book Cheminements and carrefours (Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, “‘La vérité que nous sommes.’ Rachel Bespaloff et Benjamin Fondane devant Chestov,” in Fotiade 2009b [B3], 137–150). Rachel Bespaloff (1895–1949) was a thinker and an intellectual who wrote essays on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Shestov and Camus. Born in Bulgaria to a Ukrainian Jewish family, she later moved to Switzerland and then to France, where in 1925 she met Shestov in Paris. This meeting was a key event in her life. From then on, she was interested in the philosophy of existentialism and became a friend of Jean Wahl, Jacques Schiffrin, and Gabriel Marcel—among others. After 1930, however,

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Nietzsche, as short in length as it is dense in its meaning, would be full of consequences. While Nietzsche remained the protagonist of Shestov’s subsequent book Dostoevskii and Nietzsche (1902), he progressively faded away in Shestov’s late output (in Athens and Jerusalem—to a great extent the “summa” of his entire work—his name is mentioned much less often than it was in Shestov’s early works). This should not be surprising, as Shestov’s ongoing interest regarding the new contrast of faith/rationality, as if it were in substitution to the earlier contrast between truth/morality, would also place his interest in Nietzsche under a different light. It is also possible that, over time, Shestov would reconsider the relevance of the Übermensch theory in a negative way within Nietzsche’s mind.65 Moreover, in the subsequent two decades he discovered other thinkers such as Luther, Plato, Plotinus, Pascal, and Kierkegaard, whose general thought was perhaps closer to the direction Shestov’s research was taking than certain Nietzschean results were. The clearest evidence of the difference between Shestov and Nietzsche lies in the fact that, with the passage of time, Shestov came to hold figures such as St. Paul, Luther, and Pascal in the highest consideration, whereas, according to Nietzsche (as he explains in his Antichrist), these were the very figures who were most responsible for corrupting Christ’s most authentic message.66 3. On the other hand, as is demonstrated in the subsequent articles devoted to Tolstoi, Shestov’s position with respect to the Russian novelist would reveal a significant change of perspective.67 On three more occasions—in 1909 she took a critical distance from Shestov. On her interesting and dramatic story—largely merged with the Jewish persecution during the Second World War—see Jutrin (C) and Salazar-Ferrer (C). 65 As stated before, in the fifteenth and final chapter of his The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche (and in fact the entire chapter is dedicated to this argument), Shestov clearly demonstrated how the Übermensch theory played the same role for Nietzsche that Good did for Tolstoi. Therefore, according to Shestov, the late Nietzsche would finally renounce tragedy and real life in the name of “an old idol, but painted with different colors” (Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 304). This position would be reinforced some years later: when addressing the Nietzschean positions of Merezhkovskii and Ivanov, Shestov would even more strongly distance himself from the late Nietzsche and from certain Nietzschean readings (see on this, chapter 2 §2 and §7 of this book). 66 Nevertheless, the “early Nietzsche”—the single man revolting against the universal laws of morality—would always remain in Shestov’s mind as a fundamental reference point. 67 But already in his 1903 book on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, Shestov’s numerous references to Tolstoi reveal a different attitude towards him (cf. Shestov 3/2000 [A1], 340–356). Here Shestov defines Tolstoi as “a ‘psychologist’ like Dostoevskii,” a man who “knew the solitary and obscure work of the underground” (342). Around the same time (1902–1903), in his

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(for the eightieth birthday of the writer), in 1920 and in 1936 (for the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death)68—Shestov dedicated an essay to him. While retaining (especially in the first of the three texts) his general criticism toward Tolstoi’s propoved', Shestov shows a different, more respectful attitude in treating his writings and ideas. In these essays, Tolstoi appears as an honest man, who looked face on at the tragedy of human life. Faced with this fact, as Shestov argues, he feared both his “folly” and his normal state of mind. He simply could not decide where to go—that is what Shestov implies—for he turned to religion instead of God (where “God” for Shestov is the absurd and “religion” is the quest for stability). But religion (the religion of his Confession) would never satisfy him as it was ultimately another lie.69 During his whole life he “built up worlds”—this the expression Shestov uses—that he himself would later destroy. His inner attitude toward truth and his ability, which only real artists have, to see the tragic destiny of everything could not keep him faithful forever to his deceitful worlds. Finally, at the end of his life, he definitively met the real truth, as his deep honesty led him to this result. In his absurd last trip, that finally stopped at Astapovo, he recognized and accepted the truth of “nonresistance to evil” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 143). In his life, the opposite of Astapovo was Yasnaya Polyana, that is, the place of his preaching, of his attempt at “cutting down” evil and finding a cause to everything. For Shestov, Tolstoi fought his unfinished essay on Turgenev, Shestov’s various quotations of Tolstoi are all meant to show the figure of an authentic and sincere writer in opposition to Turgenev’s ideology and mystification of truth (cf. Shestov 23/1982 [A2]). Overall, in his subsequent output, Shestov would tend rather to defend Tolstoi than to criticize him. 68 L. Shestov, “Razrushayushchii i sozidayushchii miry. Po povodu 80-letnego yubileya Tolstogo” [He Who Builds and Destroys the Worlds: On the Occasion of Tolstoi’s Eightieth Anniversary], Russkaya mysl' 1 (1909): 25–60, also in Shestov 6/1910 (A1); “Otkroveniya smerti. Poslednie proizvedeniya L. N. Tolstogo” [The Revelations of Death: The Last Works of Tolstoi], Sovremennye zapiski 1–2 (1920): 81–106, 92–123, also in Shestov 8/1929 (A1); “Yasnaya Polyana i Astapovo. K 25-letiyu so dnya smerti L. Tolstogo.” [Yasnaya Polyana and Astapovo: For the Twenty-Fifth Year of Tolstoi’s Death], Sovremennye zapiski 61 (1936): 217–230, also in Shestov 11/1964 (A1). 69 Many years later, Shestov would confirm this general view of the fundamental “honesty” of Tolstoi. In his Conversations with Fondane, while commenting on Jean Cassou’s attack on Tolstoi in his book Grandeur et infamie de Tolstoï (1932), since the author took Shestov to be on his side, against Tolstoi, quoting the word “infamy” out of context from Shestov’s book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche, Shestov replies: “Tolstoi’s infamy? Where did he [Cassou] take this word from? [ . . . ] On the contrary, we should see the great pity of Tolstoi. He turned to preaching only because philosophy could not give him an answer anymore—and because it is not possible to live without an answer. . . . Tolstoi’s tension is immense. . . . One must have not understood anything about Tolstoi if one speaks of his ‘infamy’” (Fondane [B1], 96).

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entire existence between these two poles.70 But in his final stop, “Astapovo,” in which he met “the free truth of Revelation about man created in the image and likeness of God” (144), Tolstoi went back to the “mysterious, invisible sources of his inspirations” (143). This is more or less the general idea Shestov proposes in his three essays, especially in the last one: “Yasnaya Polyana and Astapovo. For the TwentyFifth Year from Tolstoi’s Death.” Yasnaya Polyana and Astapovo, for Shestov, are the same as Athens and Jerusalem: they are the places of “reason” vs. “faith,” of “evidence” vs. “folly,” and eventually of “damnation” vs. “salvation.” The gentler words Shestov addresses to Tolstoi in the years after the publication of The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche probably disclose his real thinking towards him. Similarly to other writers and intellectuals from his generation (Pavel Florenskii is one of those), Shestov had a secret admiration for Tolstoi, even when he was in an open conflict with Tolstoi’s religious and extra-artistic positions.71 His strong desire to meet him in person, before he died, is evidence of this fact. But there is even more than this. It is noteworthy to observe how two intellectuals and key figures of the Russian Silver Age, Dmitrii Mirskii and Semën Frank, almost instinctively paired Shestov and Tolstoi, as if they saw in them a common spiritual background. Mirskii stated that Shestov “has no roots in any soil: his thought is international, or rather supranational, and in this respect more akin to Tolstoy than to Dostoevsky” (Mirsky [C], 172). He also argued that “as a writer and a dialectician, he proceeds from Socrates and Tolstoy more than from anyone else” (175). According to Frank, in their epoch only Tolstoi and Shestov were so immune to the “spirit of time,” in that they were alien to any ideological currents and “-isms” (mysticism, socialism, anarchism) and completely focused on their own task, as if it were, “in an airless 70 “[I]n Astapovo the great struggle whose major arena was Yasnaya Polyana came to a conclusion: the struggle between the idolized ‘cutting down’ and the divine ‘Resist not’” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 143). 71 As is demonstrated by the content of the manuscript “Idealizm i simvolizm ‘Severnogo vestnika’” [Idealism and Symbolism of the Severnyi vestnik] (Ms. 2110-1, file 91, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris), there was a time—not so far from the writing of this book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche—in which Shestov was even an admirer of Tolstoi’s positive preaching. One scholar who examined in depth this admiration Shestov had for Tolstoi is Alexis Philonenko. In his book La philosophie du malheur—an essay on Shestov in many ways written in a Shestovian style—Philonenko dedicates a good number of pages to tracking down many hidden and intertextual links between the two authors (cf. Philonenko 1998 [B2], 73–112). On Shestov and Tolstoi see also Sergei N. Mareev, “Lev Tolstoi i Lev Shestov o zhizni i smerti,” in Shchedrina 2016a (B2), 47–67; Piron 2013 (B3), and Dimitrova 2013 (B3).

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space, filled with just their own ideas.”72 Furthermore, Frank adds, “except for Lev Tolstoi, there is hardly a writer at present who would be so infinitely sincere [ . . . ] as Shestov” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 168).73 By the same token, in a study dedicated to a comparison of the two authors, Geneviève Piron points out that, beyond any obvious differences and contrasts in the ideology of the one with the anti-ideology of the other, Tolstoi and Shestov had in common a rare “prophetic” quality. In the same way as biblical prophets—she writes— they “oppose the whole world in the name of ‘something else.’ Therefore, paradoxically, it is in this ‘out-of-date character’ of the prophet who breaks up with one’s own time that Shestov finds again, through the Tolstoian voice, the direct answers to present time” (Piron 2012 [B3], 227).

1.4 Friedrich Nietzsche: Truth against Morality 1. In the second half of the book The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche, Shestov discusses the position of Tolstoi’s “antipode”—Friedrich Nietzsche. In Shestov’s view, this parallel between the two is absolutely consistent and geometrically linear. At the beginning, Tolstoi and Nietzsche were in the same exact situation, as if it were—in geometrical terms—in an “initial point” on a directed straight line, with only two possible (and opposite) directions of movement: one represents preaching/morality and the other represents philosophy/truth. Unlike Tolstoi—as Shestov explains—Nietzsche turned to the second option. In providing the reasons for this choice, Shestov indulges in psychological argument. In his view, in the same way as Tolstoi, Nietzsche too, at some point of his life, fell for the seductions of goodness, of morality, and of harmony. His first work The Birth of Tragedy is an example of this, in that it is “a typical example of scientific causerie, full of talent and in a pessimistic style” (Shestov 2/2000 [A1], 257). But, according to Shestov, he soon rejects this aesthetic interpretation of tragedy as he becomes sick, that is, as he sees sickness in its real face. In that moment, “he realizes that a great misfortune cannot be justified 72 Semën L. Frank, “O Lˈve Shestove,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 168. 73 It is interesting that Frank praises Shestov's sincerity here, even though Shestov himself repeatedly upheld the right of any writer to not be sincere (see in particular, what he said to Fondane, in Fondane [B1], 123). However, just as Husserl used to call Shestov an anima candida (cf. appendix one of this book), Frank probably meant a certain disposition of Shestovs writing, and also how it intertwined with his life, rather than purely its contents. Geneviève Piron's monographic study on Shestov is based mainly on this idea of a paradoxically “hidden sincerity” (cf. Piron [B2]).

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by the mere fact that it can be represented with sublime and beautiful colours; the art that embellishes human pain is to him totally useless” (258). From art he then turned to the good—“just like Tolstoi,” Shestov observes, but with the substantial difference that, unlike the latter, Nietzsche was young and in a good faith (258)—but even that could not give a satisfying answer to his need for salvation. In a moment, he found himself forced to choose between one of the two options: either good or life. He could be an example for everyone, as a sick and painful man who still celebrates the virtues of morality like many scholars fervently hoped for (Shestov mentions two of these: Alois Riehl and Henri Lichtenberger), or to be just “himself,” a man facing his tragic truth. Other critics, that is, the most important Georg Brandes, invents “two banal words” like “aristocratic radicalism” only to hide his real reasons (286). As Shestov imagines, Nietzsche must have felt that others wanted him to be “a poor sacrificial animal,” as it were, as if “a sick man has no right to be pessimist.”74 But, in fact, as a puppet in the hands of those who are sane, he has to show he is still strong, still eager to celebrate the beauty of life, the meaningfulness of good. It is here, according to Shestov, that Nietzsche’s rebellion begins. In quoting to the greatest extent excerpts from Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science, Shestov emphasizes how Nietzsche overturns the concept of virtue, that is, from obeying what others—the “sane people”—wanted him to say about his sickness to the pure rebellion against it. Now, for Nietzsche virtue became only one thing: the denial of the laws of morality and the disclosure of truth in its entirety. In this “conversion,” Shestov states, precisely while being “immoral,” Nietzsche turned into a “virtuous man, in the truest sense of the word” (262). This last truth, the truth of immorality and of the refusal to lie once and for all, also involves Christianity. Shestov quotes Antichrist and The Gay Science (book 3, §125) to reverse the Tolstoian conception of Christianity and belief. This reversal brings us to the conclusion that as a believer Tolstoi is an atheist, whereas as a manifest atheist Nietzsche is in fact the one who truly searches for God (266–269). The figure of Christ himself can be manipulated, as St. Paul and the Church could for Nietzsche, or disclosed to his truth beyond truth—which for Shestov is the real Christ, the real God.

74 For a full analysis of Nietzsche’s and Shestov’s biographical and intellectual stories— which are here considered in a strict parallel with regard to their reaction to suffering and rejection—see Yuliya Sineokaya’s two essays: “V mire net nichego nevozmozhnogo (L. Shestov o filosofii F. Nitsshe)” and “In the Circle of Non-Vengeance: Lev Shestov and Friedrich Nietzsche” (Sineokaya 1999 and 2017 [B3]).

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On this authentically “religious atheism,” Shestov advances a comparison between Nietzsche and another personality who, a few decades before him, experienced the same situation: Heinrich Heine. “Paralyzed, sick in bed, and with no hope of recovery” (269), in every aspect, Heine resembles another Nietzsche. In the same way as he does with Nietzsche’s most sensitive excerpts, perhaps fearing censorship, Shestov quotes Heine’s “rebellion against God,” from the epilogue of Romanzero, in German (270). Both in Heine and Nietzsche, as Shestov writes, “repudiation [otrechenie] is the only, inevitable way to obtain a new doctrine and a new master. In this repudiation lies the source of a new poetry and a new art” (270–271).75 In this regard, every human being is called by this truth of repudiation, even Tolstoi who in, his masterpiece The Death of Ivan Ilˈich, which for Shestov represented his personal “revelations of death,” saw clearly what truth was. But not everyone is eager to accept this terrible challenge. As Shestov argues, however, the time has come when, “with Belinskii, we must call for recognition on behalf of every single victim of history” (273). Again, Shestov repeats his personal mantra involving Belinskii’s request in a sort of literal apocalypse, that is, a revelation of the real, tragic truth to everyone. But the further his analysis advances, the more he turns to the religious subject and to the later Nietzschean works Antichrist and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Shestov advocates to himself the same protest against a God of “perfect goodness and wisdom and justice” that was already contested by Heine in his Romanzero and by Nietzsche in his Zarathustra. The need to dispose of such a God is distinctly expressed in Nietzsche’s famous words echoed by Shestov: Away with such a God! Better to have no God, better to set up destiny on one’s own account, better to be a fool, better to be God oneself! [ . . . ] Oh Zarathustra, you are more pious than you believe, with such an unbelief! Some god in you has converted you to your ungodliness. Is it not your piety itself which no longer lets you believe in a God? (274; cf. also Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 4, “Out of Service”) 75 Shestov would quote the name of Heine a number of times in his works, always as a positive example of sincerity and of fair rebellion against the unfair moral obligations that force sick people to tell an “honest lie” (chestnaya lozhˈ) so as to not endanger a specific idea of a good God or of good per se. In particular, he would dedicate a several-page aphorism to Heine, first published in the collection “Predposlednie slova (11 aforizmov),” in Russkaya myslˈ 4 (April 1907): 159–185, and then included in the collection Beginnings and Endings (1908).

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While maintaining these Ivan Karamazov–type themes—the rebellion against morality and against a “God-architect”—Shestov fully supports Nietzsche, since he never denies even the most uncomfortable consequences, in first place the implicit bond of truth-nothingness vs. lie-good, and the assumption that Christ, as the incarnation of truth, stands on the former of the two sides. It is in this context that Shestov’s final (and in many ways famous) sentence of this book, “Nuzhno iskat' Boga” [We Must Search for God] (307), should be understood. Shestov’s God, whom he describes for the first time here, is “beyond compassion, beyond good” (307). It is not even close to the common idea of a revealed God (“Deus revelatus,” in Martin Luther’s terms) and perhaps also has little likeness to a theologically conceived “hidden God” (Deus absconditus). Rather, it is the negative side of logos itself: the absolute “other” of reason. But it is still called (by Nietzsche and by Shestov) God, Christ. For Shestov there are no doubts: “[Nietzsche’s] attacks are directed neither against Christianity nor against the Gospel, but against the common places that divulge the Christian doctrine” (302). But he also clearly indicates just how far he is inclined to follow Nietzsche. It has already been noted in the previous section that in the last chapter of his book, Shestov distances himself from Nietzsche as he observes how at a certain point in the German philosopher “philosophy comes to an end and ‘preaching’ begins” (303). Shestov is referring here to Nietzsche’s theory of Übermensch. It is interesting to observe how in his quasi-identification with Nietzsche Shestov takes on the main central corpus of Nietzschean philosophy, that is, the so-called “critique of Enlightenment phase” starting with Human, All Too Human (1878–79)—thus, the critique of science, of reason, of morality; the critique of the thing “an sich,” in itself—up to Zarathustra. In all this, Shestov leaves aside the first phase of the defense of tragedy, as it appears overly clear in Shestov’s reasoning throughout the second part of his book, but also the turn to the “will to power.” At some point, as Shestov writes, “Nietzsche could not stand the terrifying face of life and he could not resign himself to his destiny” (304). Contrary to what Mikhailovskii writes in his review of this book (cf. Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 38), Shestov does take into consideration the Übermensch and Wille zur Macht theory,76 which for him are nothing but Nietzsche’s last 76 With regard to the Übermensch theory, Shestov actually swings (as he often does) between a positive and a negative appraisal of it. In chapter thirteen of The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche he employs this concept as a positive factor in his own and in Nietzsches critique of compassion. However, it is my understanding that, as the years passed, Shestov came rather to see it as a negative factor not only for Nietzsche (as stated before), but also for

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attempt to escape his tragic destiny. Such a “repudiation” of Nietzsche should not appear strange, as Shestov is not new to these affirmations, even with his most “full-blown” heroes. He never denies a moment of discouragement and of subjugation to the higher laws of morality even to the “purest ones” such as Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, and also Kierkegaard. But in this case, the disavowal of Nietzsche’s Übermensch results in an interesting and unexpected consequence, that is, the disavowal of a crucial passage for Nietzsche’s philosophy, that is, the “will to art.” Not only does Shestov not follow Nietzsche in the “will to power” but neither does he adhere to the result of the artistic essence of truth, of the world that has become a “fairy tale,” as Nietzsche says; of art as the only way to live in a world that is now devoid of any rational justification.77 Unlike Merezhkovskii, who took exactly this last direction, Shestov stays a step behind, as he would never conceive of art in that absolute form.78 If reality, for the late Nietzsche, ends up to be fiction—a production similar to the poetic creation, so that art is the only instrument capable of dealing with this new discovery—, then Shestov is not interested in “using” that instrument. He turns his attention away from this conclusion and he addresses himself to the “pathos of truth” in a world that has lost truth, so that the only consequence is a tragic aporia: tragedy is dead, but nonetheless it is impossible to give up thinking in the light of tragedy. In this sense, he is interested in Nietzsche as a “philosopher of science,” in his criticism of Enlightenment phase, as only this phase—not the all those Russian thinkers who had in mind what Shestov would call a “Russian decadence project” (see on this the section of this book dedicated to Vyacheslav Ivanov: chapter 2 §7). 77 On this part of Nietzsche’s thought concerning the art of “becoming what one is,” see Fiona Jenkins, “Performative Identity: Nietzsche on the Force of Art and Language,” in Nietzsche, Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Salim Kemal, Ivan Gaskell, and Daniel W. Conwa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 212–238. This late result of Nietzsche’s philosophy is particularly evident in his posthumous fragments in which the tragic would seem to consist of an identification of will to power and will to art, where the tragic person is the artist and a “no” to life becomes a “yes.” This interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought is largely due to many passages in Martin Heidegger’s work Nietzsche, in which Heidegger reflects on The Gay Science, Ecce Homo, and the posthumous fragments, and ultimately concludes that the most appropriate place for the tragic is in art and aesthetics. For Nietzsche, the aesthetic experience is, in fact, in Heidegger’s reading, the perfect place that witnesses the groundlessness of being, the enigmatic nature of truth, whose logic outcome is the shift from logos to myth, from the necessity of reason to the “game of language.” Before Heidegger, part of the Russian reception of Nietzsche, led by Merezhkovskii, followed this way. But Shestov adhered to his own position, for which he would find justification in the thought of Kierkegaard many years later. 78 On Shestov’s conception of art, see the entire second chapter of this book. Only in his work on Sologub is Shestov perhaps tempted to indulge in a Nietzschean solution of this kind. But already in his long and deep study on Ibsen, he manifestly points out all the risks of such a choice.

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turn to art—fully reflects Shestov’s fight against the necessity of knowledge. His future works on the philosophy of tragedy, his approach to the question of art and his detachment from a certain kind of Russian Nietzschean legacy are a demonstration of this.79 It is always surprising to observe how Shestov, since his very beginnings, had a clear idea of where he was headed. This example demonstrates this perfectly. The “will to art,” since it is a negative and still tragic will, could be an easy solution for Shestov. But it would betray his subsequent path as it would provide a form to his tragic thought that he did not want. It would somehow set the time back in its joint—which was exactly what Shestov did not want to do. 2. It is scarcely possible to overstate the relevance that Shestov’s reading of Nietzsche had for fin de siècle Russia, especially as it occurred in a crucial and “transitional” epoch of Russian intellectual history.80 As Edith Clowes remarked: “Taken in the European context, the Russian reception of Nietzsche was remarkable for its earliness and for the intensity of its debate” (Clowes 2018 [C], 38). Clowes points out a number of reasons why this happened: in a first place, the failure of Populism, the crisis of utilitarian art and of the ideals of egalitarianism, but also the emergence of a new generation of writers from a different social stratum.81 In such an unstable scenario, Nietzsche’s thought 79 Shestov’s detachment from the late Nietzsche is evidenced, in particular, by his relationship with the Russian Symbolist movement. In his article on Vyacheslav Ivanov (see Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 268–308), every time he quotes Nietzsche it is to deplore a certain attitude towards art and knowledge. Obviously, his Nietzsche was not the Nietzsche of the Symbolists, and he was not willing to follow the German philosopher in some specific conclusions of his thought. See, on this, Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal’s opinion: “On a different wavelength than the other God-seekers, he [Shestov] ignored or downplayed the mythopoetic aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, rejected Vladimir Solovˈëv’s idea of ‘all unity,’ had no eschatological expectations, and was not a mystic or an aesthete. There is no lyrical or cultic or utopian in Shestov’s philosophy and nothing communal either, no church or synagogue. His focus was in the suffering individual” (Rosenthal [B3], 138–139). 80 On the history of Russian (and Soviet) reception of Nietzsche, many important studies have been published—especially in the English-speaking world—since mid-1970s to 1990s. See in particular the classic volumes: Rosenthal 1986 (C) and 1994 (C), and Clowes 2018 (C) (1st ed. 1988). In Russia, there has been a similar interest starting from the end of 1990s: cf. Voitskaya 1996 (C), Motroshilova-Sineokaya 1999 (C), Ionaitis 2000 (C), Sineokaya 2000 and 2008 (C). Among the more recent studies, see Grillaert (C). However, in my opinion—with few exceptions, e.g., Yuliya Sineokaya—the role of Shestov in the context of this sudden diffusion of Nietzsche’s ideas in Russia at the turn of the century has never been adequately dealt with or considered. 81 After the Great Reformation of 1861, as Clowes remarks, the children and grandchildren of former serfs “would blend with the children of urban professionals to build a culture with rather

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conveyed a sort of tension that was powerfully attractive to Russian audiences: “Indeed, Nietzsche’s critique of conventional values—Clowes writes—was repeatedly compared to the Russian tradition of moral rebellion” (29). In this respect, she admits, “strong parallels between Nietzsche’s rebellious persona and the Russian archetype of the nihilist certainly exist. Both may be characterized as ‘higher natures.’ All share a well-developed sense of moral honesty, a disdain for life as it is, and a strong desire to find some worthy life goal” (31). Aside from the so-called vulgar “Nietzscheanism” (Nitssheanstvo)—that is, a desire for personal fulfillment and for the destruction of moral standards, very popular among students, which was divulged in Boborykin’s novels82—, the highbrow Russian response to Nietzsche’s thought diverged in two main directions: a new creative/aesthetic drive, on the one hand, and a new philosophical/moral consciousness, on the other. The Russian “Nietzscheans” who belonged to the first aesthetic position were Merezhkovskii, Bryusov, Gorˈkii, Belyi, Skryabin, Balˈmont, Gippius, and others; whereas thinkers like Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov, Frank, N. Losskii, Rozanov, and Shestov belonged to the second tendency. The complex and variegated Russian reception of Nietzsche started in the early 1890s mostly as an artistic popularization of vaguely Nietzschean ideas made by writers like Pëtr Boborykin and Anastasiya Verbitskaya, and carried on with best-selling writers such as Leonid Andreev and Aleksandr Kuprin.83 But it soon extended to higher literature with the adoption of Nietzschean formulas and the development of their own Nietzschean literary personae by writers such as Merezhkovskii, Bryusov, Balˈmont, Ivanov, Gorʹkii and, starting from 1898, by the entire group of Mir iskusstva, whose leading figures Sergei Dyagilev and Alexandre Benois—as Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal observes—were devotees of different goals and values [ . . . ]. These writers, as they came into their own, saw populist attitudes from a different perspective [ . . . ]. Urban and future-oriented in its outlook, the new culture seemed to oppose everything that Populists had represented” (Clowes 2018 [C], 38–39). 82 Pëtr Dmitrevich Boborykin (1836–1921), a playwright, journalist, and a prolific writer, was among the first in Russia to address Nietzsche’s thought in a popular, “vulgarized,” and indeed successful manner. According to Edith Clowes, in Boborykin’s popular novels Nietzsche’s thought (or, better, the Nitssheanstvo) “appealed to a desire to be unique, to have distinctive ideas, perceptions, experiences; in short, to be an ‘individual’” (Clowes 2018 [C], 66–67). Among the opponents of Nitssheanstvo was Vladimir Solovˈëv who, in 1899, wrote an article lamenting Nietzsche’s impact on Russian youth. See Vladimir S. Solovˈëv, “Ideya sverkhcheloveka” [The Idea of the Super-Man], Mir iskusstva 9 (1899): 87–91. 83 For bibliographical references about these authors and about the popular Nietzschean fiction, see in particular chapter 4, Clowes 2018 (C), 83–113; and chapter 14, Rosenthal 1986 (C), 315–329. For a chronological checklist on the subject “Nietzsche in Russia” (translations and critical literature from 1892 to 1919), see Rosenthal 1986 (C), 355–386.

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Nietzsche and Wagner, so that the journal “grew out of their Nietzsche-Wagnerinspired desire to create a new culture in which art and esthetic sensibility would be central” (Rosenthal 1986 [C], 12).84 The fact that the early reception of Nietzsche did not occur in an academic context but as a purely aesthetic tendency should not come as a surprise, as this was exactly the same pattern as happened in Germany not many years earlier. In Russia too, it was only when Vasilii Preobrazhenskii (1864–1900), a philosopher who died at young age, wrote an article that appeared sympathetic towards Nietzsche’s ideas,85 that Nietzsche’s thought started to become an ideological problem. The article gave rise to extensive polemics, but gained a lot of attention. At the same time, it represented the appearance of a Nietzschean presence in university debates and in the so-called “thick journals” (especially Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii and Nikolai Mikhailovskii’s Russkoe bogatstvo), with the intellectuals immediately split into two sides: those who condemned the dangerous values of the thinker (two outstanding philosophers from that time, Lev Lopatin and Nikolai Grot; the literary critic Vladimir Chuiko; and the jurist Pëtr Astafˈev, immediately followed by Solovˈëv’s very critical comments on the German philosopher) and those who saw in him some positive clues for the development of Russian culture (Vasilii Preobrazhenskii; only partially Nikolai Minksii and, quite unexpectedly, the populist critic Nikolai Mikhailovskii). Those early debates could not be objective in any way, because of the difficulties in finding original texts on which to reflect. At that time, in fact, given the lack of translations and the presence of a strong censorship,86 only those few who could travel to Germany and read Nietzsche’s works in the original had a clearer idea of his thought. Shestov was one of these people (along with Merezhkovskii and Ivanov).87 His role, in this entire process, was 84 Even “the journal’s logo—as Rosenthal explains—an eagle on a snowy peak surrounded by stars, is a Nietzschean image. It conveys Benois’ belief that the world of art is above all earthly things, above the stars, reigning there proud, mysterious, and lonely, like an eagle” (Rosenthal 1986 [C], 12). 85 Vasilii P. Preobrazhenskii, “Fridrikh Nitsshe: Kritika morali alˈtruizma,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 15 (November 1892): 115–160. 86 On the effects of censorship in Russian early reception of Nietzsche, see Clowes 2018 (C), 47–53. 87 Shestov’s extraordinary knowledge of languages is perhaps never stressed as much as it deserves. As Alexis Philonenko notes, aside from his native languages, Russian and Ukrainian, he knew old Greek and Latin very well, but also German and French, and he certainly read Shakespeare in the original English. It is not proven but there is a good chance, Philonenko says, that he also had some knowledge of Dutch and Italian (see Philonenko 1998 [B2], 40). He basically read and quoted everything in the original. “As a matter of

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that of a pioneer and innovator. He was in Berlin in 1896 and began to read Nietzsche’s works in their original language, in particular Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 44–46; and Fondane [B1], 85). Because of this, Shestov often highlighted different ideas about Nietzsche from the ones that circulated in Russia. He was unaware of or, more probably, uninterested in the Russian debates from those years and engaged in his own way of reading Nietzsche. If there was any connection he might have with the 1890s Russian critics, this was unexpectedly with Nikolai Mikhailovskii, whose reading of Nietzsche in those days was perhaps the only one that could build a dialogue with Shestov’s—although a strongly oppositional one. Mikhailovskii’s review of The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche is, in fact, very critical, both of the first and of the second part of the book, and it could not have been otherwise, given the reverence he had for Tolstoi and the different view of Nietzsche from the one Shestov assumed.88 In declaring all of Shestov’s assumptions as simply “wrong” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 36) because they are oriented too markedly towards his personal interests,89 Mikhailovskii seizes the opportunity to better explain his own defense of Nietzsche, a defense that—unlike Shestov’s praise for the German philosopher—still lies within a horizon of morality and, most importantly, within a Darwinian framework. While, for Mikhailovskii, Nietzsche epitomizes one of those turns of events that periodically come back in history to balance the overpowering of ideals in the name of the “struggle for individuality” (borʹba za individualˈnostˈ) (44), although such developments are not certainly meant to abolish morality,90 he does not see in Shestov’s book anything other than an “interesting and beautiful style of writing” hiding false conclusions (35). But, fact,” Philonenko concludes, “he had an organ whereas others, as their only instrument, had nothing else than a recorder. Only Bergson was comparable to him on the scientific and philological levels. Shestov uses all this knowledge without any ostentation” (40). 88 See Nikolai K. Mikhailovskii, “Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i Fr. Nitsshe g. L. Shestova,” Russkoe bogatstvo 2 (February 1900): 155–167; and “Lev Shestov o gr. L. N. Tolstom,” Russkoe bogatstvo 3 (March 1900): 117–126. The two reviews can be found in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 34–55. 89 Yet, as a matter of fact, Mikhailovskii’s reading of Nietzsche is by no means more neutral than Shestov’s. 90 “Nietzsche has never thought of overcoming Good and Evil,” Mikhailovskii states as he objects to Shestov, “but of overcoming kindness and anger in order to know true Good and true Evil. He has never denied the ‘rules.’ He intended to abolish the old, passing rules and give new ones” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 55).

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in fact, what he does not acknowledge in Shestov is precisely the value of his anti-ideological reading, as Shestov’s manifest disinterest for building a morality is also capable of revealing another decisive aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, that is, the crucial link between Christianity and nihilism, between truth and nothingness. Unlike Mikhailovskii’s “Darwinian analysis” of Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, the Shestovian position—which is ideally based upon Nietzsche’s turning point of On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873) and focuses on his middle-period works (from Human, All Too Human [1878] to On the Genealogy of Morality [1887])—would receive considerable acclaim in twentieth-century German criticism, in a process that starts in the mid-1930s with Karl Jaspers and continues on to Martin Heidegger’s lectures and writings between the 30s and 60s.91 In this regard, Shestov was far ahead of his time: in leaving aside the idealistic and social interpretations of Nietzsche, which progressively diminished in the second half of the century, he foreshadowed the later philosophical existential and Christian tendencies that, through a juxtaposition with Kierkegaard and with Hölderlin’s conceptions of the tragic (inaugurated by K. Jaspers,92 and followed by H. Schöck, W. Rehm, W. Struve, M. Heidegger, to name only a few), highlighted how, for Nietzsche, the “will to truth” was ultimately a “will to death.” According to these interpreters, it was in 91 See Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche. Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1936); and Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, 2 vols. (Pfullingen: Neske Verlag, 1961). In this context and with such a vast approach, it is not possible here to provide a bibliography of studies on Nietzsche. But these two books by Jaspers and Heidegger are certainly two benchmarks, recognizing the specific impact Nietzsche had on the twentieth century. It is common within this line of criticism—that is, those who follow the three readings of Jaspers, Heidegger and Löwith—to give great importance to the unpublished writings of Nietzsche, starting with On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense up to those fragments that were not included in The Will to Power. In the same way, according to Alexis Philonenko, it is extraordinary to observe how, at that time (1897–1900), without having read Nietzsche’s unpublished fragments (and, he adds, the same can be said about Tolstoi’s diaries), Shestov nonetheless anticipated many tendencies of criticism about those two authors (see Philonenko 1998 [B2], 75). Shestov himself would realize this fact many years later when Nietzsche’s posthumous works appeared. “You see!—he would say in 1936 to Fondane—At the time, they always said that it was me who made Nietzsche speak with my own words! This work [i.e., Nietzsche’s Posthumous Works] is nothing but my book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche!” (cf. Fondane [B1], 117). 92 Shestov, however, in an article he devoted in 1937 specifically to this conception of Jaspers, openly disapproved of his views on Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, which he considered overly influenced by a Kantian perspective of a theodicy and thereby denying the real, “unbearable” tragic nature of those two writers. Cf. Lev I. Shestov, “Sine Effusione Sanguinis: On Philosophical Honesty (On K. Jaspers’ book Reason and Existenz),” in Shestov 11/1982 (A1), 171–202.

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such fundamental ambiguity of truth that all Nietzsche’s thought lay, which ultimately, for Heidegger, would reveal the crisis of Western metaphysics and the destiny of Being itself, which is first identified with the will to power and then with nothingness. If read in parallel with K. Jaspers, M. Heidegger, K. Löwith, but also with the religious readings of Nietzsche written by O. Flake, W. Nigg, B. Welte, and P. Tillich, or the French antimetaphysical interpretations by A. Camus, G. Bataille, and G. Deleuze, Shestov seems to be an early precursor of these tendencies.93 Many decades later, in fact, his views on Nietzsche would finally receive the recognition that he was barely accorded in his own times. Shestov’s interpretation of Nietzsche appeared in the same year (1900) as a number of other Russian writings on the German philosopher (and, curiously enough, in the same year as his death), but it differed from them in tone and content.94 None of those readings, since they were mostly concerned with social or purely aesthetic issues, could really interact with his views. But in the years immediately after his book came out, it inspired a number of essays that could not do otherwise than take it into consideration. Interestingly enough, Shestov’s position on Nietzsche diverged from Merezhkovskii’s from the outset. Although both started from an antimoral stance, they soon developed it in two very different directions: Merezhkovskii advanced an attitude towards contrasts and building up a series positive antitheses (such as Christ and Antichrist; Earth and Heaven; the Greek sanctity of the body vs. the Christian sanctity of soul); whereas Shestov went in a more antimetaphysical direction, that is, towards “unmasking” the history of being (as Heidegger would say) and more precisely towards identifying the philosophical problem of truth with nothingness.95 It is my conjecture that a certain “Nietzschean reading” of Ivan Karamazov by Sergei Bulgakov,96 or Semën Frank’s Nietzschean influences, 93 In the case of Camus, Deleuze, and above all Bataille, such a legacy is also explicitly acknowledged. 94 In 1900, some important articles and reviews on Nietzsche were published: e.g., by P. Boborykin, G. Brandes, N. Mikhailovskii, E. Trubetskoi, N. Kotlyarevskii, and N. Minskii. For references and a complete bibliography on this, see Rosenthal 1986 (C), 355–386. 95 Merezhkovskii and Shestov may well represent the two main and opposite trajectories of the Russian philosophical reception of Nietzsche after 1900: the first was addressed to aesthetic production in the wake of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, while the second cultivated a conscience of “freedom” and “nothingness” within a general paradigm of philosophy of being. 96 Cf. Sergei N. Bulgakov, “Ivan Karamazov kak filosofskii tip,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 61, no. 1 (1902): 82–112. In particular, Bulgakov in this essay proposes the equivalence between the anti-morality of Nietzsche and that of Ivan Karamazov, which is clearly based

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or Berdyaev’s philosophy of freedom, which incorporated Nietzsche’s apotheosis of creativity, or the full affirmation in Russia of a tragic interpretation of Dostoevskii in terms of freedom and of autonomy of characters (in a tradition that notably includes Berdyaev and Bakhtin), would not have been possible to the same extent without the earlier “Shestovian filter,” that is, without his analysis of Nietzsche and, above all, the connection he made with Dostoevskii. Without doubt, all those writers—as Berdyaev implicitly admitted himself97— along with the whole Russian religious philosophy of the Silver Age, are greatly indebted to it. To a large extent, Shestov opened the way: his reading of Nietzsche had also the undoubted merit of conveying a certain tragic and anti-ideological position, extraneous to the internal debates of that time, which is entirely centered on the issues of knowledge and truth. Shestov is commonly known as a “solitary thinker” and even most of his contemporaries agreed with this definition. But, for once, in the case of Nietzsche’s Russian reception—given that Shestov’s two books were read by a large audience and they predated the main Nietzschean wave of the first decade of the twentieth century—Shestov played a significant role and had a real influence in the turn-of-the-century Russia. This influence occurred, in my view, in at least four main areas: in the affirmation of Russian religious philosophy after Solovˈëv; in fin de siècle Russia’s “revolution of moral consciousness” (as Edith Clowes defined it); perhaps, also in the general backdrop of the Symbolist movement; and in the diffusion of a specific, tragic “Dostoevskian conscience” within the Russian world and also beyond it. In fact, this Nietzsche-Dostoevskii link, as it was illustrated by Shestov in his subsequent 1903 book (i.e., from the point of view of the revolt of “Underground Man”), would be extremely productive and dense in consequences. Not only did it affect the Russian intellectual history as a whole, but it also spread to world culture in general—because of the numerous translations and editions of his book Dostoevskii and Nietzsche in various foreign languages—and it soon became a classic point of view within the acknowledgment of Dostoevskii and in the contemporary philosophical notion of humanism.

on Shestov’s analysis, and posits the crucial idea, also borrowed from Shestov, that a deeply ethical nature is forced to deny morality (92). 97 Cf. Berdyaev 1950 (C), 126. On Shestov’s influence on the young Berdyaev see the interesting thesis of Viktoriya Boldareva: Boldareva (B3).

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1.5 Dostoevskii and Nietzsche as “Philosophers of the Underground” 1. The main idea Shestov expressed in his book Dostoevskii and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy—the one which sees Dostoevskii and Nietzsche as “twin brothers,” that is, as inhabitants of the “underground,” rebels of morality and searchers for the real truth—has now become a classic and well-established position of Shestovian thought, perhaps the most notable of his “Russian life.” It is not a brand new concept in absolute terms. There were many clues already present in Russian culture that led to such a conclusion. Before Shestov, for instance, Rozanov had already considered Notes from the Underground as key to understanding the entire Dostoevskian oeuvre.98 Nietzschean rebellious characters also proliferated in Russian popular fiction throughout 1890s and their popularity was also due to the fact that they certainly recalled similar Dostoevskian characters (cf. Clowes 2018 [C], 29–41). Moreover, in his writings on Nietzsche from the early 1890s, Nikolai Mikhailovskii more than once compared Dostoevskii’s “depths of cruelty” with Nietzsche’s philosophy. In other words, the Dostoevskii-Nietzsche identification, since it was justified by this common “underground” spirit of revolt, had been in the air in Russia for some time and, explicitly or implicitly, it had certainly been advanced before. But Shestov, in a way, gathered all the pieces together—from Rozanov to “his” Shakespeare, to his peculiar reading of Nietzsche, to an already existing tragic understanding of Dostoevskii—and delivered his own “thought,” partly original and partly not, but that ultimately influenced others more than others influenced him. In fact, it became a classic viewpoint: Dostoevskii and Nietzsche as “twin brothers,” “philosophers of the underground.” It is difficult to say whether in this work the scales tip more towards Dostoevskii’s side or towards Nietzsche’s, that is, it is difficult to figure out whether it deals more with a “Dostoevskian Nietzsche” or with a “Nietzschean Dostoevskii.” Certainly, the part of the book relating to Nietzsche is different from the second part of his previous book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche. In that instance, he was still talking “about Nietzsche,” albeit with his unmistakable manner of “Shestovizing” authors.99 In this work, he analyzes a Dostoevskii-Nietzsche unity that gives 98 See Vasilii V. Rozanov, Legenda o velikom inkvizitore F. M. Dostoevskogo (St. Petersburg: Tip. S. M. Nikolaev, 1894). 99 This expression stems from a reproach that Berdyaev used to make to Shestov with regard to his style of writing. As Shestov said to Fondane: “He continually blames me for ‘Shestovizing’ the authors I talk about; he claims neither Dostoevskii, nor Tolstoi, nor Kierkegaard, have ever said what I make them say” (Cf. Fondane [B1], 87).

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voice to the “Man of the Underground,” which is a tragic point of view of humanity as a whole. The book’s general framework is rather simple and draws an analogy between Dostoevskii and Nietzsche based on a common early idealistic phase, followed by a radical change of convictions that opened up to a later phase revealing them as “cruel geniuses,” to use Nikolai Mikhailovskii’s famous expression. According to Shestov, as far as Dostoevskii is concerned this “revolution” coincides with the writing of his Notes from the Underground (1864). The experience of prison for Dostoevskii, and Nietzsche’s experience of sickness, generated in them, although not immediately, the collapse of all their previous ideals. For Dostoevskii, Shestov writes, it is possible to speak of a “change of his convictions, whereas in Nietzsche the transvaluation of all values is at stake” (Shestov 3/2000 [A1], 320). The Dostoevskii and Nietzsche we know, Shestov implies, are essentially the effect of this turning point: in this respect, the two are “twin brothers” and “what is often obscure in Dostoevskii’s novels can be explained in the light of Nietzsche’s works” (321). With all the risks that such a stance entails and also in a virtual opposition to the later theory proposed by Bakhtin on the polyphonic nature of Dostoevskian novels, Shestov reduces all Dostoevskii’s works (not only his novels but also his essayistic writings) to this premise. There is an authentic, “cruel” Dostoevskii, and the Underground Man speaks on his behalf, and there is a less authentic writer who expresses himself in all his humanitarian novels and characters and in his “prophetic speeches” and writings. Dostoevskii, as is known, loved to make predictions. Among other things, he announced that Russia was destined to resurrect the idea of a universal human brotherhood within a Europe that had already forgotten such an idea. He was one of the first Russians who had some influence on Europe. So, did his prophecy happen? It was discussed, even admired, but then it was very soon forgotten. The first gift, instead, that Europe accepted with gratitude from Russia was Dostoevskii’s “psychology,” that is, the Underground Man and his incarnations—the Raskolˈnikovs, the Karamazovs, the Kirillovs. Is not that a profound irony of destiny? (321)

To connotate both Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, Shestov very often adopts this term “psychology”, just as he also labels them “psychologists.” For him, psychology represents precisely the “cruel origin” of humanity that is soon

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corrupted with the powerful shield of reason and ideals. While it is easier and more comfortable to deny that origin, and to head for the brighter surfaces of logical reason and moral values, fate reserves for some souls the chance to return to that origin and rediscover that truth at a certain point in their lives. In a long and often repetitive account of Dostoevskii’s life story, his tragedies, doubts, and backtracking, Shestov describes the writer’s own discovery of the underground and constantly compares it with the path of his generation: his masters, Pushkin, Gogolˈ, Lermontov, and most of all Belinskii, who acts as an ever-present moral conscience to Dostoevskii. A good part of Shestov’s book is devoted to describing Dostoevskii’s inner struggle to purify himself from the residual effects of his generational values. But finally, the same “ideals and the compassion that accompanied him up to that point, now provoked in Dostoevskii a feeling of repulsion and horror” (339). Along with the Underground Man, he could exclaim: “I cannot pretend anymore [ . . . ]. Let whatever must happen, happen!” (338). However, for Shestov, the psychological path that reveals a truth from the underground is never an entirely subjective one, but in fact has a universal value. When Dostoevskii or Nietzsche discovered their own “underground,” in that moment something else in their personal experience took place and a different truth “for everyone” was revealed. “The millenary realm ‘of reason and of moral conscience’ ended, and a new era came to light, the era of ‘psychology,’ which here in Russia was inaugurated by Dostoevskii” (341). For Shestov, Dostoevskii brought to light that which his former master Belinskii had kept for himself or shared only with his most intimate friends—as Shestov had already explained in the preface to his book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche. When Notes from the Underground appeared in 1864, it was immediately clear what they were: “a scream of horror—Shestov writes—that tears the soul apart, a scream uttered by a man who, all at once, realizes he has pretended and lied during all his life” (337). From now on, Shestov’s description of Dostoevskii is a long extension of Mikhailovskii’s concept of “cruel genius” as he highlights the value of the Dostoevskian “dark heroes”—for example, Ivan Karamazov, Smerdyakov, and Kirillov. He justifies each of them and reveals the flimsiness of the “bright ones” (Myshkin and Alësha Karamazov more than anyone else). In fact, for Shestov, Dostoevskii’s “cruel art” is expressed, at what seems to be its pinnacle, in Ivan Karamazov’s “rebellion” [bunt] (cf. chapters 15 and 17, 374–380, 385–389). The same rebellion is taken up by Nietzsche, who is “Dostoevskii’s successor” (389). Shestov reads the lives of the two authors in parallel, but the book excerpts dedicated to the German philosopher are mostly a repetition

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of the second part of his previous book. Shestov retells—perhaps in a more narrative way—the story of Nietzsche’s change of convictions, from Wagner and Schopenhauer to Zarathustra. For the most part, he lingers over the key work amidst this change, that is, Human, All Too Human, which finally led to his personal “apotheosis of cruelty” (389). According to Shestov, the only relevant difference between Dostoevskii and Nietzsche lies in the form of their writing: “Nietzsche is not a novelist, he cannot speak through the mouth of extraneous heroes; he needs a theory” (408). He first turns to Positivism and Utilitarianism, but then can no longer bear that fiction and is “obliged” to give voice to his own “underground.” Human, All Too Human, as Nietzsche would declare in his diary of 1888, is “the monument of that crisis” (409), although in the work he still believed in positivistic values. From that moment on, he would gradually eliminate any “known system” to embrace the last truthful thing, that is, the “dear language of skepticism, but not a parlour skepticism [ . . . ] but that kind of skepticism that penetrates the human soul from part to part” (420– 421). “Whence,” Shestov writes, “derives the character that is so peculiar, so extraneous to people, of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is unstable, it lacks balance and does not even search for it. Its worldview, just like Dostoevskii’s, lies in its contradictions” (421). 2. Shestov’s work on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche appeared first in six numbers of the renowned journal Mir iskusstva, in 1902,100 and then as a single book in 1903 with the Saint Petersburg publisher Stasyulevich (see Shestov 3/1903 [A1]). For this reason, but also because it came out after his “successful” book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche, Shestov’s text had a significant impact on the intelligentsiya. He was no longer an unknown writer, the Russian intellectual audience had already become accustomed to his skeptical attitude, and many awaited this book with interest and some curiosity. Terms like “philosophy of tragedy,” “psychology of the underground,” and the aforementioned maudit Dostoevskii-Nietzsche connection, à la Shestov, entered the collective conscience very quickly and in an almost natural way. At that precise moment, Shestov reached the apex of his success in Russia, at least at the level of intellectual criticism. This was due also to a number of possible misunderstandings about him. At that time, for instance, he was part of the Mir iskusstva group, although he had certainly little in common with its poetics; his clear style of writing made his texts apparently 100 See Lev I. Shestov, “Dostoevskii i Nitshe,” Mir iskusstva 2 (1902): 69–79; 4 (1902): 230– 246; 5/6 (1902): 321–351; 7 (1902): 7–44; 8 (1902): 97–113; 9/10 (1902): 219–239.

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accessible to everybody; moreover, in a generally revolutionary epoch, many appreciated his sharp and skeptical approach countering what were considered old classic patterns, both in literature and in morality; finally, as Nietzscheanism was by then fashionable, he could possibly be misrepresented as an embodiment of that tendency. Overall, many people were fascinated by his personal “revolutionary” spirit and method, which were manifested in his second and third books.101 Despite all this, his 1903 book received few reviews, but two of these, in particular, resonated widely and contributed in a decisive way to consolidating Shestov’s renown to a certain extent. These reviews were written by Mikhail Gershenzon and by Nikolai Berdyaev—two young intellectuals who, at that time, were still to publish their most famous works.102 Both acknowledged Shestov’s style to be highly original and stimulating, but they were also critical of many points in his work. In particular, Gershenzon made objections to Shestov’s text from a more specifically literary criticism point of view, whereas Berdyaev contested his general idea from a philosophical perspective. For Gershenzon, Shestov’s philosophy of tragedy can be easily summarized in the formula “Pereat mundus fiat,” or “in the words of Nietzsche: ‘Nothing is true and everything is permitted.’”103 The philosophy of tragedy seems to Gershenzon to be neither exertive nor workable, but rather “a cataclysm of personal life” in which even “the person who is destined to become a philosopher of the tragedy [ . . . ] does not play any role here” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 71). In short, this philosophy “does not teach anything; it has only discovered the true engine of human will, that is, egoism, and it is aimed at suffering” (72). Furthermore, in his opinion, Shestov derived this “bare egoism” with a “methodological error,” that is, by means of “a completely arbitrary interpretation of Dostoevskii and Nietzsche” (73). In fact, he writes, “Shestov certainly identifies Dostoevskii with Raskolˈnikov and Ivan Karamazov, as if one or the other expressed the whole of Dostoevskii” (75). To obtain what he wants, Shestov 101 This is the case of Evgeniya Kazimirovna Gertsyk (1878–1944), who at the time was a young student, and who wanted to get to know Shestov after reading this and his previous book. She subsequently became a noted translator, a literary figure of the Silver age, and also a lifelong friend of Shestov (cf. Gertsyk [B1], 99–100). On Evgeniya Gertsyk, who is better known today for her various memoirs and letter collections, see Bonetskaya (C). 102 See Mikhail O. Gershenzon, “Literaturnoe obozrenie,” Nauchnoe slovo 2 (February 1904): 106–119, and Nikolai A. Berdyaev, “Tragediya i obydennost' (L. Shestov, ‘Dostoevskii’ i ‘Nitshe i Apofeoz bespochvennosti’),” in Berdyaev 1905 (B3), then republished in Berdyaev 1907 (B3). 103 Mikhail O. Gershenzon, “Literaturnoe obozrenie,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 70.

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is “forced to declare three quarters of Dostoevskii’s soul nonexistent or only nominally existing. He believes in Dostoevskii only when it is convenient for him” (75). This is what Gershenzon thought and this was also a fairly common accusation regarding Shestov’s style of interpreting literary authors, in particular during this early phase of his activity. For his part, Shestov never openly rejected these objections but he always insisted that they were irrelevant. He never claimed to be a literary critic in the common sense of the word, that is, someone who gives an objective or philological interpretation of a work. He was interested rather in the philosophical theory that preceded a work of art. Any authentic artistic work, for him, was a mere example, sometimes a metaphor of a preexisting theory, just like a tangible triangular object is a pale example of the geometrical triangle. Any discrepancy between a physical triangular shape and its abstract theory changes nothing of the truth of the geometrical law. In fact, only another geometrical theory can or might contradict the first theory.104 At the same time, it did not matter to him who Dostoevskii really was, or the “polyphony” of his opinions or of the characters in his novels. He believed in an (anti-)metaphysical truth—that is, in a “philosophical destruction” of metaphysics—of which Dostoevskii could provide a particularly good example. In the subsequent years of his life, while never giving up his psychological method, he would make this point clearer as he insisted more on the generality of a theory per se (e.g., faith vs. reason, freedom vs. necessity) rather than on the apparent adherence of writers’ lives and works to that theory. While—as was evidenced—the conflict with Gershenzon was essentially on the surface of things as it mainly arose from a misjudgment about Shestov’s role as a literary critic,105 the one with Berdyaev was noticeably 104 Shestov was actually never disturbed by this kind of objections, i.e., that the authors he was commenting on did not de facto correspond to what he said (e.g., in Gershenzon’s case, that Dostoevskii did not identify himself with the Underground Man or that Ivan Karamazov could not be the most significant character of his entire work). He simply laughed about this (cf. Fondane [B1], 87). On the contrary, he took very seriously the fact that another philosophical theory could directly oppose his own. Kant’s theory of knowledge, for example, could possibly falsify his interpretation of Dostoevskii (namely, the philosophy of tragedy), but not the existence of prince Myshkin, of Alësha (as Gershenzon implied), or of a more truthful philological reading of Dostoevskii. In this regard, he was, indeed, a philosopher, not a literary critic. 105 However, it must be observed, over the years Gershenzon’s attention shifted progressively from literary criticism to philosophy and religion: in a way, he would share with Shestov an interest for the search for a Russian-Jewish idea of knowledge. In this respect, they fundamentally disagreed about religion: while Gershenzon could not accept Shestov’s “desacralizing” conception of God, Shestov considered Gershenzon’s view of the Bible still

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more substantial. In fact, Berdyaev’s review of Dostoevskii and Nietzsche is also the first fully articulated philosophical interpretation of Shestov’s work (cf. Berdyaev 1905 [B3] in Shchedrina 2016b [B2]).106 In this text, Berdyaev manifests a fundamental admiration for Shestov, for the philosophical way he set forth its contents, the psychology of the underground, and he also considers the book Dostoevskii and Nietzsche to be Shestov’s best work (taking into consideration—at the time he was writing—his first four books, including The Apotheosis of Groundlessness of 1905). For Berdyaev, it is precisely “the profound uselessness of Shestov’s writings” and the fact that he is clearly not interested in producing literary criticism on Dostoevskii or a piece of philosophical scholarship about Nietzsche that make him, to his mind, “particularly valuable and significant” (84). Berdyaev explains his position with the fact that Shestov has great merit with his sharp criticism of moral ideals and of any kind of Positivism: it is no longer possible to ignore his “warnings,” to avoid the “abyss” and to reply to it “with the most sublime, but ordinary ‘ideas’” (104). He continues: “If one ignores and suppresses what he [Shestov] talks about, and what the so-called decadence has been threatening for a long time with the ‘idealistic’ defamation, an explosion from the underground is about to happen” (104). But while the philosophy of tragedy seems to be a necessity, the way Shestov proposes it is simply contradictory. In short, Berdyaev’s criticism (in a way, a classical philosophical objection to relativism) develops as follows: Shestov maintains an absolute, uncompromising skepticism which, as long as it is affirmed and reputed to be “true,” is no longer skepticism, but a too rational and “Hellenized.” After they met for the first time in 1909, the two became close friends since they shared a crucial part of their lives during the difficult years of revolution, especially for Jewish people like them. After 1920, Shestov moved to Europe while Gershenzon remained in Russia. During that time, they carried on exchanging letters: Shestov talked about his difficult times without money or a job, but still managed to send parcels to Gershenzon with food and supplies, and he helped him to be published in Germany (cf. Shestov 24/1992 [A2]). In an essay for Gershenzon’s death in 1925, Shestov dedicated some of his most passionate words to him, in particular to his religious thought and to his Jewish faith (see Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 7–17). According to him, however divided Gershenzon was between faith and reason, he finally made his choice for the “real Bible” about which “one must neither speak nor think,” as he declared in his Correspondence Between Two Corners with Vyacheslav Ivanov (9, 16). In this regard, in fact, Shestov supported Gershenzon’s position against Ivanov’s. For an examination of the Correspondence from Gershenzon’s “less explored” point of view, see a stimulating essay by Brian Horowitz in Horowitz 2013 (C), 198–212. 106 Nikolai A. Berdyaev, “Tragediya i obydennostˈ” [Tragedy and the Everyday], in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 80–104.

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positive theory. “The psychological method is very fruitful,” Berdyaev writes, “but there is also [ . . . ] some kind of colossal misunderstanding. Experiences can only be experienced” (85). What Shestov does instead is “rationalizing the chaos of experience” (85). “One can rebel against different rationalistic and monistic systems—I deeply sympathize with this—but then this person is fatally doomed to replace them with other, irrational and pluralistic ones” (85). No matter how uncertain, inessential or aphoristic such judgments are, they are nonetheless thoughts and not experiences. “Here I catch out the author of the Apotheosis” Berdyaev states (85). He does not deny that Shestov’s discoveries about the hidden psychology of Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Nietzsche were true, but he objects that, after such discoveries, Shestov himself is forced to fall into a new schematism, which would produce new generalizations. From a strictly logical point of view, a “truthful” attack against good can only end up being another “good,” as Berdyaev tries to demonstrate: I will say even more: Shestov is a fanatic of good, his “immoralism” is the product of a moral zeal and an ill conscience. Shestov is also a humanist, he protects an Underground Man who lives outside humanity, he wants to write a declaration of his rights, he may even secretly sigh according to the religion of Christ [ . . . ]. Christ taught love and called the people of tragedy to him, but He did not say anything about the categorical imperative and morality. The voice of the author of the “apotheosis of groundlessness” breaks and trembles when he says the name of Christ. Shestov has his own philosophy, his own ethics, perhaps even his own religion, no matter how much he tells us that “ideas are not needed.” For Shestov, the philosophy of the tragedy is truth, truth-truth, and truth-justice. The philosophy of ordinariness is a lie, its truth is false, its “good” is immoral. (92)

What Berdyaev strikingly discloses about Shestov is that, since “he gives a psychological justification for the quest of transcendence,” ultimately “he is a metaphysician with all his desires” (93). In fact, he brilliantly defines Shestov’s philosophy as a “psychological metaphysics” (97) that, without using logical proofs and aside from any system, nonetheless demands persuasiveness from its readers. Although Berdyaev’s definition did not have great success in the future Shestovian scholarship, it grasps an undeniable fact, that is, that Shestov’s thought can hardly be placed outside philosophy. In the twentieth century, many authors would say about him that he “philosophized

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against philosophy” (see on this §2 of the concluding section of this book). This is understandable as long as it is clear that he never does anything other than philosophy, albeit a specific philosophy against philosophy (not “something else” against philosophy). As Berdyaev observes, his “psychology of tragedy”—the point from which he started with Shakespeare—is made “to be translated into the language of philosophy, and so we will have the philosophy of tragedy” (98). Still, in Berdyaev’s view, as Shestov advances such a strong horizon of a transcendent, universal “untruth” or, as he says, bespochvennostˈ [groundlessness], he is also destined to remain firmly in the field of a philosophical truth, precisely because he maintains there is absolutely no truth. In fact, the absolute absence of a truth is an absolute truth. As long as there is for him a transcendent truth “for everybody” of that kind, even a “logical” one in its refusal of logic, Shestov would never become anything other than a philosopher. Berdyaev understood this, but he nonetheless disagrees with another aspect of Shestov’s philosophy: in precisely the same way as he does not acknowledge the intrinsic—albeit paradoxical—metaphysical nature of his thought, he is also incapable of seeing the real perspective of the truth he discovered. In this way, Berdyaev states, he simply reaches his destination in the “land of groundlessness [ . . . ] where everything is equally possible and impossible, where we find ourselves beyond ‘truth and falsehood,’ ‘good and evil’ [ . . . ] in a word, in the kingdom of darkness” (128). For Berdyaev, this result is not acceptable: he approves the destructive side of philosophy, but when it arrives at a “philosophical skepticism” as its final result, this is just “a ridiculous phrase” (96). “Every true tragedy,” Berdyaev says, “implies not only ‘no’ but also some final ‘yes’” (89). That ultimate, positive face of tragedy reveals the real truth of life, which for Berdyaev is a hidden creative power of human nature and the deepest truth of its unlimited freedom. While Berdyaev somehow discloses here in nuce some of the main philosophical positions he would express in the subsequent years, he also hints at a different reading of Dostoevskii compared to Shestov’s—a reading that starts from Shestov’s “kingdom of underground” as well as from the centrality of Ivan Karamazov and the rebellious, “devilish,” parts of Dostoevskii’s work, but one that is also able to reveal a more complex and complete “truth about the person,” which ultimately reveals an inner division of human nature (87). In the same way as Ivanov-Razumnik, Berdyaev initially sympathized with Shestov’s criticism of positivistic ideals and nineteenth-century philosophies. But, for different reasons, neither Ivanov-Razumnik nor Berdyaev were willing to follow Shestov right up to his extreme conclusion. In fact, the Shestovian

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concept of an “unredeemed tragedy,” in the case of Ivanov-Razumnik, should lead to the building of his “immanent subjectivism,” whereas, in the case of Berdyaev, it could well represent the base of his “philosophy of freedom.” But Shestov’s “groundlessness”—this absolutely negative point of arrival of his thought—was not able to offer any support to their projects and would have appeared rather a dead-end to them, than a feasible result. Unlike the concepts of underground, antimorality, transvaluation of all values, and all the Nietzschean-Dostoevskian “bad teachings,” for the Silver Age cultural atmosphere the label “apotheosis of groundlessness”—the latest of Shestovian inventions—was not appealing to anyone, in any way. However, it was exactly the point to which Shestov was headed.

1.6 Apotheosis of “Bespochvennostˈ”: Towards a Philosophy of Tragedy 1. Shestov promptly responded to Berdyaev’s objections in an article he addressed to him that appeared in the famous almanac of Russian mystical anarchism, Fakely, edited by Georgii Chulkov.107 With a quite ironic tone, he admitted he was caught in a logical trap: he could hardly contest what Berdyaev asserted about his “antiphilosophy” being equally a philosophy and his “untruth” being all the same a universal truth. “What is true is true.” Shestov wrote. “He caught me out; found me at fault” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 238). The following explanation of such a “fault”—written in a tone midway between the

107 Lev I. Shestov. “Pokhvala gluposti. Po povodu knigi Nikolaya Berdyaeva ‘Sub specie aeternitatis’” [The Praise of Folly. On Nikolai Berdyaev’s book Sub specie aeternitatis], Fakely 2 (1907): 137–162. The same article was reprinted in Shestov 5/1908 (A1). The mere fact that this text was published in Fakely testifies that Shestov participated actively in the meetings of the Philosophical-Religious Society in Moscow and was part of the group led by Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Belyi, and Georgii Chulkov. The birth of this society, both in Moscow and in St. Petersburg (where Merezhkovskii was a leading figure), is one of the most significant signs of the Religious Renaissance epoch in Russia. A time when, as had rarely happened previously, the intelligentsiya reflected on itself and its relationship with the West, and on the problems of art, philosophy, and religion. Shestov was a part of that movement, albeit as an independent thinker and always in his own detached way. Significantly, of all the widely varying positions of the Russian Silver Age, he was closer to the Fakely group of Ivanov and Chulkov, i.e., the mystical-anarchic current of the Renaissance, than to other positions, like for instance the orgiastic-mystic religion of Merezhkovskii and Rozanov, or the philosophical Christianity of Bulgakov, Frank, and Berdyaev. Yet, despite all this, Shestov would ultimately remain extraneous also to the Fakely group as he did not really share their ideology or messianic orientation.

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serious and the ironic—discloses a very precious premise of Shestov’s entire thought and perhaps also in some way its “hidden face”: But what’s the point? Is this how we read books? After reading a book, we must forget not only all the words but also all the author’s thoughts and remember only his face. For words and thoughts are only imperfect means of communication. We can neither photograph nor draw the soul, and so we turn to the word. We have known for a long time that “every thought, once spoken, is a lie.” And Berdyaev has found me at fault. Instead of coming humanely to help me, to read between the lines, knowing that it is impossible to find the right expressions, he throws a spanner in the works. He is not at all friendly. (238)

Here, Shestov implicitly acknowledges a substantial question. Not only does his philosophy stem from a crisis of Western philosophical logos—for it strives to push itself to the very limit of the same logos in a final attempt at restoring that crisis—but at a certain point the same philosophy also no longer has the “logical” instruments for saying what must be said: since philosophy (i.e., metaphysics) and logic (connected to the theory of knowledge) are already behind the point at issue he is looking for. Metaphysics and logic have simply failed to grasp the ultimate truth: this is Shestov’s fundamental acknowledgment that Berdyaev is unwilling to accept. Shestov sees the complete crisis of logos, Berdyaev does not. This is the crucial point at stake. For Shestov, when logos itself has collapsed, there is no point in trying to adjust it with the same, broken logos. As was noted in the first part of this chapter, at the beginning of such a discovery he made an effort to “fix” Shakespeare with Kant—that is, fix the crisis with the cure—but then he discovered that Kant (i.e., the pinnacle, with Hegel, of Western metaphysical tradition) was the problem. It would thus be impossible to “fix” Kant by means of Kant. As Geneviève Piron observed, the idea Shestov advanced in the previous passage, “It’s not possible to photograph the soul,” is highly crucial to him as it displays a direct connection between “inner life, individual experience and a hidden meaning of the cosmos” (Piron [B2], 165). It plainly affirms that there is a universal truth. But it also states the failure of Western logos, of rational language, which like a photographic camera seeks to grasp such an unrepresentable truth. As will be shown in the next chapters of this book, in the years after 1910 Shestov would realize that the most direct philosophical translation of that sentence points straightforwardly to Plotinus rather than to Plato, while a theological implication would pass

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through Augustine and Luther rather than through Thomas Aquinas. In all cases, Shestov’s answer to the crisis of metaphysics relies upon the Neoplatonic tradition. In replying to Berdyaev, he significantly recalls a verse of Tyutchev’s poem “Silentium!” [Molchanie; Silence] (“a thought, once spoken, is a lie”), as if he had to hark back to old Slavophile and Neoplatonic motifs in order to stay where he wants to stay, that is, in an inexpressible space, at the edge or even beyond the Western logos. Plotinus, along with only a few other philosophers (mainly Nietzsche, Pascal, and Kierkegaard), would be the key to dealing with this space (i.e., Shestov’s philosophical space) between the honest “truth-seekers”—Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Heine, Lermontov, and others—and the “official” philosophy and modern science. The latter appear strong, but their strength is merely a cover for an irreversible crisis: in fact, the bespochvennostˈ—the absence of their fundament. Only a philosophy that is able to respond to that ultimate brokenness can legitimately aspire to the truth. This is Shestov’s fundamental paradox: a broken philosophy in order to respond to a philosophy that is broken. It is the same paradox as that of Tyutchev’s verse: “A thought, once spoken, is a lie”—in a Shestovian translation—means there is nothing outside language, but language does not work. All the used terms (thought, spoken, lie) are within the domain of language and meaning, but they fail to make a truthful sense. Therefore, there is a truth, as is stated in that verse (if there is a lie there is also a truth), but it cannot appear in all that we have: the realm of meaning. The thought—that is, the reason with its most ambitious expression: the Western philosophy—fail to grasp that truth. With irony—but not too much, he “begs” Berdyaev to understand all this or even to sympathize with what he is trying to do: that is, overcoming philosophy by means of philosophy itself. It is too easy, he seems to say to Berdyaev, to pull him back to the simple logic of words while he is in such a difficult position. Still implicitly—I must observe—Shestov acknowledges that there is no other way than philosophy to overcome philosophy: otherwise he would have used other ways. But he firmly remains and confronts with the most classic, metaphysical, Western tradition of philosophy, albeit at its very edge. He pursues a literally impossible task, that is, staying in philosophy so as to deny philosophy. With this precise respect, he refuses any easy solution that would avoid the contradiction, as only the philosophical contradiction matters to him. In fact, he never accepted being considered a “skeptic” or “nihilist,” or a “mystic.” All the latter options would remain, albeit negatively, nonetheless “positive” philosophical stances. In fact, he always claimed he could not be included among the skeptics as he was still searching for a positive truth, but none of the actually expressed philosophical

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systems were of any help to him: “Or is the person who awaits the truth, and who does not call the first error he encounters the truth, a skeptic?” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 238). In addition, while he withstood Berdyaev’s logical objection, in his turn he upbraided Berdyaev for the inconsistency of his thought and the fact that he changed position often during his life, but he always remained the same. For this reason, he maintains, Berdyaev’s thought never really confronts life, with the truth of life. His changing “different systems,” his “solemn words,” even his attacks on reason are created precisely to escape the real tragedy of life and of thought, and to finally tame the folly of life (225–234). From this early confrontation between the two friends—while many others would follow—, it turns out that the main divergence of their conceptions lies in the concept of “failure of reason,” which for Berdyaev is partial and must be “fixed” or overcome, whereas for Shestov it is a complete, uncompromising failure. Shestov’s radical questioning of reason would also be the main point of the attacks he was subjected to for his new work. The critical reception of Shestov in these early years of the twentieth century reflects a major misunderstanding about his work,108 which the publication of his 1905 book The Apotheosis of Groundlessness would definitively unveil. As was observed more than once, his two books on Tolstoi and Nietzsche and on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche were appreciated for their style and for a generally skeptical attitude towards the old moral ideals, and the proposal of a “new” rebellious hero, the Underground Man, which was a sort of “hidden operator” in Dostoevskii and Nietzsche in particular. The successful category of “philosophy of tragedy” was generally understood by Shestov’s audience in this way: as a prologue to an upcoming revolution of some kind. The same category, however, was meant by Shestov rather as stasis, as nonresistance to meaninglessness or, as he said many times in quoting Baudelaire, as “resignation.”109 These latter points were considered totally inacceptable to basically anyone: from Mikhailovskii to Merezhkovskii, to Frank, but also to those who may be 108 Berdyaev himself repeatedly used the word “misunderstanding” with reference to Shestov’s reception, in particular, in Russia. See, for example, the text he wrote for Shestov’s death, “The Fundamental Idea of Lev Shestov’s Philosophy” (Berdyaev 1938–1939 [B3]), also in Shestov 11/1982 (A1), 1–6. 109 Cf. the epigraph, a Baudelaire verse that Shestov used to introduce the essay on Chekhov in his fifth book Beginnings and Endings (1908): “Résigne-toi mon coeur, dors ton sommeil de brute” [Resign yourself, my heart, sleep your brutish sleep]. Shestov would quote these verses several times in his works. At the beginning of his book on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche he adopted a similar quotation by Baudelaire: “Aimes-tu les damnés? Dis moi, connais-tu l’irrémissible?” [Do you love the damned? Tell me, do you know the irredeemable?].

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ideally closer to Shestov, like Gershenzon, Berdyaev, and Ivanov-Razumnik. The full title of his last work, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: An Experiment in Adogmatic Thought (see Shestov 4/1905 [A1]), gives a perfectly clear indication of his real intentions and, at the same time, removes all possible misunderstanding. The book was written in an aphoristic style—hence the use of the term “experiment”—and for the first time it did not deal with a specific author, but with various and “jumbled” thoughts. In other words, the two most appreciated Shestovian features, his classic prose style and his psychological comments on well-known figures, disappeared in one fell swoop. What remained, in fact, was the least tolerable part of his thought: scattered aphorisms celebrating the apotheosis of groundlessness. Not surprisingly, the book received mostly negative reviews and comments. Shestov, of course, was not happy about this, as Natalʹya Baranova recalls in her work.110 While the renowned critic Yurii Aikhenvalˈd, who had manifested some interest in Shestov’s early works, this time labeled the new book pretentious and unserious (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 78–79), Dmitrii Filosofov even called it “poison” (165) for Russian society as, he said, “it denies all sorts of values [ . . . ] it is not criticism, it decomposes everything, it does not create but rather destroys all being” (167). However, Apotheosis raised also a lot of curiosity and appreciation in authors like Boris Pasternak, Nikolai Minskii, and Vasilii Rozanov (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 87–88). Rozanov, in particular, saw in Shestov’s text an innovative form of expression completely adapted to modern times. For Rozanov, this work is “amazingly sincere” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 132) and has a unity precisely in its lack of systematicity: “Having lost the ‘system,’ the book acquired truth and accuracy [ . . . ]. With the system, he [Shestov] was just a compiler, and, devoting his works to Tolstoi, Nietzsche and Dostoevskii he was a slave of these giants” (134). In the end, he said, this “apotheosis” is “incomparably more vital, brighter, more necessary for everyone than the philosophy of our university professors” (135). The Apotheosis of Groundlessness is actually the result of an abandoned project for a book on Turgenev and Chekhov, which Shestov started between 1903 and 1904. Parts of that book were used for an essay on Chekhov, “Tvorchestvo iz nichego” [Creation from Nothing], and the rest converged in 110 For a description of the debates about this book and about Shestov’s reactions, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 86–99. Most of these reviews are collected in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 78–167. Despite the harsh criticism—or perhaps because of it—this book had an enormous impact on the Russian intellectual milieu. Shestov himself gained recognition as one of the most interesting intellectuals of his generation.

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this book, which is divided in two parts and contains 168 aphorisms, some of which are very short. Shestov adopted this aphoristic genre starting from 1902, but he was aware that people in Russia were not used to this style (cf. Shestov 4/2000 [A1], 452). Shestov was right, although there were notable examples of it in Russian literature, even from the eighteenth century (Radishchev) and the nineteenth century (Griboedov, Krylov, Chadaaev, to give only a few examples). But in those cases, the works’ moral intent and linear content probably made this style of writing more acceptable. Contrary to what happened in Russia in 1905, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness would not appear to the contemporary reader as a subversive or strange text: the number of translations into foreign languages and the appreciation it received abroad are evidence of this. It is rather a typical, albeit immature Shestovian work, written in the style that characterized a large part of his subsequent output. The subjects Shestov deals with are mostly literary and reflect his interests from that time in Russian literature. In a way, the premise of this work is philosophical, while its contents are literary. In the preface, in fact, Shestov asserts that he chose the aphoristic style as he could no longer bear to write in a systematic way, especially when dealing with his scattered and uncertain thoughts. In particular, Shestov declares his discomfort with the typically philosophical devices—the “conclusion,” the “last word,” and the “worldview” (454)—which he himself tried to achieve in his previous works. After such a declaration of intent, in the two parts of this work, he expresses his opinions—often briefly and with more clarity and straightforwardness than he did in his previous books—on a number of different authors and ideas. On the one hand, he has an opportunity to reconsider many of his opinions on Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Heine, and others from different angles, on the other, he introduces new views on Turgenev and Chekhov, in particular. This book has the undoubted merit of removing many ambiguities about Shestov’s real intentions: for the most part, it sets out what Shestov was not able to achieve in the form of a “system” (e.g., a philosophy of art, a philosophy of religion, a literary theory). Its main idea—if it is at all possible to draw one from such a variety of aphorisms— lies in an uncompromising opposition between the big philosophical systems (such as conceived by Kant and Hegel) and the “private truths” of the writers (mainly Chekhov, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Shakespeare, Gogolˈ, and Lermontov). Moreover, as Michael Finkenthal acutely suggests, this work “contains also the first Shestovian incursions into the world of Greek philosophy” (Finkenthal [B2], 43)—in particular in aphorisms nos. 25, 33, and 39 of the first part—as

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well as “some of the major questions about religion and faith he will forcefully pose later” (44).111 On the whole, in this book Shestov manifests a sincere faith in the power of authentic art, chiefly literature, to speak the truth—a truth that has nothing to do with the “official” truth of science and philosophy. His “experiment in adogmatic thought” consists exactly in a frontal and unjustified opposition of the writer’s private feelings to the rationality of philosophy. Along with his essays on Chekhov, Sologub, and Ibsen, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness can be considered Shestov’s most “aesthetic work,” that is, the one in which he best expresses his philosophical aesthetic views or, to put it better, what the relationship between truth and art is. As will be explained in greater detail in the next chapter of this book, such a contrast between art and philosophy characterizes these years of Shestov’s life. 2. The “apotheosis of bespochvennostʹ” seems to be in many ways the coherent conclusion of the philosophy of tragedy. While the commentators of his books all hoped for a different—definitely less radical—result, Shestov steered his research straight into the path of an uncompromising tragic truth. But what, in the end, was Shestov’s “philosophy of tragedy”? Was it a regular philosophy, that is, something that has to do with the history of metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, or was it a sort of “literary idea”—a personal expression of human suffering? At first, it would seem to be the second option, as Shestov wrote in the preface of his book on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche: “Philosophy of tragedy: does not this mean perhaps philosophy of desperation, of folly and even of death?! Is it possible to talk here of any philosophy?” (Shestov 3/2000 [A1], 308). The meaning of this expression, for Shestov, can be no more than a contradiction in terms, as where tragedy begins no philosophy is possible. Every philosophy and every idealism—Shestov argued—has always pursued the goal of self-justification (samoopravdanie), with the result of leaving behind the uninterested search for truth and of creating innocuous systems of thought (311). Consequently, he said, “there is a field of the human spirit that never had volunteers: people go there only against their will. It is the field of tragedy. Anyone who ventures into it begins to think, feel and desire 111 See, in particular, aphorisms no. 51 (first part), no. 33 (second part), and no. 41 (second part). According to Finkenthal, although the book has no linear path as Shestov had abandoned some of the ideas of his younger years, one can find in it “the starting point of practically all the themes to be developed by Shestov in his later works” (Finkenthal [B2], 41).

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differently from others” (316). The philosophy of tragedy is, then, a radically different way of thinking—a substantial alternative to idealism, philosophy of knowledge, science, and morality (317). Ultimately, for Shestov, the issue at stake is of another kind: “Can a philosophy of tragedy exist?” (317). This last question, his insistence on the logical impossibility of such a philosophy, and the way he will develop, until his death, the concept of tragedy within the theory of knowledge rather than within a poetics or an artistic theory, would point to the first option mentioned above: when he was speaking of a philosophy of tragedy, Shestov was primarily thinking of advancing his own philosophical stance. To achieve this, he mainly sought a comparison with Western philosophy. At the beginning, he contrasted the artist/writer’s “underground truth” with the official truths of philosophy and science. In the second part of his life, he himself would progressively enter the “agon megistos kai eskhatos psukhais,” the “greatest and uttermost fight for souls”—as he would love to say in quoting Plotinus (Ennead I:6, 7)—between the necessity of reason and the search for a superior overcoming of such a necessity. Shestov’s philosophical need to get to the heart of the paradox of reason (that is, “who will judge the supreme judge?”) is not an isolated or unconventional position. It is, in fact, not far removed from the paradox of Western metaphysics as posed by Heidegger—most famously in his 1929 lecture What Is Metaphysics?—that is, that the way (logos) to the truth of being is deceitful, in that the logical question on being does not reveal the “who” that asks that question. Therefore, its truth is ultimately a false truth, and here the history of being unexpectedly meets, ex ante as it were, the history of nothing. Such a discovery brings into the philosophical field, as a crucial passage in Heidegger’s existential analytic, the Heideggerian concept of “anxiety” (Angst) as an intrinsic link between the Being of entities and the Being of Dasein. More than two decades before Heidegger, the Shestovian concept of “tragedy” played a similar role in calling into question the classic Greek idea of philosophy as “episteme” (knowledge/science).112 But the idea of “tragedy” as a theoretical 112 In some ways, it is easy to find common stances between Shestov and Heidegger, or Bergson, at this initial stage that concerns their critical perspectives towards Western metaphysics. Shestov, in fact, was very interested in the philosophy of the two. But when it comes to reflecting on a second phase of that critique, Shestov always seems more interested in the value of the contradiction per se, than in its positive and possible consequences, such as those that both Heidegger and Bergson developed. In this regard—i.e., in the “impasse of tragedy” as a philosophical problem—Shestov would paradoxically find a better interlocutor in Husserl than in Heidegger, although their dialogue on this point was mostly “off the record.”

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paradox, or as an active impossibility of logos set by logos itself,113 has a precise tradition in Western thought and it reaches a decisive turning point with Friedrich Nietzsche. Shestov, in fact, intercepted this tradition with Nietzsche, as it were; he brought it to Russia114 and connoted it with Russian literary contents. Subsequently, above all in his last works, he expressed his own radical position that produced its effects mostly in the Western world. This tradition is the so-called “tragic thought” and is essentially a modern philosophical problem, although it stems from the classic Greek tragedy.115 The crucial role of Nietzsche was precisely that of turning the literary object of tragedy (as was also considered by Aristotle) into the idea of tragedy itself. In this evolution—also anticipated by Aristotle, for whom tragedy already belonged to the past because it had achieved perfection (cf. Aristotle, Poetics 1449a, 15–16)—Nietzsche, and before him, Schelling, no longer developed a thought on tragedy but rather a thought on the tragic. As Peter Szondi, one of the best interpreters of this process, famously affirmed in his seminal work of 1961: “Since Aristotle there has been a poetics of tragedy. Only since Schelling has there been a philosophy of the tragic.”116 This philosophy posits above all the “identity of opposites” as the equivalent, on a philosophical level, of the tragic form in art. While Nietzsche cannot be considered the inventor of this new and anticlassic Greece, he certainly set out a striking recapitulation of a whole rethinking of Greek tragedy that was elaborated in particular in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. The classic and solar Greece, as notably described by Winckelmann, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, was contrasted with an anticlassic and nocturnal Greece, mainly in Friedrich Hölderlin’s translations of Sophocles and Euripides as well as in Heinrich von Kleist’s Penthesilea (1808), but most of all in Schelling’s elaboration, around 1841, of the “dark side” of Greek thought in his Philosophy of Revelation. In this intermingling of the two sides, the rational 113 In his last works, Shestov would dwell extensively—with Pascal, with Kierkegaard and with the search for an alternative philosophical way in the Bible—on this aporetic nature of truth and on the necessity of continually “staying” with that contradiction. 114 For a short survey on Russian tragic thought, see Mary Ann Frese Witt’s chapter “Groundlessness: Nietzsche and Russian Concepts of Tragic Philosophy,” in Frese Witt (C), 126–137. 115 Among the vast literature on this subject, see in particular Joshua Billings, Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014); and the less recent but still classic Walter Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968). 116 Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Pal Fleming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1.

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

man, whom Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy identifies with Socrates, meets his alter ego Dionysius, and Nietzsche is thus able to set this “modern” tragedy in the place where an intimate connection between Apollo and Dionysius is achieved. In Nietzsche, the tragic therefore assumes the value of a transcendental principle in which the historical form of Greek tragedy finds, at one and the same time, its fundament and its negation: the bond of brotherhood of the two antithetic gods represents in this way the same essence of the tragic. This inner conceptual antinomy of tragedy characterized the philosophical elaboration this concept had in Europe in modern times. This happened, initially, with Friedrich Hölderlin and Karl W. F. Solger, who applied to Greek tragedy the idealistic and dialectical categories of form and matter, and internal and external content. Yet, as Szondi acknowledged, it was with Schelling and Hegel that tragedy was conceived as a form of paradox that reason cannot tolerate and only art and religion are capable of representing. The tragic, on a philosophical level, is a conflict between necessity (objectivity) and freedom (individuality): this idea was set out by Schelling in his Philosophy of Art—originating from his lectures in Jena from 1802–1803.117 It is in this work that the fundamental concept of the tragic, later assimilated by Nietzsche, is established and it is probably in the same idealistic debate that Greek philosophy is turned into a “modern philosophy.” In a way, in the tragic (modern) thought, the “fault” (e.g., Oedipus’ fault) becomes a “necessity” and not an error (as it was for Aristotle); but that necessity is equally intolerable for the individual free conscience. This “modern tragic” is the statement of an unresolved contradiction. While the “ancient tragic” is that kind of thought which views the “essential,” always in the light of the healing and restoration of a broken totality and consequently as a sort of metaphysical consolation, starting from his work Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, Nietzsche recognizes the impossibility of seeing the tragic in this way, that is, as a recovery of the “original.” He discovers, on the contrary, the rupture of the epistemic paradigm, the nothingness of truth, and embraces the antitragic as the modern tragedy. In this way, he imposes a decisive philosophical turning point on the debate on the tragic. Shestov was evidently very close to the spirit of this German debate and, as stated earlier, he took from Nietzsche the decisive input to contribute to it and to position himself among the rank of tragic philosophers. At first, he started with a criticism of moral values but soon turned to a criticism of rationality, 117 For a comment on this, see Devin Zane Shaw, Freedom and Nature in Schelling’s Philosophy of Art (New York: Continuum, 2010).

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with even more radicality than Nietzsche. He gave a name to his philosophical stance, bespochvennostˈ—a name that has always been the most uncomfortable of Shestov’s concepts both for his commentators and for his translators.118 The term is largely philosophically connoted: it means that there is no longer a ground (pochva) for reason. In this respect, it would be indeed possible to associate Shestov with the tradition of Western irrationalism possibly starting with Arthur Schopenhauer. However, every time he is linked to an already existing philosophical tradition, there is always a resistance of his thought that takes it apart. Perhaps it is still that bespochvennostˈ at the beginning and end of everything, which inevitably underlines the radicality and peculiarity of his position. It is particularly interesting, in this regard, to analyze Shestov’s relationship with Schopenhauer, which strangely has been scarcely explored by critics. Schopenhauer is mentioned many times in Shestov’s writings and, most significantly, starting from Apotheosis. In this text, he is acknowledged as one of the first modern philosophers—perhaps the first—to revolt against the tyranny of reason by means of a complete overturning of the value system: he converted joy into suffering, any positive stance into a negative one, and thought into will. Indeed, even before Nietzsche did so, he fought Western metaphysics at its heart and opened the way to tragedy. In Apotheosis, Shestov praises Schopenhauer’s philosophy for being more “music” than “logic,” and Schopenhauer himself for being the real direct rival of Kant.119 If this is so, why did Shestov never rely on Schopenhauer’s philosophy as he did on Nietzsche’s? Why did he never consider him Nietzsche’s “twin brother” in the way he did Dostoevskii? In an aphorism from 1909 entitled “An Underlying Premise,” the longest text he dedicated to Schopenhauer, Shestov expressed his full thought on the German philosopher, which reveals a change of perspective.120 In all 118 Significantly, in its various translations in different languages this term was often reduced to more comprehensible concepts, such as those of infinite possibilities, disorientation, eradication, and precariousness. But all these names, in avoiding the philosophical idea (as well as literal translation, in Russian language) of a total lack of ground (or base, or fundament), still keep a more or less positive “base” to create a meaningful context. Consequently, they do not reflect the contradiction “per se,” which Shestov wanted to highlight in particular in his book’s title Apofeoz bespochvennosti. In the strongest philosophical sense of the word, in fact, when there is no base for meaning, nothing meaningful is possible: not even eradication or precariousness. Or, at least, from then on, any possibility lies in a domain other than “concept.” 119 See aphorism no. 17 (second part), in Shestov 4/2000 (A1), 549–552. 120 This text belongs to the collection of aphorisms “Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge” [Filosofiya i teoriya poznaniya] which appeared in Russkaya mysl’ 4 (April 1909): 19–47,

CHAPTER I    The Philosophy Of Tragedy (1898–1905)

Schopenhauer’s philosophical output and especially in the way he sets up his philosophy, rather than in its result, Shestov writes, “there is a particularly interesting and curious underlying premise,” that is the right to impose his truth “as something mandatory for everybody” (Shestov 6/2002 [A1], 55). Schopenhauer would have never admitted this—he says—but it is clearly implicit in all his work. In this way, for Shestov, Schopenhauer transformed his “will” into a new concept that is equivalent to a Kantian “a priori.” Apparently, here Shestov applies to Schopenhauer the same argument as that which Berdyaev accused him of. Yet, in his reply to Berdyaev, Shestov came up with a “skeptical argument” against himself, so as to defend himself: he denied his full belief in his own words and he went back to the event of the suffering for the suffering’s sake. But in this case, he considers Schopenhauer’s philosophy too positively oriented to be even similar to his, or Dostoevskii’s, or Nietzsche’s view. It is closer to the shape of a “logical truth” rather than a tragedy or a “shout of horror,” since it should be an authentic “place of crisis” of the Western logos, as Schopenhauer’s philosophy claims to be. For Shestov, the revolt against reason must be a revolt against a precise model of truth. The only way to achieve this overturning and to really rebel against the tyranny of necessity is to remain in the contradiction—to live in the aporetic nature of truth and never detach oneself from it. This is the difference, in his opinion, between Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, or at least between the most relevant part of their achievement, and Schopenhauer. In his mature writings from 1920s, Shestov would continue to muse even more on this aspect. There is not a single text of his, from that period, in which every positive development of tragedy and any positive faith or hope are not deconstructed in favor of a constant reference to this “self-boycotting” truth. This is his ultimate trial from which no one escapes, not even his “heroes” from that time, Plotinus and Kierkegaard, who were also judged on that basis. In an essay written in 1927, “What Is Truth?,” in response to Jean Hering’s criticism of his article on Husserl, Shestov presents his philosophical view in the most unequivocal way. After an evaluation of the whole of Western philosophy, he counterposes only two figures who openly lost their faith in reason and manifested this loss in their works: Plotinus and Nietzsche. The same distrust occurred in Russia with Dostoevskii, in particular, in his Notes from the Underground. This fact, for Shestov, represented a decisive turn in the history of philosophy: and was later included in the book The Great Vigils (Velikie kanuny, 1911). Cf. Shestov 6/2002 (A1), 52–59.

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Part One    Shestov in Russia The Notes from the Underground are, so to speak, a critique of pure reason, but of a way more radical in type than the Kantian critique. Kant assumed that metaphysics should be demonstrable in the same way as geometry and the other sciences. Dostoevskii goes further: he asks himself whether demonstrability itself is necessary and if mathematical sciences truly provide us with a norma veritatis. (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 398)121

What Plotinus, Nietzsche, and Dostoevskii did was harbor suspicion about reason itself, that is, about that “last trial” to which everything had been forever subordinated. When the necessity of reason, guaranteed by its most trustworthy operator—the principle of noncontradiction—, is called into question, what remains is apparently only a tragic (i.e., contradictory) instability of knowledge. The latter originates from a fundamental intuition about the existence of truth and the discovery of the unreliability of the best instrument we have to grasp that truth. The philosophy of tragedy is, at its logical core, a philosophy of contradiction. Yet, far from being a sterile or a sophistic game, that contradiction reveals a different level in the understanding of being, and it consequently poses a threat and marks a revolution in Western metaphysics. This is Nietzsche’s role in the history of philosophy—of whose process Martin Heidegger is the most notable result—, and this is the point from which Shestov starts while he links to it his Russian (Tolstoian, Dostoevskian) heritage. Following a plainly Nietzschean path—which can be seen in an exemplary way in The Gay Science—he too stems from the classic and historical tragedy, but then he detaches from it to arrive at the truth of tragedy, which is the revelation of its aporetic and therefore most authentically “tragic” essence. As will become clear in his last works, Shestov’s specific contribution to this process in the history of philosophy, as well as his difference from Nietzsche and the other protagonists in it, consists of a peculiar radicalization of this aporia, which would find its main target in the concept of “necessity” and would be brought decisively into a religious realm. In the end, for him, the aporia of truth would become the same coexisting contradiction between Western “Athens” and Judeo-Christian “Jerusalem.” 121 This affirmation of Shestov’s deeply impressed the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze who quoted it in his book Difference and Repetition (1968) to highlight the shift, in the philosophy of knowledge, from the “determinate” to the “indeterminate,” finally arriving at the overcoming of identity and at the “universal ungrounding” (Cf. Deleuze [C], 361).

CHAPTER II

Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

2.1 Introduction: Shestov and the Philosophical Problem of Art

S

hestov’s interest in philosophy developed almost spontaneously from the loss of a number of other ambitions or attempted vocations: first, his studies in mathematics and law; then his early (and lost) writings on the social condition of workers and on the industrial legislation in Russia; then his attempts at writing short autobiographical novels; and finally his early “idealistic” phase of journalism and literary criticism (1895–1899) that included his book on Shakespeare. Philosophy gradually emerged as an answer to those “failures.” At the beginning, around 1895, it was a positive answer—a solution to his doubts; but soon he came to see it as their very cause. This happened, first, with his reading of Kant, who was admittedly involved in order to “repair” the apparent nonsense of Shakespeare’s tragedies; and, in a second phase, with the pivotal discovery of Nietzsche—whose philosophy Shestov opposed to Tolstoi’s and Kant’s morals and paired with Dostoevskii’s tragic view of life. Whether as an ally or an enemy—that is, as the way in which Shestov produced his arguments or, on the contrary, as the target of his attacks—from that moment onward, philosophy would be a constant presence in his studies as well as the all-encompassing model on which he based his reflections. Shestov’s use of Kant’s and Nietzsche’s ideas in his early works—although, in these two specific cases, with opposite aims—was meant to find a universal meaning in literature or, as

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it were, to subsume the meaning of literary works under a general paradigm of a (nonetheless) philosophical truth. This was his largely unconscious intention1 through which he somehow created a sort of “philosophy of literature”—once more anticipating a tendency that would have a certain success in the twentieth century.2 In his article “Lev Shestov kak filosof ” [Lev Shestov as a Philosopher] (1939), Nikolai Losskii acknowledged that in Shestov’s works from the early years of the century “literary criticism occupied a prominent place” and yet “he was a philosopher, as in his analysis of the artist’s works he went back to the mystery of life, to the problem of good, and to the essence of morality” (Losskii [B3], 139). For this reason, Shestov was not interested in being faithful to the literary text as a philologist or a critic is supposed to be. He was generally accused by professional critics, such as Aikhenvalˈd, Mikhailovskii or Gershenzon, of betraying (often, if not systematically) the historical facts and literary text.3 At the same time—as has been observed in the previous chapter—his early books appealed to audiences and critics precisely because of their style and their literary interpretations or seemingly ideological positions. There is no doubt some truth in what Berdyaev said, that is, that there was much misunderstanding in the appreciation of Shestov as an intellectual figure, especially since this appreciation mainly arose from a “stylistic” point of view.4 But it is precisely in this capacity that he entered the intellectual milieu of St. Petersburg. In May 1901, while he was in Switzerland, he received a letter from 1

This is, at any rate, Berdyaev’s observation, which Shestov ultimately accepted (see §6 of the first chapter of this book). 2 The intersections between philosophy and literature are a phenomenon that characterized twentieth century because of its effects both in literary theory and in philosophy. In the specific sense described here, many “classic” philosophers adopted literary works to find confirmation of their theories, or on the contrary they derived an independent philosophical theory from literature and the arts. Some examples of this include the works of Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Stanley Cavell, among others. Shestov is not certainly the initiator of this tendency, but his analyses of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, above all, were an important source of inspiration in Russia and abroad for this particular use of literature for philosophical purposes. 3 According to Edith Clowes, this contrast between literary critics and philosophers (and, as philosophers, Solovˈëv along with Rozanov and Shestov were certainly among the first to follow this trend) inaugurated a different way of reading literary texts while “a new philosophical discourse gradually emerged and asserted its own authority in the context of powerful literary and scientific competitors” (Clowes 2004 [C], 11). 4 Shestov, however, never “despised” the stylistic appreciations he generally received. See, on this, a letter from 1905 to Aleksei Remizov: “It is a weakness, I know it, but I really like that they praise my style” (Shestov 25/1992 [A2], 154).

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

Sergei Dyagilev who invited him to contribute to the recently created magazine Mir iskusstva (1899–1904), which would mean so much to Russian cultural history as a whole.5 “After reading my book on Tolstoi,” Shestov said to Fondane, “Dyagilev asked me to collaborate on his journal. At that time, if you will allow me to speak about myself without modesty, I had in my portfolio the manuscript of ‘The Philosophy of Tragedy.’ I sent it to him. Dyagilev declared himself enchanted by it” (Fondane [B1], 89). Thus, Shestov began his career as a literary critic in the circle of Russian artists and intellectuals that gravitated around Dyagilev and his journal. One might say that he shared neither the principles of that group nor the more general “religious renaissance” trend of those years: in that movement, Shestov was indeed an independent intellectual and a “solitary thinker,” as Anatolii Akhutin stated in a famous essay (cf. Akhutin 1993 [B3])—which also shows how Dyagilev was willing to open his magazine to different attitudes and ideas. This “independence” did not actually prevent him from having a considerable impact on the so-called Russian Religious Renaissance: not by chance, in his analysis of that variegated movement Nikolai Zernov significantly described Shestov as an important part of it and a “treasure of the orthodox Russian culture” (Zernov [C], 366). Following Dyagilev’s call, during the ensuing years (more or less until 1910), with the partial exception of an article on the American philosopher William James,6 Shestov wrote a number of essays on 5 On Shestov’s first contact with Dyagilev and the world of intellectuals in St. Petersburg, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 63–73. The Mir iskusstva [The World of Art] was cofounded in St. Petersburg in 1899 by Alexandre Benois, Léon Bakst, and its chief editor Sergei Dyagilev. The magazine and the new artistic group that was behind it promoted a radical renewal of the arts, and largely criticized the old standards of the social art of the previous century while encouraging artistic individualism and the principles of Art Nouveau, and also called for the revival of theatre and the synthesis of arts. 6 This essay—“Logika religioznogo tvorchestva. Pamyati V. Dzhemsa” [The Logic of Religious Creation. In Memory of William James]—is the only one from the 1911 collection The Great Vigils (Velikie kanuny) that had not been published before. It was written in Coppet (Switzerland) after William James’ death (on August 27, 1910). The article is mainly a commentary on James’ 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. The fact that the Russian translation of this book was made by Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich should certainly be considered one of the reasons why Shestov’s interest was aroused towards this work. Shestov’s position with regard to this book is that, although James initially opposed all sciences in the name of a creatively religious “foolishness” (and Shestov puts this foolishness on a parallel with the foolishness of the crucified Christ of whom St. Paul speaks in Corinthians 1:9–23), in a later phase he could not uphold this idea and surrendered to the seduction of the “social usefulness” of such foolishness. Once again (he said something similar in his reply to Berdyaev [see chapter 1, §5]), Shestov highlights how hard it is to remain

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literary authors such as Merezhkovskii, Turgenev, Chekhov, Sologub, Ibsen, and again on Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Shakespeare, in which he argued for a largely tragic view of these authors’ works, along the same lines as his previous analyses on Tolstoi and Dostoevskii.7 His first writings from this new approach were two reviews (which appeared in 1901 and 1903 at the explicit request of Sergei Dyagilev) of the last works of Dmitrii Merezhkovskii8 and an essay on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that was meant as an introduction to the third volume of Shakespeare’s works for the publisher Brockhaus (St. Petersburg, 1903).9 At the beginning of twentieth century the Russian intellectual audience seemed more interested in Shestov’s attitude of challenging literary works rather than in facing the problems of good and evil or morality and antimorality. As he confessed years later to his friend Fondane: “Since I had begun with a study on Shakespeare, then on Tolstoi and on Chekhov, they took me for a literary critic, and I myself believed this a little” (Fondane [B1], 86). It is likely in contradiction and, in this case, to accept a “foolishness” that is not “nice” or “useful” but merely uncomfortable and unacceptable. This essay, as previously remarked, is an exception among the others that are oriented towards more literary subjects. But it still mentions the fact that “problematic characters” are often used in literature with the same scope as William James’ use of his “religious foolishness,” namely, that they are employed as a useful means to obtain a more valuable artistic result. 7 Shestov published these articles in the above-mentioned Mir iskusstva as well as in other critical reviews such as Voprosy zhizni, Russkaya myslʹ, Polyarnaya zvezda, and Rechʹ. The majority of these essays were collected in the books Beginnings and Endings (1908) and, above all, in The Great Vigils (1911); see Shestov 5/1908 and Shestov 6/1911 (A1). The book The Great Vigils appeared, probably at the beginning of 1911, with the publisher Shipovnik as the first (chronologically, the sixth) volume of a publication project of Shestov’s oeuvre. Within the same year, Shipovnik republished four more volumes, starting with volume 2 on Tolstoi and Nietzsche, with the sole exclusion of Shestov’s first book on Shakespeare. However, as Natalˈya Baranova points out, these five volumes were sold out very rapidly and soon became a bibliographical rarity. Because of the First World War and the Russian revolution, it was impossible for Shipovnik to continue reprinting this series. This was, in the event, the only attempt at a complete publication of Shestov’s works while he was alive. According to Natalˈya Baranova, Shestov wished very much to see his complete works published, but many obstacles arose on the way over the years (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 135). There is some uncertainty on the date of publication of The Great Vigils: as Natalˈya Baranova writes, there was no date printed in the Shipovnik editions. Supposedly, this book was issued on March 1911 (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 135), although in her 1975 bibliography the same Natalˈya Baranova assigns it a date of 1910. 8 For an analysis of these works, see the next section. 9 This essay—as has been already explained in chapter one—is highly indicative of Shestov’s mature position on Shakespeare and it sheds a new light on his previous works on the same subject. See Lev I. Shestov, “‘Yulii Tsezar'’ Shekspira” [Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar], in Shestov 4/2000 (A1), 584–594.

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

that, for some time, Shestov himself trusted his audience’s judgment and the opportunities of work he was offered, and therefore was happy to assume this role.10 For nearly ten years (1901–1910), he challenged himself with close and detailed interpretations of literary works, in a way he would never pursue again during his life.11 In the meantime, his personal life entered a new phase. In autumn 1901 he came back to Russia to remain there until 1908. He resided in Kiev but spent his summers in Switzerland where his wife Anna and his daughters Tatʹyana and Natalʹya lived permanently year round. This choice was due to the fact that he took control of his family’s cloth manufacturing business because of his father’s critical state of health—Isaak Shvartsman was forced to move to Wiesbaden in Germany with his wife, Shestov’s mother, to seek a cure in a specialized center—and in this way he could also help his family at distance. In Switzerland, Anna could finally conclude her studies in Medicine while Tatʹyana and Natalʹya went to primary school. But this separation from his family can also be explained by the fact that Shestov kept his marriage secret from his parents during all this time because of their disapproval.12 His winter life in Kiev 10 In a couple of letters to his wife from that time (1901–1902), Shestov showed a certain degree of faith in the possibility of establishing himself in literary criticism. He also had a plan to make a comparative analysis of the literature of Kiev and that of St. Petersburg (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 66, 72). This interest in literary criticism is also attested to by the unpublished manuscripts from those “Kievan years,” between 1901 and 1908, which reveal this kind of research. In particular, an unfinished text entitled “Dostoevskii and Tolstoi” (probably written in 1902) seems to outline a common aptitude of the two writers for an authentic literary vocation (see Ms. 2110-1, file 92, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). Among the recent studies that took a closer examination at this literary phase of Shestov’s output, see in particular Lashov 2006, 2009a, 2009b, 2010 (B3), Piron 2003, 2007, 2012 (B3), Tabachnikova 2005, 2008a, 2012a (B3), and Valevicius (B2). 11 After his exile in Switzerland and in France, in 1920, Shestov would again publish a few articles on Dostoevskii and Tolstoi but mostly in response to an explicit request by French audience and critics. By that point, however, his interests were directed towards philosophical or biblical subjects. 12 As Natalˈya Baranova recalls in this respect: “The impossibility of carrying on a family life was a big burden on the couple. But starting from autumn 1906, the Shestovs could live together as they were certain that his parents would not know because of the grave sickness of his father. In 1908, the Shestovs settled down in Germany, in Friburg-en-Brisgau [ . . . ] where they spent two winters” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 102). It is difficult to follow Shestov’s movements during all these years. He was continually traveling: between Switzerland, Italy, Germany and Russia; but also, within Russia, between Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg. Essentially, he never spent a whole year in a single place. On this time of Shestov’s life, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 63–131, and Fotiade (B1), 41–58.

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during these years was calm and quiet. Shestov describes it in many letters to his wife in which he informs her of all of his projects, studies and incomes.13 As testified by Sergei Bulgakov, Shestov hosted all the Kievan intellectuals in his big house for long talks and discussions: there, he made a closer acquaintance with Berdyaev, Georgii Chelpanov, Evsei Bronshtein, Evgenii Lundberg, Adolʹf Lazarev, and the aforementioned Bulgakov.14 Despite his commitments at his father’s enterprise—which he soon managed to delegate to other people as he transformed it into a joint stock company—Shestov found ways to spend long evenings alone at home in comfort and during that time he read a great deal, especially literature. It was in those years that he wrote his first aphorisms and his studies on literary authors, which eventually converged in his books The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905), Beginnings and Endings (1908), and The Great Vigils (1911). As Natalˈya Baranova notes, the collection of essays The Great Vigils “marks the end of the first period of Shestov’s activity during which he was interested more in literary than in purely philosophical problems” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 135). Within this period of literary interests, there was a specific question Shestov investigated, in particular in some of his essays (above all, those on Chekhov, Sologub, and Ibsen), namely the nature of art and the philosophical problem of artistic truth. This is certainly a minor question within Shestov’s entire output, especially if compared to the direction his research would take in the second part of his life. Yet it occupies an important place with regard to this phase of his thought as well as to his relationship with Russian symbolism, with the renaissance of arts, and with the various artistic movements of Silver Age Russia.15 Although this aspect has never been deeply explored by critics, Shestov did develop his own position in philosophical aesthetics: it was a position he derived somehow naturally from his most philosophical work from this time, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness. As we will see in the next sections of this chapter, he investigated the rise and fall of “artistic truth,” as if it were in a subverted Hegelian triad in which, starting from the Chekhovian nothingness of art, an oracular and “positive” message emerged (Sologub), which was eventually destined to fall as the last deceitful illusion of being (Ibsen). 13 See Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 65–67. The letters quoted by Natalˈya Baranova correspond to the Ms. 2111-1, vol. I (first part), sheets 225–233, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris. 14 See Bulgakov’s testimony, in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 441. See also Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 75–77. 15 On this, see §7 of this chapter.

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

For Shestov, art has a special power and a direct link with the most profound truth of the human being. In a text dedicated to Tolstoi, written in 1920, he asserted that nobody—not even St. Augustine, Rousseau, Stuart Mill, or Nietzsche, in their personal diaries—is capable of speaking the truth in a direct way. It is necessary to hide behind a literary work or, as it were, to pass through “art.”16 Only in a work of art, according to Shestov, one can find the real truth. For, he says, “he who wants the ‘truth’ must learn the art of reading artistic works” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 111). This also implies a peculiarly “subjective” role for the interpreter, since the latter must be a real “philosopher” in tackling the writer’s text in order to highlight its deepest meaning. This was also observed by Adolʹf Lazarev, a Russian critic and one of Shestov’s closest friends, in a letter to Shestov concerning his subjective style of writing: “It always seemed to me that, in you, the form was inseparable from the content. When you say what no one says, it can only be said as you do. And when you say the same thing as others, familiar thoughts seem to acquire a new meaning.”17 At the same time, art is the primary and possibly the only source of a truth that rational thought, on its own, would never be able to reveal. Many times, during these “literary criticism years” Shestov hinted that the art of Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Heine, among others, had the power of disclosing a meaning that the authors themselves could not recognize. Authentic art, for Shestov, has a “capacity for truth” that reason does not possess. Like an unconscious oracle, the authentic artist is endowed with such a gift. Here, Shestov might appear close to the position of Russian symbolism: many of his affirmations and, before all else, his article on Sologub, would seem to point to this conclusion. But eventually he radically diverged from it. This is notably evidenced in his work on Ibsen, where art is declared truthful but seductive and, 16 On the importance of “speaking indirectly,” see also Shestov’s “reproach” to Fondane who had contested that manner of speaking: “There are things of which one cannot speak other than indirectly. This is also the case of Nietzsche and Dostoevskii. It is necessary not only to ‘forgive’ their way of speaking, but also to come to appreciate and understand the hidden meaning of their writings” (Fondane [B1], 123). 17 Letter from Adolʹf Lazarev to Shestov, October 1, 1929 (Ms. 2117, file 176, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). Adolʹf Markovich Lazarev (1873–1944), philosopher and lawyer, graduated from the Faculty of Law in Kiev. He was part of the philosophical circle of Georgii Chelpanov, where he met Shestov, Berdyaev, and Shpet. He was director of the Foreign Trade Bank in Kiev. He became a close friend of Shestov whom he joined in 1926 in Paris, where he taught philosophy at The French-Russian Institute. In 1948, his posthumous book came out in French, Vie et connaissance [Life and Knowledge], with a collection of articles about philosophers; its first chapter was dedicated to Shestov (see Lazareff [B3]).

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in the end, deceitful. In art—as Shestov’s study on Ibsen demonstrates—the highest truth coincides with the most sophisticated deception. The conclusion of that essay appears as a condemnation of art for art’s sake, although this would happen more in practice—that is, in Shestov’s life—than in theory. In actuality, after this essay on Ibsen, Shestov would progressively turn away from literary works as a source of research and would become more interested in philosophical and religious subjects.18 In a seemingly ante litteram Adornian way, Shestov acknowledges the truth of art to be a highly sophisticated “illusion,” for he later aims at implicitly “redeeming” the same illusion within a philosophical (and, in Shestov’s case, philosophically religious) “way out” from art. In other words, none of the truths that authentic artists like Dostoevskii or Chekhov or Ibsen found out were declared false by Shestov, but for him the temptation to aesthetically indulge in those truths or, worse, to “translate” them into rational concepts could lead the same writers along the wrong paths.19 Hence, for Shestov, there is a strong need for a “negative philosophy” as a guard: not only a guard against philosophy itself but also against art and the truth that is disclosed by art. As he declared in a 1905 letter to his friend, the writer Aleksei Remizov, while pointing out the differences between them: “You love art, descriptions, sometimes excessively, to the point of being distracted from the fight. As for me, I am in the underground but I am always ready to jump outside, but I have a heavy stone around my neck that prevents me from getting up” (Shestov 25/1992 [A2], 144). This particular aspect of Shestov’s conception can be found in his master-disciple relationship with Fondane: during the long wait for the publication of Fondane’s False Treatise of Aesthetics (1938)—which occurred in November 1938, just a couple of weeks before Shestov died—he feared that his friend Fondane might indulge in “aesthetic temptation” and forget the “fight.”20 For 18 However, it would be a mistake to think that during all these years (1901–1910) Shestov’s interests were completely detached from theoretical philosophy. In fact, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, his essay on Turgenev and many aphorisms are full of long digressions on Kant and the theory of knowledge, and more in general on the meaning of Western philosophy. In the Shestov Archive at the Sorbonne there is a manuscript, dated probably 1906, about an unfinished study of only six pages on the philosophers Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband (cf. Ms. 2110-1, file 94, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). Even during this time when he studied Sologub and Ibsen, it is evident that Shestov was following with interest the spread of neo-Kantianism in Russia, and that Kant and his epigones were always a “hot topic” in his mind. 19 These “risks” will be emblematically evidenced in §2 and §6, with Shestov’s analysis of Merezhkovskii, Turgenev, and of the “last” Dostoevskii. 20 On the friendship and intellectual relationship between Shestov and Fondane, see appendix 3, at the end of this book.

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

Shestov, even when art speaks the truth, the latter must be denied, because any “positive” truth is a falsity: this is the crucial lesson from his “apotheosis of groundlessness” and, possibly, the meaning itself of his bespochvennostˈ. Truth is a contradiction in that when it is revealed, it is false. The task of philosophy is to keep this contradiction alive by revealing it in all its evidence.21 At the end of his aesthetic reflection, Shestov implicitly proposes a turning away from art: in this respect, he was the antipode of a large part of his generation and, in particular, of Merezhkovskii (see §2 of this chapter). But he was also antithetic to the late Nietzsche—the Nietzsche of the “Will to Art”—as was demonstrated in the previous chapter. If something like a “Shestovian philosophical aesthetics” exists, then it can be found in Shestov’s essay on Chekhov, in particular, and it is a “negative aesthetics” (§3). As a result, his analyses of Sologub’s and of Ibsen’s works (§§4–5) determined how this negative aesthetics should be applied to art itself and to the artist’s life and choices. Shestov’s ultimate philosophical goal appears to be a way out from art and, at the same time, a way in to real life, which is not a pleasant place to stay but rather a “living aporia” made of absurdity and inconsistency. After his study on Ibsen, in this crucial turning point that the year 1910 represented in his life, to a certain extent Shestov experienced his own “death of aesthetics” in the same way as the Hegelian “death of art.” He put aside the “question of art” and all the related critical problems that had so occupied his mind during the last decade. This did not occur because art ultimately did not reveal the truth he was looking for, but—as in the case of Hegel’s aesthetics—it occurred precisely because it did.22 21 For some reason, this is a task that Shestov acknowledges to be more appropriate for philosophy than for art. In actuality, “defending a contradiction” (like a philosophy of tragedy is meant to do) seems more a logical than an aesthetic issue. His imminent change of interests, from literature to religion and Greek philosophy—which would occur between 1910 and 1920—can be also explained in this light. Shestov, in fact, would turn to the religious subject neither as a problem of faith and personal commitment, nor as a possibility for developing a religious philosophy, but rather as a possibility for obtaining a logically alternative domain to oppose to Western reason. 22 The overcoming of something—or the most authentic overcoming (e.g., in Hegel’s dialectics)—never originates from a failure, but rather from a success. Shestov’s faith in the truthfulness of authentic art (e.g., that of Dostoevskii, Heine, Chekhov, or Sologub) makes it necessary for a new definition of art itself. This happens because Shestov (with his analysis of Ibsen) discovers the antithesis of art in “life”, for there is a need for a synthesis, which Shestov will find in religion as an attempt at thinking the absurd. These might not be the exact terms in which Shestov would have put his thought, but it is not far from what actually happened in his intellectual path. Although the latter may not appear as dialectical as—for

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2.2 Aestheticism and Ideology: On Merezhkovskii and Turgenev 1. There was no love lost between Merezhkovskii and Shestov: this is what Georgii Adamovich once affirmed, according to Natalˈya Baranova (BaranoffChestov 1991 [B1], 128–129). In 1910 Adamovich—at that time a close acquaintance of Shestov—recorded Shestov’s impressions about his meeting with Lev Tolstoi at Yasnaya Polyana (on March 2, 1910). Apparently, the only thing the two, Shestov and Tolstoi, agreed on was a critical judgment on Merezhkovskii’s book on Tolstoi and Dostoevskii. To an external viewer, however, the situation may have seemed completely different. Shestov and Merezhkovskii were two of the earliest and most noticeable fruits of the Nietzschean revolution at the turn of the century. They were certainly paired by many as two “rebellious types,” whose rebellion was first of all against every form of Positivism. Significantly, precisely because of this “epic fight” against Positivism, one critic, Boris Griftsov, in a specific monograph of 1911, Tri myslitelya: V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovskii, L. Shestov [Three thinkers: V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovskii, L. Shestov], compared Merezhkovskii, Shestov, and Rozanov and defined them as three “wonderful and fabulous sprouts” of their time (Griftsov [B3], 1). Shestov and Merezhkovskii were also among the first of their generation to have rediscovered God within philosophical thought, for they were, in many ways, the initiators of a real post-Solovˈëvian religious philosophy in Russia. Berdyaev once recalled that after Merezhkovskii read Shestov’s book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche he began to use the word “God” at every moment.23 At Dyagilev’s explicit request, Shestov wrote two articles for Mir iskusstva, each dedicated to one of the two volumes of Merezhkovskii’s work Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevskii.24 In the first, and actually very short, article, with which Shestov made his debut in Mir iskusstva, he tried to be very diplomatic with regard to the first volume of the work. But in the second and longer article, he finally example—Merezhkovskii’s or Berdyaev’s, it nonetheless has its own inner development and its own inner opposite categories. 23 “He [Berdyaev] told me: ‘It’s from you that he took God.’ But in his [Merezhkovskii’s] second book this idea became central. He used the word God in every form he could [ . . . ]. But Merezhkovskii was no Caruso: he was a small-time tenor” (Fondane [B1], 89). 24 Lev I. Shestov, “O knige Merezhkovskogo (‘Lev Tolstoi i Dostoevskii.’ T. I)” [On Merezhkovskii’s Book (Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, vol. 1)], Mir iskusstva 8/9 (1901): 132– 136, and “Vlastʹ idei (Po povodu knigi D. Merezhkovskogo ‘Lev Tolstoi i Dostoevskii’)” [The Power of Ideas (On D. Merezhkovskii’s Book Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, vol. 2)], Mir iskusstva 1/2 (1903): 77–96. This second text was also included in the Russian edition of The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (Shestov 4/1905 [A1]). On the difficult relationship between Shestov and Merezhkovskii, see Piron (B2), 46–55.

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

expressed his strongly critical position. Dyagilev was actually aware in advance of Shestov’s negative opinion of Merezhkovskii’s book and was surprised about it, but he nonetheless let Shestov publish his text in the journal (cf. Fondane [B1], 90). After reading the first review, Merezhkovskii himself was enthusiastic. One day in St. Petersburg, in fact, he invited Shestov for a meeting with Rozanov and other intellectuals. Since very few had heard of Shestov at that time, Merezhkovskii exclaimed: “How can this be? Don’t you know the best author in Russia to have written on Nietzsche?” (90). As Shestov commented: “This happened after my first review. But after the second one, he disappeared for a long time. I had told him too many truths. But still, he annoyed me with his ‘God’” (90).25 In this review, while constantly defending Tolstoi (more than Dostoevskii) from Merezhkovskii’s interpretation, Shestov generally accuses Merezhkovskii’s book of having merely formal and literary value but missing the real core of Tolstoi’s and Dostoevskii’s works. Furthermore, he maintains that Merezhkovskii misuses the word “God” in that he reduces it to the same tone and level as those he had previously used to deal with other subjects: “Until now, he was engaged in scientific and literary issues, now he, in his own words, has become ‘engaged in religious issues.’ The very expression ‘to engage in religious issues’ is an expression that has recently become used [ . . . ] but it contains a big misunderstanding. There are no religious ‘questions’ and there cannot be any ‘engagement’ in this” (Shestov 4/2000 [A1], 596). According to Shestov, “religion is not a discipline and is not a science, and any attempt to equate it to any human field of knowledge should be considered essentially illegal” (596).26 By considering it instead as a “discipline,” Merezhkovskii—as Shestov puts it—seeks to prove the existence of a “philosophically religious idea” that is truer than all the historical forms of Christianity. While in the first volume of this work Merezhkovskii still paid attention to reality, in the second volume, Shestov writes, “he once and forever closed his eyes to reality and, 25 Shestov also stated that Merezhkovskii remonstrated with Dyagilev about that publication: “He [Merezhkovskii] came to the journal’s offices and made a hysterical scandal” (Fondane [B1], 90). Relations between Shestov and Merezhkovskii were not easy even during the years of exile in Paris. As Shestov recalled, they met rarely, but they still discussed and disagreed on political questions (90–91). 26 Subsequently, in the same article, Shestov explains his thought in the most concise way: “I believe that no person has the right to create a religion and that there is nothing to create. For one of two things must be true: either God exists, and then religion is given to us by the Bible; or there is no God, and then it is best for Merezhkovskii and I to shut up” (Shestov 4/2000 [A1], 603).

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having surrendered completely to the power of ideas, begins to generalize and judge, or, as it seems to him, to create a new religion” (598). Shestov describes Merezhkovskii’s attitude as an “ideological radicalism” (ideinyi radikalizm), in that he is a “hunter of ideas” of which “he loves only the most extreme and most radical ones” (599). Also, to some extent, he usually pretends to dissociate himself from his own ideas, which artifice, in Shestov’s opinion, places him among the most original Russian writers. According to Shestov, Merezhkovskii uses strong and sharp expressions in his prose (he certainly learnt this from Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, Shestov argues [599]),27 he always keeps a “positive degree” and finally he is an excellent writer. But nothing is authentic in his texts. For Shestov, the only reason that moves Merezhkovskii to write his texts is a mere love for aestheticism. There is no real tragedy in his works, but he pretends to be tragic in order to express more radical ideas.28 But those ideas—Shestov harshly concludes—“are not needed” (616). Interestingly, Shestov told Fondane that this study on Merezhkovskii was very useful to him in clarifying some issues.29 He did not say what kind of issues, but from his text “The Power of Ideas” it is evident that Shestov critically reflects upon any positive and “formal” development of those same questions he actually cared about: art and religion first of all. From their common mentor Nietzsche, Merezhkovskii and Shestov developed two opposite approaches: the first was a positive revealing of the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values, whereas the second direction definitely consisted of a negative development of it. Shestov himself acknowledged such a legacy, also with 27 Yet, in the same passage, Shestov also reminds us that it was not from Nietzsche that Merezhkovskii learned the art of aphorism along with its idea that no unity is ever possible in thought. 28 It is interesting to observe how, in his criticism of Merezhkovskii’s “aestheticism,” Shestov treats his argumentation almost on an entirely aesthetic level—as he rarely did on other occasions. As an expert on opera and a lyric singer himself (and this is one of the rare cases in which he gives proof of his knowledge in this field), Shestov advances a number of examples concerning opera singing technique to describe, by analogy, Merezhkovskii’s pretense to be what he is not and to achieve what he is not able to achieve (cf. Shestov 4/2000 [A1], 601–602). The epigraph by Paul Verlaine that he puts at the beginning of this article is also highly meaningful in this regard: “De la musique avant toute chose. . . . Et tout le reste est littérature” [Music before everything. And all the rest is literature]. It seems as if, at the beginning of his career as a literary critic, Shestov immediately chose something else, i.e., “music,” to state that he did not want to follow those like Merezhkovskii in such formal and “artificial” literary criticism. 29 See, on this, the convincing thesis of Geneviève Piron, for whom the disputes and divergence with Merezhkovskii “seem to have pushed Shestov to redefine his conception of faith and religion” (Piron [B2], 54).

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

a noticeable detachment from Nietzsche,30 when he told Fondane that the book was “a Nietzschean book, which even imitated Nietzsche’s flaws” because Merezhkovskii “used to speak of God in the same way as Nietzsche named the ‘Anti-Christ,’ with a loud voice, with shouts, with anger. . . . But Nietzsche was already half crazy when he wrote about the ‘Anti-Christ.’ Nevertheless, in the crazy Nietzsche, there was still Nietzsche” (Fondane [B1], 89). Therefore, through Merezhkovskii’s example, Shestov identifies where he does not want to go. He does not long for a purely aesthetic taste and for the formal side of art: in fact, he sees the risks of becoming too familiar with an “aestheticized” tragic conscience, and thus forgetting the fight and the fundamentally uncomfortable position that is given by tragedy. In other words, if aesthetics is connected to truth it cannot be the same as Merezhkovskii’s truth. He probably also acknowledges, in this case, what differentiates him [Shestov] from Nietzsche or from certain results of Nietzscheanism. He sees what art should not be and what religion equally should not be. Merezhkovskii appears here to be Shestov’s antipode just like Tolstoi-the-moralist was Nietzsche’s antipode. It is likely that Shestov saw on this occasion how important it was to remain still on the negative side of truth: in reading what he considered to be Merezhkovskii’s complete distortion of Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, albeit based on the same premises he had assumed for himself, he understood the perils of any positive stance, even if it were a “positive Nietzscheanism.” This article “Vlastʹ idei” [The Power of Ideas] was subsequently included in the book The Apotheosis of Groundlessness. But when the book was translated into French, Shestov decided not to translate and insert this article. He explained the reason in this way: “For what purpose? After all, we are two Russian writers in exile. It might have done him wrong” (Fondane [B1], 90). 2. In 1902, Shestov was planning his fourth book. He collected sufficient material for it and, following the model of his second and third work, he decided to once again draw a parallel between two authors: in this case, Turgenev

30 At some point, Shestov mentions the fact that he and Merezhkovskii relate to different works of Nietzsche: Merezhkovskii relates to the late and most dogmatic ones, whereas Shestov relates to the middle-period and nondogmatic works (cf. Shestov 4/2000 [A1], 604–605). Cf. also Piron: “In attacking Merezhkovskii, Shestov engages his fight against a dominant aspect of the ‘Religious renaissance’ culture of his time: the tendency to create concepts and schemes, polarized oppositions, and multiple syntheses requiring that the theoretical corpus of Russian symbolism resembles less to philosophy than to theology” (Piron [B2], 53).

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and Chekhov.31 At some point, however, as he explained in the preface of his Apotheosis, Shestov changed his mind, abandoned the essayistic form and turned to an aphoristic style. While he would use all the pages he had already written on Chekhov both in Apotheosis and in his subsequent article on him,32 he put aside most of the material on Turgenev that was contained in a 146-page manuscript. This manuscript was published in original Russian language only in 1982, by the publisher Ardis in Ann Arbor (Michigan, US), with the simple title Turgenev (see Shestov 23/1982 [A2]), whereas Shestov’s own interest in Turgenev seemed to fade away over the years.33 Shestov’s view of Turgenev is negative. He recalls that Dostoevskii and Tolstoi also had such critical opinions on him and in his analysis he constantly contrasts the two writers with Turgenev. For Shestov, in the history of Russian literature Turgenev is the only one who “adjusted” Pushkin, in that he tried to move the tragic view that emerged from Pushkin’s realism onto a more reassuring level. In this regard, Turgenev, the inventor of the lishnii chelovek [the superfluous man]—Shestov says—, is the one who turned tragedy into farce; the one who introduced the word “use” (polʹza) in literary realism to provide “an explanation for any given horror and even for murder” (13). In Shestov’s view, Turgenev’s role in Russian literature is fundamentally one of having “betrayed”

31 Shestov’s intention of writing a book entitled “Turgenev and Chekhov” before transforming it into The Apotheosis of Groundlessness is also confirmed by Ivanov-Razumnik (see IvanovRazumnik [B3], 229). Oleg Ermishin interpreted Shestov’s decision to abandon this book project as a crucial passage in the development of his future method of writing, which will find a definitive form with the work Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1936): see O. T. Ermishin, “Metod Lˈva Shestova” (in Ermichëv [B2], 56–72). 32 See the next section dedicated to Shestov’s essay on Chekhov. 33 Although this publication was issued as a single volume, it cannot be considered as a proper “book” in Shestov’s bibliography as it is made of excerpts and fragments that were conceived for another book, as mentioned earlier, on Turgenev and Chekhov. This manuscript (Ms. 2102, file 10, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris), which is not exempt from gaps and redacted pages, bears the date July 31, 1903, the title Apofeoz bespochvennosti (which Shestov would use for his subsequent and definitive version), and two epigraphs in French and in German: “Résigne-toi mon coeur, dors ton sommeil de brute” [Resign yourself, my heart, sleep your brutish sleep] (Baudelaire), and “Nur für die Schwindelfreie” [Only for the Vertigo-Free] (a sign on alpine trails). This text (later published in its entirety in 1982) is not only about Turgenev but also contains long digressions on—among others—Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Kant, and the Greek philosophers. Shestov included about one-third of this text in The Apotheosis of Groundlessness. On the complex history of the publication of Apotheosis and on what was omitted from it, including large parts of this manuscript on Turgenev, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 81–83.

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

the true Russian realism, so well expressed in Tolstoi’s War and Peace, so as to finally serve the “European spirit.” It is evident—Shestov writes—that Turgenev adhered to that opinion according to which to every tragedy must follow a farce, and this must be the essence of the worldview. It is equally evident that Turgenev was not alone in his opinion, but that he had the entire European philosophy, or better, the entire European civilization behind him. Turgenev was the most educated, the most cultured of Russian writers. He spent almost all his life beyond the border and absorbed everything that the enlightened West could offer [ . . . ]. He deeply believed that only knowledge, that is to say, European science, could open man’s eyes and explain everything that required an explanation. (10–11)

It is from this perspective, Shestov adds, that one must consider Turgenev’s attacks on Lev Tolstoi. For Turgenev, a true artist should fully draw on Western knowledge in order to find and represent true freedom. His faith in Europe, in European values as well as in the “formal” content of Western knowledge (“Turgenev—Shestov writes—was seduced above all by the external organization of Europe” [19]), is Turgenev’s most characteristic trait according to Shestov. This faith in and seduction of the possibility of finding the “last word” on the greatest problems of humanity—the meaning of suffering, of life, and the existence of God—was the reason why he sacrificed his art to a reasonable message that could help humanity. Unlike Dostoevskii and even Tolstoi, he searched for wisdom rather than for truth. “Nonetheless Turgenev—Shestov observes—while he remained a convinced ‘Westernizer’ almost until his death, he ultimately did not manage to become completely European, although he wished this with all his heart and was in the most favorable condition to achieve it” (15). He fought with his nature as an artist, he had doubts: a number of “odd” novels (Shestov names: Prizraki [Visions], Sobaka [The Dog], and Dovolʹno [Enough]) are proof of his uneasiness.34 For Shestov, “Enough” is a variant of some verses of the Shakespearean Macbeth: “But how far Turgenev is from Shakespeare’s soul! He does not feel within himself the same terror he 34 In particular, Shestov pinpoints in Turgenev’s novel The Old Woman [Starukha] (1878) the place of the writer’s crisis. In this text, for Shestov, Turgenev develops in a better way what he was not able to bring to an end in “Enough.” Also, for Shestov, the tragedy that had always become a comedy in Turgenev’s works, in “The Old Woman” became a “tragedy” once again (cf. Shestov 23/1982 [A2]), 109).

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admires in the horrors described by Shakespeare [ . . . ] His tale is well written, but it is weak and lifeless” (24). Shestov’s analysis of Turgenev fully reflects his main interests from his first two books: the meaning of Shakespeare’s tragedies, the Kantian and “European” philosophical solution to the existential horrors of life, the controversial relationship between Russia and the West, and above all the idea that there is a tragic truth that only an unconscious but true art can display. But then, for the sake of a more comfortable life, the reason suppresses this truth, so that even gifted writers—like Turgenev—are convinced to sell their soul to the devil in order to achieve that comfort. A good part of this text on Turgenev, in fact, is dedicated to these subjects: to Kant, Hegel, Socrates, and Western science. With all his doubts and torments, Turgenev could never really express his own “Confession” as Tolstoi did (cf. 34–35):35 “He was obliged to choose between the prevailing ideas and his life [ . . . ]. He did not find in himself the strength to fight against science, and he sacrificed his life” (33–34). A striking example of this choice, in Shestov’s opinion, is the essay “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” in which “Turgenev moves Hamlet from the real to the ideal world” (73). For Turgenev, Hamlet and in some way also Don Quixote are mere “types,” ideal types that have nothing to do with the real life. The “superfluous man,” for Shestov, is also a type (94). The general impression this unfinished text gives—especially because of its long digressions—is that, for Shestov, the figure of Turgenev was above all a magnet for other (to him) more relevant questions he wanted to treat: from the intellectual relationship between Russia and the West to the meaning of Russian literature with respect to this relationship (including here a better understanding of the real nature of Pushkin, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi), to a criticism of Kantian moral philosophy. For a number of reasons, in Shestov’s view Turgenev was a point of both convergence and divergence for all these questions rather than an interesting writer per se (like Tolstoi, Dostoevskii, and Chekhov unquestionably were). It is no surprise, then, that he abandoned the project and used part of this material for his book Apotheosis.

35 Curiously, there is little trace in this essay of the “preacher Tolstoi” Shestov was so critical of in his book on him. Tolstoi is here described as the diametrical opposite of Turgenev, as an authentic artist who found the courage to break away from all the literary traditions and describe life just as it was.

CHAPTER II    Art As Negativity: The Literary Criticism Years (1901–1910)

2.3 Creatio ex Nihilo: Chekhov’s Aesthetics Shestov’s essay on Chekhov was originally intended as the second part of his unfinished book Turgenev and Chekhov, in which Chekhov was the most authentic artist and the antithesis of Turgenev. Although some references to Chekhov can be found in The Apotheosis of Groundlessness—which means Shestov’s interest in Chekhov began earlier—, this specific text was probably written in 1904 (the year of Chekhov’s death) and immediately after Shestov finished writing his fourth book (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 94). The text appeared as an article in 1905 in Voprosy zhizni—a journal that was issued only in 1905 and appeared immediately after the suspension of Novyi putˈ.36 These two journals gathered all the most important intellectuals from that time as well as the main protagonists of the Russian Silver Age: from S. Bulgakov and N.  Berdyaev, to D. Merezhkovskii, V. Rozanov, S. Frank, A. Blok, V. Ivanov, F. Sologub, A. Belyi, E. Trubetskoi, V. Bryusov, and many others. Considering the importance that the figure of Chekhov had and the fact that this article was published in full view of the cream of the Russian intellectual milieu, it did not actually receive much attention. The reason for this might be that this work was probably considered as the last subjective “Shestovian interpretation” in which the author’s work was completely absorbed by Shestov’s thought. With a multifaceted writer like Chekhov, this tendency of Shestov’s must have been felt in this case to be even more troubling than in other circumstances.37 However, in the years that followed this essay also received some notably positive mentions and some surprising judgments. In his study on Shestov of 1911, Boris Griftsov maintained that “this article establishes the most correct point of view on Chekhov [ . . . ] with striking subtlety, he traces in Chekhov the latter’s veracity and hopelessness” (Griftsov [B3], 184). Even more significantly, in 1935, Ivan Bunin acknowledged Shestov’s essay to be one of the best ever written about Chekhov.38 In recent years, a few critical studies have been devoted to this essay.39 Indeed, in tackling a figure such as Chekhov, 36 Lev I. Shestov, “Tvorchestvo iz nichego” [Creation from Nothing], Voprosy zhizni 3 (1905): 101–141, included in Shestov 5/1908 (A1). 37 This is also evidenced by Olga Tabachnikova’s analysis in Tabachnikova 2012b (B3), 184–186. 38 As Bunin writes: “Shestov’s article is one of the best on Chekhov, whom Shestov names a ruthless talent” (Bunin [C], 226). In English: Ivan A. Bunin, About Chekhov: The Unfinished Symphony, trans. Thomas Gaiton Marullo, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 65. 39 See, in particular, the essays contained in Tabachnikova 2012b (B3): Andrei Stepanov, “Lev Shestov on Chekhov” (169–174); Olga Tabachnikova, “Between Tragedy and Aesthetics:

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Shestov’s uncompromising and rigid position may raise many problems and create a fecund contrast. Needless to say, Shestov’s view of Chekhov is—in the same way, in fact, as with all the authors he commented on—biased and limited to a single point of view. The editorial team of Voprosy zhizni even wanted to put a note to “warn” the reader about the fact that his interpretation of Chekhov was strongly influenced by the “skepticism of the author” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 117). In point of fact, his “subjective critique” (as Geneviève Piron defines it)40 is never directed towards an objective understanding of the literary text. From the latter, he instead takes the “pieces” he wants so as to build his own philosophy, always with his style of “speaking indirectly.”41 As Andrei Stepanov argues in a recent study on this article, “among Chekhov’s characters, Shestov is primarily interested in those who find themselves in desperate situations and had to create ‘from nothing:’ Professor Nikolai Stepanovich, Ivanov, Laevskii, Voinitskii, Kovrin” (cf. Stepanov [B3], 170). Nonetheless, he continues: “The concept of ‘creation from nothing’ assumes the necessity to live, think, feel, and act in someone who is totally disillusioned with the rational ideas which hitherto framed his or her existence” (170). In this regard, Stepanov adds, “Shestov turns out to be only superficially close to Chekhov, for the latter managed to stretch the domain of portrayed social contradictions (in the broadest sense), and to deepen them to include those common to all mankind” (171). Leaving aside the thorny problem of Shestov’s adherence to the literary text—whose task, as stated before, he was obviously not pursuing—this essay on Chekhov has a particularly relevant meaning for comprehending Shestov’s philosophy, and especially for his conception of art. He himself seemed to have acknowledged this when, in a letter to his sister Fanya, who had some difficulty in understanding the book Apotheosis, he suggested she read this article on Chekhov, in which the same philosophical content as that in the book was presented in a simpler and more coherent Shestov’s Reading of Chekhov—A Gaze Directed Within” (175–197); Savely Senderovich, “Shestov-Chekhov, Chekhov-Shestov” (199–217); Svetlana Evdokimova, “Philosophy’s Enemies: Chekhov and Shestov” (219–245). 40 On this, see also a specific article by Geneviève Piron: “Lev Šestov et la critique subjective” (Piron 2003 [B3]). 41 On Shestov’s method of “speaking indirectly” and its effects on his aesthetics, see also an illuminating article by Geneviève Piron: “Aux Sources de l’inspiration: Chestov et l’esthétique (à partir des carnets de notes inédits)” (Piron 2007 [B3]). In this text, Piron analyzes Shestov’s unpublished book notes to reconstruct an intimate bond between his style and the content of his writing. As a result, one can see the importance of speaking indirectly, of not indulging in “aesthetic temptation,” and of the hidden meaning of Shestov’s many recurring expressions, which are never casual or detached from a previous context.

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way (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 98). As Svetlana Evdokimova remarks, Shestov “is one of the first readers of Chekhov, along with V. V. Rozanov and S. N. Bulgakov, who sees in Chekhov not only a great artist, but also a philosopher, although a philosopher of a peculiar kind” (Evdokimova [B3], 221).42 This is, in fact, Shestov’s approach to Chekhov: he aims at finding in Chekhov the hidden roots of a universal aesthetic truth, and of an implicit connection between art and life. But the first step in Shestov’s philosophical quest is to find out what “true art” is. While in his analyses of Merezhkovskii and Turgenev, he had already evidenced the opposite, that is, the inauthenticity of art, with Chekhov he can finally pass to the truthful side of the same subject. 2. In the same way as he had found support in Nietzsche and Dostoevskii to uncover the deceit of morals and philosophy, Shestov now relies on Chekhov to unmask the deceit of art. At the beginning of his article, he claims that critics usually see in Chekhov “the knight of pure art,” that is, of art that is devoid of any duty and finality. But such a perspective is as misleading as that of the 1860s critics who judged an artist’s talent merely on the basis of the notions expressed in his or her works. According to Shestov, it is noteworthy that a critic from that generation, Nikolai Mikhailovskii, is one of the very few to have warned the readers about Chekhov. For Mikhailovskii, Shestov observes, Chekhov’s eyes, as it were, reflected “evil sparks”—there was no “purity” in his art, but a precise awareness of a fundamental negativity of life. Mikhailovskii was right—as Shestov remarks—although nobody at that point believed his words anymore: he was outmoded and overtaken by a new generation of critics. For Shestov, in fact, in all his works Chekhov does no more than mislead his readers: he first makes the reader foretaste the triumph of human hopes, but then he inexorably annihilates them one by one in a subtle and therefore even more relentless way. “Art, science, love, inspiration, ideals, the future—select all the words with which humanity is, or has been in the past, consoling or amusing itself— Chekhov has only to touch them so that they fade, wither and die in a moment. Chekhov himself pales under our eyes: he withers and dies” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 186). For Shestov, Chekhov is the “poet of hopelessness” (185). Although 42 As Evdokimova puts it: “Shestov is one of the first readers to point out that Chekhov’s characters experience existential crises, that they are alienated characters who struggle with hopelessness and absurdity, and he senses that Chekhov, along with Dostoevskii, developed positions which were existentialist in all but name” (Evdokimova [B3], 225). Evdokimova’s essay offers an interesting parallel between Shestov and Chekhov, with some concordance and various, more relevant, discordances.

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the critics do not recognize such cruelty, his works speak with clarity. Between 1887 and 1889, Chekhov writes two dramatic stories that inaugurate this tragic path: “Ivanov” and “Skuchnaya istoriya” [A boring story]. It is precisely from these two works that the Shestovian reading of Chekhov starts. The protagonist of “Ivanov” is a young landowner; that of “A Boring Story” is an old professor: both find themselves at a turning point in their lives. They make a break with their past and suddenly discover they have no purpose in life. They are useless to life and to society. But in the awareness of their uselessness, they discover another more precious truth. As happened to Tolstoi’s Ivan Ilʹich, they move from being the mediocre people they were before, to now becoming capable of understanding their situation in depth. The novel The Death of Ivan Ilʹich, according to Shestov, is in fact the model of the late Chekhovian output with regard to this notion of “uselessness.” This new truth is the consciousness that what is most precious for people coincides with what is declared useless and meaningless by the world. In Shestov’s view, this truth also reveals the meaning of human tragedy: the absurd fight between that truth claiming one’s rights and the world that ignores that claim. “A Boring Story” is for Shestov the beginning and symbol of Chekhov’s most mature phase. Shestov’s passion for this tale is close to that of both Lev Tolstoi and Thomas Mann.43 In this work, Shestov observes, the themes of isolation, incommunicability, and disenchantment with life are treated with an extreme clarity. These are, for him, characteristic features of all Chekhov’s oeuvre, which in Russia are grouped under the expression “Chekhovskoe nastroenie” [Chekhovian state of mind]. In the tale, professor Nikolai Stepanovich experiences the total lack of meaning in his life. He loses confidence in his vocation and perceives an ongoing feeling of apathy towards life that with a typically Chekhovian term—Shestov says—is called “bezdarnost’,” namely “mediocrity,” or a sense of “opacity” of existence. His only friendship is with his former student, Katya, a failed actress, as disillusioned by life as he, who cannot give him a single word of hope, to the point that the two fall into a total lack of communication and, at the end of the story, say a cold and detached goodbye to each other. In Shestov’s description, 43 It seems that after a period of aversion to Chekhov, thanks to this tale Tolstoi changed his mind. This episode is reported in Alexander B. Goldenweiser, Vblizi Tolstogo, vol. 1 (Moscow: Kooperat. Izd., 1922), 71. On Thomas Mann’s predilection for “A Boring Story,” see Thomas Mann, “The Stature of Anton Chekhov,” The New Republic, May 16, 1955, https://newrepublic.com/article/78215/the-stature-anton-chekhov. “‘A Boring Story’,” Mann writes, “is my favorite among all Chekhov’s stories, an outstandingly fascinating work which for gentleness, sadness, and strangeness has no equal in the literary world” (ibid.).

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professor Nikolai Stepanovich seems to become progressively extraneous to himself and to his past life, as if nothing that happened before is of value to him any more: “He feels with clarity [ . . . ] as if he has become a criminal, although he did not commit any crime” (190). With Chekhov, Shestov seems to repeat what he had already said about Nietzsche, Heine, and all those people who, at a certain point in their lives, found themselves on the fringes of society, in their own “underground,” not because they had committed a crime, but precisely because they did not commit any. In fact, for once, they have been sincere and honest with themselves. With Chekhov real life comes into play. He gives voice to the defeat without a remedy as well as to those stories for which it is meaningless for any narration to exist. There is no utility in Chekhov’s stories, Shestov implies: but it is here that its authenticity lies. This is, for Shestov, Chekhov’s art: “the decomposition of a living organism” (194). He aspires to “create from nothing” according to a process that is unnatural in appearance only. He takes away from his characters all hope and any escape from desperation: “nonetheless they live, they do not die at all” (197). Chekhov enacts a living, permanent contradiction: “Creation from nothing or rather the possibility of creating out of the void is the only problem that is capable of occupying and inspiring Chekhov” (201). For Shestov, all the characters in the Seagull reflect better than any others the Chekhovian state of mind: they talk, think, and act all in the same wamy “as if the same, deaf and monotone rhythm of daily existence put their conscience and will to sleep” (212). By means of this destruction, for Shestov, art can be transformed in real life. It is there, in that point of refusal, between narrative and reality, that art opens a breach into the reality of things. The usual mind is capable of accepting and including in its knowledge a positive or a negative sign of reality: but it cannot tolerate a view that excludes both, it cannot tolerate contradiction. Chekhov tells the story of those beings for whom “it is impossible to accept reality, but it is also impossible not to accept it” (208). Once again, Shestov puts the issue of contradiction at the center of his reflection. In the same way as contradiction was at the heart of his philosophy of tragedy, it is now the crucial point of his aesthetics of tragedy. The “nothing” he talks about with regard to Chekhov is something that excludes the opposite extremes while joining them in an unresolvable aporia. As he himself pointed out in his letter to his sister Fanya, this essay on Chekhov is extremely important to better understanding the idea of bespochvennostʹ. The same connection Shestov had found, through Nietzsche, between truth and nothing—an idea that would be so fruitful for Heidegger, starting precisely from his rereading

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of Nietzsche—is also revealed here between art and nothingness. If art has to do with truth, it must originally have also had a relationship with nothing. Shestov’s “nothing” is a necessary and structural (i.e., not casual or circumstantial) impossibility of meaning.44 This might not be correct for Chekhov, or at least philologically speaking or in the absolute terms in which Shestov puts it. But it is certainly true for Shestov, in that he establishes—through Chekhov— his own aesthetics. Out of the “underground,” out of contradiction, according to Shestov, a “true art” cannot exist. On the contrary, where meaning is not possible, in life or in art, there is truth. This indeed might appear as a different truth from the truth of Western rationality, with its dogmas of the law of noncontradiction and the principle of identity. But the same Western logos, for Shestov, must have a “before” in a foundation that cannot have the same rationality. This deeply Neoplatonic assumption is implicitly present from now in the Shestovian conscience, but it will be fully discovered in the years immediately after this essay on Chekhov. Shestov’s entire investigation is directed at this furthest region of being, that is, that of a second dimension of being itself, with the only instrument he has: rationality. That rationality, however, at a certain point will itself be a copy of a higher truth which has no need of such a rational foundation. This will be the main Plotinian teaching Shestov will pursue in his search for truth.45

2.4 The “Oracular” Gratuity of Sologub’s Prose and Poetry Shestov’s study on Fëdor Sologub has always been among those least reviewed by critics.46 This may seem surprising as this essay is one of the few in which Shestov expresses his aesthetic thought in the most positive way, taking a precise position without hiding behind the screen of logical negations. This was understood clearly perhaps only by Andrei Belyi, who saw a precise demarcation between the book Beginnings and Endings and Shestov’s previous works, which—as he significantly wrote—“many of us did not appreciate” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 159). In this collection, and in particular in the essays on Chekhov, 44 In an aphorism from The Apotheosis of Groundlessness entirely dedicated to Chekhov (no. 30, first part), Shestov posits this direct correspondence between Chekhov’s art and the truth of life, which is a totally tragic truth. 45 On this and the philosophical problem of truth, see, in particular, the essay “What Is Truth?” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 365–402) that is almost entirely constructed as a comment on Plotinus. 46 Lev I. Shestov, “Poeziya i proza Fëdora Sologuba,” Rechʹ 139, May 24, 1909, 2–3. Later included in the book The Great Vigils (see Shestov 6/2007 [A1], 219–233).

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Sologub, and Ibsen, Belyi saw a new and different leitmotif: “Shestov asserts the freedom of creativity: everything lies in the sphere of creativity—philosophy, logic, art, religion; the one who creates is right and, in creating, she or he wins” (159). In a way, and especially after reading the essay on Sologub, Belyi was not far from the truth in thinking that he could possibly include Shestov among the followers of symbolism. With his analysis on Chekhov, in fact, it finally became clear to Shestov that the fact that beauty could save the world was no longer in question, but rather the opposite, that is, that it could deceive it. But since not everybody has the “luck” to be able to find a solution under the influence of that deceit, and Chekhov was one of those who could not, he was obliged to tell the tragic truth: that is, no beauty could ever save the world. This was Shestov’s final truth about Chekhov, and about the “evil sparks” that Mikhailovskii glimpsed in his eyes—Chekhov discovered the “nothingness” of life and of art; he exhibited tragedy, the real tragedy, without embellishments or justifications. In this way, for Shestov, the origin of everything, as well as the origin of art, could not be anything other than “nothingness,” for every authentic creation should be a creatio ex nihilo. In his writing on Sologub, however, Shestov gives the impression of aiming at overcoming this consideration. Perhaps being influenced for a brief lapse of time by the symbolist movement, he wonders what the real nature of poetry and, by extension, of art is, and what is left of it beyond the conscient will of the artist. In other words, is art a pure means of communication, solidly in the hands of the writer, like an essay or a rational speech, or is it something different, something independent from the writer, like a source and oracle of a truth? When Shestov wrote this article, Fëdor Sologub’s fame in Russia had reached its apex.47 This was due, above all, to his most famous novel The Petty Demon [Melkii bes] that was published in a standalone edition in 1907. The novel became immediately popular and had numerous printings during the author’s lifetime. Shestov became interested in Sologub possibly for a number of reasons: in the first place, because Sologub frequented the same Petersburgian literary group as him (among others: N. Minskii, D. Merezhkovskii, Z. Gippius, A. Remizov, A. Blok, and V. Ivanov), and in the second place because his “Karamazovian” novel The Petty Demon was without doubt close to Shestov’s 47 Fëdor Sologub is the pseudonym of Fëdor Kuzmich Teternikov (1863–1927). Sologub began his career at the end of the 1890s writing poems and short stories mainly for the journals Severnyi vestnik and Sever. He is mostly remembered for the novel The Petty Demon, but during his life he published various genres: poems, short stories, fairy tales, novels, plays, and translations.

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sensitivity, and the critic Ivanov-Razumnik had acknowledged such an affinity in his 1908 volume that, in fact, drew a parallel between Sologub and Shestov (along with Andreev). Shestov’s study on Sologub reflects, therefore, this particular time in which he was trying to make a career in literary criticism, for he was interested in symbolistic issues and attended the literary meetings attracting poets, artists, and actors at Vyacheslav Ivanov’s “tower” (i.e., his house in St. Petersburg), the famous “Ivanov’s Wednesdays,” and also the “Sundays” at Sologub’s house. The appreciation obtained by an outside-the-box writer like Sologub was surprising to Shestov. He wondered how it was possible that a novel of such absolute cruelty was capable of being approved by a vast audience. In fact, the novel’s antihero, the morally corrupt Peredonov, is one of the most evident examples of Russian “poshlostʹ,” that is, a particularly negative character, in this case an insane and paranoid personality with no chance of redemption.48 But for Shestov it is Sologub’s prose as a whole that is brutal and repugnant, like the “scream of a beast.” In this sense, as Shestov observes, if Pushkin is the poet of reconciliation and relief, Sologub must definitely be something else: “He does not have the gift of tears. His sparkling eyes are dry: no humidity covers them,” but rather “he screams with no reason” (Shestov 6/2007 [A1], 220). His Petty Demon is worse than the scream of a beast: “Throughout this copious novel, professor Peredonov let himself indulge in an uninterrupted series of so many senseless and repugnant actions as to make even the contemporary reader—who is used to the most extreme manifestations of a realism without restraint—turn his or her head away” (221). Shestov describes the feeling given by this novel as “inebriating vapours” [oduryayushchie pary] and he suspects that Sologub’s intention is precisely that of consuming the reader with such a “vapour.” There is something peculiar in Sologub, which makes Shestov think that he is not the one who chooses what he writes. In a poem, Sologub depicts himself as an executioner who is forced by a divine curse to accomplish his death sentences: this fate, as Shestov puts it, must seem to him even worse than the fate of the condemned. It forces him to inflict unjustified and unexplainable tortures. “None of our writers—Shestov says—created such a heavy, dark, and suffocating atmosphere. And one wonders: why?” (224) It is evident to Shestov that Sologub is not the author of his own destiny: perhaps he is only the “spokesman,” or the intermediary, like the ancient interpreters of oracles 48 According to Dmitrii Mirskii, Peredonov became “the most famous and memorable character of Russian fiction since The Brothers Karamazov, and his name is now a byword of literary language. It stands for the incarnation of sullen evil [ . . . ] one of the most terrible figures ever created by a poet” (Mirsky [C], 200).

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were. Socrates, as Shestov argues, compared poets to oracles because they drew their truths from the unknown and they were often incapable of making a sense out of them. While many contemporary poets claim to be like oracles although they, in fact, establish their own consoling and innocuous truths, in Shestov’s view, Sologub is an authentic oracle because, for one thing, he would probably not be able to explain his revelations: “In his poems he does not speak, this is certain: he sings. I know no one else among the Russian poets whose verses are closer to music than those of Sologub [ . . . ]. He lives, he slowly kindles and he sings: his song is heartbreaking and desperate, sometimes consoling and desperate, but always of an enigmatic beauty” (225–226). Judging from his words, it seems that for Shestov there is no longer any question about the issue of the task of art, along with the possibility and the ways in which it may relate to truth. Here Shestov is apparently facing something he had not thought of before: namely, that art is not merely a means of truth—a truth that, through Chekhov, he sees in the absolute demystification and, ultimately, in nothingness—but that art has its origin in truth. Artistic creation, in its essence, is not bound to any relationship of causality and to any will: it is, then, unconscious creation and absolute freedom. It is, thus, related to a different truth from the one we are familiar with: the crazy truth of the poet is something that seems extraneous and disquieting to other people. These people ponder the why of such a truth and they would like to show the poet the “usual beauty” and the light of this world, but the “obstinate” poet remains still in the same place. As Shestov puts it: “While reading Sologub, the ordinary man sometimes feels a fit of rage. First the inebriant vapours, then this enigmatic stillness: how can Apollon give his benediction to such works?” (233). In this case, poetry appears to be something completely different from that world of meaning so familiar to anyone. In poetry Sologub loses himself; in the oblivion of consciousness, the word he pronounces becomes meaningful per se. It no longer needs to relate to something known. On the contrary, it appears as an autonomous and free voice of the unspeakable. It becomes, thereby, an oracle. In his analysis of Sologub, Shestov takes a step forward with respect to the notion of realism he reached with Chekhov. He acknowledges that in Sologub’s prose and poetry a sort of theatrum veritatis is displayed: that is, a place in which art reveals itself as an original and ungrounded expression. But precisely by virtue of its groundlessness, art is finally freed from truth itself. In the end, art does not have to answer to anything or anyone—not even to truth. Shestov’s position, in this circumstance, is unusually close to an “art for art’s sake aesthetics” and possibly to a symbolistic poetics—no wonder then

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that a personality like Andrei Belyi was impressed by this “new view” that he (or “we,” as he said, referring to his whole generation of symbolist poets) had not seen in the works preceding Beginnings and Endings. What is the source, Shestov wonders in conclusion, of that which is not merely explainable with a realist tendency of making art according to reality? Whence does it originate? At the end of his article, Shestov once again revives the question of Sologub’s art as an unsolvable enigma. The last word is the poet’s word. Art begins where any rational speech ends. As Shestov concludes: “We must go back to Socrates. Sologub is . . . an oracle. His prose does not originate from realism, but from inebriant vapours, his poetry, like the responses of Pythia, is an eternal and torturing enigma. There is in it a wonderful music whose meaning neither he nor his readers are asked to guess” (233). For Shestov, the highest value of art lies in a poetry that is capable of transforming itself into music, and it is there that his aesthetics finds an egress from logos and its own place of truth.49 While this work on Sologub will leave no lasting trace in Shestov’s late output—mainly because it belonged to a literary phase he would soon abandon—it is nonetheless relevant to his personal investigation on the nature and meaning of art. In this regard, it marks the transition between the acknowledgment of the autonomous (“oracular”) truth-value of art and its final destiny, that is, its ultimate conflict with life. Shestov will deal with this question in his longer and more substantial study on Ibsen, whose tragic conclusion—consisting of the conflict itself—he had already anticipated in 1905, in an aphorism from The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (see aphorism no. 46, first part).

2.5 Ibsen and the Destiny of Art The “oracular” gratuity of art is the last of Shestov’s discoveries and the point where his thought comes closer to the stances of symbolism. Art is an oracle and pure art descends directly from truth. But truth, as Shestov abundantly 49 Generally speaking, when Shestov uses the word “art,” he primarily means literature (and more particularly poetry) and music, which represented the artistic fields of which he had a better knowledge. He almost never or entirely never referred to other arts, including painting. Cf., on this, Evgeniya Getsyk: “Later, in my countless conversations with Shestov, I noticed that the art perceived by the eye did not exist for him: he never mentioned a single painting. Only music and the word could reach him” (Gertsyk [B1], 101). In this particular sequence (i.e., prose literature, poetry, and music) a sort of purification of art itself from reason to pure inspiration seems to occur for him. When he mentions “music”—and this does not actually happen frequently—the tone of his discourse generally reaches a particular degree of intensity, devoid of his typically logical negations and criticism.

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affirmed in his works, is decay and an abyss. It is, as it were, a deep night where no light is visible. Artists, as oracles, cannot avoid expressing that truth “from nothing.” Shestov devoted a large part of his efforts to this specific question, in particular on Henrik Ibsen, in the years between 1906 and 1910. His interest in the works of Ibsen is also corroborated by Evgeniya Gertsyk who remembered how, in the years immediately following the publication of The Great Vigils, he was still speaking passionately about the Norwegian writer (see Gertsyk [B1], 109).50 All these efforts converged in a long essay entitled “Victories and Defeats: The Life and Work of Henrik Ibsen” [Pobedy i porazheniya. Zhiznʹ i tvorchestvo Genrikha Ibsena].51 As is stated in the title, all Ibsen’s work is interpreted as a long series of triumphs alternated with defeats; honors and victories, but also tributes to pay because of those wins. Most of all, Shestov sees in Ibsen’s life trajectory a long, grueling fight with himself. According to Shestov, after his 1849 debut with the play Catiline, Ibsen went through a deep crisis as a result of which he lost confidence in everything, even in his writing skills or in his ability to have something to tell others and a meaning to display through his works. But suddenly, after eight years of more or less failed attempts, something happened and a man “who had no voice, suddenly starts to sing,” and he appears to be capable of doing so with strength and inspiration. He starts “singing” the heroes’ exploits, the mystery of life and death, the joys and pains, and the beauty of the North. Thanks to this art, Shestov says, “the ancient Vikings revive in front of us and transform our dull and sad life” (Shestov 6/2007 [A1], 124). Ibsen seems to have found his “muse”: he writes The Vikings at Helgeland (1858), the inspired song of a skald (i.e., a poet who composed at the Scandinavian courts during the Viking era), Ernulf, who becomes aware of his powers. In a single day, he lost all his sons and has fallen into a deep desperation. But when his daughter reminds him that he still has an important mission to accomplish, since, as a scald, he must honor the memory of his sons with a song, the old man starts to sing, first with a feeble voice but then his song becomes louder and is capable of removing the darkness around him. From this moment on, for Shestov, Ibsen perceives 50 “I especially remember with what passion in one of those meetings he [Shestov] was speaking about Ibsen emphasizing his cherished topic: it is the most horrible and deadly thing for a man to abandon the woman he loves for the sake of an idea, or duty. To abandon a woman, i.e., life, which is deeper than the meaning of life [ . . . ]. From this idea, his essay on Ibsen developed” (Gertsyk [B1], 109). 51 This essay first appeared in Russkaya myslʹ 4 (April 1910): 1–30; and 5 (May 1910): 1–38. It was then included in The Great Vigils (Shestov 6/1911 [A1]).

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himself in the same way as Ernulf, as a king or a prophet: “The word has come and a great secret was revealed [ .  .  . ]. The gods send men misfortune and affliction so that poets can find a subject for their stories” (127). For Shestov, Ibsen was tormented for a long time as to whether to follow this inspiration or, on the contrary, represent real life. His works Love’s Comedy (1862) and The Pretenders (1863) would mainly reflect his doubts. But the prophetic voice was not yet extinct in him and the time to make it come out arrived with his poem Brand (1866), followed by an equally ambitious work Emperor and Galilean (1873). This was, according to Shestov, Ibsen’s “great season,” the one in which his art spoke out with a clear and recognizable voice. In that time, he said, it was no longer the Muse who appeared to Ibsen, “but God in person, who sent him the gift of affliction [ . . . ]. And when the gift of being a poet comes from God, the gift of being a prophet comes even more from Him!” (147) But, in Shestov’s view, after Emperor and Galilean something changes in Ibsen: the big themes slowly vanish and even though his public loves his works, he seems to be deeply disappointed with himself. The play Ghosts (1881) is a turning point in this regard: people were offended by it. Ibsen said more than once that his task was not to give answers but to raise questions. For Shestov, the whole second part of Ibsen’s oeuvre, starting from Ghosts and ending with When We Dead Awaken (1899), is incomprehensible for anyone who does not want to listen to that previous indication. He underwent an upside down metamorphosis: from a teacher he became a shy student; from a bold prophet, a weak and lost person. This is his story that began with victories [pobedy], which then turned into defeats [porazheniya]. This is the curve of his art that sprang into the light of the day and suddenly fell into a dark night with no return. He discovers in his mature age that nothing is left of the truths he received as a gift from the Muse. His own art, the same art for which he was named “the great Skald of the North,” which was first a solemn song and then a prophecy, now lives the defeat of the night, while on the other hand the big lie of his art still triumphs in the daylight with the approval of all. As Shestov writes: “Truth is in the throes of death. It is running out of time” (185). All Ibsen’s new heroes are quite different from the “prophet” Brand, who was always confident about himself and his mission. On the contrary, they know neither what they do, nor why: they go towards the unknown. They are forced to go there as the truths of before—the light, warmth, faith itself—are by now a faded memory. Even in the subsequent plays, Hedda Gabler (1890), The Master Builder (1892), and Little Eyolf (1894), even in the diversity of topics, there is always one same background: the hostility against and distaste for acknowledged values. In his

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own “night,” Ibsen discards everything that is considered useful or essential for people. On the contrary, he takes with him whatever is useless, feeble, and consumed: “Every sun—Shestov writes—, every source of light must be turned off: more exactly, it is turned off by Ibsen himself ” (204). In this regard, John Gabriel Borkman (1896) anticipates by of a couple of years the great conceptual core of Ibsen’s last work: When We Dead Awaken. For Shestov, this play was conceived as an epilogue and a reflection on the subject that absorbed Ibsen’s entire life: the relationship between art and life. The protagonist of When We Dead Awaken is an old sculptor, Rubek, who when he was young had a big dream: that of creating a work capable of representing the resurrection of the dead. He thus commits himself to a project called Resurrection, but at the same time he becomes uninterested in the woman who posed as a model for him for that work, Irena, and who gave him her “living soul.” He transferred in that work the living reality he had in front of him and a masterpiece came out of it. Years later, when he was rich and famous thanks to that work, he met her again. Irena now accuses him of having sacrificed his life to a work and of having “killed” her and himself in trying to set their deepest nature in stone once and for all. As Shestov argues, in the same way as Dostoevskii, Rubek had only one, big idea: resurrection, immortality. But at some point, in his youth, he changed his faith into a song and then into a prophecy, and then he wanted this prophecy to have a recognizable shape: he wanted to fix it forever in a work. But to fix truth in a work of art means to condemn it to death. It is for this reason— Shestov comments—that Irena says she and Rubek have already been dead for a long time: they are “corpses” who momentarily awake only to acknowledge they have never lived. As Shestov had asserted in an aphorism, “The Swan Song,” he published in the book Beginnings and Endings (1908), When We Dead Awaken is Ibsen’s best work: in it, “he recognizes and glorifies that which Gogolˈ had already done fifty years before. He gives up on his art and, with hatred and contempt, he recalls what once was the work of his life” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 251).52 For Shestov, it is when facing death that an artist discovers, just like swans, their best song—the last truth. It is there that Gogolˈ set fire to his best work, that Turgenev wrote his Senilia and that Ibsen composed his play When We Dead Awaken (cf. 252). In Shestov’s view, the last revelation of art is in a way its very 52 This text was part of a collection of aphorisms that appeared for the first time in 1907. See Lev I. Shestov, “Lebedinye pesni (ob Ibsene), Predposlednie slova” [The Swan Songs (on Ibsen), The Penultimate Words], Russkaya myslˈ 4 (April 1907): 159–185.

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death. If a link between art and truth exists, this must lie in the negation and dissolution of art itself. Shestov reads Ibsen’s last work as the impossibility for art to survive without compromising and corrupting the very truth it carries. Even when art is not a mystification or an embellishment of truth, but is the full revelation of it, it is condemned to death for the mere fact of aiming at fixing that truth in a work. The cathartic value of any artistic creation is, in reality, an impurity and an original sin that forbids the experience of truth, as it eliminates the primacy of reality. For Shestov, it is possible to avoid this destiny only by means of an ultimate Chekhovian “denial” [otrechenie] and, consequently, a return to nothingness, to the bespochvennostˈ. In the triplex passage from Chekhov to Sologub, to Ibsen, Shestov’s aesthetic conception is finally accomplished—for art is not and cannot be a point of arrival. The most authentic path of the artist, for Shestov, seems to be an ongoing triumph over catharsis and a way of allowing “light” to be reabsorbed by darkness. In his view, Ibsen followed exactly this trajectory: he let truth take its course, and he did not oppose it. The night—in Shestov’s view—is the last word of his creation. His best work, his “swan song,” can be no other than a song that is sympathetic with the night it is reaching out towards. This work on Ibsen occupied Shestov’s interest for a number of years. It was his biggest effort after The Apotheosis of Groundlessness and before his studies on Luther, Plotinus, and Greek philosophy. The latter studies partially obscured the importance of Ibsen for Shestov. But even when the writer was not mentioned, his works would remain a stable presence in Shestov’s mind. In a way, for him too, this essay was the “swan song” of his literary criticism activity.

2.6 Retracting Tragedy: Dostoevskii as an Essayist Shestov’s “spiritual dialogue” with Dostoevskii can list various phases, starting from his first book The Philosophy of Tragedy, in 1903 and concluding with Shestov’s last “match,” the one between Dostoevskii and Kierkegaard. In between, there were countless mentions of Dostoevskii, who was a constant reference in almost any of Shestov’s writings and reasonings. Yet, even in such a context, there is one of Shestov’s essays that stands apart from all the others.53 In this case, and perhaps only here, Shestov attacked Dostoevskii in the same 53 Lev I. Shestov, “Prorocheskii dar. K 25-letiyu smerti Dostoevskogo” [The Gift of Prophecy: For the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Dostoevskii’s Death], Polyarnaya zvezda 7 ( January 1906): 481–493. Later published in Shestov 5/1908 (A1).

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way as he did all the other defenders of ideals and of morals. This article was written for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Dostoevskii’s death and it deals with the part Shestov liked the least about the great Russian writer, that is, his essayistic activity, which he developed most notably in The Diary of a Writer and in numerous articles he wrote for magazines as well as in his public speeches. It may seem strange to see Shestov criticizing Dostoevskii and even stranger to read that he attributed to Tolstoi a courage that, according to Shestov, Dostoevskii did not have. But this fact evidences how independent Shestov was from any preconceived concept and even from an immutable sympathy that he must assign to his “hero.” In a way, this article demonstrates how Shestov stood on the side of tragedy and not, in principle, on the side of a “writer”—even when this writer was Dostoevskii. In Shestov’s view, during the 1870s Dostoevskii started to achieve fame and glory, and a certain economic tranquility. It was then that he began to participate in public debates and take a position on the problems of society. He started, Shestov says, to “give advice.” It was at that point that a part of his public began to consider him as a prophet, a “prophet of God,” as Solovˈëv defined him. As Shestov puts it, there is always a moment in a writer’s life when, having reached a certain degree of perfection, he can decide to become a prophet, since prophets are considered greater than writers. But this is a fatal mistake for an artist, that is, to claim to be a politician. Dostoevskii’s “prophecies,” in fact, were not at all original, Shestov argues. They simply agreed with the policies of the government and with the expectations of public opinion. In this regard, Dostoevskii did no more than repeat what was already acquired by the common feeling of his time: autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationalism. He turned out to be the “spokesman” of the Russian government.54 Even his pride—and Dostoevskii, as Shestov affirms, had a huge pride, unique in its genre—did not suffer from this, as he considered being a prophet a higher quality than being a writer. In a completely unusual way for him when speaking of Dostoevskii, Shestov’s tones are severe as he says that although he constantly referred to the Gospel, Dostoevskii was nonetheless far from accepting its real consequences, but he used the Sacred Text only to the benefit of Orthodoxy and not 54 “The latter turned its avid eyes toward East [ . . . ] and Dostoevskii started to demonstrate that Constantinople was indispensable to us and to foresee that it would be ours very soon” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 218). Or, for example, “Moskovskaya gazeta expressed the idea that it would be good for Tatars from Crimea to emigrate to Turkey, so as to be able to populate the peninsula of Crimea with Russians, and Dostoevskii supported such an original idea with enthusiasm” (218).

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of Christianity. For “Christianity is not for he who has a house, a family, the things for living, glory and a homeland [ . . . ] Christ said ‘Leave everything and follow me.’ But Dostoevskii is afraid of loneliness, he wants to be a prophet for his contemporaries, for those who have a stable home” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 221). It is here that Shestov declares Tolstoi to be braver than Dostoevskii, for at least he abandoned the “historical level” to focus on the enigma of God. Tolstoi, for Shestov, challenges the impossible in wanting to test the truth of the Gospel. But Dostoevskii, along with his “master” Solovˈëv who—Shestov here affirms—“apparently never experienced the underground” (223), considers the Gospel only as a confirmation of Slavophile doctrines and of the reasons of state. But, in fact, as Shestov concludes: Dostoevskii, who was an authentic artist, in this common universe left no trace. In 1937, Shestov read a lecture on Dostoevskii in French on Radio Paris, in which he harked back to the main interpretation of the writer he had delivered in his book The Philosophy of Tragedy. In this lecture there is no evidence of Dostoevskii’s “retraction of tragedy,” which Shestov maintained in this article written in 1904 and published in 1906. There should be no surprise about this, as in delivering a reading for the French audience—which mainly sounded like a divulgation of his ideas on Dostoevskii—he probably preferred to not touch on the writer’s “lowlights.” Although Shestov’s opinion on Dostoevskii did not change after this essay, it would actually have been reinforced in the general concept of Dostoevskii’s “Karamazovian cruelty” and of his rebellion against all ideals of “omnitude” (vsemstvo). In his 1937 lecture, Shestov would say: “Dostoevskii responds to everything that ‘omnitude’ asserts with the sharpest rejection; to everything that it blesses he responds with curses” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 163). This was and would always be Shestov’s “official” position with regard to Dostoevskii. But that did not prevent Shestov from being objective when necessary. Most of all, this text reveals how, for him, the self-contradiction and “fight”—the same fight Dostoevskii stopped accepting in his public speeches—always came first. The “tragic fight,” and nothing else, is actually the only and most reliable sign of truth.

2.7 The “Magnificent” Vyacheslav Ivanov In 1908, Shestov moved with his wife and daughters to Freiburg, Germany, but at the same time they traveled often to Kiev, and he went numerous times to St. Petersburg and Moscow. In March 1910, he moved to Coppet in Switzerland with his family, this time for four years. Natalˈya Baranova ascribes this long

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time abroad to family reasons: Shestov wanted his daughters to attend school in French. At the same time, he could travel regularly to Germany to meet his relatives, in particular his sister Fanya and her husband German Lovtskii, and Shestov’s nephew, Georgii Balakhovskii. Shestov was very attached to Fanya and her husband, as the numerous and intimate letters the two exchanged testify. They also often travelled to Coppet to stay with the Shestovs.55 During this time in Coppet, Shestov began to study Greek philosophy (in particular Plato and Aristotle),56 medieval philosophers, the Bible and, above all, Luther. It is in this period that he wrote an unfinished book on Luther, Sola fide, which would be published posthumously only in 1966 (Shestov 12/1966 [A1]).57 In August 1914, Shestov’s father died in Berlin, and at the end of that year Shestov and his family went back to Russia where they would stay for about four years in Moscow, in an apartment that Shestov’s friend, the philosopher Gustav Shpet, found for them. In Moscow, Shestov returned to the old life he had stopped for four years. He attended literary meetings with his friends: Shpet, Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, the Gertsyk sisters (Evgeniya and Adelaida), and Vyacheslav Ivanov—it was by then a well-established group, although they were united more by personal friendship than by a common philosophical idea (cf. Gertsyk [B1], 110–113, and Fondane [B1], 82). Ivanov was nearly always the host and organizer of those meetings: in some way, he resumed his project from some years earlier, when he was a point of reference for St. Petersburg’s intellectual world. Two more different figures than Ivanov and Shestov could not have existed.58 The two had met regularly in St. Petersburg between 1905 and 55 On Shestov’s life during these years in Switzerland, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 133–146 and Gertsyk (B1), 106–110. 56 He asked his brother-in-law German Lovtskii to send him books by Plato and Aristotle from Germany, in German with original Greek text. 57 On the complex history of this manuscript, see chapter 3, §2, of this book. 58 For a comparison between Shestov and Ivanov, see G. Piron, “Léon Chestov et ‘Viacheslav le Magnifique’” (in Fotiade 2006 [B2], 157–172), Piron 2008 (B3), Maslov (B3), K. G. Isupov, “Shestov-kritik v dialoge c Vyach. Ivanovym” (in Ermichëv [B2], 150–155), and Adamovich 2016 (B3). Cf. Adamovich: “Lev Shestov had a lot to do with Vyacheslav Ivanov, although, perhaps, there were no less similar writers in our new literature. Ivanov always spoke of Shestov with respect, which was mixed with either sadness or perplexity: he did not seem to understand what, strictly speaking, Shestov wanted, why he would beat his head against the wall, and the fact that he wished to get answers to his clearly unanswered questions. Shestov asserted that he highly appreciated Ivanov’s poetry, although it was found out in conversation that he could not remember almost any of his poems” (Adamovich 2016 [B3], 207–208).

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1908, when Shestov mostly lived in Kiev and travelled to St. Petersburg for the meetings at Ivanov’s house, the famous “Tower.” At that time, Ivanov was a well-known personality of the Russian Silver Age. As Geneviève Piron puts it, he was a “bridge builder,” a point of reference for the multiform Russian cultural renaissance, “with his subtle ability to transform, according to the ideal of conciliarism, ‘people’s communication into the Platonic Symposium’” (Piron 2008 [B3], 421). On the contrary, Shestov was a solitary writer and not certainly as “conciliatory” as Ivanov was. Their friendship had a second round about ten years later, between 1914–1917, when both Shestov and Ivanov moved to Moscow, and the latter organized home meetings with his philosopher friends Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Gershenzon, Ern, and others. Evgeniya Gertsyk recalled those meetings in that everyone had a special affection, a particular attitude of care towards Shestov. “He [Shestov] loved battles of words” (Gertsyk [B1], 111), she wrote, but he was also very kind to his opponents, developing his reasoning very slowly as if he had all eternity before him: My sister and I were especially aesthetically appreciative when Shestov and Vyacheslav Ivanov converged: the malicious and subtle Hellene, and the deep Jew with one single idea. It was paradoxical how the changing and playful Vyacheslav Ivanov would start building solid dogmas and Shestov, who was expected to glorify the Almighty, would deny everything posing tricky questions. (111)

An echo of these discussions can be found in a text Shestov read on November 4, 1916 at the Philosophico-Religious Society in Moscow. The text was entitled “Vyacheslav velikolepnyi” [Vyacheslav the Magnificent], which soon became a published article.59 Shestov’s reading raised some clamor: Vladimir Ern felt the urgency of replying immediately, in Ivanov’s defense, with his article “On Magnificence and Skepticism (For a Specificity of Adogmatism)” in which he severely attacked Shestov’s “skepticism” (see Ern [C]). In actuality, Shestov’s article, for once, is different from his usual rail against “dogmatism.” On the contrary, he considers Ivanov’s style and argumentations very convincing as long as they do not go too far in asserting a worldview.60 But at the same time, for Shestov, in praising classicism and European culture, Ivanov misses something important 59 Lev I. Shestov, “Vyacheslav Velikolepnyi,” Russkaya myslˈ 10 (October 1916): 80–110. In 1923, this article was included in the book The Power of Keys (Shestov 7/1923 [A1]). 60 This idea is confirmed by Georgii Adamovich (see Adamovich 2016 [B3], 208).

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about a Russian, antimodern, and yet—precisely for this—also “antidecadent” spirit. In his long and wide-ranging reasoning, Shestov touches on further questions and possibly the most important one: the meaning of the concept of “decadence.” Shestov presents this concept in various ways. Through Ivanov, he traces its genesis and its peak in Russia as a discredit of Tolstoi; as a correction of Pushkin who is turned towards Schiller; as a development of Dostoevskii’s poetics towards more “European” literary patterns; as a return to the early Nietzsche, “the one who conciliated the German Wagner with the Greek Apollon in his The Birth of Tragedy” (Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 284); and as a veneration of the Western classical culture that leads to imposing a single idea in Russia that must be true also for the masses. As Shestov observes, there is a paradoxical—to all appearances impossible—analogy of Ivanov’s poetics with Marxism, in that both created a world that does not exist and imposed it to the mass. In his original analysis, mostly taking Ivanov’s newly published collection of essays Furrows and Boundaries (1916) [Borozdy i mezhi] as a reference, Shestov strenuously defends Tolstoi and Pushkin against Ivanov’s attacks, seeing them as the real victims of such a decadent ideology. There are no real “attacks,” he says, as Ivanov is always “positive” and “conciliative.” But his conciliation is steadily oriented towards a goal, namely, the victory of his Schillerian ideal. Interestingly, Shestov does not deny the fact that some of his most important heroes—Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, the Greek tragedies—are the same Ivanov uses for his “philosophical project” (this is the way Shestov refers to it). Shestov is aware that there is a school of Russian heirs to Dostoevskii who “completely broke with the tradition of Russian literature” (274). Those people, and Ivanov with them, “no longer wish for simplicity and clarity” (274– 275). “Ivanov—Shestov writes—does want complexity, an inextricable plot of thin arabesques, often barely visible to an untrained eye” (275). Ivanov’s paradox, for Shestov, is that, with all this complexity, he abandons Pushkin and supports the mass (“and he writes ‘Mass’ [Chernʹ] with the capital letter,” Shestov observes [278]). In this essay, Shestov’s argumentation is complex and original. While he compares Pushkin to Ivanov, and Schiller—on whose side Ivanov, according to Shestov, would stand—to Pushkin, he also points out a sort of “decadent project” that is carried out by some Russian intellectuals (most notably, Ivanov, Sergei Bulgakov, and the “late” Berdyaev of The Meaning of Creation) to impose on Russia a certain European model that is mainly given by a certain reading of Nietzsche—the early Nietzsche and the Nietzsche of the Antichrist—along with a Kantian philosophy of knowledge. Shestov calls

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this project “Russian decadence” in that it is seen as “dependence” on Europe in all fields: literature, thought, science, and even religion. For Shestov, the classic Russian literature (he names: Pushkin, Lermontov, Griboedov, Gogolˈ, Turgenev, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and others, up to Chekhov) was never “dependent” on Europe in the way Ivanov (along with Berdyaev and Bulgakov) claimed to be. In fact, the opposite happened: it was Russian literature that imposed a way of thinking on the West (285–287). Shestov asks: “Why do they put Pushkin aside for the love of Schiller? Why is Dostoevskii interpreted in accordance with Schiller? Why is Tolstoi turned into a harsh moralist and, because of his publicist essays, War and Peace and the works of recent years are neglected?” (286). For Shestov, Ivanov has great talent, but his talent does no more than make notions that are banal and dangerous more brilliant. “What is the essence of decadence?” Shestov asks. It is—he says—curing oneself with equally decadent cures (291). Consequently, Tolstoi is regarded essentially as a moralist; Chekhov as the dawn of the prerevolutionary period; even Socrates is considered by Ivanov—following Nietzsche’s interpretation—as a decadent (287). All these affirmations, as Shestov argues, are nothing original, but in Ivanov’s mouth they appear brilliant and magnificent. This is why Shestov names Ivanov “The Magnificent” [Velikolepnyi]—a definition Dmitrii Mirskii appreciated in a special way.61 Yet Shestov’s essay is not as ironic as one may think. Because of Ivanov, he is forced to rethink his own intellectual history and to reconsider figures such as Nietzsche and Dostoevskii. He sees the risks inherent in certain readings of them, while he probably acknowledges his more solid closeness to Tolstoi and Pushkin. Ivanov is a “Westernizer” in a way Shestov does not want to be. For this reason, he needs to reestablish a number of philosophical categories concerning Nietzsche and a general philosophical worldview. Not by chance, he repeats multiple times in his text sentences like “it is necessary to come back again to gnoseology” (293) and he involves Kant and Schopenhauer in his argumentation. He does not consider Ivanov’s “style” as a purely literary issue: there is a definite danger in it. This danger is the affirmation of one only point of view (297). Ivanov, for Shestov, “knows everything, understands everything. Whatever one is speaking of, he is able to explain everything” (298). Ivanov’s magnificent classicism aims at silencing a distinct 61 “Shestov, who is a master of the pointed epigram, has given Ivanov the nickname of Vyacheslav the Magnificent, and ‘magnificent’ is the best definition one can think of for his style” (Mirsky [C], 207).

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Russian voice, as it were, a “gnoseological voice”—a different, more original point of view on truth than the one of modern European philosophy. The conclusion of this essay is a summary of a certain result of modern philosophy that acknowledged the victory of Kant. Ivanov, in Shestov’s view, is the last sophisticated epigone of this victory, of a “monotheistic gnoseology”—he extends the principle of identity to all spaces of reality. He is perfectly able to explain Dostoevskii with the Aristotelian “A=A.” “However—Shestov says—A=A is true for the empiric world, but there are other territories” (302). Significantly, Shestov contrasts Pushkin with Schiller and Aristotle as if it were a multifaceted and pluralistic worldview versus a one-sided explanation of facts. Not even Dostoevskii is sufficiently “polyphonic”—as we would say nowadays— to stand and resist Ivanov’s mind. But eventually, for Shestov all this power of logos is decadence, and Ivanov, as a decadent, “fights against his decadence with decadent means” (306). In philosophical terms, decadence for Shestov is the renunciation of going beyond the principle of identity and of exploring what lies before it. Such a renunciation is achievable only by the finest minds, like Aristotle, Kant, Schiller, and Vyacheslav Ivanov. In this essay on Ivanov, Shestov is unusually transparent and direct in his thoughts, as if he were speaking directly to his friend Ivanov (and in some way he was). What is most interesting in it is the constant mention of an underlying problem in the philosophy of knowledge (i.e., exploring the origin of it) and the reference to Plotinus as the main opponent of Kant and Aristotle (and consequently of Schiller and Ivanov). Shestov discovers that he has no “literary arguments” to contest Ivanov’s views on Dostoevskii. In a way, after reading Ivanov, Shestov finds that what is necessary is not replying to him and providing a more rightful interpretation of Dostoevskii, but providing a criticism of Kant. The main question, to him, is not “literary” or artistic, but it lies in the field of the theory of knowledge. Art has its path, with different ways and solutions. At the end of his essay, he candidly admits that without thinking of the ultimate problem of truth and of Ivanov’s possible claims about it, he would even listen with pleasure to his “magnificent fantasies,” to his poems, to his passion for the Greek world, for Schiller, Nietzsche, and Goethe, and to the prophetic tone of his writing. But then there is Plotinus, there are those who do not stand with Ivanov—he also mentions Pushkin, Tolstoi, and Chekhov—who speak another truth. Then, there is the problem of truth itself, which Shestov “cannot renounce” (307). Indeed, in his article Shestov revealed with little restraint his opinion about Ivanov, which he had probably kept to himself for a long time, since at

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the end of the article he admitted that he felt “his soul relieved” (307). This fact, however, did not influence the relationship between the pair too negatively. In subsequent years, when the two were living in Europe (Shestov in Paris, Ivanov in Rome) their friendship remained stable. The tone of their letters is friendly and joyful, and betrays the pain both felt at being in exile. Shestov, as always, offered his help to his Russian émigré friends: he had more connections in the literary world and acted as an intermediary for Ivanov to be translated into German and Italian. On his part, in a 1936 letter for Shestov’s seventieth birthday, Ivanov acknowledged that he learned to appreciate Shestov’s “voice warning against death and spiritual pride” and, he added, “as the years pass, I love you more and more, I think, I understand” (Shestov 30/2009 [A2], 431).

CHAPTER III

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3.1 Introduction: The Events of History—Shestov’s Political Views

D

uring the February Revolution of 1917, Shestov was in Moscow with his family. Natalʹya Baranova offers a reconstruction of that time through six letters he sent to his relatives, in particular to his mother and to his sister Fanya, who both lived in Switzerland (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 174–180). The first phase of the revolution seemed exactly as the propaganda described it, that is, “great and bloodless.” But, Baranova writes, Shestov “did not share the general enthusiasm, he went out rarely and remained sad and thoughtful in his office” (174). In his letters, he describes the situation in a generally hopeful way: the new government has gained everyone’s trust, the shops and transport systems are working as usual, and in Moscow in particular, there is a continual celebration. His friends, according to Baranova, reacted in different ways to this new situation. Berdyaev, like Shestov, was skeptical and rather concerned, and because of this—Baranova writes—he was considered “a reactionary” (178). On the contrary, Andrei Belyi, along with some other friends of Berdyaev, felt that a new order and a “new man” had been born. In this respect, Shestov and Berdyaev were on the same side: they thought, as Baranova observes, “that the revolution would not stay at the February phase, that it would not be without bloodshed and suppression of freedom” (178). As the months passed, the situation changed. In a letter Shestov sent to his mother on October 2, 1917, he complains about the troubles the family business in Kiev is experiencing. In his next letters, sent in November to his mother, to his sister Fanya, and to her husband German

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Lovtskii, Shestov states that there is nothing to comment on: everything is “sad” and “there is nothing to celebrate” (181). For Shestov, some wanted to see the good in the events taking place, but “they are mistaken. From the current chaos, an abject reaction will come [ . . . ]. Today the ignorant mass of people has already lost all understanding of what is happening” (182). Shestov’s pessimism would continue, in his letters from December and January 1918, he laments for the first time a lack of basic necessities: “I live day by day.” He wrote to his mother on February 17, 1918. “I try to work so as to think less of war and politics” (183). In July, Shestov and his family moved to Kiev to stay at the home of his sister Sofiya and her husband Daniil Balakhovskii.1 At this time, Kiev was the capital of the Ukrainian People’s Republic under the control of Germany. But in November 1918 the Germans left, the city of Kiev passed from “hand to hand,” being occupied first by the Bolsheviks and then, on September 1919, by the White Army. In that moment, also because of a number of anti-Jewish pogroms, the situation became unsustainable. The Balakhovskii family left Kiev in fall 1918 to go first to Odessa and then permanently to Paris, leaving their apartment to the Shestovs, who would remain there until October 1919. The difficult situation in Kiev, in particular for Jewish people, pushed Shestov to make a decision2 that anticipated by two years the mass exile of some of his friends (including Berdyaev, Frank, 1 Daniil Grigorˈevich Balakhovskii (1862–1931) was a Kievan Jewish engineer, owner of sugar factories and philanthropist, who married Shestov’s sister Sofiya Shvartsman. As a great music lover, he was friend of Rakhmaninov and Skryabin, for whom he organized a concert in Kiev in 1913. It was probably through him, or at least in the same musical circles he frequented, that Shestov came into contact with Boris de Schloezer, who was Skryabin’s brother-in-law. Due to Skryabin’s premature death (1915), his family went to live with the Shestovs in Daniil Balakhovskii’s house, and Boris de Schloezer, brother of Skryabin’s wife, soon joined them (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 186–189). 2 The dramatic situation Shestov experienced in Kiev in 1919—with constant requisitions of his house, no money available from the banks, the prospect of having no heating in winter, and a constant apprehension due to the antisemitic mood that seemed worse in Kiev than in Moscow—is described by Shestov himself in two letters to Gershenzon from March 8, 1919, and from August, 21, 1919 (Shestov 24/1992 [A2], 102–103, and 103–104). See also Natal’ya Baranova’s reconstruction of this period of Shestov’s life (which she also shared as a teenager): Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 184–201. According to Baranova, Shestov’s fame as a “revolutionary philosopher” protected their family for a while, but then it was discovered that their true surname was Shvartsman and that they were a rich family, and the problems began. During the scuffles of the civil war, the warehouse of the Shvartsman factory was set on fire and Shestov “witnessed this fire from Balakhovskii’s ‘skyscraper’” (186). The seat of the “Skryabin Society” was established in the same building so as to provide another means of protection for the group of people living there. But this expedient, too, did not last long; the house was searched many times and all the people inside were advised to leave: first the Balakhovskiis, then the Skryabins and, finally, Shestov with his family, who went first to a small house (dacha)

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N. Losskii, and S. Bulgakov) who were expelled in 1922 through a decree made by Lenin himself.3 In mid-October the Shestovs left Kiev for Yalta where they joined other members of his family and of the Balakhovskiis, all ready to leave. They spent nearly two months there, waiting for passports and trying to solve all their financial issues (money and goods left in Russia). Finally, the authorization came at the beginning of January 1920, and they were able to move first to Constantinople, where they boarded a boat bound for Genoa, where they arrived on February 5, 1920. They subsequently moved to Geneva, where they stayed in the apartment of Fanya and German Lovtskii for about a year, before moving permanently to Paris in April 1921. Between 1920 and 1921, a transitional time of his life, Shestov, along with his brothers, had to make a number of important decisions concerning the liquidation of his family business in Kiev and regarding where he wanted to move after Geneva.4 In 1938, Benjamin Fondane asked Shestov about his last year in Russia: [Fondane:] And we are still talking about the Bolshevik Russia of 1919, in Kiev. [Shestov:] “What is happening now in Austria [i.e., Hitler’s invasion of April 11, 1938], was happening already then . . . and under Lenin. The old Jewish people, the rabbis, were in prison. When someone was suspected of having money, they went straight ahead and took it. I was, fortunately, persona grata. Some of the leaders of the movement were among my readers. . . . They thought that since I was a revolutionary in philosophy, and they were revolutionaries in politics, that we were in agreement. They had not lost hope that I would be converted. But the horrors that one saw. . . . I avoided crossing the streets. I went to hold my lectures at the University, but I took the least-used streets.” (Fondane [B1], 156) outside Kiev and then, when the more systematic searches for Jewish people began, at the end of summer 1919 (when the White Army took Kiev), they decided to leave Russia (189). 3 On the notable to many event of the filosofskii parokhod [philosophers’ ship], see Heller (C). 4 Shestov was aiming for a city where he could have a future within the Russian intellectual émigré community, and the two main options were Paris and Berlin. After a careful evaluation, he opted for the first of the two. As for his family business, the difficult decisional process concerning the sale of the company and distribution of the remaining money among family members is described by Natalʹya Baranova through Shestov’s letters to his brothers. The letters reveal that they lost most of their patrimony and had to accept a modest life they had never known before. Shestov’s own stance was to cease investing in a further venture in Europe (the company already had a branch in London) but to try instead to make a living for his family in the literary-intellectual world (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 203–209).

CHAPTER III    Wandering Through The Souls (1914–1929)

On Shestov’s escape from Russia, Fondane asked: “And how were you able to leave Russia? Did they let you go?” “Oh, no!—Shestov replied—But the Whites came. I knew a priest who had been on the socialist left, then he had become a White. He gave me a paper saying that I had been tasked with carrying out a mission for them. If I had shown my passport, in which it was mentioned that I was of Hebrew religion, it would have been all over. . . . But with the document, I was able to pass. By Crimea, then Constantinople.” (156)

In a letter to Gershenzon from August 6, 1917, Shestov expresses his disillusionment about the current national and international political situation. With a sense of general hopelessness, he talks about those politicians who, in spring 1917, were negotiating peace. He writes: “even those who consider themselves and whom others consider to be the arbiters of fate—like Ribot or Lloyd George—are only puppets in the hands of history” (Shestov 24/1992 [A2], 101). Shestov further adds that there is no point talking about politics and, with some irony, while admitting that instead of being interested in politics he is writing a “purely philosophical article on Husserl,” he maintains that dealing with philosophy “in modern times, after all, is a shame” (101). But, according to Schloezer, Shestov was more interested in political and historical events than he appeared. On the contrary, to Schloezer’s mind, Shestov was very sensitive to the facts of the “real” world and his constant immersion in a philosophical dimension by no means prevented him from developing an attentive ear for the historical circumstances.5 In Dmitrii Mirskii’s view, the way 5 See, on this issue, Boris Shlëtser (Schloezer), “Pamyati L. I. Shestova” 1939a [B3], in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 437. Shestov’s concern about the current political situation is also testified to by Fondane in one of his later meetings with him (March 26, 1938): “Shestov is tired, thin, his speech is weak. The political events of recent times: Hitler’s entry into Austria, the persecutions of Jews, the Moscow trial, have greatly affected him. As always, these problems brutally posed by reality resonate at the very center of resistance of his philosophy. ‘Hitler entered Austria—Shestov said—, I am constrained to admit that it had to happen, that it is. But I’m not convinced’” (Fondane [B1], 152. Fondane’s emphasis). Changing subject, Shestov added: “There is a considerable difference between Stalin and Tsarism, to the advantage of Tsarism. Of course, there was censorship at that time: it was understood that certain things were forbidden; but never would it have occurred to them to oblige us to write about a particular thing, to think in a particular way. We were at least ‘free’ to not say something we did not want to say” (152–153). On the same subject, two months later Shestov says (May 18, 1935): “Hitler is merely imitating Stalin. But before Stalin it was almost the same thing. And even under the Mensheviks. Under the Tsar, we protested

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in which Shestov dealt with philosophical problems and the way in which he oriented himself in life situations were entirely different. As Mirskii shrewdly observes: As soon as Shestov has to do with the world of ordinary experiences, with the conduct of men and the facts of history, his religious immoralism and irrationalism become inapplicable and unnecessary, and he falls back on the most ordinary common sense. It was from the point of view of common sense that he condemned Bolshevism, not from that of his religion. (Mirsky [C], 174)6

Shestov’s common sense was a “fact,” that is, something to put into practice and not something to reflect upon. There was a time, when he was a teenager, when he thought and acted as a revolutionary. But thereafter, after his tragic turning point, there was no longer even a pale shadow of ideology in his works and speeches.7 He possibly understood that it was not in political ideas for much lesser things. . . . But they say that you can’t carry out a revolution wearing gloves. So . . . ” (155–156). 6 Although with a different and more critical interpretation, Nikita Struve expressed a similar opinion at the end of his essay: “In politics, Shestov seems to approve that ‘rationality’ which, on the contrary, he abhors in philosophy [ . . . ]. On the Russian Revolution, Shestov revealed an exemplary and almost prophetic lucidity. But his political philosophy suffers of a serious contradiction with respect to the main principle of its philosophical message: in the earthly city, irrationality is a synonym of evil, whereas knowledge and rationality are the original sin of the human soul. Is it not, perhaps, because he was not able to solve this contradiction that Shestov was uninterested in history and in politics?” (Struve [B2], 75). In actuality, however, Struve’s opinion seems more a confirmation that Shestov’s thought is indeed a “philosophy of contradiction” and not a “philosophy of irrationality,” for the two opposite stances must stand together in a “living contradiction” and not be overcome or reconciled in a synthesis. Moreover, as can be seen almost everywhere in his dialogues with Benjamin Fondane, Shestov was indeed interested in politics, the facts of which after all enormously affected his life and the life of his family. But, as Dmitrii Mirskii argued, he simply applied to his understanding of these facts a more usual common sense; he probably considered that they did not deserve a philosophical understanding (and consequently a philosophical essay devoted to them) but only right decisions and right actions in life. It is true, however, that he was not interested in “writing” at all about those subjects, and that he was disillusioned about the power of that kind of writing and the power of collective movements or actions. He believed more in the decisions of single individuals and in the ideas of small groups. It seems to me that the reason for his “silence,” in this field, lies more in his general disillusionment in the power of social and political ideas than—as Struve suggests—in his inability to solve a theoretical contradiction within his thought. 7 In his essay on Shestov “Léon Chestov, témoin à charge,” from La conscience malheureuse (1938), with regard to this earliest “revolutionary” phase of Shestov’s life in which he pro-

CHAPTER III    Wandering Through The Souls (1914–1929)

that one should be an extremist, but in other fields of thought. From then on, he observed all his friends (Berdyaev and others) “at a distance,” becoming involved in one or another political or religious position. Shestov could perhaps be considered, in current terms, as a “moderate”—but he also made his clear decisions: he left Russia after the revolution, he condemned Bolshevism but also the tsarist regime; subsequently he condemned both Stalin and Hitler from the very beginning of their rise in politics, and he always did so without hesitation.8 He also directly suffered from antisemitism. But he never “sided” on anything: he never adhered to organized movements, to preestablished ideologies, to political parties or to religious confessions. That which gave him direction in all those fields and stances was, as Mirskii defined it, his personal “common sense,” to which he paid more heed than to any external influence. But, although his mind was clear about many of these issues, he did not like to either talk or write about it. “It is not worth it,” he used to say. He certainly felt that other, philosophical, questions were more urgent—only they were worth spending time writing about and discussing.9 This is the reason why there is no reference to any current historical, moral or political fact in his writings, tested for the rights of the working class, Fondane maintains that Shestov’s subsequent abandon of his credo is in appearance only: “One should not see in it a rejection, but only an overcoming of the problem. The problem of the alienation of the worker is still there. It only involves, according to Shestov, a different solution from that to which he had prematurely given his agreement” (Fondane 2013 [B3], 283 note). 8 In one of the longer excerpts from his conversations with Fondane concerning his political ideas (December 14, 1935), Shestov talks about his disagreement with Merezhkovskii who apparently, in a recent conversation with him, had supported Laval and his pro-Hitlerian politics in order to free Russia from Stalin (“Hitler will invade Russia and overthrow the regime,” Merezhkovskii said), Shestov replied: “So I replied to him that little as I liked Stalin, I liked his Hitler even less. And that it was not a solution that would please me. . . . He got cross and we parted angry. That is why I did not go to the Jubilee tonight, although I received an invitation. And I did not even write to him. You know my political ideas. I do understand a thing about capitalism and socialism. But after all, I’ve known capitalism and I suffered from it. Since socialism has not yet been able to do any harm, we have the right to hope. Freedom is lacking here and there. Stalin is as authoritarian as the Tsar” (Fondane [B1], 90–91). In another conversation ( July 16, 1935), Shestov said: “I do not like war. But if it were necessary to make war against Hitler, I would take up a gun at my age. You know what I think about Bolshevism? Well, if Hitler attacked the Soviets, the Soviets would have to be defended to prevent Hitler from becoming the master of Europe. Between two evils, I choose the lesser” (81–82). 9 In a conversation with Martin Buber reported by Fondane (from April 13, 1934), while agreeing with Buber on the importance of identifying the biblical serpent with the “serpent of knowledge,” Shestov ironically exclaimed: “What is Hitler in comparison to the serpent of knowledge?” (64)

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and consequently this part of his thought has been neglected.10 But perhaps there is an exception in everything and there is one in Shestov too. There are three short texts, in fact, in which Shestov wrote about his political ideas in a plain, as it were, non-Shestovian style: “Firebirds: For a Specificity of Russian Ideology” (1918), “What is Russian Bolshevism?” (1920) and “Menacing Barbarians of Today” (1934).11 Considering their subject and style, and also the fact that they have always been largely ignored by the Shestovian scholarship,12 these texts should probably occupy a place apart in Shestov’s output. A month after arriving in Europe, Shestov received a proposal from Evgenii Lundberg to publish his works in German. Lundberg was a young Russian writer, a former admirer, and a friend of Shestov who adhered with enthusiasm to the 1917 Revolution. From 1920 to 1924 he was the chief editor of the publisher Skify (The Scythians), funded by the leftist socialist revolutionaries in Berlin. Along with his works, he asked Shestov for an article on the Russian Revolution. This text (“What is Russian Bolshevism?”) was in effect printed as a brochure in 15.000 copies by Skify, but at some point Lundberg—who evidently had not read the content of the text before sending it to print—delayed its distribution. In November 1920, after a long consultation with Shestov, Lundberg decided to destroy all the copies. Only fifty copies were left: some were sent to libraries in Russia and one was sent by Shestov to Daniil Balakhovskii who managed to have it translated and published in French in the journal Mercure de France on March 1920 (see Chestov 10/1920a [A2]).13 Lundberg’s surprise in reading his friend’s 10 One of the rare studies on this part of Shestov’s output, although limited to just the article “What Is Bolshevism?,” is: Nikita Struve, “Chestov et la politique,” in Struve-Laurent (B2), 71–75. 11 See Shestov 9/1918 (A2), 10/1920 (A2) and 15/1934 (A2). The three essays are available together in a French translation, in Shestov 34/2015 (A2). 12 The first of these essays, “Firebirds: For a Specificity of Russian Ideology” [Zhar-ptitsy: k kharakteristike russkoi ideologii] is not quoted even in Natalʹya Baranova’s bibliography. It was discovered by Aleksandr Ermichëv and republished in Znamya 8 (1991): 189–193. In 2015 the same text was translated into French and included in the collection of Shestov’s “political essays”: Chestov 34/2015 (A2). 13 On the complex negotiations with the publisher Skify—which would ultimately not result in the publication of all his works but only in the reprinting of his second and third books, and in the edition of his new work Potestas Clavium (1923)—see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 216–220. The controversy with Lundberg concerning the refusal to publish the brochure on Bolshevism embittered Shestov, but the two eventually resolved their differences: in any case, as Baranova writes, Shestov “did not wish to recall the accident concerning this brochure” (218). In 1935, Shestov briefly mentions this episode to Fondane: see Fondane (B1), 77.

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political ideas reflects a general misunderstanding concerning Shestov’s works that lasted for a number of years in Russia. Considering his oppositional nature and the seemingly nihilistic content of his writings, Shestov was easily classed among the anarchists and revolutionaries. At that time, in fact, contrary to the case of Berdyaev, Frank, and Bulgakov, and all the Vekhi group, the religious character of his philosophy was probably not clear (Sola Fide and Potestas Clavium had been already written, but not yet published). Natalʹya Baranova reports an episode in which, in August 1919, the Bolsheviks offered Shestov the chance to publish his manuscripts from 1916–1918 (those which converged for the most part in the 1923 book Potestas Clavium) but on condition that he added a short preface in defense of the Marxist doctrine. Shestov refused to write this preface and the publication never occurred.14 According to Lundberg and Baranova, however, in this early phase of the revolution he was never in open conflict with the Bolsheviks, and even had friends among them, such as Lundberg and Natan Vengrov. The latter was a literary critic and teacher who frequented the circle of Maksim Gorʹkii’s friends and joined the revolutionary movement. He was involved in popular teaching in Kiev, and probably helped Shestov to obtain his teaching post there in 1918–1919. As Lundberg reports in his memoires, Vengrov “protected” Shestov during that difficult time “from little and big problems.”15 “What is Russian Bolshevism?,” however, is an unequivocal condemnation of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and therefore it is not surprising that Lundberg did not want to distribute it. Shestov’s main thesis from this essay is that there is substantial continuity between the Bolshevik mind and the previous imperialist ideology. Shestov reports an episode in which a project for a railway line linking Moscow to St. Petersburg was submitted to the former tsar Nikolai I. It seems that, without even reading the project made by the engineers, Nikolai I traced a straight line with a pencil on the map connecting the two capitals and so he solved the problem. As Shestov comments: 14 See, on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 191. See also an interview Shestov gave to Frédéric Lefevre in 1931 for Les Nouvelles littéraries: “In other words, with this page they asked me to deny all my work. I am sure that nobody from the old regime, not even among the most reactionary people, would have ever advanced such a proposal” (Frédéric Lefevre, “Une heure avec Léon Chestov,” reprinted in Cahiers Léon Chestov 7 [2007]: 3). 15 Quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1991(B1), 191. Evgenii Lundberg wrote a journal on these early years of the revolution, in which Shestov is quoted many times, not as an enemy of the revolution but also not as a fervent supporter: see Lundberg (B1).

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Part Two    Shestov in France The current masters of Russia solve all questions in the same way. And if Nikolai I’s regime, like that of most of his predecessors and successors, in all fairness deserves the name of ignorant despotism, we can even more fairly define the Bolsheviks’ regime with this term. It is despotism and, I strongly stress, ignorant despotism (Shestov 34/2015 [A2], 40, Shestov’s italics).

The same idea concerning the salvific role of Russia in Europe and in the entire world is due, as Shestov ironically remarks, to the fact that “contrarily to Europe, Russia believes in the magic power of the word. However strange it may seem, the so fervently materialist Bolsheviks in reality appear like the most naïve idealists. For them, the real conditions of human life do not exist” (42). Therefore, Shestov defines Russian Bolshevism as an ideology based on the union of rhetoric and brute force. When, in the early months of the revolution, they faced the real possibility of anarchism, that is, of total lack of authority, in their fear of losing power, the Bolsheviks opted to reestablish the tsarist methods. As Shestov puts it, they decided to remain entirely and completely faithful to the bad habits of the old Russian bureaucracy. From that moment [ . . . ] it was clear that the revolution was crushed and that Bolshevism was, essentially, a deeply reactionary movement, and even a step back from Nikolai II because, very quickly, the Bolsheviks understood that the methods of Nikolai II were not enough for them and that it was necessary for them to adopt the governing wisdom of Nikolai I, or even of Arakcheev. (49–50)

For Shestov—and he actually expressed this opinion in 1920— Bolshevism created nothing new in Russia but merely resuscitated the despotism of those previous Russian emperors or ministers of war who used military force to govern the country. In this respect, Shestov describes Russian Bolshevism as essentially “reactionary” and also “parasitic” (54), since it never aimed at improving the economy or production, but only at cynically exploiting the workers. Bolshevism strived with all its efforts to prevent the freedom of the Russian people. In many ways, in Shestov’s view, they betrayed not only the Russian people but also the Marxist and socialist doctrine since they favored destructive efforts over any economic organization (54–55). According to Shestov, Marx’s task was a constructive one, but “the Bolsheviks have suddenly

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given up this task, above all because they had not a single chance of creating anything” (55). In the spring of 1920, as Shestov writes this article, his mind is clear about the meaning of revolution: “I can assert with certainty: the date of November 7, 1917, must be considered as that of the collapse of the Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks did not save, but betrayed the worker and peasant population” (80). The fact that Shestov’s skepticism regarding Bolshevism did not arise after his departure from Russia, but earlier, is proved by another text, “Firebirds: For a Specificity of Russian Ideology,” which appeared in the “non-Soviet” journal Vozrozhdenie in June 1918. In this article, Shestov harks back to his 1906 article on Dostoevskii, “The Gift of Prophecy,” in which he harshly criticized the great writer for his “essayistic turn” and his bad political previsions. He also takes back a former criticism he expressed against Berdyaev’s, Struve’s, and Bulgakov’s sudden change of mind, from Marxism to Christianity.16 For Shestov, in fact, there is an overall “Russian” particularity of ideology which makes it always appear “romantic” or a “gift from heaven.”17 Russian ideology is similar to the mythological “firebird” of Slavic folklore that must burn and destroy itself in order to accomplish its mission, which is both benediction and malediction at the same time. In this sense, demanding any coherency or an economic, political or technical analysis of the facts in order to join this or that ideology is completely useless. For Shestov, there is no point in debating about “left” or “right,” “imperialism” or “socialism,” “monarchism” or “anarchism,” because in Russia all these options fall back under a general sort of Russian idealistic-Romantic state of mind, which aims at creating a world—a world that, for Shestov, clearly cannot exist—through the mere power of “word” and “rhetoric.”18 This is why, for instance, it is so easy for Sergei Bulgakov to shift from Marxism to Orthodox 16 In his article on Berdyaev “The Praise of Folly,” Shestov sarcastically observed how people like Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov or Merezhkovskii changed their mind in a very short lapse of time, embracing Christian religion after having been Marxists or economic materialists (see Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 227–228). 17 In this regard, Shestov writes: “Therefore, among us, the imperialists are people who do not have an imperialist ideology, and the monarchists are people who do not have a monarchist ideology. But what is a Russian socialist? Here again, indeed, he is neither similar to a German socialist nor to a French socialist. He is always the same romantic who is detached from reality. What is important to him is to sing hymns to socialism” (Shestov 34/2015 [A2], 102). 18 As Shestov comments: “In the same way as we imagined transforming Russia into a great military power just through decrees, without doing any of what was necessary to acquire the strength and the army, so nowadays we strive, also by means of decrees, to establish a socialist paradise in our country” (106).

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theology, or for Dostoevskii to move from his personal “Underground” to the lustrous position of prophet to the tsar. In Russia “people should live for a superior idea,” Shestov says, and it does not matter whether this is the ideology of socialism or the ideology of imperialism (107). For Shestov, Russian ideology (which includes, without distinction, every political, religious, and social position) is a great escape from reality—a reality that sooner or later comes to claim its rights and to give back the same troubles that existed before. But the Russian intelligentsiya is never interested in that reality; instead it aims at dictating its laws “to nature itself ” and if nature does not obey then, as Shestov says, “we do not accept this world” (110). This, for Shestov, is the main reason behind the “innumerable excesses that we have seen in recent years” (109). For him, this represents simultaneously both the biggest strength and the greatest weakness of Russians. Shestov’s third and last political essay is of a special kind as, unlike the others, it offers a link and a “key” to connect his entire philosophy with his reflections on the present historical situation. Written in 1934, “Menacing Barbarians of Today” reflects an awareness about the turn of events in Hitler’s Germany but also about a harshness in Stalin’s regime that it had not possessed years before. Overall, Shestov’s tone is highly discouraged and pessimistic. In the situation at the time—with the harbingers of war, and with a people, the Jews, who are seen as the main enemy of those wanting to establish a new imperialism—Shestov sees the realization of a final destiny of technical-scientific rationality. All of a sudden, it is clear to everybody that the new Barbarians are allied with science, and that science is not (as the Judeo-Christian tradition is and always has been) a real adversary to that barbaric “hidden face” of human beings. What is happening in the twentieth century, in fact, is the revelation of the essentially brutal nature of humanity.19 It was only through a misunderstanding that during the nineteenth century people believed that scientific rationality per se would save the world from the fundamental barbaric attitude of the human mind. As Shestov implies, science is not evil in itself, but it could become allied with evil to great advantage: “The Barbarians of today have understood for a long time that science and technology can be useful also to them, and that they are even indispensable” (123).

19 Shestov starts his reasoning from a European saying he had already quoted in previous works, “Grattez le Russe et vous trouverez le Tatare” [Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar], modifying it to “Scratch a European and you will find a Barbarian” (116–117).

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For Shestov, while Hitler wants to get rid of all Jews he also aims at getting rid of a Judeo-Christian idea that has spread throughout Europe through the Bible, Jesus, Mary, and the apostles Peter and Paul, all of whom were Jewish, undermining the “will to power” that is typical of the human race and of European culture in particular (120). Most of all, according to Shestov, this is an “oriental” idea: “Asia is the motherland of religion. No prophet, no apostle was ever born in Europe. Prophets and apostles came from the East. The historians have every reason to speak of the influence of East, even on ancient Greek thought” (127). The first philosopher who gained awareness of this, for Shestov, was Plotinus: “The last great Greek philosopher, Plotinus, represents for us a sort of appeal to humanity: it is impossible to limit oneself to the spiritual conditions of life to which Europe was destined by its past development” (127). This appeal is also Shestov’s appeal. Along with Plotinus, he aims at redirecting the course of truth away from deception and into its right path. With this essay, Shestov takes a sort of revenge against all the accusations his philosophy received of not dealing with the present time and historical facts. In some ways, he demonstrated that his lifelong fight against the metaphysical concept of “necessity” was not a personal obsession but a real, objective issue. “Necessity,” that is, the main factor of Western logos and Western thought, the factor that created Western civilization (which, in a way, is world civilization), is something that eventually leads that civilization to its own destruction. Necessity, for Shestov, is the universal condition for the accomplishment of any goal, that is, for winning over any adversary. But eventually, precisely because it is the strongest means of all, it becomes the primary aim of everything and only it remains. In other words, as Shestov would say, Jerusalem can never win over Athens when the very concept of “win” pertains to and was invented by Athens.20 But when the only designated winner ends up destroying itself as a consequence of the awareness that there is nothing to defeat anymore but itself, then Jerusalem appears to be a salvific and alternative realm to that rationality that aims at establishing what is true and false, good and bad, what should be considered optimistic and pessimistic. At the end of his essay, Shestov states that, beyond all those previous categories, the only important thing is to save our freedom, in the broadest sense of the word, which includes freedom of thought, of the soul, but also the physical freedom of a people. 20 In Potestas Clavium, Shestov maintains that the only goal of Western logic and of Western philosophy, the very reason of its birth, was after all that of winning over any of its adversaries: it was created to be the winner, no matter of the content of its debates (see aphorism no. 3, “The Classic Argument,” in Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 41–44).

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3.2 The Power of Keys: Faith and Church in Martin Luther The years he spent in Coppet with his family (1910–1914), virtually on the eve of the Russian Revolution, were a decisive turning point in Shestov’s life. For the first time since he began his career, he was isolated from the Russian intellectual milieu and, in some way, this detachment influenced his interests and reading. As Evgeniya Gertsyk recalls, in Coppet Shestov was completely immersed in the study of the Bible and at the same time of Greek and medieval philosophy (cf. Gertsyk [B1], 110). But there was another author Shestov examined in depth in this period—an author whose discovery, according to Boris de Schloezer, represented “a capital event in Shestov’s spiritual life.”21 This author was Martin Luther.22 It is possible to affirm that Luther meant as much for Shestov’s middle phase of philosophical research as Nietzsche and Dostoevskii had meant for the early phase. Only through Luther did Shestov begin to consider faith as a truly alternative realm to reason. But what was Luther’s particular contribution to the development of Shestov’s philosophy in this transitional epoch? Why was it Luther, specifically, who addressed Shestov’s interests towards his philosophical reading of the Bible? There is no doubt that this “sabbatical” in Switzerland, after his first six books published in Russia, is a decisive passage in Shestov’s research. It is equally true, however, that Shestov had not been completely uninterested in the religious problem up to this point. He was Jewish, he grew up in a solid Jewish tradition, although due to his personal problems with his father he distanced himself somewhat from it. Lev Tolstoi actually sensed this fact, as he defined Shestov a misbeliever especially considering that he was Jewish— years later, Shestov sagaciously replied to that remark by indicating Nietzsche

21 Cf. Schloezer 1966a (B3), 18. Here Schloezer is mentioning in particular Shestov’s discovery of Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. 22 In these years (1911–1914), Shestov worked on a book project on Luther, entitled Sola Fide. However, when he had to leave Coppet to return to Moscow, he could not take the manuscript with him (six books totaling 1100 pages). He would only retrieve it in 1920, at the time of his exile. In subsequent years, he managed to publish different parts of this work in his two books Potestas Clavium and in Job’s Balance. Eventually, he left two main texts unpublished: one was about Greek and Medieval Philosophy and the other concerned Luther. These two texts (Ms. 2109, files 82–87 [with the exception of chapters 18–24 of the first part], The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris) were published for the first time, separately, in 1957, in French, and together in Russian in a 1966 book, entitled Sola fide—Tolʹko veroi [Sola fide—By Faith Alone] (see Shestov 12/1966 [A1]). On the history of this manuscript see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 146–148.

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as the source of his “religious belief.”23 Yet, at least up to 1910, his indefinable “Nietzschean God,” as well as his open rejection of the “God” of Merezhkovskii and of the generally religious tendencies of the Silver Age might well confirm Tolstoi’s presentiment. If taken in the strictest context of Russian religious philosophy, Shestov is probably a “misbeliever,” as he never shared the epoch’s religious enthusiasms, which indeed he often despised. But in his first works, and in particular in The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, there are nonetheless a number of clues indicating a specific philosophical interest in religion and the Bible, as well as a sincerely “Nietzschean” appreciation of the figure of Christ as an example of humanity and authenticity. Every time Christ is quoted in his work, it is actually with this connotation. In sum, Shestov was always interested in the religious problem and his thoughts on the Bible and on Christianity were inclusive and philosophical rather than confessional or dogmatic. He always applied an unbiased and nonconfessional philosophical point of view to his religious perspective on the Bible. In this phase, the only real influence he had in this regard certainly came more from Nietzsche than from his family or cultural background. At the same time, as was pointed out in the previous chapter, he had difficulties dealing with Merezhkovskii’s and Ivanov’s interpretations of Nietzsche, and he was probably aware that the late Nietzsche would probably better fit the Symbolists’ views than his own.24 In such a context, Shestov’s interest in Luther must be regarded as a continuation of his search for God after Nietzsche. In fact, as Evgeniya Gertsyk writes in referring to Shestov’s remark to her, in Luther “he did not find a new reformer, but a tragic soul akin to Nietzsche, akin to him” (Gertsyk [B1], 109). By the same token, Natal’ya Baranova considers Shestov’s approach to Luther to be very close to his own story: “It is a sort of spiritual autobiography of the author” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 148). In Baranova’s view, “among the characters Shestov visited in his ‘peregrinations through the souls’ very few were as close in spirit as the young Luther was—his fight for faith was similar to his own fight. This book is philosophical rather than literary” (148).

23 On Tolstoi’s comment, see Gorky (C), 48. Talking to Fondane in 1935, Shestov accounted for Tolstoi’s words by the fact that he had not read the chapters on Nietzsche of his book The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche (Fondane [B1], 96–97). 24 This point may be confirmed by Shestov’s essay on Ivanov. In this text, every time Shestov quotes Nietzsche it is not intended to mean “his” Nietzsche, but Ivanov’s. Paradoxically, then, in order to counter Ivanov’s view, Shestov must support Tolstoi in opposition to Ivanov’s Nietzsche.

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At the beginning of his essay, Shestov draws a hazardous parallel between Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor, some of Tolstoi’s characters (especially Ivan Ilʹich, Brekhunov, and Father Sergius), Nietzsche, and Luther (cf. Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 111–120).25 Shestov is aware that Tolstoi, in particular, would never accept such a comparison with his “enemy” Luther, but, for Shestov, beyond the obvious divergences among all these personalities, at a deeper level of understanding, they are on the same side because they challenge the common awareness and they refuse the power of logic to risk their own life in an unknown territory.26 In this sense, Shestov writes, “the Nietzschean formula ‘beyond good and evil’ and the one Luther took from Apostle Paul, ‘hominem iustificari sola fide’ [man is justified by faith alone], mean exactly the same thing.27 But Luther revealed himself to be even more audacious and coherent than Nietzsche” (120).28 In Shestov’s view, the figure of Luther is the missing link in a chain that includes Plato, St. Paul, Tertullian, Plotinus, St. Augustine, 25 According to Anatolii Akhutin, this start from Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor, here and in the subsequent book Potestas Clavium—a start intended to highlight the alliance between the Catholic Church and Western philosophical logos—, marks the beginning of a new path for Shestov. From this point on, he would tackle all his subjects from this perspective (cf. Akhutin 1997 [B3], 273). “However—Akhutin adds—, it is not at all in the Church, nor in the pope that Shestov sees the root of evil. Shestov’s main discovery on this new path is the intellect itself, the metaphysical intellect that was worshipped by the Hellenic sages whom the Church obeyed with its theology, and which reigned in the new times under the name of universal ‘rigorous science’—a reason that speaks with the authority of faith, or a faith providing itself with the authority of reason” (273). 26 Endel Kallas stresses the highly original meaning of this early—perhaps the earliest ever made—association of Luther with Dostoevskii and, in general of this whole Shestovian essay, which represents a pinnacle within the Russian studies on Luther: “How curious indeed—Kallas observes—to think that the primary Russian theological study of Luther for our twentieth century should have come from the hand of a Russian Jew!” (Kallas [B3], 432). 27 In his highly positive consideration of St. Paul, it must be observed, Shestov is anything but a disciple of Nietzsche, according to whom Paul is one of the main historical factors behind Christianity’s detachment from Jesus, since his work Antichrist could be easily renamed “antiPaul.” Shestov never shared this view and, in fact, Antichrist is one of his “master” Nietzsche’s works that he appreciates the least (as he repeatedly affirms in his article on Vyacheslav Ivanov). On the contrary, his opinion on St. Paul developed autonomously, through reading his texts or under the influence of Luther’s Commentaries on the Pauline epistles. 28 In another passage of this essay, Shestov maintains, with an unusually emphatic tone, that in affirming his thought Luther was even more audacious than Dostoevskii, who always hid behind the mask of the Underground Man. In comparison to Luther’s statement on the finality and meaning of the Law in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, Shestov solemnly declares, “even Dostoevskii’s Notes from the Underground—which dealt with the same subject—pales” (Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 252).

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Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, and applies to all those who rebel against the logical, “binding” power of reason. Luther is particularly important in this sequence as he deduced, in the religious field, the extreme consequences of what Paul and Augustine had already announced, that is, that faith, “faith alone,” was the only possibility to free God from the tyranny of reason. For Shestov, Luther was more radical, more coherent than Paul and Augustine. As he continually repeats in this essay, Shestov does not see Luther’s importance in the reformation or in the moralization of Church: he would have never broken with Catholicism for such reasons alone (cf. 181). These are, in fact, entirely secondary aspects. Luther—and this is the truest value Shestov accords to his historical role—brought to the terrain of God a battle concerning the final extremity of philosophy. Shestov here repeats his crucial definition from the end of his book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche, which he uses to link Augustine and Nietzsche in a rather original way: “We must search for what is beyond compassion and good. We must search for God.”29 Shestov’s God is beyond the tyranny of reason and of good: it is a free God, free from everything. This is the meaning of Paul’s, Augustine’s, and Luther’s expression sola fide, “by faith alone.” And here we can grasp the importance Shestov accords to Luther, who had the courage to withdraw the ultimate result of a last doubt that appeared to Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine.30 A doubt that was immediately suffocated by Aristotelian logic and by a whole Christian theology that, with Thomas Aquinas, was specifically built upon it. Shestov explains his position in a long excursus regarding the dispute between Augustine and Pelagius on the doctrine of grace, and on the role of Plotinus within the history of Greek philosophy (about half of this essay is devoted to these subjects and to Augustine’s thought in particular).31 In particular, he explains the way in which this “terrible doubt” was silenced by an astute Catholic Church, a church that for Shestov is, as many argue, complexio oppositorum32 and one that closely resembles the church of the Grand Inquisitor. 29 “The challenge St. Augustine brought to the ancient world has been revisited in our times by Friedrich Nietzsche against modern philosophy. When I had to talk about the polemics between the two opposed geniuses of our epoch, Tolstoi and Nietzsche, I summed up the essence of their positions in this way: ‘The good is not God, we must search for what is higher than good—we must search for God’” (Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 156). 30 In this essay, Shestov mainly considers Luther’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, De servo arbitrio, De votis monachorum, and the Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians. 31 See chapters 3–8 inclusive (121–181). 32 As Shestov argues, in order to obtain its historical scope, Catholic Church accepted “the simultaneous recognition of radically opposed stances” (136).

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For Shestov, there is an obvious self-contradiction, in the Church’s choice of condemning Pelagius and defending Augustine whereas, in practice, they did just the opposite; with the paradoxical result that both Luther and the Church rely upon Augustine. But the church did everything in its power to defend the principle that “authority is beyond the Holy Scripture,” Shestov says (138). Its only goal was that of “appropriating what was proclaimed by the successor of St. Peter on this earth, that is, of the potestas clavium [the power of keys] in its entirety” (136). To obtain this result, the church willingly accepted, at least formally, the more “attractive” figure of Augustine with respect to Pelagius, but in effect it followed the latter.33 Shestov’s argumentation is extremely well documented—he quotes the major Catholic and protestant theologians who dealt with this issue. In the end, he concludes that this dogma of salvation by faith lies at the very core of the contraposition of both Hellenism and Judaism, and of paganism and Christianity. Sola fide is the highest and most absurd challenge to Western (which for Shestov meant: Hellenic, pagan, scientific, and theological) thought. The first philosophical author to take this challenge was Plotinus (who harked back to a number of questions raised by his master Plato),34 while the first author who related this question directly to the Christian God was, in fact, Martin Luther (who reprised it from his master Augustine). This was, in Shestov’s view, the real reason for the schism: not the disagreement with Johann Tetzel on the selling of indulgences, but the conviction that “the one who relies on one’s wisdom, on one’s justice, on one’s strength, will never be saved. Luther’s disgust for Catholicism in general, and for monasticism in particular, flowed from this conviction” (209). Still, he continues: “Anyone who relies on himself denies God. For between the way in which a person saves himself from troubles and the way in which God saves a person, there is not and cannot be anything in common” (209). Shestov’s main idea is that “Catholicism entirely derived the idea of potestas clavium from Hellenic thought,” that is, from Socrates’, Plato’s, and Aristotle’s conception of the eternal truths: “It is exactly the same theory as that affirmed by the Church: the 33 “Catholicism refused Pelagianism—nonetheless it lives on Pelagius’ ideas” (130–131). Shestov repeats the same idea on other occasions (see 179 and 201): “They [i.e., Catholics] enhanced St. Augustine but believed in Pelagius—they read the great Apostle Paul with veneration, but followed Socrates” (208). 34 “The philosophy of Plotinus”—Shestov writes—“in absorbing all the destructive elements that had been accumulated over the centuries, undermined any possibility of certainty. It exposed the weakness and powerlessness of the human intellect, and it also abandoned a pitiful and weak humanity to itself and to its insignificant strengths” (146).

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only difference is that Socrates instead of the Catholic Church chooses the reason” (196). Both Socrates and the Church, in fact, proclaimed their own infallibility (197). Luther’s importance, for Shestov, seems to lie in the fact that, as a result of his rebellion, Shestov recognized the substantial continuity between philosophical-scientific thought and theological thought in all its clarity. Luther did for theology what Plotinus and Nietzsche did for philosophy. They all put a radical doubt where the doubt was interdict and excluded: Plotinus established a doubt in the validity of intellect, Nietzsche in morals, and Luther in the subjugation of God to human reason. From this essay on Luther, many of Shestov’s interesting ideas emerge: on the one hand, the complete continuity Shestov sees (in a negative way) between Catholic and Hellenic thought, hence his confirmation of Dostoevskii’s view from the Grand Inquisitor; on the other hand, the extraneity of St. Paul to this tradition—St. Paul who is, according to Shestov, “betrayed” by Church in the same way as St. Augustine was. In this respect, Shestov’s position differs substantially from that of Nietzsche. Luther’s affinity with Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, and Nietzsche, in particular, must be seen from the original Shestovian view of rebellion against the “highest power”— the power of what is reasonable and moral (here perfectly represented by Plato and Aristotle, and by the theology that derived from their thought)—and only in this sense it can be understood. But according to Shestov, Luther himself was not capable of remaining faithful to his audacity to the end. When the “apostate” ended and the “reformer” began, Luther “was forced, willy-nilly, to consolidate his revelations in definite and clear expressions, to transform them into universal truth and obligatory truth” (271). In that moment, when he wrote his Catechisms, he lost his revelation and his own “ecstasy” to become a normal theologian like others. In his Catechisms, Shestov concludes, “faith is transformed into merit, in the same way as in Thomas Aquinas” (279). “And now Protestantism is only a simplified Catholicism, as all Catholic theologians rightly say. Here too, as always in history, it was the reasonable Socrates, not the insane one, who won” (281). Shestov’s conclusion on Luther is not different, after all, from other final comments he made on Dostoevskii’s and on Nietzsche’s life trajectories, where a new, last temptation took precedence over the audacity of their life. But this, in some way, confirms the difficulty of exposing an “ultimate truth”—in the case of Luther, the sola fides—that lives in the intimacy of our soul, because it is by definition a “mystery” (281).

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3.3 The Two Histories of Western Philosophy Along with his discovery of Luther, the years in Coppet represented for Shestov a time of deep study on another subject he had long wanted to tackle. When he was commenting on literary works, in the early phase of his activity, it was already clear to him (at least from the numerous philosophical references and digressions he made) that behind literature he was actually in search of a theory of knowledge and of truth, which he could find only in the history of Western philosophy. In this regard, nobody really taught Shestov anything about philosophy—his acquaintances were mostly with literary critics and he used to write for that kind of audience. This isolation somehow reinforced his philosophical vocation as he felt that it was time to deal with the sources of what really interested him. In Coppet, he had at his disposal many texts of Greek and medieval philosophers—which he mainly ordered from Germany—in Greek and Latin, and German. From then on, Shestov made a massive effort to study the history of Western thought over a period of about ten years, until his definitive departure from Russia in 1920. This whole work resulted in the production of a number of texts and short writings: some of which were published, during or after Shestov’s life, while other minor writings have remained unpublished. The main work reporting his ideas on the history of philosophy is represented by the introduction and first two sections of Potestas Clavium, published in 1923.35 His most specific studies on Greek and medieval philosophy are also the subject of the first part of the book Sola Fide, first published in 1966, but written around 1911–1914. Finally, in the last year he spent in Russia before his exodus, he held a course on the history of Greek philosophy at the Popular University of Kiev (1918–1919).36 The text of that course was found in a typed manuscript that was published for the first time in 2001, with the title Lektsii po istorii grecheskoi filosofii [Lectures on the History of Greek Philosophy], edited by Anatolii Akhutin (see Shestov 13/2001 [A1]).37 35 These parts, written in an aphoristic form, appeared earlier, separately, in various journals in Russia, Germany and France, between 1916 and 1921, and were also collected in the book Potestas Clavium (Shestov 7/1923 [A1]), which in its third and final section also contains the crucial essays on Husserl and Ivanov. 36 In a letter to Gershenzon, written on March 8, 1919, Shestov includes a brief note concerning this experience: “At the Popular University I read an ‘Introduction to philosophy.’ The work was a disaster—I am not used to speaking, I have to write all the lectures. But listeners seemed happy, they applauded” (Shestov 24/1992 [A2], 103). 37 See Ms. 2110-2-2, file 95, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris. This unfinished manuscript is divided into eight chapters reporting different authors

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In The Shestov Archive at the Sorbonne there is another manuscript from the same period that reflects Shestov’s interest and work on this subject.38 But the results of Shestov’s efforts in history of philosophy can be found throughout the texts he wrote and published after the time he spent in Switzerland and even after his emigration from Russia. There is possibly not a single essay or chapter of his later books In Job’s Balance, Athens and Jerusalem, and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy that does not contain a reference to Socrates and Plato, or to Plotinus and Augustine. Furthermore, the courses he held at the Sorbonne University, starting from spring 1922, all focused on philosophical subjects.39 In this respect, one might well say that the way Shestov studied and absorbed the history of philosophy constitutes the main underlying scenario of all the works he wrote in the second part of his life and career. The same old and new Shestovian “heroes” of this late phase, from Pascal and Plotinus to Kierkegaard and Job, are considered in opposition to this preestablished scenario of the history of philosophy that affirmed the victory of Western logos, that is, of the “binding powers” of Western reason over all other possibilities, including God and humanity itself. In a way, the work Shestov did at this time was that of identifying the boundaries of what it was that he was fighting— that is, the very core of Western logos, which he identified in the concept of or currents of ancient philosophy. It starts classically with the Presocratics, followed by single chapters dedicated to the Sophists and Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, The Megarian school, the Cyrenaics and Cynics, and Stoicism, and concludes with a chapter on Epicureanism. In this exposition, Shestov’s style appears to be more didactic and informative than usual. It is clear that his intent was mainly to provide a number of general notions on the history of philosophy to people who probably knew very little about it. His general narration is less provocative and paradoxical in comparison to his usual tones, although it also reveals the main ideas of his generally dialectical view of the birth of philosophy, that is, the victory of a conception of philosophy as “logic knowledge” over a discarded view of philosophy as “wisdom.” This text is undeniably relevant precisely because of the unusual homogeneity of Shestov’s reasoning, although it lacks its natural conclusion, i.e., Neoplatonism, due to the interruption of the manuscript itself. On Shestov’s general approach to ancient philosophy, see Kurabtsev 2006b (B3). 38 This manuscript, of about one hundred pages, is entitled “The Fundamental Problems of Philosophy from a Historical Point of View.” It mainly deals with the genesis of theory of knowledge in Greek philosophy as a theory of truth-episteme [science] as opposed to truthdoxa [opinion]. Given its plain and explicatory tone, it was probably one of the lectures Shestov read at the Popular University of Kiev. See Ms. 2110-2-2, file 96, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris. 39 Natalˈya Baranova reports some of the titles of the courses Shestov held in his first years (1922–1925): “The Contemporary Russian Philosophy,” “Russian Philosophy from the 19th Century,” and “The Philosophical Ideas of Dostoevskii and Pascal” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 268–269).

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“necessity” as a preliminary warrant to the principle of noncontradiction. In this demarcation of historical boundaries, Shestov found his definitive place and his role as a philosopher: a philosopher opposing “official” philosophy, but nonetheless a philosopher. All the Shestovian texts regarding the history of ancient philosophy— despite being written at various times and often quoting different authors or texts40—proceed almost in parallel and they solidly reflect a common view concerning the theory of knowledge in a specific way. Shestov’s starting point in his personal understanding of the development of Western thought is the decisive shift from the Greek concept of “moira” [fate] to the one of “logos,” or, in other words, from myth to rational thought, and from chaos and arbitrariness to the necessity of logical evidence. At a certain point, to the Greek philosophical mind it became clear that not even God could escape the realm of logical necessity: in fact, God—in order to be God— should obey it. For Shestov, this idea of a law (the law of necessity) standing even “above God” must be ascribed most significantly to Socrates—which is where the Platonic doctrine of ideas derives from (cf. Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 29–35). From that moment on, philosophy became a synonym of “episteme” [knowledge/science], and the goal of philosophy was the construction of a truthful world dominated by logic, in particular, according to the “classic argument,” that is, the principle of noncontradiction (41–44). But, in Shestov’s view, this was not the only genesis of Western philosophy— there was another “aborted” or never openly recognized origin that could be ascribed to Plato’s words from Phaedo (64a) in which he affirms that philosophy is fundamentally a preparation to die.41 According to Shestov, it was Plato who first betrayed his own words or, at least, did not comprehend 40 The first part of Sola Fide (“Greek and Medieval Philosophy”), written probably in 1912, already posits all the main themes of Shestov’s analysis concerning the birth of philosophy in Greece along with the path of its development in the history of European philosophy. The subsequent Lectures on the History of Greek Philosophy (1919) and the first two parts of Potestas Clavium (written around 1915–1919) then differentiate and extend those themes in greater detail to other authors and, in particular, to Plotinus and Augustine who have, for Shestov, a key role in the crisis and reconsideration of Western thought. 41 This is the passage of the Phaedo (64a) quoted by Shestov: “Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. Now if this is true, it would be absurd to be eager for nothing but this all their lives, and then to be troubled when that came for which they had all along been eagerly practicing” (Plato, Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 1, trans. Harold North Fowler [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966], 64).

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them until the end. If he did, the history of philosophy as the search for “episteme” would probably have ended immediately. But, on the contrary, it started in that very moment: with Socrates, Plato’s doctrine of ideas, and Aristotle’s metaphysics—it started as the building of an epistemic thought, not as a destruction of it as Plato’s “neglected” words aimed at doing. Shestov is aware that there are irreconcilable differences between Plato and Aristotle, and that they are generally considered in opposition to each other (cf. Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 54). But, in this case, he is considering their role from a higher perspective—a viewpoint from which their intentions coincide, as the fundamental intention of both Plato’s and Aristotle’s philosophical thought is to provide humanity with the most powerful means to dominate God (i.e., the “Shestovian God,” coinciding with the concept of absurd) through the self-evidence of reason (40–41). The “official” history of philosophy is, for Shestov, the history of truth, understood as the noncontradictory concept of nature, good, and justice, trading places with God: the same God that previously was “moira,” arbitrariness and contradiction (cf. Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 30). Throughout the centuries, this history revealed its true face in that it accomplished the meaning for which it was born. Shestov relates to Anaximander, in the notable words that are considered the oldest fragment of Western thinking.42 This fragment “prophetically” displays a destiny of dominion over everything else and, eventually, self-destruction.43 Such a dominion occurred in history by means of a series of alliances and successions, and in particular by imposing the idea of the noncontradictory nature of reality as a sort of potestas clavium. For Shestov, the “power of keys” is not a question related to the Catholic dogma and to the primacy of St. Peter. It was, in fact, invented by Socrates as an effective way to dominate 42 Most famously interpreted first by Nietzsche in the early 1870s and then by Heidegger in 1946, this fragment had a critical edition in 1903 by Hermann Diels, to which Shestov probably referred. According to a generally accepted text, the fragment reads: “But where things have their origin, there too their passing away occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly established time.” The whole second part of Potestas Clavium proceeds as a comment to this fragment. Once again in this case, thirty years before Heidegger, Shestov’s philosophical sensitivity appears to be close to many of the future Heideggerian issues. 43 In my view, in this passage, which is transversal to the whole book Potestas Clavium, Shestov anticipates with brilliant insight—indeed not so common for those times—a theme that would occupy a large part of the later work of Husserl and Heidegger, i.e., the crisis of Western science and the so-called “question concerning technology” (die Frage nach der Technik).

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the world by keeping in the human mind the “keys” to control everything else, even the mysteries beyond the human nature (46). From a historical point of view, the Catholic Church obtained this power through its alliance with Greek philosophy and with the philosophy of Aristotle in particular. But the Church was not the only depositary of this power. Subsequently, in our own times, it is modern science that has inherited it, or better, conquered it (47).44 The essence of Catholicism, therefore, is the same essence as that of Greek metaphysics and of modern science: it is the essence of Western logos, which—as was predicted in Anaximander’s words—starts as a binding and inescapable necessity, then becomes dominion, and eventually self-destruction. For Shestov, the story of the Grand Inquisitor sums up this event most accurately. Socrates invented the potestas clavium as a means to build the strongest power in this world (46, 48). The history of Greek and Western philosophy is the history that discloses this idea, starting from Anaximander’s prediction. It then proceeds, in its most decisive phases, with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who, not by chance, was defined by Catholic theologians, Shestov observes (89), as the precursor Christi in naturalibus (“Christ’s precursor in natural things). Its later proponents include Philo of Alexandria,45 all the Fathers of Church up to Thomas Aquinas,46 then again Descartes and all European philosophy culminating with Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason, for Shestov, “is nothing but a Protestant hymn to Socrates” (Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 32),47 then with positive science and, in 44 See Shestov’s words: “In the same way as Catholicism, in its own day, seized the potestas clavium from the pagans’ hands, thus in our times positive science tries to grab this enviable privilege from Catholicism’s hands” (Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 47). 45 In Shestov’s view, Philo is a key figure in the shift from Greek metaphysics to Christian theology. It was he who found that “extremely fascinating solution” which affirms that “Christian revelation should not contradict the reason of the Greeks: the logos” (89). For Shestov, Philo’s solution had a decisive influence in the subsequent development of Catholicism, which diverged significantly in this point from the meaning of the Old and New Testament that would never have supported the pretenses of reason to impose truth. 46 On Thomas Aquinas’ crucial role within this development of Western philosophy and its intertwinement with theology, see Shestov 12/1966 (A1), 23–27. 47 Shestov’s consideration of Immanuel Kant deserves a separate discussion, as the German philosopher pervades Shestov’s oeuvre from beginning to end: at first (in his book on Shakespeare) as a partial possibility of redemption for the apparent meaninglessness of Shakespearean tragedies, then as a definite distortion of the existential and tragic truth. In his overall negative view of Kant, Shestov actually agrees with a well-established tradition of the nonacademic Russian philosophy and, in particular, of the religious philosophers of the Silver Age. In this respect, Pavel Florenskii appears to be one of the most notable of Kant’s adversaries. In 1925 Semën Frank affirmed that “the criticism of Kant’s philosophy and the fight against Kantism are constant topics of Russian philosophical thought” (Semën

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recent times, with Husserl. It is a history in which metaphysics, theology, and science converge as a single entity. From Shestov’s perspective, they are not enemies: they are, in fact, allies. But Shestov also tells a counterhistory of philosophy: a concealed, alternative version of the first, starting precisely from Plato’s “disregarded” affirmation that “philosophy is a preparation for death.” In point of fact, before Plato it was Diogenes who spread this different variant of the birth of philosophy (cf. 9–16). This history is the opposite of Kant’s immutable principles and postulates: it is, in fact, the contempt of oneself—a truth which personalities like Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and Martin Luther acknowledged, but which Shakespeare, Dostoevskii, and Tolstoi also had in mind.48 Along the line connecting Plato to Kant, the siren’s song of reason built its kingdom, but another antipodal kingdom had always existed underneath—the kingdom of the distrust and contempt of reason. This concept of the “death of reason by means of reason” was present in Diogenes, was latent in Plato’s Phaedo, and exploded with Plotinus and with the medieval mystics. For Shestov, this is the backward history of philosophy, which from the win proceeds to the loss, from life to death: “Inversely, it can be said with no less certainty that on the day when people cast off the supremacy of Socrates and recognize the insane Diogenes as their leader, then the end of the world will come” (33). But there was, nonetheless, one thinker who dared to doubt the supremacy of Socrates with the same instruments of logos. Shestov’s history of ancient philosophy concludes with Plotinus, “the last of the great Greek philosophers” and the one who rediscovered what Diogenes and Plato had only intuited, that is, that philosophy is to timiotaton, “that which matters most” (Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 176). He derived his main ideas from Plato, just like—according to Shestov—Husserl’s philosophy originates from Plato. But Plotinus brought philosophy back into the track of what really matters, for—after him—it would be highly unfair to exclude from the realm of philosophy authors like Mozart and Beethoven, Pushkin and Lermontov (176). “Who is right?” Shestov asks. “The Platonic Husserl or the Platonic Plotinus?” (176). Both believed in a universal and eternal idea that could explain the contingency of the world. But Plotinus, unlike Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl, at a certain point doubted that idea. In a penetrating and audacious sentence, Shestov declares that Plotinus’ theory of soul and L. Frank, Russkoe mirovozzrenie [St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1996], 169). Among the rare studies focusing on this specific aspect of Shestov’s relationship with the work of Kant, see Kalinnikov (B3), Taput’ 2004 and 2006 (B3). 48 See, on this, in particular aphorism no. 10, “De novissimis,” in Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 69–75.

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of the intelligible world does not express his real thought, just as the characters of Zosima or Alësha Karamazov do not represent Dostoevskii’s real thought (cf. 184). Once more, Shestov maintains a notion of a fundamental duplicity of truth, which reveals itself through a tendency to harmonize a necessity and through an opposite, somehow more authentic, tendency to destruction. What is important to him is that some authors recognized that this contradiction lay at the core of human being and of truth itself, and they acted consequently. As Shestov puts it, Plotinus, Nietzsche, Tolstoi, Dostoevskii believed in the luminous part of truth: each of them partly developed a thought concerning a positive and necessary truth. But they also found its opposite, the underground, to be equally true. For they were “forced” to abandon the pretenses of reason and embrace a skeptical view of reason itself. This idea of philosophy as a preparation for death, however, should not be considered entirely in the domain of wisdom, although Shestov would always defend (most notably in his conversations with Husserl) a definition of Western philosophy as wisdom rather than as evidence of reason. But it is equally significant that not only did he never develop a theory or practice on wisdom, but he also never insisted on searching for and exposing a full truth of that kind. He was, in fact, more interested in contrasting the “official” philosophy of logos—whose criticism always occupies almost the whole of Shestov’s analysis—in the name of an “unauthorized” philosophy of wisdom, which is often mentioned but much less or not at all disclosed. The fact is that, for Shestov, “preparation for death” is not so much a “practice of wisdom” as it is, in fact, a theory of knowledge, although of a negative, antithetic kind. What Shestov has in mind is a countertheory of knowledge, as if it were the negative side of Western logos, but nonetheless a dialectical part of logos itself. His theory of truth does not contemplate that the positive and epistemic side of truth is simply false, so that a new theory would substitute the other, but rather that, at a certain stage, it becomes contradictory. The second history of philosophy comes to light at its fullness in this very point. This stage occurs as a revelation of an existential tragedy that happens—as Shestov explains—in those “places where the sun’s rays do not reach: the underground, the bottom of sea. There is no light there; there, it is dark: but are not life and the truth of life possible there?” (43). The preparation for death is, therefore, a “counterlight” tackling the most luminous light and eventually revealing the very image of contradiction: for “A” and “non-A” can and should stand together as the two incompatible sides of one higher truth. The “death,” for Shestov, is above all that of a certain idea of knowledge. In the history of ancient philosophy, he searches

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for all the smallest signs that could lead to this ultimate truth consisting of two antipodal parts. To a great extent, Shestov reads this history as a “psychological metaphysics”—to use Berdyaev’s definition again—in that he identifies the concealment of this contradictory truth taking place in the personal fears of the human being. But it is still a metaphysics as it involves the whole nature of human and superhuman things. It was with Augustine, Tertullian, Plotinus, and all the Neoplatonic authors that this “counterlight,” or, as it were, this “will to death” met its opposite, which up to that moment had been the undisputed winner, that is, the “will to power” expressed by the Greek Socratic-Aristotelian logos. It was Plotinus who first openly doubted the absolute legitimacy of that power—Shestov acknowledged this fact many times. What distinguished Plotinus from other philosophers, according to Shestov, was that, unlike Plato, he used logos to question logos itself. But it was also the very doubt, the tragedy of facing an inescapable paradox, and not the eradication of one’s adversary (e.g., the triumph of irrationality) that indicated the most authentic way for Western philosophy.49 Along this way, Shestov would find his well-known tragic protagonists and would trace his own path. Shestov’s background in philosophy is as a self-taught man, and this is perhaps evident in the way he never mediates between the different positions (which he always sees as oppositions). He considered this an advantage that might give him more freedom in expressing his thoughts: “I am always accused of quoting texts that no one quotes, of discovering passages that had been left to rot. Perhaps if I had studied, I would have quoted only the authorized texts. This is why I give all my quotations in Greek and Latin. So they cannot say that I Shestovize” (Fondane [B1], 88). Shestov is right in many ways: he has the freedom and gift of finding original clues and connections in the history of philosophy. He also possesses the limitation of continually assuming a one-sided perspective in his explanation of facts, a perspective that encompassed more than two thousand years of philosophy. But his knowledge of texts and criticism, as well as the amount of primary sources he read—most of them in their original language, whether Greek or Latin or German—is still impressive. Not only did he read the classics of philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus, and so on), but he also consulted the most relevant studies in both Catholic and protestant theology and the main histories of philosophy that circulated in his own time (above all Eduard Zeller’s, which served as his constant point of reference). If he reduced many texts and authors to his own view, he certainly 49 For an understanding of this point, see the concluding chapter of this book.

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did so after reading all that he could read. If there was an original or meaningful passage that might reveal a different outlook on things, he would surely find it. In sum, Shestov had a rather slanted view of Western philosophy: his almost obsessive insistence on the subject of those who won and those who lost is evidence of this. But his care for and knowledge of texts—to the reading of which he devoted most of his time—is also a guarantee that he was truly searching for something in the authors and texts he dealt with. In my view, he was looking—“between the lines,” as it were—for something that nobody had seen and that could better explain or extend Nietzsche’s philosophical position— which Shestov implicitly always assumes throughout his “historical reading.” Finally, he found it in a neglected medieval state of mind (yet already present at the beginning of Greek philosophy), a “wise” mistrust of logos, opposing an ineluctable direction that Western thought had already taken. Needless to say, these two opposite determinations of Western logos—an official and a clandestine one, the first public and the second undercover—would serve Shestov as an underlying historical scenario for his philosophy of tragedy, which would openly emerge in his last works.

3.4 The Fight against Self-Evidences: Dostoevskii, Pascal, and Spinoza 1. There is a watershed date in Shestov’s “second life” in France, and this is February 1922. On the occasion of the centenary of Dostoevskii’s birth, the renowned journal Nouvelle revue française decided to pay homage to the great Russian writer with a monographic issue in which, among other contributions, were two studies by André Gide and Jacques Rivière. It was Gide, at the suggestion of Boris de Schloezer,50 who asked Shestov—until then a virtually unknown writer in France—to contribute with an essay. Shestov sent the first part of his article “Preodolenie samoochevidnostei” [Overcoming SelfEvidences], entitled “Dostoïevski et la lutte contre les evidences” and translated by Schloezer. This text had already appeared in Russian in Sovremennye zapiski 8 (1921) and would be published in its entirety in two more issues of the same journal in 1922.51 Because of its collocation beside two huge names 50 At the time, Boris de Schloezer worked on the editorial staff of Revue musicale, which was in the same building as Nouvelle revue française. He knew Rivière in person and recommended Shestov’s name for a contribution in the Revue. 51 See Léon Chestov, “Dostoïevski et la lutte contre les évidences,” Nouvelle revue française 101 (February 1922): 134–158. The full Russian version, published between 1921 and

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like Gide and Rivière, and because of its fresh style and content, Shestov’s article had a tremendous impact on French intellectual readers. Numerous positive comments and reviews appeared, first and foremost by Gide and Rivière. Charles du Bos, who was an influential literary critic and the editor of the publishing house Plon’s “Auteurs étrangers” series, was an enthusiast and proposed to Shestov to publish it in a book.52 Suddenly, his destiny in France changed from being an unknown writer to becoming a point of reference for anything related to Russian thought. He was offered a post as lecturer in Russian philosophy in the Institut d’études slaves affiliated to the Sorbonne University53 and, most important of all, he became acquainted with the French intellectual milieu at a relatively early date, only one year after leaving Russia. This did not mean either that his finances were settled forever, or that his life in France would be easier than the one he had in Kiev. However, thanks to Boris de Schloezer’s translations, he had the good luck to be read in France, a chance that was not shared by all the intellectuals of the Russian émigré community, at least in the early stages of their stay in Europe.54 For these reasons and despite his innate tendency to be reserved, Shestov had many contacts in Paris from the outset. He frequented the “salon” of Jules de Gaultier, who at that time was a crucial figure in Parisian philosophical circles (it was there that he met Benjamin Fondane). In the Parisian intellectual context,55 he had the opportunity to become acquainted with the majority of the

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1922, is: “Preodolenie samoochevidnostei. K 100-letiyu rozhdeniya F. M. Dostoevskogo” [Overcoming Self-Evidences. On the Occasion of the Centenary of Dostoevskii’s Birth], Sovremennye zapiski 8 (1921): 132–178; 9 (1922): 190–215; 10 (1922): 128–146. The book, which also included Shestov’s essay on Tolstoi, was Léon Chestov, Les révélations de la mort. Dostoïevsky-Tolstoï (Paris: Plon, 1923). On the enthusiastic reactions to Shestov’s article on Dostoevskii, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 261–268. All this praise, however, neither gave Shestov false hopes nor distracted him from his practical concerns: he soon realized that the acclaim did not automatically transform into opportunities to make a living out (see, on this, a letter from March 1922 to German Lovtskii and Fanya in BaranoffChestov 1991 [B1], 265–266). This Institute, which at that time was called the “Russian section” of the Sorbonne, was created in 1919 by the French historian Ernest Denis to host the Russian students of the diaspora. It still exists and is a center of research on Slavic studies. On these early years of Shestov’s life Paris, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 239–349. See also, in particular, the correspondence concerning these years with Mikhail Gershenzon, Boris de Schloezer, and German Lovtskii and Fanya: Shestov 24/1992, 31/2011, and 32/2013 (A2). Jules de Gaultier (1858–1942) was a French critic and philosopher who was among the first to introduce Nietzsche’s philosophy in France. At that time, he was the editor of Les Editions du Siècle publishers. After reading Shestov’s articles on Spinoza and on Pascal,

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most renowned French writers and philosophers: Gide, Rivière and Gaultier, of course, but also André Malraux and Gabriel Marcel (who had, at the beginning, a special appreciation for Shestov’s ideas),56 and highly influential figures such as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Jean Paulhan, and Charles du Bos, who all contributed to making his name known in France or helped him to be published. In all this, his relationship with Boris de Schloezer was decisive: the two were joined by a deep friendship that had developed in the difficult “pre-” and postrevolutionary years in Kiev, and helped each other in various ways. Schloezer was not only “Shestov’s translator” but also a fine interpreter of his thought, who wrote for Mercure de France a famous article that introduced Shestov in France.57 He was a solid presence in his life, and a soul more akin to Shestov’s mind than might appear at first sight.58 There are perhaps only three figures who always supported Shestov not only as friends but also in his sometimes “unpopular” ideas, to the extent of being considered by some (like Berdyaev) as his “apologists”: Boris de Schloezer, Benjamin Fondane, and (with a lesser role) Adolʹf Lazarev. But Schloezer, who had a practical mind and many connections in the publishing world, turned out to be particularly important during Shestov’s life. The correspondence between the two—edited for the first time in 2011 by Olga Tabachnikova—helps to better reconstruct their friendship and to reveal which both appeared in French in 1923, Gaultier decided to translate and publish Shestov’s second and third books. Ultimately only the book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche was published, in 1925, with a preface by Gaultier himself and translated by Tatʹyana Shestova and Georges Bataille. Gaultier’s passion for Shestov’s philosophy did not last long: they never lost touch completely, but after 1925 their contacts diminished. As Fondane acknowledged, Shestov and Gaultier were, in fact, two very different personalities. 56 On Shestov’s relationship with Gabriel Marcel, see Viktor P. Vizgin, “Shestov i Marselʹ,” in Shchedrina 2016a (B2), 165–182. 57 The article “Un penseur russe: Léon Chestov” (see Schloezer 1922 [B3]) appeared in October 1922 as a sort of response to the general curiosity about Shestov after his essay on Dostoevskii for Nouvelle revue française. Charles du Bos maintained Schloezer’s article to be of “perfect comprehension” and clarity, and wanted to use it as a starting point from which to write his own study on Shestov. He actually declared this intention more than once, but in the end the project was never realized (see, on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 291–292). 58 In all his writings on Shestov, Schloezer always took special care to mediate between the ideas of the author—whom he highly respected and defended—and the readers’ capacity of understanding. He was an apologist of Shestov, but with a sense of moderation that made his argumentation pleasant and never arrogant. For a list of Schloezer’s writings about Shestov, see Schloezer (B3). Even today, there are not many studies on Schloezer’s own output as a music critic, essayist, and novelist. See, on this, Bonnefoy (C), Esclapez (C), Sviridovskaya (B3), and, in German, Gun-Britt Kohler, Boris de Schloezer (1881–1969): Wege aus der russischen Emigration (Cologne: Bohlau, 2003). On Shestov’s presence in the works of Schloezer, see Christensen (B3).

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the strong network of relations they had, as well as the history of Shestov’s publications in France (see Shestov 31/2011 [A2]). Perhaps it is not inappropriate to affirm that this first article on Dostoevskii (1922) oriented the reception of Dostoevskii in France in a certain philosophic-existential way. Shestov himself was immediately regarded as an existential philosopher rather than a literary critic, at a time when the “existential tendency” in philosophy was at its dawn, particularly in France. Shestov intercepted an existing existential sensitivity, which he fed and boosted with new subjects and ideas, for which he was greeted as a pioneer of certain literary themes in philosophy and, in that very moment, he was indeed the most famous Russian philosopher in France. Needless to say, his name was closely associated with his philosophical interpretation of Dostoevskii and with linking this to Pascal’s thought. Shestov’s fame in France was built around this combination, for he caught the interest of French existentialists, such as Marcel (in a way, also Malraux and Gide)—and, later, Camus and Sartre, but also philosophers like Jacques Maritain and Henri Bergson.59 The influence Shestov had—along with that of Berdyaev (who arrived in Paris three years later)—in this regard, for the development of French existentialism is profound and hard to contest. However, as is evidenced by Fondane’s Rencontres, the feeling of being misunderstood was always dominant in him and he never felt influenced to orient his research so as to follow the prevailing trends. On the contrary, his studies originated only from his own interests and curiosity, even to the detriment of the advantages he might have received had he adhered to the spirit of times. Nevertheless, Dostoevskii always remained a point of reference for him, as if it were his “trademark,” and perhaps the most solid link to his past Russian background and interests. But Shestov connected and “updated” his former interpretation to his new research—already begun with 59 Shestov’s consideration of Bergson was rather ambivalent. According to Baranova, he did not have any relationship with Bergson: “He never tried to meet him and did not mention him except, en passant, in certain works [ . . . ]. Their thoughts followed entirely different paths. He used to talk about this with his friends” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 119). With regard to Bergson’s books, Shestov told Fondane that he appreciated only his very first: Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). In his opinion, Bergson’s subsequent works, and in particular The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), were less valuable or even faible (cf. Fondane [B1], 97, 71–72, 107). In the Shestov Archive there is an unpublished manuscript, written in 1926, concerning Bergson—nearly irrelevant in length and content, but that testifies Shestov’s interest in the French philosopher in the mid-1920s (cf. Ms. 2110, file 100, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris).

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Potestas Clavium—on the theory of knowledge in Western philosophy and on its relationship with the truth of the Bible. In France, Shestov produced two main articles on Dostoevskii. The first was the aforementioned “Overcoming Self-Evidences” (1922), which in 1929 would be also the opening essay of the book In Job’s Balance. The second was the result of a series of lectures Shestov delivered in French on Radio Paris in spring 1937, then published in French and Russian in the journals Les cahiers de Radio Paris and Russkie zapiski.60 Shestov’s Dostoevskii from this second phase, however, is not the same Dostoevskii Shestov dealt with in the early years of his career. In those early times, Shestov was fighting another battle— against morals and against a tragedy of morality rather than a tragedy of truth. Significantly, in this second reading of Dostoevskii there is no trace of Nietzsche, who is never mentioned, whereas he was the key to reading Dostoevskii and main reason why Shestov felt the need to involve Dostoevskii in his path to the philosophy of tragedy. In 1920s, and in a process that started ten years earlier, it was Plotinus—rather than Nietzsche—who was Dostoevskii’s double. Although Shestov, as usual, preferably refers to Notes from the Underground and to the most “Karamazovian” aspects of the writer’s novels, Dostoevskii is no longer just an individual rebel—the alter ego of Nietzsche, Heinrich Heine, and the Underground Man—but is more a rebel-philosopher who is aware of the Plotinian “great battle” in front of him. And the enemy to be fought is no longer the Kantian or Tolstoian morality but the Aristotelian and Husserlian theory of knowledge. In this way, Shestov brings Dostoevskii into his “new” philosophical fight against self-evidences and against science. More than once in his 1922 essay, he pairs him with Plotinus: what unites them, he declares, is the courage to relinquish the stability that is given by “general laws” and to try “to overcome our ‘experience’ of knowledge” so as to be “overrun with a deadly fear that only the void exists” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 48). Aristotle and Kant, the antipodes of Dostoevskii and Plotinus, were in fact “moderate to the extreme” (50). Such moderation is one of the most appropriate connotations 60 See Léon Chestov, “L’oeuvre de Dostoïevski,” Les cahiers de Radio Paris 5, May 15, 1937, 449–475, and Lev I. Shestov, “O ‘pererozhdenii ubezhdenii’ u Dostoevskogo” [On the “Change of Convictions” in Dostoevskii], Russkie zapiski 2 (1937): 125–154. There is also a third contribution in which Shestov explicitly involved Dostoevskii: this is the last “parallel” he drew, perhaps the one he felt with the most urgency and which he believed in the most, i.e., the parallel with Kierkegaard: “Kirkhegard i Dostoevskii. Golosa vopiyushchikh v pustyne” [Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii. Voices in the Wilderness], Putʹ 48 ( July–September 1935): 20–37. The same essay was included as a preface to his book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Shestov 9/1939 [A1]).

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of the Western logos—which, according to Shestov, took form firstly in the Greek metaphysics, then in Christian theology, and eventually in modern science. Shestov sees all these events as tied in a strict bond of continuity. The Underground, the place of abnormality opposing moderation, is the realm where Dostoevskii set all his most authentic works; it is the realm where the only possible philosophy is the Plotinian timiotaton (51). The fight against self-evidences is not only a fight from this “abnormal” position in which to timiotaton trades place with that which should be logic and necessary, but it is also a fight that must be conducted with different means than logic (54). In this long essay, Shestov strives to explain the absurd “logic of the Underground,” which is not at all a logic, and yet Shestov treats it as such— as if it were a “logic.” In this way, he generates a discourse full of paradoxes and repetitions, with a rhetoric that continually challenges its adversary by means of vain provocations in the wake of the Underground Man’s speech. The spirit of Notes from the Underground, which, as Shestov tirelessly repeats, is the most revealing source of all Dostoevskii’s works, pervades the whole essay “Overcoming Self-Evidences,” and it is an insane, useless, destructive spirit. Its “will to death,” however, is not motivated by mere nihilism, but reveals the same awareness that medieval mystics had: that is, that the real principle of death was the “2+2=4,” and that the only result of theodicy was not defending God, but defending “2+2=4” (57 and 61). Shestov here sets a sort of fundamental principle of discontinuity between antipodal elements. The same idea of “balance”—which gives the book its title (In Job’s Balance) and is taken from Job 6:2–3—indicates the impossibility of measuring two unequal quantities, for one of the two is not a “quantity” at all. It is the image of absurdity: that is, that which is weightless daring to challenge the heaviest weight. Two dimensions are here facing off against each other, but their confrontation is not actually possible: nonetheless, it is required and provoked by the Dostoevskian heroes, without any possibility of being effective. This is the way in which he explains the heart of Dostoevskii’s creation and, above all, the heart of Shestov’s own philosophical thought. Something absurd, like Plotinus’ ecstasies or the Christ from the Grand Inquisitor, must happen to prevent death, real death, from winning over life, and prevent a dead principle from taking over for a living being. Throughout this essay, which not by chance starts with a highly meaningful fragment of Euripides as an epigraph,61 Shestov seems to switch the meaning of the terms “death” and “life.” There is an actual death promising an apparent 61 “Who knows whether to live be not death, and to be dead life?” (Euripides, Fragment 639 N).

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life (the principle of noncontradiction, the Grand Inquisitor, “2+2=4” along with all the laws of science) and there is an actual life that must appear under the shape of death in order to be revealed and understood.62 In his subsequent article “On the ‘Regeneration of Convictions’ in Dostoevskii,” which originated from a series of five lectures that were broadcast on radio—obviously meant for a larger French audience63—Shestov harks back to his well-known psychological reading of Dostoevskii, that is, the writer’s shift from an idealistic phase of his early works to subsequently being the “cruel talent” depicted by Nikolai Mikhailovskii. The Dostoevskian quotations Shestov employs to support his idea (Ippolit’s “Confession,” the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, the speeches of Stavrogin, Kirillov, Ivan Karamazov, and the Underground Man) and the general argument he develops are almost the same as those in his 1903 book on Nietzsche and Dostoevskii, with the significant difference that he substitutes Nietzsche with Pascal, and he finally addresses the meaning of Dostoevskii’s rebellion relating to a fight against science.64 Science gave solutions—Shestov writes—that are clear as a fist. This means that finally a soulless force, more correctly, a force indifferent to all, obtained power, through science, over the fate of the universe and of men. This thought was utterly unbearable for Dostoevskii. But meanwhile he felt that people submitted to this thought and, as it sometimes appeared to him, submitted to it finally and forever, and even joyously. (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 167)

62 In many ways, this is a legacy of the Nietzschean lesson that remained throughout Shestov’s life. 63 The five lectures lasted fifteen minutes each and were aired on radio between April 3 and May 1, 1937, and then published together in the review Les cahiers de Radio Paris, May 15, 1937 (see the contract for this emission: Ms. 2120, file 40, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). The same text was later included with the title “On the ‘Regeneration of Convictions’ in Dostoevskii,” in the posthumous book Speculation and Revelation (1964). 64 Significantly, in his 1922 and 1937 articles on Dostoevskii, Shestov uses Plotinus and Pascal as Dostoevskii’s “double” or elective partner, rather than Nietzsche, who previously played that role. The reasons for this change are many, as they generally reflect a partial, though never explicated, rejection of Nietzsche’s thought by the late Shestov. Indeed, the Nietzsche of the “Antichrist” and of the Übermensch was not suited to this new, more markedly religious (in the medieval and mystic meaning of the word) phase of Shestov’s research.

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Shestov here recalls the identification he made in Potestas Clavium between Greek metaphysics, dogmatic theology and modern science, and the opposition between religion (allied with science) and God—the absurd. This is perhaps—he concludes—the greatest temptation that a tortured human soul can prepare for itself and endure: religion is still possible, but God is not, God is impossible, or, more correctly, that God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob of whom Scripture speaks and to whom Pascal appealed is impossible, and only the God of the philosophers [ . . . ] is possible. (167–168)

2. According to Gustav Shpet—a Husserlian philosopher and a close friend of Shestov who had disapproved of his 1918 article on his mentor Husserl65—, the essay on Pascal was the best thing Shestov had ever written.66 This affirmation may be regarded as true if one considers the positive critical reception this text had in France and in Europe—a text that over the years established Shestov’s fame as much as his writings on Dostoevskii and Tolstoi did.67 Among all the “souls” he “wandered through,” Pascal is perhaps one of the most immediately elective for Shestov. It is no surprise that, for once, Shestov’s reading is not as original as is in other cases. In an unusual way by his standards, Shestov’s reading of Pascal is apologetic rather than unconventional. It is, somehow, a 65 See, on this, appendix 1 of this book, “Shestov and Husserl.” 66 It was Gershenzon who referred to Gustav Shpet’s impression in a letter from 1924 (see, on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 312–313). Shestov’s essay on Pascal appeared first in French, as a small book in the series “Les cahiers verts,” and then in Russian in the journal Sovremennye zapiski. See Léon Chestov, La nuit de Gethsémani. Essai sur la philosophie de Pascal (Paris: Les cahiers verts, 1923); Lev I. Shestov, “Gefsimanskaya nochʹ. Filosofiya Paskalya” [The Night of Gethsemane. The Philosophy of Pascal], Sovremennye zapiski 19 (1924): 176–205; and 20 (1924): 235–264. The same essay appeared in 1929 in the collection In Job’s Balance (Shestov 8/1929 [A1]). 67 The French edition of “The Night of Gethsemane,” issued in 1923 with a preface by Daniel Halévy, had an immediate success with a circulation of 4000 copies sold in a year. According to Natalʹya Baranova, no other book by Shestov sold that much (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 287). Jules de Gaultier, Charles du Bos, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Henri Bergson, among others, particularly appreciated this study. The only negative voice was that of his friend Berdyaev, who was in Berlin by that time and read the book in the French edition. According to Berdyaev, Shestov’s reading of Pascal was too nihilistic in that it denied Pascal’s “positive” faith in Christ and in the Christian event: Berdyaev also extended the same criticism to Shestov’s views on St. Paul, St. Augustine, and Luther (see, on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 322–323). For a contemporary reexamination of Shestov’s engagement with Pascal, see Beaumont (B2).

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defense of Pascal against Voltaire’s criticism, effected by radicalizing the distance between the two.68 He had no need, in effect, to find particularly new ways to approach the Pensées, since all the major Shestovian themes are already displayed quite clearly in this work: from the fundamental contradiction of the human nature divided between infinite and nothing, and lying in a permanent condition of anxiety and wretchedness, to the opposition of the philosophers’ God to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to the criticism of philosophical rationalism. Pascal seems the “perfect piece” of the Shestovian puzzle, possibly so perfect that—philosophically speaking—he might have nothing more to offer than what Shestov already has. Considering Shestov’s dialectical method, which preferably works on shifts, oppositions and incongruities, this immediate adherence of Pascal’s tragic thought to his own may be less fecund than other cases he considered. This is partly true: Pascal’s impact on Shestov’s oeuvre is, at least quantitatively, less relevant than that of other authors. Nonetheless, Shestov found his way in the exploration of Pascal, in particular, in a radicalization of some of his themes. In his article “The Night of Gethsemane,” Shestov reads Pascal as an “existential philosopher” in opposition to Descartes and along the same lines as Augustine and Luther. But Shestov takes such anti-Cartesianism to the extreme, and he does so on the grounds of fideism and of refusal of logic. He then quotes those pensées (and in fact there are many, in Pascal’s text) that can give support to his theses: against Descartes (Pensées, 77–78) and against a certain kind of rationality (82, 345, 388, 843). Shestov is actually convinced that Pascal did not want to express his thought as he did: if his original project of an “apology of Christianity” had been accomplished, as Shestov supposes, we would probably have thought of a different author (cf. Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 286). But this also did not matter: Pascal—in Shestov’s view—was the first “to not take into account his own convictions as well as whatever is precious to men” (285–286). His most authentic truth should be seen in the absolute tragicity and in the complete instability of the human condition. Shestov insists especially on Pascal’s “thought” no. 72 about the disproportion of man with regard to nature, which he often quotes and which possibly represents the main reference of his reading: “We burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our 68 Evgeniya Gertsyk reports a curious episode in which Shestov—who did not usually speak in this manner—once declared to her that the main task of his philosophy was “to forever unmask Voltaire’s thought” (Gertsyk [B1], 110).

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whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses. Let’s not look for any assurance and firmness!” (Pascal quoted by Shestov: 287–288). Pascal is the antipode of Descartes and even though an instable and insecure truth, as Shestov comments, is a “contradiction in adjecto,” his only purpose is that of not looking for certainty and stability. In Pascal, Shestov highlights all the medieval and mystic themes that were dearest to him: a general spirit of self-sacrifice, Job’s impossible fight against God, Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum, and the overall concept of renouncing any earthly warrant about our life. Shestov considers Pascal as a man of the Middle Ages, with all the positive meaning he assigns to such a definition. At the same time, in heeding all the medieval praises of the non pudet and of the “impossibile,” that is, in refusing logical common sense, Pascal, like Luther, reveals himself to be a modern misologos— one of the most audacious figures of modernity. In the Deus absconditus, in the open refusal of the Gods of logic and of science, there is a deeper truth that both Luther and Pascal had understood: “It seems that everything is over. Something is over, in fact, but something else begins. New and incomprehensible forces feed us, new revelations guide us. With no ground below our feet it is impossible to walk as before—this means we no longer have to walk, it is necessary to fly” (312). Taking an example from Pascal’s experience, Shestov’s expresses his own conclusion through “thought” no. 751—one he liked so much and would quote several times in his works: “Let people then reproach us no longer for want of clearness, since we make no profession of it” (315). In Shestov’s interpretation, Pascal’s thought is nearly a manifesto of that “misology” that, albeit incognito, had always permeated Western philosophy. After Plato’s “clandestine” doubts about the solidity of the system, after Plotinus’ open expression of such doubts, in modern times Pascal brought this process to a conclusion by maintaining that submission to the law of identity is not a better warrant of knowledge than rejection of it. The Pascalian monito “Let’s not look for any assurance and firmness!” is not an unreasoned suggestion, but—for Shestov—is a sign that the time has come for a different consideration of truth in Western thought, even, or most of all, in modern times. 3. One of the essays Shestov published in the first ten years he lived in France was dedicated to the Jewish-Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza: “Legitimate and Illegitimate Children of Time. Spinoza’s Historical Fate.”69 Shestov’s choices of 69 Lev I. Shestov, “Synov’ya i pasynki vremeni. Istoricheskii zhrebii Spinozy,” Sovremennye zapiski 25 (1925): 316–342, also In Job’s Balance (Shestov 8/1929 [A1]). This article had

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the philosophical authors he wanted to read and comment on was always particular, and scarcely influenced by the views of others or, as he used to say, by “the spirit of time.” His discovery of Spinoza actually occurred many years before his exile to France: he already used to read his works in depth during his stay in Coppet—in particular but not exclusively the Ethics—and section VII of the manuscript of Sola Fide was dedicated entirely to Spinoza. Shestov’s approach to this seventeenth-century philosopher is not easy, as it combines many of the ambiguities of Shestov’s dialectical method (for it is often unclear if he is praising or blaming the author he comments on) with the ambiguities that are already intrinsic in a difficult author like Spinoza. However, the title and subtitle of his 1923 article, later inserted in the book In Job’s Balance, seems to leave no doubt on Shestov’s main intention about this subject: Spinoza was a legitimate, perhaps the “most legitimate” child of his time and his “historical destiny” was that of accomplishing something that no one else, before him, had the courage to do. His “task,” according to Shestov, was that of “killing God” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 267), that is, of submitting God to the laws of nature, and teaching people to think that God does not exist, that only substance exists, and that the mathematical method (i.e., the method of the impersonal, objective and scientific examination) is the only true method; that Man is not a Nation within a Nation, and that the Bible, prophets and apostles did not find out the truth, since they merely gave people moral teachings and laws that can completely substitute God. (275)

For Shestov, Spinoza was Descartes’ most authentic disciple with regard to this task: the disciple who, more ably than Descartes, taught humanity that “the true name of God is necessity” (271). Therefore, within his philosophy of history,70 Shestov’s treatment of Spinoza concerns the “winning branch” of Western thought, that is, the one standing on the opposite side to Plotinus or Pascal. Based on Shestov’s description, there is little risk in stating that Spinoza is, to a great extent, the most strenuous and “decisive” representative of this side, historically more relevant than Descartes and perhaps even more than Kant and Hegel. The fact that Shestov puts Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, appeared two years earlier, in French, in Léon Chestov, “Les favoris et les déshérités de l’histoire. Descartes et Spinoza,” Mercure de France 600, June 15, 1923, 640–674. 70 This is, in fact, the title of the general section of the book In Job’s Balance, in which this essay is placed along with the contributions on Pascal, Plotinus, and the article “What Is Truth?” (another essay on Plotinus as the antipode of Husserl).

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Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Husserl in the same line of continuity in the history of philosophy should be at least suspicious to any reader who is familiar with the subject. But Shestov was neither naïve nor unaware of a critical point of view of that history, and in fact he was already very well acquainted with the majority of texts and critical studies regarding it. The point is that precisely this inappropriate and uneven group of authors he lists indicates the real nature of his reasoning. He was aware that Kant is, in so many ways, antithetical to Spinoza, as well as to Hegel. Likewise, Shestov’s friend Husserl would have never acknowledged being placed in that list. But this “too large” coalition demonstrates that Shestov was thinking of something other than the normal, sometimes enormous, differences and contrasts among those authors. He was not thinking of the relevance of being rationalistic, or idealistic rather than pantheistic, or vice versa. However important those differences are, Shestov had in mind a larger framework that, in effect, was common to all of them— and within that context the specific role of Spinoza was even more fateful. To adopt a Shakespearean expression so important to Shestov, Spinoza was the one who “set time back in joint,” since the “derailment” occurred with any existing single human being who is conscious of his or herself. From the perspective of the eternal truths, Shestov writes, “every individual human being escaped illegally towards existence, so that there is no right to live” (260). In this respect, Shestov argues, “I guess I am not exaggerating if I say that Spinoza, rather than Descartes, was the father of the new philosophy” (263). Shestov depicts this paternity as the most classic Greek and Shakespearean tragedy: just like Brutus with Caesar, for Spinoza the one who was the most legitimate child of God (since he searched for God more than any other philosopher) should murder his father. As Shestov enthrallingly puts it, “he was chosen by God to kill God himself ” (267). After Spinoza, Shestov continues, all the major Western contemporary philosophers, from Kant to Husserl, and Fichte and Hegel in particular, live “entirely from Spinoza’s legacy” (268). For Shestov, the “only substance” invented by Spinoza, of which Hegel was so enchanted, made it impossible today to think of another gnoseological worldview. The “only substance” is, for Shestov, the principle behind any naturalistic, materialistic or “scientific” conception: it is the last accomplishment of the Greek logos, which by means of a series of “paternal killings” reached its final target: that is, the conviction of the nonexistence of freedom.71 71 Spinoza’s “naturalism,” Shestov writes, conveyed the idea “that feeling free is an illusion, that a stone, if it were endowed with conscience, would be convinced to fall freely on the ground,

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As stated before, Shestov’s alignment of Spinoza’s well-known pantheism with an entire classic tradition of Western philosophy that appeared utterly different, even including Philo of Alexandria and Patristic theology up to Descartes and Hegel, is a bizarre point of view that possibly needs some clarification. In this regard, his earlier reference to Spinoza in the manuscript Sola Fide may be of greater help in interpreting this point than his later essay. In Sola Fide, Shestov understands for the first time an essential question originating from Spinoza’s philosophical quest. As he puts it, after hiding for a number of years under the umbrella of logic—but logic to him, as Shestov argues, was the same as the Church’s authority was to St. Augustine: it was a means to protect what was most precious to him—, “Spinoza began to feel that reason was omnipotent” (Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 166). From that moment on, his real philosophical project took on a clearer form: the self-sufficiency of virtue and the reduction of all reality to the first definitions that revealed an eternal and immutable order in the connection of phenomena. What emerged was the primacy of the necessity underlying the apparent plurality of the real world. In his system, Spinoza eliminated any kind of plurality of causes and, along with it, all autonomy of the singularities. For Shestov, he obtained something that neither Descartes nor Kant achieved: the highest degree of the Will to power of Western logos or, in other words, the omnipotence of reason. No gaps or disparities, no different degrees among beings, in sum, no freedom—in the way we used to conceive it—was allowed in his world. “Reason” itself came out of this process as a transformed concept: “The last ratio of Spinoza’s philosophy derives from the recondite depth of exceptional experiences, inexpressible in words” (168). As a result, Shestov observes, the Spinozian God is “extraneous to rationes boni” or, quoting Spinoza’s Ethics (IV, proposition 68), “If people were born free, and as long as they remained free, they would not acquire any concept of good and evil” (Shestov 12/1966 [A1], 169). As Shestov concludes, a God that is alien to the reasons of good (rationes boni) is equal to the negation of the existence of God. Nevertheless, Spinoza arrives at “God” and “freedom” in a way that is apparently similar to St. Augustine, that is, as a beatitudo that is the same as the fullness of the soul, but which ultimately has nothing to do with it. Shestov discovers that Spinoza had found a God beyond good and evil, but that “beyond” is the opposite of what he had in mind with the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. The reason why, from a certain point although it is quite clear to us that it cannot fail to fall” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 270).

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onward in his life, Shestov stops using Nietzschean formulas in his philosophy as he used to do before is perhaps due also to such ambiguities. As he understands, the Spinozian “beyond good and evil” is entirely different from the Nietzschean revolt against values, and his natural freedom that should lead to the acquiescientia animi [the tranquility of the soul] in no way resembles the existential, tragic, and uncomfortable freedom of the Underground Man and of the Christ from the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The Spinozian concepts are the result of an “upgraded” and reinforced—because it is “natural”—will to power. Although Spinoza’s philosophy may appear antiscientific to the modern mind, for Shestov it in fact epitomizes what lies at the deepest core of science, that is, the imposition of a superior law in the realm of being and, consequently, the eradication of any particular divergence from that law, namely, the discharge of “that which matters most” (to timiotaton). The latter, for Shestov, is the source of a philosophy that is antipodal to the main path of Western thought and to Spinoza who, in being “chosen by God to kill God,” was the one who inflicted “the last shot” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 267).

3.5 Philosophy’s Revolt against Itself: Plotinus’ Ecstasies According to Natalʹya Baranova, Shestov’s first knowledge of the work of Plotinus came from Vyacheslav Ivanov (see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 170–171). This is actually entirely probable: it is no surprise that during the meetings in “Ivanov’s Tower” in St. Petersburg, the name of Plotinus, whose aesthetic thought Ivanov admired greatly, might have come up many times. However, Shestov mentions Plotinus for the first time in his work on Luther, around 1912–1913. From that moment on, the Greek philosopher would be a constant presence in Shestov’s writings: in particular, his figure would be crucial throughout Shestov’s study and research on the history of Greek philosophy that he undertook up to 1919, culminating with his lectures on the same subject at the Popular University of Kiev (1918–1919). But it was not until after 1923 that he found the time to go back to the Enneads72 and devote a full essay to Plotinus, as he had probably wanted to do for many years. This essay, written in 1924, was published in July 1926 in the journal Versty with 72 There are two editions of Plotinus’ Enneads in the catalogue of “Shestov’s library” at the Sorbonne archive: the first (the one he consulted for his most recent writings on Plotinus) is a French translation with Greek text by Émile Bréhier (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1924); the second one is a German edition with Greek text by Otto Kiefer (Jena and Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1905). See Ms. 2124, page 20, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris.

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the title “Exasperated Discourses: On Plotinus’ Ecstasies,” and three years later it was included in the collection of essays In Job’s Balance.73 During these years between 1926–1927, he had also planned to write an entire book on Plotinus—a significant number of pages of this project remain in a manuscript that was published for the first time in 1992.74 Yet, around the same time, he was asked to write a response to Jean Hering’s article that attacked his essay on Husserl and, according to Natalˈya Baranova, the debate with Hering interrupted the book project (378–379). Shestov wrote a long reply with the title “What Is Truth?,” extending the discussion from the meaning of Husserl’s work to the meaning of truth in Western philosophy, for this essay contains many parts and ideas of his manuscript on Plotinus.75 In many ways, in fact, “What Is Truth?” is more an article on Plotinus than a defense of his previous study on Husserl as it was supposed to be. Of the three main works Shestov wrote on Plotinus, however, the unfinished book of 1926 is probably the one that most clearly explains from a historical point of view the philosophical role and peculiarity he assigns to Plotinus. In this work, Shestov sets the role of Plotinus within the wider context of Greek philosophy, from Anaximander onwards. Shestov’s central idea is that, in the history of Greek philosophy, logos traded places with God. Although logos itself was born from the precise awareness of its impotence, in order to fulfill its “will to power”—that is, the truest origin of logos itself—it claimed the right to legislate and to judge. This, for Shestov, is the main law of Greek philosophy, the one everybody, from Socrates to the Stoics, always agreed on: that is, the individual who judges (reason) is also the individual who legislates, and vice versa. In this regard, logos and nous, reason and intellect, are synonymous—as, 73 Lev I. Shestov, “Neistovye rechi. Ob ekstazakh Plotina” [Exasperated Discourses: On Plotinus’ Ecstasies], Versty 1 ( July 1926): 87–118, also in Shestov 8/1929 (A1). 74 See Ms. 2105, file 35, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris. The manuscript, of about 130 pages, entitled “Ob istochnikakh misticheskogo opyta Plotina” [On the Sources of Plotinus’ Mystical Experience], was published only partially in March 1926 (see Shestov 14/1926 [A2]). It was published integrally in Russian in 1992 (see Shestov 26/1992 [A2]) and in Italian in 2005 (Lev Šestov, L’eredità fatale. Etica e ontologia in Plotino, trans. Valentina Parisi [Turin: Ananke, 2005]). In The Shestov Archive there is also another fragmentary manuscript, dated 1925, with notes on Plotinus and extracts from his work (Ms. 2105, file 34). 75 Lev I. Shestov, “Chto takoe istina? (Otvet na stat’yu J. Hering ob avtore)” [What is Truth? (Reply to J. Hering’s Article on the Author)], Sovremennye zapiski 30 (1927): 286–326, also in Shestov’s 1929 book In Job’s Balance (Shestov 8/1929 [A1]). On this article, partly on Husserl and partly on Plotinus, which was also published in French and in German in the same year, see appendix 1 of this book, “Shestov and Husserl.”

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in Shestov’s view, they ultimately are for Plotinus. Consequently, there is no room for anything other than logos, and logos, with its intrinsic character of necessity and of the impossibility of not assenting to the evidence of its own truth, is, in fact, the supreme root of knowledge. Any truth can only derive from knowledge/logos. On this point, as Shestov repeatedly asserts, there was no disagreement between Greek philosophers, even between the most different schools of thought. The will to power of Western thought was born in this moment, when a secondary and impotent means (logos), with regard to the mystery of the universe, claimed omnipotence for itself, assuming all the powers to judge and legislate. In that moment, all humanity, nature, universe and God himself were subsumed as mere objects of its understanding. This was the process that led to the formation of the Western philosophical-scientific mind. Even good was ascribed to the same order of things, so that for Plato the greatest misfortune would be to become a misologos, that is, one who despises intellect—a quote Shestov loved to repeat quite often. Plotinus, in Shestov’s reading, was the last and one of the greatest representatives of this tradition. In many ways, he can be considered the peak of Greek philosophy—the one who had all the most important thinkers in mind, and, like them, was equally persuaded of the boundless power of the nous. In a passage of the Enneads quoted by Shestov, Plotinus states that “Intellect is the first legislator and, at the same time, is also the law of being” (Enneads V, 9.5). Shestov is sure—and he provides many Plotinian quotes in this respect—that Plotinus was solidly convinced of the fact that only intellect was the legitimate ruler of our understanding of the world. His conviction was as stable as that of one of the main philosophers who preceded him in the same Greek tradition. However—and herein lies the core of Shestov’s interpretation—at a given point Plotinus lost faith in this “legislator.” He became a misologos—that is, man’s worst destiny according to Plato. This turning point, for Shestov, must be seen within the Enneads as a sort of awakening of the soul. It does not happen all at once, but is hidden everywhere and in one specific passage it explodes in the form of a revealed truth. Shestov sees the key to the whole of the Plotinian oeuvre in his sentence from Enneads III, 6.6: “In so far as the soul is in the body it rests in deep sleep” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 325). This implies there is a double truth, that is however incompatible in itself. It is not the old medieval issue on the “double truth,” theological and philosophical, but rather a question on the ultimate truth which conflicts with and cannot coexist with all our everyday truths—for example, with the truth of science and of morality. Very often, as Shestov argues, poets say the same thing: but Plotinus is not a

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poet—he is a philosopher in the same way as Aristotle (328). If he says that the ordinary truths, deriving from the principle of noncontradiction, are the truths of a “sleeping soul” this means that the understanding of the unity (namely, of the truth of revelation) is given neither by science (episteme) nor by the intellectual intuition (noesis) [ . . . ] but by a participation (parousia) that lies beyond science. When the soul grasps an object by means of science, it goes further from unity (i.e., once more, from the truth of revelation) and ceases to be one. In fact, science is logos and logos is multiplicity. (329)

When Plotinus reaches this understanding, Shestov says, “he betrays the fundamental thought of his divine master: he disowns the logos, he becomes misologos” (329). The same Plotinus who used to affirm that “in the beginning is the reason and the reason is everything” (Enneads III, 2.15), has evidently discovered a superior principle to reason itself—a principle that cannot, by definition, be revealed through reason, but through something else. This “something” is the mystic ecstasy, which does not occur at the beginning but at a precise point when—as Zeller, quoted by Shestov many times, pointed out—Plotinus lost his trust in reason. Reason was no longer a suitable means to reach the destination Plotinus aspired to. In fact, it was inadequate because it led to a multiplicity that betrayed the fundamental simplicity that Plotinus was aiming for. The awakening of soul meant the abandon of logos. In Shestov’s view, Plotinus’ philosophy on this point is directly antithetical to any theodicy or to any ethics or, in particular, to the Hegelian philosophy: that is, it is opposed to any system that tries to harmonize the different levels of reality or put them in a consistent dialectics. Plotinus’ doctrine of ecstasy posits a fundamental fracture and a discontinuity between the “sleeping” world of science and a revealed truth, according to which no conciliation with anything else would be ever possible. “Plotinus himself,” Shestov writes, “knows very well that the mystery will never become a truth accessible to everybody” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 351). In this sense, the only figure who could be placed on the same side as Plotinus—with Hegel on the opposite side—is the prophet Job, with his “exasperated discourses” (352). In the same way as Job cannot find an explanation for his situation, Plotinus, in his search for the supreme unity, that is, for the ultimate truth, can no longer accept the necessity of scientific evidence. “It was against such a necessity—Shestov states—and against the self-evidences

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that accompany it that Plotinus fought. When he said that the soul, as long as it is tied to the body, sleeps a heavy sleep, it was about them that he spoke” (355). The conflict, then, the “great conflict” announced by Plotinus, which Shestov quotes often in his writings, is a fight against logos and against everything that makes a concept out of a truth. That concept, for Shestov, is the “deep sleep” of the soul. “Plotinus’ philosophy,” Shestov concluded, “which he defined with a single word, timiotaton (that which matters most), had the goal of liberating Plotinus himself from the nightmare of visible reality” (361). This liberation, however, could not happen through any intellectual act or even through a physical action, but only eksaiphnes, that is, suddenly, as result of chance and as a “gift.” The ultimate truth, as Shestov explains in his essay “What Is Truth?,” is an evasion from wisdom, which occurs at a certain point in the path of reason and “it leads to this ‘suddenness,’ which cannot be deduced, cannot be founded on anything” (394). At this level of knowledge, Shestov implies, Plotinus discovers that it is useless to have a solid ground when there is no need to be sustained, in the same way as there is no need for thought when truth comes from God. The ultimate meaning of the Plotinian lesson, for Shestov, is that the most authentic truth “does not need any foundation, as it is capable of proceeding by itself alone” (402). 2. Plotinus’ name recurs often in Shestov’s texts from 1916 onwards and his importance appears to be decisive in the definition of Shestov’s late thought. For Shestov, the Greek philosopher represents assuredly a turning point in Western philosophy, that is, a sort of inner crisis and a revolt of philosophy against itself. Although Shestov was fully aware of the contemporary critical studies on Plotinus,76 his interpretation does not follow any of the main existing trends in the Plotinian scholarship but, like the majority of Shestov’s readings (especially concerning ancient philosophy), is mainly based on a strong personal intuition he adopted in his direct approach to texts. For Shestov, Plotinus is not the mere epigone of Plato, nor does he represent a totally divergent tendency in Western thought. On the contrary, he epitomizes philosophy’s lucid awareness about the insufficiency of its means and, in particular, about the role of intellect, which returns to being nothing more than a faded image of 76 As happens in all his writings, especially those on the history of philosophy, Shestov quotes numerous critical studies with regard to what he is saying and reveals himself to be always informed on the subject. In the case of Plotinus, he read and quoted some of the studies by Hegel, Eduard Zeller, Émile Bréhier, Henri Guyot, Marcel de Corte, and Eduard von Hartmann.

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a truer and higher reality, and certainly not the supreme judge and legislator. Shestov does not even feel the need to justify his intuition and does not appear too worried about the incongruences within the Enneads with respect to what he states. As noted previously in this book, he affirms that, like Dostoevskii, whose real thought should not be judged based on the characters of Zosima and Alësha but instead based on those of Ivan Karamazov and Kirillov, Plotinus, too, should not be considered on the basis of his metaphysic theory of the soul, but rather on his mistrust of logos that represented a decisive transition in the comprehension of his theory of the One (Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 184).77 In effect, while Plotinus produced an immense metaphysical construction concerning the soul’s return to the “Good One,” he also maintained—as Shestov recognized—that this process was, in its final stage, an overcoming of thought itself. As a rigorous consequence of his research, Plotinus defined the “Good One” as a “thought beyond thought” (hypernoesis), as it were, an “external face” to Being, for the One is beyond the same Being, and reaching such an “object” necessitates overcoming the same sphere of thinking. The first treatment of this doctrine—which widely exceeds the Platonic intuition that is still the intuition of a form, an act of seeing the intelligible—occurs for the first time in Enneads VI, 9–13, and arrives at the idea of a “sudden intuition” and of transmutation of the soul in an ecstatic moment that is no longer life, but lies beyond life itself. This final leap is, in fact, an apophatic one, that is, the abandon of logos itself— since the latter is no longer sufficient for this last stage.78 This is the main point of Plotinus’ philosophy that Shestov considered the most authentic, and the one that interested him most. Shestov’s reading of Plotinus is perhaps neither canonical nor complete— as it does not cover the entire spectrum of Plotinian thought—but it is not unfounded. With a remarkable intuition, Shestov detached himself from what might have been the easiest interpretation for him, that is, from the majority 77 Talking to Fondane about this ambivalence towards an author when he writes a text, Shestov even compares Plotinus to himself (and to Kierkegaard) by saying that they were all subjugated by a feeling of impotence with regard to the “necessity” of something higher and stronger—i.e., logic or morality, or the “sublime.” Shestov acknowledges that with regard to his own first study on Shakespeare, in which he admits he tried to solve those same problems in a philosophical way: “I too, in my first book, I had reached the sublime [ . . . ]. I explained King Lear through the character of Brutus, when speaking of Job, I agreed with his friends. Later, I gave up the ‘sublime’” (Fondane [B1], 112–113). 78 On this aspect of the ultimate silence or apophasis of philosophy facing the “ineffable First Principle,” see the recent study by Nicholas Banner, Philosophic Silence and the “One” in Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

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of ideological interpretations that arose from Romanticism (but based on earlier schemes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries) that saw Plotinus, particularly because of his doctrine of ecstasy, as a figure located outside the Greek world. These positions can be summarized by Jakob Brucker’s famous idea about Plotinus being one of the main representatives of the “eclectic sect” (De secta eclectica)—those Neoplatonic authors who, since they were followers of an obscure philosopher, Potamo of Alexandria, produced a thought that was scarcely original, and an artificial combination of disparate ideas.79 Although Shestov indeed focused on Plotinus’ doctrine of ecstasy and he is chiefly interested in the mystic turning point of his thought, which he sees as crucial to the Greek philosopher’s thought, he never actually persisted in its irrational, dynamic and ultimately religious character as a good part of the esoteric tradition of Plotinian readings did. Shestov never took a stand in this sense, since he neither relied on those studies proposing a fully esoteric view of Plotinus, reducing his thought to a sort of “divine mania” of the poet and therefore seeking its inspiration outside Greek thought;80 nor did he follow the same Neoplatonic trends in Russia—for example, in the circle of Vyacheslav Ivanov or elsewhere, with their search for extrarational or emotional revelations—or, further still, for Neoplatonic “mediators” between the human and divine. The fact is that Shestov’s reading is, perhaps surprisingly, balanced between recognizing the centrality of mysticism and ecstasy and forming a strong connection between those two stances and the history of Greek, Platonic, and even Aristotelian, philosophy—of which the Plotinian metaphysics represents the coherent development of a number of motifs already present in that history. In point of fact, Shestov succeeds in keeping these two stances together throughout his interpretation, and this may be one of the most interesting aspects of his Plotinian reading. With his consideration of Plotinus’ theory of ecstasy as a full derivation from Greek rational thought,81 whether consciously or not, Shestov adopted a 79 For an overview of the history of critical studies on Plotinus from Marsilio Ficino onwards, see Stephen Gersh, ed., Plotinus’ Legacy. The Transformation of Platonism from the Renaissance to the Modern Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). 80 Émile Bréhier, whose critical edition of the Enneads Shestov read, proposed a monographic study on Plotinus with this precise goal, i.e., to demonstrate his radical difference from Greek thought, although keeping many aspects of it (see Émile Bréhier, La philosophie de Plotin [Paris: Boivin, 1928]). However, when Shestov wrote his main texts on Plotinus, Bréhier’s book had not yet been published. 81 In the essay “Exasperated Discourses” Shestov defines Plotinus’ philosophical system as “the most complete and audacious among the aspirations of Greek philosophy” (Shestov

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critical stance that must be originally ascribed to Numenius of Apamea—rather than to Philo of Alexandria or to Plutarch (who insisted more on the religious and dynamic aspects of ecstasy)—according to whom ecstasy is essentially the knowledge of what comes absolutely first, that is, good, where good itself stands above Being.82 In a similar way to Numenius’ original position, and in some senses following complementary stances by Hegel and Zeller (who both refused the Romantic enthusiasm for a mystic, pantheistic, and extra-Greek key of reading of Plotinus’ Enneads),83 for Shestov, Plotinus’ mysticism has essentially a “gnoseological value” in that it serves to understand a truth that lies above logic and intellect, and ultimately above Being itself. Hence the fundamentally critical role in which he sets the figure of Plotinus with respect to Aristotle and Plato, rather than considering him as a mystic or prophet belonging to another tradition. In this regard, Shestov may come close to a trend that was popular during the 1950s and 1960s with the definitive overcoming of the “eclectic sect” formula (along with all its strictly spiritual and religious derivations) and the recognition of the existence of “Middle Platonism” and “Neopythagoreanism” as coherent stages in the development of Platonic philosophy, and of Plotinus’ thought as at least in part a derivation from them.84 In this sense, the alleged influence of the “East” on Plotinus has been widely dismissed by modern scholars. Equally, in his dialogues with Fondane, it is possible to see the high consideration Shestov gave to Plotinus’ bond with Greek tradition or, in fact, to his direct relationship with Aristotle and the “suffered” necessity for him to “stay” in that tradition, at least until an unavoidable breakpoint. Plotinus followed the great Greek tradition, and he set great store by the Noûs (intellect) and the episteme (knowledge), sometimes even more than others. You would think he was exaggerating on purpose. But there is a moment when he wants to leave the Noûs, where he challenges Greek thought—and that’s what nobody wants to see [ . . . ]. Plotinus tried to go beyond the Noûs of Aristotle and the Stoics. (Fondane [B1], 103) 8/1993 [A1], 338). 82 With respect to Numenius, however, the return to the Good One in Plotinus assumes a logically coherent form. 83 Although, it must be observed, neither Hegel nor Zeller held Plotinus in the highest regard, as Shestov did. 84 For an overview of all the studies produced on this subject, see John Dillon, The MiddlePlatonists (London: Duckworth, 1977).

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And again: Plotinus always took cover under the Platonic, or even Aristotelian tradition; this was how he labelled everything he had to say, which was not always as orthodox as they say. He was afraid of being considered a misologos. So, from time to time, he used his irrefutable arguments: one must, and necessity [  .  .  .  ]. It was impossible for Plotinus to confess his thought exactly, without passing for a misologos [ . . . ]. He therefore tried to ask his questions as if they were orthodox questions, as if Aristotle might have asked them. Did he not say that philosophy is the “most important” thing in the world? Did he not speak of supreme law? He also said that before the ONE all knowledge ceased, that it was necessary to raise oneself above Knowledge. (111–112)

According to Shestov, therefore, Plotinus is neither merely a “mystic” nor in the least an irrational thinker, he is on the contrary entirely tied to the Greek philosophical tradition, even to Aristotle, but at the same time he overcomes that tradition and, at a certain point, he decisively breaks with it. This double transition, for Shestov, is something the Plotinian critics have ever hardly understood or accepted, because they always tended either to exclude Plotinus from or completely assimilate him in the classic Greek philosophy or other existing experiences.85 In an aphorism (no. 49) from the collection “Audacities and Submissions” (In Job’s Balance), Shestov writes: “The capital flaw of the majority of studies consecrated to Plotinus—in fact, nearly all—lies in the fact that their authors strive in every way to reduce or to eliminate the contradictions they find, by means in the first case of comments and explanations, and, in the second, of corrections and additions” (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 240). In this case, Shestov is criticizing in particular Eduard von Hartmann whose study of 1899 tried to find in Plotinian philosophy the most perfect form of transcendent metaphysics of the ancient world, and in order to achieve this— somehow following an interpretative path inaugurated by Friedrich Schlegel in his 1804–1805 Lectures on “The Development of Philosophy”—he compares 85 Speaking to Fondane, Shestov criticizes Marcel de Corte’s study comparing Plotinus’ mystical experience to that of John of the Cross precisely for posing a sort of “normalization” of Plotinus under the one or the other label (in this case the “sincerity of the philosopher”). See Fondane (B1), 111–112, and Marcel de Corte, “L’experiénce mystique chez Plotin et saint Jean de la Croix,” Revue carmélitaine 2 (1932): 164–215.

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Plotinus’ notions of the One and of reason to the Spinozian ideas of substance and anima mundi.86 Shestov harshly opposes any attempts of this kind, whether rational-philosophical or mystic-religious, to assimilate Plotinus’ thought within an already existing system or thought. “Philosophy,” he says, “cannot be a common work [ . . . ] and this is true in a particular way for the philosophy of Plotinus. It is impossible to complete Plotinus through Spinoza or Schelling, or Schopenhauer, or Hegel. It is impossible to ‘complete’ Plotinus” (241). For Shestov, the value of Plotinus, and the immense relevance he assigns to his figure in the history of philosophy, lies in the fact that while examining and summarizing an entire Platonic and Aristotelian tradition, and being somehow at the top of it, he nonetheless found a point of rupture and at the same time of “upgrading” of this tradition. He lost faith in the logos, as Shestov often repeated, but this loss must not be interpreted as discouragement or as a merely human feeling, but rather as a logical dismissal of logic itself—as a necessary overcoming of the concept of “necessity.” In his reading of Plotinus, Shestov aims essentially at preserving this experience of fracture, both in its rational awareness and in its unicity and unpredictability—hence his dissatisfaction about the various interpretations of his work.

3.6 Audacities and Submissions: Shestov’s Intellectual World Lev Shestov’s impact in the French intellectual milieu was as sudden as it was striking, although this neither brought the financial advantages he at first hoped for, nor made it easier to publish his works as he wished. Along with the crucial figure of his friend and translator Schloezer, two of the main advocates of his success were undoubtedly André Gide and Jacques Rivière, whose esteem for Shestov was of great assistance in making known his name, which none or few had heard of before. Shestov, in his turn, was always grateful to them, and to all the others who believed in him and facilitated his cultural adaptation. Among these, it is worth mentioning also Jules de Gaultier, Charles du Bos, Paul Desjardins, Jean Paulhan, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who were all members of the “Committee of Shestov’s Friends” that was organized in 1936 on Schloezer’s initiative to sponsor the translation and publication of the book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. With Gide, however, the relationship was also ambivalent. According to Fondane, on one occasion Gide refused to write a preface to a French edition 86 Eduard V. Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphysik. Erster Teil: bis Kant (Leipzig: Hermann Haacke, 1899).

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of Shestov’s works because of a political divergence between the two: Gide endorsed the Soviet Union, while well aware of Shestov’s opposite opinion. Somewhat ironically, he defined Gide as one of the most intelligent men he had ever met (Fondane [B1], 77). But he also added: “Gide is too intelligent, it is his intelligence that forbids him to see clearly” (82). While a frank confrontation between the two, particularly on the subject of Dostoevskii, never really happened, many signs—at least in Shestov’s words—indicate that Gide did not want such a confrontation. One of the aspects Shestov criticized in Gide’s reading of Dostoevskii was that he payed too little attention to the role of Notes from the Underground (133).87 Along with André Malraux, Gide did not always support Shestov’s publications in French. Of a different nature was Shestov’s relationship with Jacques Rivière, whose premature death touched him deeply and prompted him to write a short but intense article that appeared in April 1925 in a monographic number of Nouvelle revue française dedicated to Rivière (see Shestov 13/1925 [A2]). With Lévy-Bruhl, who was the editor in chief of Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, the relationship was also completely transparent and sincerely tolerant despite the differences in their views. Nowhere in Shestov’s correspondence is there any indication that LévyBruhl was not willing to publish his works. The same can be said with regard to Paulhan and Desjardins. As Olga Tabachnikova observes, Shestov’s relationship with the Russian émigré community in Paris was paradoxically more complicated than the one with the French intellectuals. “Political views,” Tabachnikova writes, “which marked a sharp divide between individuals in exile, clearly carried a significant weight in the distribution of personal sympathies—perhaps even more so amongst Russians themselves than with respect to their attitudes to the French” (Tabachnikova 2011 [B3], 220).88 Shestov and Schloezer, unlike many of their compatriots, did not share in any particular political commitment, they did not participate in any society (e.g., Berdyaev’s Religious-Philosophical Academy, or Merezhkovskii’s “The Green Lamp” or Ilˈya Fondaminskii’s “The Circle”), and did not even promote any idea of a “lost” Russia or of a “Russian idea.” On the contrary, they almost represented a case of different intellectualism, which regarded the current politics as if from a more detached perspective. In this regard, the two were also very close and faithful. They shared, as Tabachnikova 87 On Shestov’s and Gide’s different views on Dostoevskii, see Tabachnikova 2008b (B3). 88 In two articles rich in details, Olga Tabachnikova reconstructs these years of Shestov’s life as an exile: see Tabachnikova 2008d and 2011 (B3). On the life of Russian émigré intellectuals in France between the two wars, see Livak (C) and Mjør (C).

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argues, a sort of “code of honour” consisting of “mutual help and support, especially given the often tragic circumstances of life” (229). Overall, in the early Parisian years Shestov came into contact with many intellectuals, writers and poets. Among these, there is a significant encounter with Marina Tsvetaeva, who had recently settled in Paris. Shestov attended Tsvetaeva’s first public poetry reading on February 6, 1926, and two months later Tsvetaeva read a published extract of Shestov’s unfinished book on Plotinus (Shestov 14/1926 [A2]), which impressed her so much that she wrote him a letter of intense appreciation.89 Shestov appreciated Tsvetaeva’s work. He was always supportive towards her and he was one of the few people who assisted and helped her financially during the years of extreme poverty in Paris.90 Shestov was always available to meet the French and European intellectuals in the literary or cultural circles of Paris. Directly or indirectly, he came into contact with nearly all the main figures of his time and, when he had the opportunity, he participated in the current debates or intervened on new published books. This is the case for three long reviews he wrote about some recent works by Richard Kroner, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Karl Jaspers.91 Shestov’s review of Kroner’s books Von Kant bis Hegel [From Kant to Hegel] (two vols., 1921–1924) and Die Selbstverwirklichung des Geistes. Prolegomena zur Kulturphilosophie [The Self-Realization of Mind: Prolegomena to the Philosophy of Culture] (1928) was engaged and positive. Richard Kroner (1884–1974) was a German neo-Hegelian philosopher, a Christian of Jewish origin who viewed Hegel as the “Protestant Aquinas.” He was quite famous in his time and his work Von Kant bis Hegel remained one of the most classic studies on German idealism. With regard to this book, Shestov endorses Kroner’s ideas almost completely in seeing Hegel as the apex of Western philosophy, in particular with the identity 89 See Tsvetaeva’s comments about these two events in her letters to Shestov: Marina Tsvetaeva, Sobranie sochinenii v 7 tomakh, vol. 7: Pis′ma (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 1995), 47. 90 This episode is reported in a letter of June 4, 1927 that Shestov sent to Max Eitingon, quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 387. On the relationship and intellectual affinity between Tsvetaeva and Shestov, see Lossky (B3), Tabachnikova 2008c (B3), and Irma V. Kudrova, “Lev Shestov i Marina Tsvetaeva—tvorcheskie pereklichki” (in Ermichëv [B2], 132–149). 91 See Shestov’s articles “Richard Kroner. Von Kant bis Hegel,” Putˈ 27 (April 1931): 95–100; “Mif i istina. K metafizike poznaniya,” Putˈ 50 ( January–April 1936): 58–65; and “Sine effusione sanguinis. O filosofskoi chestnosti,” Putˈ 54 (August–December 1937): 23–51. All these articles also appeared almost immediately in French translation and were later included in Shestov’s posthumous book Speculation and Revelation (Shestov 11/1964 [A1]). I have already mentioned Shestov’s article dedicated to Karl Jaspers’ book Reason and Existenz, and his negative opinion about it, in chapter one, § 4, note 90, in the context of Shestov’s reception of Nietzsche.

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of religion and philosophy, which brings the main goal of Aristotle’s metaphysics to a conclusion. In his approval of Kroner’s position—he defines Von Kant bis Hegel as “the best of all that has been written on German idealism” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 104)—as well as in the clear and objective way he sets out his ideas, Shestov demonstrates his remarkable competence and deep interest in German philosophy, the study of which he never really abandoned from late 1890s to the end of his life. But he also reveals his decisive preference for Hegel over Kant, and with regard to Kroner’s second book, demonstrates his critical view of the ultimate possibility of identifying the philosophical (and theological) logos with the logos of St. John. While Kroner supported such a hypothesis, Shestov distances himself on this point, stating that there is an ultimate hiatus dividing Biblical and Christian truth from any truth deriving from a form of rationality, and Hegel himself—Shestov writes—“would hardly have asserted that there is not one thesis of the Holy Scripture that he would not turn into his system” (103). “Also it is hardly correct—Shestov says—that ‘spirit’ in Hegel has the same meaning as ‘spirit’ in the evangelists. In Hegel, as in Kant, nothing or almost nothing of faith remained” (103). Shestov also wrote an enthusiastic review about Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s book The Primitive Mythology (1935). Despite being it a book on sociology and ethnology, and somehow following the researches of Émile Durkheim, Shestov treats it as a purely philosophical or, as he says, “metaphysical” work. In fact, he insisted that The Primitive Mythology was “one thousand times more metaphysical than Leibniz” (Fondane [B1], 92). Lévy-Bruhl did not agree with such a definition, but Shestov, actually not without reason, approached the book’s content as a direct challenge to Western logic. Lévy-Bruhl—and this is his main position, according to Shestov—does not judge primitive peoples’ ideas according to the well-established Western logical criteria. He describes “myth” as an alternative source of truth based on an “affective category of the supernatural” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 121). For Lévy-Bruhl, this category “is also intimately connected with the mystical orientation of the primitives and chiefly distinguishes their thinking from our own, which is conditioned by intellectual categories” (121). This leads to a different role for experience, displaying the “immediate data of consciousness,” a “fluidity of nature,” and ultimately a different—for Lévy-Bruhl, not false, not wrong, or “mad”—perception of reality. For Shestov, in his book Lévy-Bruhl reveals with an extraordinary audacity a crisis of Western logos by setting “the foundation not of a ‘theory’ of knowledge, to which we have been accustomed, but for a metaphysics of knowledge, which has not existed among us to the present time” (128). In other words,

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in Shestov’s reading, the epistemic logos is nothing but a “theory,” whereas a metaphysical view displays not just one possibility of knowledge but several. In his perennial search for a way out from Western logos, Shestov identifies in Lévy-Bruhl’s respect of the cognitive paradigm of the primitive mythology a feasible possibility. Although it will be not his way, since he preferred to proceed through an internal negation of logos (Plotinus, Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard) and an active reference to the “absurd” faith of Biblical prophecies, Shestov once again perceived the novelty and fecundity of a position that was at least confronting the real problem, that is, the binding power of Western reason. Interestingly, Shestov here admits a distinction between a theory of knowledge and a metaphysics of knowledge, and he places the Western logos in the first of the two. This positive meaning of the word “metaphysics,” which in this case is antithetical to logic, is perhaps surprising but not unique within Shestov’s writings. He describes Lévy-Bruhl, who defends the antilogos of primitive people, as a “metaphysician,” and implicitly does the same with himself as a “tragic philosopher.” Apparently, at the end of his life, and especially after his meeting with Husserl, Shestov saw more clearly that his “antiphilosophy” was still a form of metaphysics, which is somehow philosophy. In other words, the quest for the limits of epistemic knowledge represents a “metaphysics of knowledge,” that is the search for an alternative domain of knowledge itself—a domain that may possibly include the “principle of contradiction” and the lack of a foundation (bespochvennostˈ). In this pretense for an “alternative philosophical truth,” to which he also ascribed Lévy-Bruhl’s analyses on primitive mythology, Shestov once more unconsciously foresaw many of the philosophical tendencies of the second half of the twentieth century, and especially the epistemic discussions within the Mythos-Debatte and the affirmation of German and French philosophical hermeneutics. As far as challenges to Western rationality are concerned, another field that was potentially close to Shestov’s interests was psychoanalysis. Shestov admired Sigmund Freud, whom he probably met in person. Freud himself, Shestov reported, started to read his book Potestas Clavium—which he himself sent to Freud—but when he came across a passage on Darwin, “he became indignant and threw away the book, which he never picked up again.” “However,” Shestov added, “he had read The Night of Gethsemane from beginning to end without displeasure” (Fondane [B1], 102). Shestov’s main contact with psychoanalysis came from his sister, Fanya, who was a psychoanalyst herself, formerly a patient of Sabina Spielrein and then a student of Max Eitingon (1881–1943)—a Jewish Belarusian medical doctor and psychoanalyst, and a

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disciple and a former patient of Freud, as well as founder of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin. Fanya herself had had direct contact with Freud and was one of his followers. It was she who first proposed this direct affiliation of Shestov’s writings, in particular his “peregrinations through the souls,” with a possible psychoanalytic interpretation connected to Shestov’s early trauma, for all the people Shestov analyzes are no more than “masks” of his own projections (see, on this, Shteinberg 1991 [B1], 244). Through Fanya, Shestov came in contact with Eitingon with whom he started a long correspondence and a friendship that lasted until the end of his life.92 As Shestov reports, in his youth Eitingon had been an admirer of both Freud and Shestov—whose works he used to read because he wanted to translate the book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche into German. But he eventually “chose” Freud and this was a subject of discussion between the two (Fondane [B1], 99). As Natalˈya Baranova argues, “Eitingon’s attitude with regard to Shestov was quite exceptional” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 273).93 Without doubt, a connection between Shestov’s style and content and a psychoanalytic reading is more than possible and there are many arguments to support this approach. At the same time, a total reduction of his writings to psychoanalytic schemes would probably stumble into too many of the claims of universality that Shestov’s tragic thought has. For tragedy, in Shestov, must certainly start from a personal experience in order for it to become a projection, but, on another level of consideration, it also lies before and beyond any individual experience. The Shestovian tragedy is primarily an event but is also an idea, which Shestov treats as such—the idea of contradiction, not different from a mathematical concept. It lives in the “singleness” and this fact is absolutely true. But it also lives per se in a universe that eventually coincides with God, where Shestov’s God is a “God-other” and “God-beyond,” or in other words, beyond psychoanalysis itself. For these reasons, in my view, the affinity between Shestov’s seemingly psychological analyses on his authors and the classic psychoanalytic patterns, or any kind of “psychoanalytical literature,” is only partial and can work only in the short term. At a certain point, in the Shestovian world, any personal experience, however traumatic, rejoins a

92 The correspondence between Shestov and Eitingon was published in 2014 and is without doubt a precious document concerning Shestov’s ideas on psychoanalysis: see Shestov 33/2014 (A2). On the same subject of “Shestov and psychoanalysis,” see also Jijina-Ogden 2019 (B3) and Vorozhikhina 2012 (B3). On the relationship between Shestov and Eitingon, see Tabachnikova 2012b (B3). 93 On the meetings between Shestov and Eitingon, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 267–276.

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universal, transcendent truth, which by definition for Shestov is “ecstatic” and “other” with respect to our world. In the Shestovian “vocabulary,” the words “audacity” [derznovenie] and “submission” [pokornostˈ] have a significant importance precisely in revealing the attitude of calling the established paradigm of truth into question so as to overcome “our world.” The quest for the limits of knowledge requires an audacious attitude, while necessity rules and dominates where this attitude is absent. In a collection of fifty-two aphorisms entitled “Audacities and Submissions,” which constitute one of the main parts of the book In Job’s Balance (Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 149–250), Shestov revisits and reworks all his major lifelong ideas and authors but with this precise idea concerning those times or moments when people or concepts audaciously challenged the common wisdom. For Shestov, “the history of philosophy—if we rely on the opinion of the historians—is the history of the human being’s submission” (250). In this regard, Plato and Aristotle triumphed, whereas Protagoras, the prophet Isaiah, St. Paul, but also Pascal, Shakespeare, and Heine—these are the names Shestov selects in this case—have lost. But such a victory is only the victory of a paradigm, perhaps the strongest one. What Shestov seeks, and his search is an epistemic search, is the “exit door” of that paradigm. In all the texts he read, the people he met, and the debates he entered—whether anthropology or literary criticism or psychoanalysis—his only aim was to find this door: the ultimate door of logos.

3.7 Shestov and the Russian Philosophers 1. As Igorˈ Evlampiev observes, while “the entire Russian philosophy of the beginning of the 20th century [ . . . ] to one degree or another was based on the processing of the heritage of Vladimir Solovˈëv,” Shestov takes the first place among those few who not only “did not rely on the ideas of Solovˈëv, but also opposed their position to the position of their great predecessor” (Evlampiev [B3], 259). As a matter of fact, Solovˈëv was in Shestov’s mind from the very beginning of the latter’s activity, although Shestov always took a strong oppositional stance towards him. Two of his first writings from the 1890s—in what may be named as the “idealistic phase” of the Shestovian thought—were addressed to Solovˈëv. Written for the Kievan journal Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo and signed—actually against his will—with pseudonyms, these two articles contested the Solovˈëvian thought in his recently published book The Justification of Good (1895) (see Shestov 1/1895 and 3/1896 [A2]). The first

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article attacks Solovˈëv with regard to his opinion on war, which he considered a “disease of progress” overcoming its “internal disorders,” and the second one fiercely opposes his conciliation of right and morality in a dynamic perspective on the progress of human conscience. Shestov fights these two positions in the most radical way, in a way harking back to his former university studies in Law. Above all, he denies a normative juridical principle, as well as a principle of authority, in defense of the primacy of the human person and of an “inner truth.”94 Interestingly, the whole Shestovian research formally started from a criticism of Solovˈëv and, quite ironically, it was Solovˈëv himself who recommended his friend Leopold Sev to intercede with the publisher Stasyulevich to get Shestov’s second book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche released.95 Over the years, however, Shestov mentioned the philosopher only occasionally in his texts. But it was evident that Solovˈëv’s thought was always present in Shestov’s mind, at the very least as a counterpart to oppose. Evidently, at a certain time in his maturity, and when Solovˈëv’s philosophy had by that time gained the rank of classic, Shestov felt the need for a full confrontation with it. In fall 1926, after returning from his summer holidays in Châtel-Guyon, where he used to go with his wife every summer during those years, he did not begin again on his interrupted book on Plotinus but, instead, worked on his annual university course at the Sorbonne, which he delivered with the title “Vladimir Solovˈëv and Religious Philosophy.” At the beginning of June 1927, he started to write an article based on that course, which, between 1927 and 1928, would be published in two issues of the journal Sovremennye zapiski: “Speculation and Revelation. The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovˈëv.”96 In 1929, the same article would be translated and published in French and in German. 94 On these two articles, a sort of “archaeology” of Shestov’s production, see Ermichëv (B3). 95 Previously, however, Solovˈëv had denied the publication of the same book in the journal of which he was the editor Vestnik Evropy, mainly out of respect for Tolstoi, who had been severely attacked by Shestov in the book. On this episode, which represents the only—albeit significant—intersection between Shestov’s and Solovˈëv’s lives, see Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 56–57. 96 L. I. Shestov, “Umozrenie i apokalipsis. Religioznaya filosofiya Vl. Solovˈëva” [Speculation and Revelation: The Religious Philosophy of Vl. Solovˈëv], Sovremennye zapiski 33 (1927): 270–312; and 34 (1928): 281–311. The same article was included in the 1964 collection Speculation and Revelation, to which it gave the title (Shestov 11/1964 [A1]). On the philosophical relationship between Shestov and Solovˈëv, see Desmond (B3), Oppo 2020 (B3), Porus 2004 (B3), and Elena V. Besschetnova, “‘Opravdanie Vladimira Solovˈëva’: Shestov protiv Solovˈëva,” in Ermichëv [B2], 104–114.

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In this text, Shestov retraces Solovˈëv’s philosophical path and defines him as the one who unquestionably brought philosophy to Russia in the form of a “religious philosophy.” But for Shestov, by following the steps of a task that was already accomplished by the first generation of Slavophiles, his philosophy did no more than implant Schelling’s thought and, more generally, the categories of a certain type of Western philosophy, on Russian soil. To do this, according to Shestov, Solovˈëv had to forget the “revelations” of the great Russian literature: from Pushkin—whom, as Shestov comments, Solovˈëv did not like and “was at enmity with” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 27)—to Gogolˈ, to Lermontov, to Chekhov (Solovˈëv, Shestov observes, “does not mention Chekhov by name even once” [29]). In other words, for Shestov he had to substitute “fate” and “revelation” with a “religious philosophy” that had nothing “revealing.” Moreover, Shestov writes, as far as Dostoevskii was concerned, Solovˈëv was interested only in those ideas “that he himself suggested to him and that Dostoevskii more or less successfully developed, but always as a disciple, chiefly in the Diary of a Writer” (22). This was, according to Shestov, Solovˈëv’s entire philosophical path: his “last word” is “religious philosophy” for whose edification he discarded all Russian literature and “accepted the God of Spinoza” (84). He was “completely in the power of what Harnack called ‘das Hohelied des Hellenismus’ [The Song of Songs of Hellenism]. That is why, despite his assurances that he was seeking God, he sought only the truth and the good” (62).97 Significantly, Shestov points out Solovˈëv’s main mistake in having followed the path of Philo of Alexandria—upon which was built the entire Western theological-philosophical civilization, up to Hegel—instead of that of Plotinus (cf. 34). Nonetheless, this same Solovˈëv who “did not like” Pushkin and Chekhov and who submitted to Schelling and Spinoza, and who even “corrupted” Dostoevskii as he made him “reemerge” from the Underground, had a radical turning point at the end of his life: “Toward the very end of his life, when he looked back on what he had done, did he begin to experience an uneasiness that, at first glance, is not to be justified by anything. He threw himself into his Apocalypse and began his Three Conversations with their crowning History of the Antichrist” (32). For Shestov, it is undeniable that “between Three Conversations and what Solovyov had written earlier lies an abyss that is not to be filled up by 97 With respect to the entire Solovˈëvian doctrine of good and of ethics, Shestov harshly commented: “All these are commonplaces of philosophy, all this can be found in Hegel as well as in Schelling and in any representative of German idealism you please” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 62).

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anything” (32). Solovˈëv at first was not fully aware of this change. His last philosophical word, Shestov writes, was still “religious philosophy,” but the last word of Solovyov’s philosophy was not his last word. As the reader knows, toward the end of his life there occurred a “change of spiritual mood.” The change consisted in the fact that he experienced the complete impossibility of worshipping that speculative truth which he preached in the course of his twenty-five-year literary activity. The fruits of the tree of knowledge began to appear to him as bringing not life but death [ . . . ]. In Three Conversations Solovyov does not even recall Spinoza, Hegel, and Schelling and all those considerations that led him to the Hellenic truth and the Hellenic good [ . . . ]. Three Conversations is not a reflection on but a commentary to the Apocalypse. (84, 86)

In Shestov’s view, there was a moment in which even Solovˈëv, although not philosophically but existentially, experienced the uselessness of the fruits of the tree of knowledge: “In the last days of his life Solovyov turned away from the speculative truth and the speculative good, as if he sensed that not through ‘reflection’ but through thunder is the eternal and final truth obtained” (88). Overall, Shestov did not esteem Vladimir Solovˈëv. In his personal correspondence or conversations, he ungenerously defined him as “a not very original philosopher, who repeats above all Hegel and Schelling”98 or even a “philosopher of the second order” (Fondane [B1], 60). According to Igorˈ Evlampiev, this is the main limitation of Shestov, whose “extreme polarity” of perception “does not allow him to see the ‘semitones,’ which often contain the main value of new philosophical ideas” (Evlampiev [B3], 267). In this case, for Evlampiev, “Shestov does not notice that, in some of his components, Solovˈëv’s worldview is fully consonant with his own search for the authentic in man” (269). From another perspective, however, it was precisely Shestov’s incapacity to see the “semitones” that provided a different route for Russian religious philosophy to follow at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is significant that Shestov objects to Solovˈëv, as his biggest sin was to have forgotten the specifically “tragic” tradition of Russian literature. In fact, in the tragic “link” between Nietzsche and Dostoevskii—a connection that Shestov saw better than any other, perhaps precisely because of the absence of “semitones” in his view—, a 98 Letter to Max Eitingon from June 4, 1927 (quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 387).

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new post-Solovˈëvian and “anthropological” conscience was born in the wake of Dostoevskii.99 This conscience, anticipated by Rozanov, was affirmed by Shestov and brought to a conclusion, in some way, by Berdyaev. In this respect, Solovˈëv and Shestov may be considered as the real antipodes of the Russian religious philosophy—the two sources that bring metaphysics and antimetaphysics to stand together, the one opposed to the other. 2. Aside from Vladimir Solovˈëv, Shestov was also interested in the thought of his other coeval Russian philosophers. In this case, however, several distinctions have to be made. Theoretically speaking, all the difficulties Shestov had with literary critics and historians for always being “too much” a philosopher in his analyses on literature could be overcome by establishing a direct comparison with the philosophers of his time. But Shestov was not an easy man. He systematically opposed the trends of his time—he was too “religious” for a certain philosophical set and he was considered excessively irrational or nihilistic for another. Moreover, as Berdyaev somewhat sternly (but not without reason) stated, any “dialogue with L. Shestov is difficult, since he is not a man of dialogue, he is a man of monologue” (Berdyaev 1936a [B3], 50). In section one of the concluding chapter of this book, a map of the reception and legacy of Shestov’s thought, even in Russia in his own times, is traced out. This naturally includes its reception by other Russian philosophers. What emerge rather clearly are the complications and obstacles in finding a point of dialogue from both sides. Some philosophers, such as Vladimir Ern or Semën Frank, could not accept or even openly disdained Shestov’s “skepticism.”100 Others, like Nikolai Losskii or Vasilii Zenˈkovskii, strived to “tame” it into acceptable religious categories.101 Yet, with such premises, all these were inevitably excluded from a dialogue with Shestov. A fine intellectual like Pavel Florenskii—who Shestov met in 1918 on the occasion of Sergei Bulgakov’s ordination, at which Florenskii concelebrated at the liturgy (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 184)—was too much of a theologian for Shestov and, vice versa, Shestov was probably too much of an “existentialist” for what 99 On this see Igorʹ Evlampiev, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: Toward a New Metaphysics of Man,” Russian Studies in Philosophy 41, no. 3 (2002): 7–32. 100 See Ern (C) and Semën Frank, “O Lˈve Shestove” [On Lev Shestov] (1908), in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 168–172. 101 See Nikolai O. Losskii (B3), Vasilii V. Zenˈkovskii, “Pamyati L. I. Shestova” [In Memory of L. I. Shestov] (1939), in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 431–436, Zenˈkovskii (B3), and Zenkovsky (C).

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Florenskii’s worldview could tolerate. Although the two might possibly share a “discontinuous” conception of knowledge, the ways and vocabulary of such a discontinuity were too manifestly distant from each other.102 Shestov’s relationship with his Kievan co-citizens—Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Bulgakov and Gustav Shpet—deserves a separate discussion, as they were Shestov’s friends even before “philosophers-colleagues.” In a way, this made the philosophical understanding between Shestov and them more difficult as it lacked objectivity. But while with Berdyaev there was a long history of articles and comments—mostly polemical and oppositional—that they dedicated to each other,103 Shestov did not write anything on Bulgakov and Shpet, because their positions in philosophy were even more distant from his own than Berdyaev’s was. To Shestov’s eyes, Bulgakov was a “theologian” and Shpet was a “phenomenologist,” and he did not want to enter into the specificities of either discipline. An echo of their reciprocal disagreements, but also of their friendship, can be found in the correspondence they exchanged over the years, as well as in the articles that Bulgakov and Shpet devoted to Shestov.104 It must 102 In the catalogue of Shestov’s library there is Florenskii’s masterpiece The Pillar and Ground of the Truth, which he probably received from Gustav Shpet when he was in Coppet (see Ms. 2124, page 39, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). It is likely that he read it, along with Sergei Bulgakov’s works and Vladimir Ern’s doctoral thesis. In a letter to Gustav Shpet, Shestov wrote that Ern, like Florenskii, instead of “speaking of what matters to him [ . . . ] crushes us with his science and his reflections” (letter of June 15, 1916, in Shchedrina 2005 [C], 334). 103 See, on this, appendix 2 of this book, entirely dedicated to the relationship between Shestov and Berdyaev. 104 Regarding this correspondence, see Shestov 27/1995 and 28/1999 (A2), and Shchedrina 2005 (C). Bulgakov wrote a long article on the occasion of Shestov’s death in which he explained the reasons for their friendship and their philosophical disagreement (Sergei N. Bulgakov, “Nekotorye cherty religioznogo mirovozzreniya L. I. Shestova” [On Some Aspects of Shestov’s Religious Worldview] [1939], in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 441–456). Part of Bulgakov’s argumentation is discussed in chapter 4, §1, of this book with regard to a possible definition of Shestov’s “religious philosophy.” On the Shestov-Bulgakov relationship, see the proceedings of a roundtable that was held in Moscow in 2018: Kozyrev-Vorozhikhina 2018 (B3). As far as Gustav Shpet is concerned, he wrote but did not publish in his lifetime a text in defense of Husserl with regard to Shestov’s 1918 article on the German philosopher: see Gustav G. Shpet, “Rabochie zametki k statʹyam L. I. Shestova ‘Memento mori (po povodu teorii poznaniya Edmunda Gusserlya)’ i ‘Samoochevidnye istiny’” [Working Notes on L. I. Shestov’s Articles “Memento Mori (On Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Knowledge)” and “Self-Evident Truths”] (Shpet 2010 [B3], 210–221). The same article was reprinted in the collection of essays L. I. Shestov: Pro et contra (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 279–290). For a comment on this text, see appendix 1 of this book, on Shestov and Husserl. An interesting roundtable on the theoretical relationship between

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be said, however, that while a connection between Bulgakov’s and Shestov’s thought appears very difficult, as Bulgakov himself acknowledged, Shpet largely appreciated Shestov’s thought and saw many points in common with his own views. Given all these premises, it will come as no surprise that, aside from those texts on Berdyaev and on Solovˈëv, the only texts Shestov devoted, with a great deal of admiration, to Russian philosophers were addressed to two unorthodox, nearly eccentric, authors such as Vasilii Rozanov and Nikolai Fëdorov.105 In the case of Rozanov the sympathy was actually reciprocal, as he had already been one of the very few to write a highly positive review of Shestov’s book The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, precisely at a time when other critics used to severely attack it, and he even went to visit Shestov in person to talk about this book (cf. Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 88).106 In his text dedicated to Rozanov—an oral text that was conceived for a public reading—Shestov speaks passionately about Rozanov’s “atheism.” He compares him to Nietzsche and, above all, to Dostoevskii, whom he calls “Rozanov’s master.” For Shestov, Rozanov’s greatest enemy has always been Christianity. But, since he loved to repeat to himself and advocate Fëdor Karamazov’s words (“Even though I am a pig, God loves me”) his atheism could well be compared to that of Nietzsche. Shestov, in fact, sets Hegel on Rozanov’s opposite side, and in particular the Hegel “philosopher of religion,” for whom a true religion was a religion without miracles, a “rational Christianity.” Rozanov, in Shestov’s view, became an atheist because he lost faith in miracles and could not accept a Hegelian solution. He discovered that “God is dead” but could not bow to the “wall” of science and natural phenomena. Unlike Dostoevskii, however, he was not willing to fight Shestov and Shpet was held in 2016 with Maryse Dennes, Tatˈyana Shchedrina and Boris Pruzhinin (see Denn-Shchedrina-Pruzhinin [B3]), and two more articles on the same subject have been produced by Shchedrina (B3) and Porus 2006 (B3). 105 The first text, entitled “V. V. Rozanov,” was read by Shestov on January 26, 1930, at a meeting of the new magazine Chisla (which shared an editorial committee with Les cahiers de l’étoile) entirely dedicated to Rozanov. That same evening there were readings by Schloezer, Berdyaev, and Adamovich, among others. Shestov’s text was then published on Putˈ 21 ( June 1930): 97–103, then in Shestov 11/1964 (A1). The second essay “N. F. Fëdorov,” an unpublished and incomplete text probably written in 1933, was included in the posthumous collection Speculation and Revelation (Shestov 11/1964 [A1]). 106 See Vasilii V. Rozanov, “Novye vkusy v filosofii” [New Tastes in Philosophy] (1905), in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 130–137. Along with similar views on Dostoevskii, the two also shared an opposition to Solovˈëv’s metaphysics and ethics. See the writings of Rozanov’s famous polemics with Solovˈëv, in Vasilii V. Rozanov, Russkaya myslˈ, ed., A. Nikolyukin (Moscow: Algoritm, 2006), 370–490.

CHAPTER III    Wandering Through The Souls (1914–1929)

against that wall with his life. Shestov returns to the Notes from the Underground as the highest Dostoevskian touchstone—the one that links Dostoevskii and Rozanov, but that also separates them. Because “Rozanov lacked that unrestrained audacity which inspired Dostoevsky in his creation” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 96). “Is it permissible to reproach Rozanov for this?” Shestov asks. “It is permissible—he concludes—to think that Rozanov was not mistaken when he applied the words of the old Karamazov to himself. Although he renounced God, and although he uttered terrible words, nevertheless, for these words and this renunciation, God [ . . . ] loved him” (97). Shestov’s attitude towards the philosophical authors he considers appears to be the same as his “Nietzschean beginnings” (and personalities like Rozanov possibly take him back to that early rebellion against morality): he prefers sincerity, or even a “sincere curse,” to the best explanatory or conciliative theory. For Shestov, whatever the case, to think means to think “tragically.” Out of this, that is, out of a living and suffering contradiction of the thinker, there cannot be any authentic thought. If “God is dead,” as he seems to say, nothing easy can follow. His preference for Rozanov with respect to, for instance, Sergei Bulgakov conforms entirely with this point.107 For the same reason—and again it may elicit no surprise—, in a highly fragmentary text that was included in the Russian edition of Speculation and Revelation, he praised the philosophy and personality of Nikolai Fëdorov. Although the incompleteness of this essay does not allow a full comprehension of Shestov’s opinion on Fëdorov, it is clear that, just as with Rozanov, Shestov appreciates the audacity and deep honesty of the Russian philosopher. In particular, Shestov recognizes in Fëdorov two aspects that are similar to his own views: the will to fight against nature and the laws of science, and, just like the prophets of the Old Testament, the courage to pursue an impossible task. In this regard, Shestov condemns those scholars— like Aleksandr Gornostaev—who, albeit in good conscience, tried to interpret Fëdorov according to more acceptable or appealing intellectual categories (e.g., the recent theories of Einstein or Minkowski, or Freud). Shestov, on the contrary, recognizes in Fëdorov a sort of radical humanism, for his “Philosophy of the Common Task” project is, in fact, a defense of the singularity and pure 107 In a conversation with Fondane on February 17, 1937, Shestov introduces the personality of Bulgakov, recalling his “changes of mind,” when he passed from Plekhanov to Kant, then making attempts at conciliating Kant and Marx, or Marx and Nietzsche, up to his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Ironically, Shestov adds that Bulgakov recently organized a conference on the miracles of the Gospel, and he comments: “Well! He explained these miracles in the most natural way” (Fondane [B1], 133–134).

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specificity of the human being, which comes from the act of conceiving that which is “unheard of,” and from the act of going against common wisdom and ordinary knowledge.108 To Shestov’s eyes (but also to the eyes of those who admired him, such as Dostoevskii, Solovˈëv and, above all, Lev Tolstoi), Fëdorov represented exactly this deeply human “audacity.”

108 On Nikolai Fëdorov’s The Philosophy of the Common Task, see Irene Masing-Delic, Abolishing Death. A Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 76–104.

CHAPTER IV

Athens And Jerusalem: The Logic And The Thunder (1930–1938)

4.1 Introduction: Shestov as a “Jewish Philosopher”

T

he last ten years of Shestov’s life were characterized by a number of significant events. First and foremost were the important encounters with Martin Buber, Benjamin Fondane, and Edmund Husserl: the first was a close friend and an important figure in Shestov’s late rapprochement with the Jewish religion; the second was his “disciple”—the one who disseminated and relaunched his thought in France; and the third was his “mentor” as well as the person whom Shestov felt understood him better than any other. Husserl also introduced him to the thought of Søren Kierkegaard—another paramount event of these years for Shestov—to which he decided to dedicate an entire book. More generally, in the last phase of his life, Shestov turned decisively towards a more religiously oriented research, not so much in the sense of “studies on religion” but rather a philosophical confrontation with the Bible and an extremization of the polarity between reason and faith that, in point of fact, had been always present in his thought. All this research would finally converge in his pivotal work Athens and Jerusalem (1938), which—with considerable difficulty and like the previous work Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (1936)—was published first in French and then, many years later, in Russian.1 1 On the long and troubled “negotiations” concerning the publication of Shestov’s works in French—with the publishers J. Schiffrin (Éditions de la Pléiade), Éditions Sans Pareil,

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Shestov’s “religious turn” must be set within a long but constant rapprochement to Judaism which characterized the years from the mid-1920s onwards. Already in 1925, after his sister Elizaveta and her husband Lev Mandelberg moved to Palestine, probably in Tel Aviv, he manifested the desire to visit them, and regretted not knowing Hebrew, which would have helped him obtain an invitation to teach in the Palestinian University. Nevertheless, the Mandelbergs tried to arrange a trip for him, in autumn 1925, to give lectures in the university for two months on the subject “The influence of the Bible on Russian and European philosophical thought.” Shestov at first was very enthusiastic about this possibility, but it turned out to be more difficult than expected for practical and financial reasons (see, on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 363–367). Shestov’s “dream” of going to Palestine, however, would be fulfilled in 1936—he stayed there for about a month between April and May, in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, and gave a series of lectures in German on the subjects “Parmenides in Chains,” “Tolstoi,” and “Dostoevskii and Kierkegaard.”2 In the last year of his life Shestov struggled with his ever-worsening health and with difficulties reading, but he was still very intellectually curious: he followed with great apprehension Hitler’s invasion of Austria and all the “horrors” in European history that seemed unending from 1914 onwards.3 In his final two years, in particular, he was studying Indian philosophy and the Upanishads, which he mentions many times to Fondane.4 His greatest desire was to write a and Vrin—along with the establishment of a “committee of Shestov’s friends” to fund such a publication, see the correspondence between Shestov and Max Eitingon reported in Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 394–403. On the “committee,” established on the occasion of Shestov’s seventieth birthday, and on the many warm letters and articles dedicated to him that he received from his friends for his birthday, see Baranoff-Chestov 1993 (B1), 162–171. 2 On Shestov’s enthusiastic impressions about this trip, on the success of his lectures, and also on the uneasiness raised by a number of disturbances between the Arabic and Jewish populations during his stay, see Natalˈya Baranova’s report through Shestov’s letters: BaranoffChestov 1993 (B1), 172–175. See also Shestov’s letters to Benjamin Fondane, in Fondane (B1), 120–124. 3 In a letter to Boris de Schloezer from September 11, 1938, Shestov reveals his concern for the destiny of Europe, and his fear of Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler, and recognizes more than ever the need to give importance to the essential figures of history, the prophets and apostles, who never lost their faith in God even in the face of the most terrible horrors, and whose importance seemed even greater in such times (see letter no. 97, in Shestov 31/2011 [A2], 158–160). 4 “Then he tells me about Shankara’s Hindu philosophy,” Fondane writes about a meeting from January 27, 1937. “Just think!” Sestov said. “These people were as ignorant as the prophets of the Bible. They knew nothing about chemistry, physics, etc. But in pure reason, they reached an exceptional power and finesse. Elegance, precision. Shankara reminds me of

CHAPTER IV    Athens And Jerusalem: The Logic And The Thunder (1930–1938)

book on the subject, although he was aware it would never happen. He instead managed to write his last article in memory of Husserl, whose death occurred a few months earlier than Shestov’s and touched him deeply. The article on Husserl appeared in the journal Russkie zapiski at the end of the year, just after Shestov’s own death on November 20, 1938. In accordance with Shestov’s will, his burial was celebrated by a rabbi who recited the Kaddish (cf., on this, Fondane [B1], 170). Shestov’s relationship with Judaism was not always linear or comprehensible. He came from an observant family: his father, in particular, had Zionist connections and attended the synagogue regularly. His entire family environment was Jewish, but he soon rebelled against this heritage. While very young, he was initially a sort of anarchist. Later, he married an Orthodox woman, and seemingly abandoned any confessional position after embracing a Nietzschean “nihilistic” stance against any positively religious view. At a certain point, he became fascinated by a Lutheran approach to Christianity, based on the sola fide idea, and in this way rediscovered the Pauline letters, precisely in the light of an uncompromised Christian faith. Along the way he appreciated many other Christian authors: chiefly St. Augustine, Tertullian, John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, and of course Pascal and Kierkegaard. As Sergei Bulgakov argued, Shestov seemed to see no difference between Old and New Testament (cf. Bulgakov [B3] in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 451). All his quotes from the Gospel (and there are many in his writings), and particularly those concerning Christ, appear to be almost “dogmatic,” as if they revealed a Nietzschean pathos and a sense of uncompromised purity that might be ascribable to an “unmistakable truth.” He would probably not be able to appreciate Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard in the way he did without this inner belief, which was actually not dissimilar from Dostoevskii’s, in the purity of the Gospel. But Shestov’s Christ, it must be said, seems unquestionably closer to the Christ of the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor than to any other theological representation of him.5 At the same time, he was very critical of Bergson’s Saint Thomas. It is almost a system of thought” (Fondane [B1], 131–132). On February 26, 1938 he added further: “I am still in the Hindu thought. Remarkable. The Europeans always explain it as they explained the Bible: we put aside what makes us uneasy, we keep the rest [ . . . ]. In the Rigveda, the Upanishads, one feels a totally different thought, which nobody utters. . . . Yes, they don’t always stop before the impossible; they want to go further” (150). 5 Shestov’s appreciation of Christ and of figures who marked a radical discontinuity with Hebraism, such as St. Paul and St. Augustine, is certainly problematic in relation to his “Jewish thought,” and it deserves more attention and further studies to be better understood. It must be observed, however, that his interest in Paul and Augustine lies almost

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affirmation that St. Paul and the other Catholic saints were closer to God than the prophets, as he declared to Buber with reference to Bergson’s book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.6 In fact, as emerges not only from his biography but also from how his thought developed, the points of departure and of arrival in Shestov’s personal trajectory lie unequivocally within a Jewish horizon.7 On the one hand, his closest relationships, his relatives and most of his friends, were Jewish. With those people in particular, Shestov shared a sort of common destiny, an unconditional trust, and the possibility of discussing certain subjects that did not exist with others. This can be seen very clearly in entirely within the oppositional category “faith vs. reason” and in no way concerns dogmatic or ethical questions. Based on one of his rare theological dialogues with Fondane, it is even possible to affirm that Shestov’s sympathy for St. Paul originates in St. Paul’s “betrayal of the Law,” which Shestov admitted to be true and which, in his opinion, focused attention again on an “arbitrary God” who stands before the Law, and before any historical alliance (cf. Fondane [B1], 136–137). See, on this, also Langton (B3). As far as Christ is concerned, it is not always clear what Shestov’s “theological” position was: i.e., his actual view of Christ’s nature and eschatological role. Overall, he separated the figure of Christ per se—for whom he had the highest consideration—from “faith in Christ” and from the theological role Christ played for the Church. In the same conversation with Fondane, Shestov declares that sometimes—he refers to a book by Louis Gilbert on the religious subject that was in a certain sense based on Shestov’s thought—“one believes in Christ as if it were in Socrates, a Socrates one hundred, one thousand times greater, it does not matter! One believes in Christ so as to be dispensed from believing in God” (Fondane [B1], 137). Somehow contradicting the latter affirmation, Sergei Bulgakov, who admitted he had reflected extensively on every time Shestov quoted “Christ” in his works in order to figure out his view of him, while declaring Shestov’s position in this regard as “uncertain”, finally came to the conclusion that “Christ for Shestov is not God incarnate, as the Scripture says, but ‘the most perfect among human beings’” (see Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 452). With regard to this point, Berdyaev wrote that, particularly in the book on Kierkegaard (1936), Shestov reveals his real thought about Christianity. For Shestov, according to Berdyaev, “Christianity falls into the line of Socrates, Stoicism, Idealism, that is, into the line of the serpent, into the line of nonbeing, which turned into reason and morality, into eternity” (Nikolai A. Berdyaev, “Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 413). Consequently, “the incarnation of God is unacceptable for L. Shestov. The fact that God has become a man seems to him acceptable only to the mind and invented by the mind” (413). Undoubtedly, in Shestov’s thought there is an original and problematic combination of Hebraism and Christianity that, particularly from a theological point of view, still needs to be disambiguated and explored in depth. On Shestov’s engagement with the image of Christ, see also Beaumont (B2). For a general analysis on the Jewish-Christian encounters in Russian religious thought, see Rubin (C). 6 See Shestov’s letter to Buber from June 9, 1932, quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1993 (B1), 114–115. 7 For an understanding of Shestov’s figure from a more Jewish perspective, especially from a historical point of view, see Kornblatt (B3), Rubin (B3), and Tabachnikova 2008d and 2012b (B3).

CHAPTER IV    Athens And Jerusalem: The Logic And The Thunder (1930–1938)

his conversations with Fondane and in his correspondence with these friends and family. This is true in the case of his relatives, of Schloezer, Gershenzon, Fondane, Eitingon and Buber, but also of Lévy-Bruhl and Husserl. On the other hand, the entirety of his philosophical quest is directed towards a way out from what he defined as the Western triad (Greek philosophy, Christian theology, and modern science) and into an alternative domain of truth that for him was, unquestionably, a “Jewish domain”—that is, a prophetic truth, the truth of the “illogic” and “arbitrary God” of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Not only does Shestov see in his “Jerusalem” the continuity of the Jewish experience, but also and above all an alternative paradigm of knowledge with respect to “Athens” (a metonymy for Greek-Western logos) that is based on faith and on the awareness of the insufficiency of logos. Shestov’s “religious philosophy” can be connoted as “Jewish” not just because it is a reflection on Hebraism (its sacred texts, beliefs, traditions, etc.),8 but even more because it is a radical criticism of what was originally opposed to it, that is, the Greek paradigm of knowledge which, according to Shestov, falsified the meaning of Scriptures and, eventually the authentic meaning of life. There is an “authentic truth” that has been violated by “Athens,” Shestov says in the most of his writings, and this truth was originally revealed to the prophets and assigned to the Jewish people. The most severe criticism of Shestov’s religious philosophy came from Sergei Bulgakov. In his commemorative article (1939) for Shestov’s death,9 Bulgakov sums up in a number of points what he considers to be the incongruities in Shestov’s claims for a philosophical discourse on religion. For Bulgakov, the religious “Kierkegaardian-Shestovian” (interestingly, he treats the two as one) “philosophy of the absurd” is, in the first place, an empty thought with the 8 See, in this regard, a remark Shestov made to Fondane on December 4, 1937: “For me, the Bible is not the ‘authority.’ I read the Bible just as I read Plato, and I realized that it replied to some questions which not only did philosophy not posit, but also that it prevented from being posed” (Fondane [B1], 144). 9 Sergei N. Bulgakov, “Nekotorye cherty religioznogo mirovozzreniya L. I. Shestova” [Some aspects of Shestov’s religious worldview]. See Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 441–456 (also Bulgakov [B3]). However, in a personal letter he sent to Shestov on October 22, 1938, Bulgakov appeared much more conciliatory and was even able to see some points in common between Shestov’s and his own philosophy, in particular in the “freedom of the creature.” Conversely, he sees in the “philosophy of revelation” the biggest disagreement as Shestov turns without hesitation to an “antidogmatism” that Bulgakov cannot accept. But he nonetheless observes that at least on the “dogmatic” affirmation of the Hebrews 11:6 (“For the one who comes to God must believe that He exists”) they should agree. See Bulgakov’s letter quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1993 (B1), 219–220.

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mere intent of denying rational philosophy.10 Secondly, linking God’s omnipotence to the concept of absurd led to equally unacceptable consequences, like a God committing a sin or ending His own existence, which takes the whole discourse back to the fact that only “everything that is ontologically possible is possible for God” (455). Finally, in Bulgakov’s view, the power of faith should never be considered either abstractly or literally (even the miracles of the Gospel, for Bulgakov, cannot be taken in a literal sense since no one can ever move mountains by means of faith), but must be understood in a certain direction, as the Devil’s temptations to Jesus clearly reveal. For all these reasons, as Bulgakov maintains, “dogmatic theology must be the only possible religious philosophy” (448) because such a philosophy needs a doctrine and an ontology to avoid meaninglessness. It is evident, therefore, that Bulgakov’s requirements for a “religious philosophy” to exist were not the same as Shestov’s requirements. As far as his main argumentation is concerned, Bulgakov is right. It is true that Shestov often manipulates his biblical quotes, that he does not differentiate between Old and New Testaments (even Emmanuel Levinas observed this about Shestov),11 and it is correct that renouncing any criterion of truth leads nowhere in a rational definition of truth (which Shestov still claims, since he writes books to support one thesis over another). It is also widely agreed that the “arbitrariness” of God, as Bulgakov maintains, cannot include the possibility of God being evil or ceasing to be God—so the same arbitrariness does indeed have limits, which fall back under a concept of rationality that Shestov nonetheless does not accept. Yet, in all his criticism of Shestov’s works, Bulgakov does not accord any value either to any kind of apophatic discourse or theology, or to any negative dialectics or negatively philosophical argumentation, whereas in the history of Western thought all these stances have always played an important role. He also does not see the question on the limits of knowledge, which Shestov continually raises and which is without doubt a metaphysical question. 10 As Bulgakov writes: such a philosophy “is pure rationalism, only with a negative coefficient, with a minus. Its content is limited to the struggle against Athens, that is, Greek philosophy (for Shestov) and Hegelianism (for Kierkegaard). Without such a criticism, it simply would have nothing to say about itself. There is no overcoming of thought and word in it, but only their abstract negation. Faith, which is opposed to reason here, is in fact by no means wordless or meaningless” (Sergei N. Bulgakov, in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 455). 11 See Levinas’ review of the book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, in Levinas (B3), 141. Shestov himself actually acknowledges this position in a letter to Sergei Bulgakov from October 26, 1938: “To me, the contradictions between Old and New Testament have always seemed fictitious” (quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 222).

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Furthermore, he puts Kierkegaard and Shestov on the same level as if they were two similarly “naïve” attempts at producing a philosophical thought, and in so doing he reveals himself as having missed many of the deep questions they raise and, more generally, the value of any philosophico-religious tradition that did not follow the canonical path of “rational theology” in the way it originated from the fusion with Greek philosophy. For Shestov, in fact, the duty of a ( Jewish) religious philosophy should be precisely that of openly contrasting the program of reconciliation between reason and faith, inaugurated by Philo of Alexandria. Yet, such a radical conflict is already present in the Talmud, at least before the subsequent mediations of Yehuda Ha-Levi and Maimonides. It is the Talmud that expresses the incompatibility between the Torah and the Epicureans (in the sense of all Greek philosophers). Hence, according to this radical version, “biblical philosophy” may literally be a nonphilosophy—an apophatic expression or, in other words, a philosophy in search of a hidden, “non-self-evident” truth. All this is actually close to Shestov’s thought, which for Bulgakov, in fact, is not a “philosophy” at all. In this regard, it must be said, few modern Jewish philosophers have dared to challenge Greek wisdom as he did. Leaving aside the long-standing problem of the existence of a “Jewish philosophy” that must be considered different from a “thought of Israel” or a “philosophy (as self-expression) of Judaism,” it must be observed that with the intellectual movement of the Haskalah—the Jewish Enlightenment—the thought of Israel turned from a “thought on religion” to a pluralistic, metareligious approach to this problem.12 But, even within this reconsideration, the dialectic between “Athens” and “Jerusalem” has always been crucial for the definition of a Jewish thought. If it is true that a thought of Israel is mainly a self-conscience of the Hebraic tradition that is carried on through the Greek categories of thinking, then such a thought is structurally and historically divided between the two opposite paradigms of continuity or discontinuity with that same tradition. In this respect, Shestov takes on a precise role in defending the tradition and against the caesura that, in his view, began with Philo of Alexandria and that, in many extents, achieved a relevant success 12 On these admittedly immense questions concerning the nature of a Jewish philosophy and, in particular, in relation to modernity, see at least the following studies: Raphael Jospe, What Is Jewish Philosophy? (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1988); Ze’ev Levy, Between Yafeth and Shem: On the Relationship Between Jewish and General Philosophy (Bern: Peter Lang, 1987); Nathan Rotenstreich, Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1968); and Neher (C). See also Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman, eds., History of Jewish Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2003).

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in history with the creation of a faith in reason, and consequently a faith in the autonomy of the Law that traded places with God—the “living God” of Israel. A possible key to reading Shestov’s “Jewish philosophy” comes from Fondane’s idea of Shestov’s quest for lost Judaism.13 According to Fondane, in modern times “the great Jewish tradition was abandoned,” for “the ‘autonomous’ morality is none other than Israel’s great sin of pride in History” (B. Fondane in Jutrin 2009 [C], 196). “After men invented autonomous morality,” Fondane continues, “everything was subjugated to it: the God of the Old Testament who is compassionate, angry or repentant, has been transformed into a just, immutable, perfect, immobile God—a God for pagan philosophers” (196). For Fondane, this was also the original meaning of the Nietzschean formula “God has been killed”—which Shestov understood already in 1900 and before Nietzsche’s posthumous works clarifying this concept were published: it was the God of moral good, the “moral God,” not the God of good. In this way, Fondane concludes, “the moral position of Judaism throughout these last centuries has been turned against the metaphysical position of this same Judaism!” (197). This had happened already with two men who were both Jewish and philosophers, Mendelssohn and Spinoza, who “detached the Old Testament of its truth” (197). It is precisely this “denied and broken tradition” that Shestov tries to restore, in Fondane’s view (196). The manner of this restoration might seem paradoxical but, in Fondane’s opinion, is perfectly correct, as it is a counterbalance of what happened in history: in the same way as in ancient times the Jews witnessed the actual presence of God, “in modern times, and against the modern time” they must be the only ones “to witness, with the same anguish, the absence of God! Alone in the modern world and isolated in Judaism, Lev Shestov witnesses this anguish!” (198). An elaboration of this idea, based essentially on Shestov’s article on Martin Buber, would lead to an original Shestovian interpretation of the Jewish thought that is, in some ways, proximate to the Kabbalistic-Hasidic current of Jewish mysticism.14 In this current, the ideal of the philosopher is represented by the devequt, that is, the “mystic union with God” and with the “hidden truth,” 13 See Benjamin Fondane’s article “Léon Chestov, à la recherche du judaïsme perdu,” La revue juive de Genève 37 (April 1936): 326–328, also in Jutrin 2009 (C). 14 This interpretation was proposed by Massimo Giuliani in a stimulating essay written for the Italian journal Humanitas: Massimo Giuliani, “Il giudaismo nascosto di Lev Šestov” [Lev Shestov’s Hidden Judaism], Humanitas 3 (May–June 2009): 509–520. See also the position of José Maria Neto, in Neto 1993 (B3). For an overview of the various currents of Jewish mysticism, see the excellent work of Gershom Scholem: Scholem (C).

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and therefore by the mystic essence of the true knowledge and by the cruciality, in this sense, of the Abrahamic faith. The similitude between this mystic current of Hebraism and Shestov’s philosophy is particularly striking with regard to the theory of truth, where the latter is always presented in the form of the hiddenness and is never a rational self-evidence. Truth, both for Shestov and for Kabbalistic-Hasidic mysticism, is not the knowledge of the world, but it is the suffering search for a vision of truth that is an “experienced truth” accessible to those who are humble and devote, rather than opinionated and assertive. Shestov, however, never quotes or claims for himself any of the positive teachings of Hasidism: for example, the Lurianic doctrine, the divine sparks suffused in the world, the “husks” (qliphoth)—that is, the impure spiritual forces—nor even the ethical doctrine centered around the figure of the tzadiq (the saintly leader or the “righteous one”), whose existence, in fact, in his correspondence with Buber Shestov openly contests. It is precisely in his dialogue with Buber that Hasidism’s importance for Shestov becomes clear (Shestov, however, admits to having no actual knowledge of this doctrine, apart from what he learned through Buber).15 Such importance seems to lie in a subtle, inner tension that pervades Hasidic mysticism in opposing an apparently “natural view” of the world—which Shestov sees in the Greek philosophical-scientific logos—and in search of an “unnatural,” hidden revelation that can happen only by means of faith. This possible point of union between Shestovian and Hasidic thought is to be seen mainly in a negative conception of truth and in the belief of a Deus absconditus, which encompasses within itself the other belief that such a truth is always beyond the Law, where the Law, in fact, is at risk of becoming an idol that distances faith from truth. In Shestov’s view, the devequt should be “translated” into an essentialist, Neoplatonic, or rather Plotinian, conception of the world—in sharp contrast, in this case, with Buber’s anti-Platonic and existentialist stance. But Shestov’s devequt seems to be rather a “sudden state” or a gift than a spiritual search or an ideal communion with the “inner light” of the infinite, as it is in the Hasidic conception. In any case, Hasidic mysticism and Shestovian thought share a common tension towards the “silent truth,” the awareness of the necessity of the interruption of logic and of “normative ethics”—the “autonomous ethics” as Fondane would say—and most importantly the absolute reliance on the “only faith” in the Abrahamic 15 See Shestov’s comment to Fondane: “I really only knew Hasidism through Buber. I heard about it from my father, who was a scholar in Hebrew things, but an indifferent scholar in matters of religion. I was left with the idea that of all the ‘dirty Jews,’ those Jews were a little dirtier” (Fondane [B1], 73).

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God. For Shestov, historic Judaism has often lost this truth, bending itself to the Law or to a reduction to morality in a way that is no different to what Christianity did and to what philosophy and science did. This is Shestov’s main concept of the “serpent of knowledge” and of the biblical “fall of man.” In this respect, it is a transversal concept, just as, in many ways, Shestov’s Hebraism is a transversal category that overcomes the biological and historical boundaries of Judaism. The Jewish truth, in Shestov’s view, is a truth for the world, a sort of “metaphysic Judaism”—as Fondane also understood it—for it is not by chance that Job, the biblical personality who is emblematic of the whole of Shestov’s thought, is not Jewish, even in the rabbinic tradition. Shestov’s quest for the “lost Judaism” coincides with the quest for the ultimate philosophical truth. In the same way, the Bible, to him, is essentially a book concerning the knowledge of the truth. The centrality of the Bible is decisive not only for spiritual concerns, but for also for “scientific ones.” It is evident even from his late religious writing, such as Athens and Jerusalem and his article on Buber, that Shestov’s interests remain philosophical. But—and this is the most surprising fact—in the 1930s works, he brings the Bible into the issue of the “theory of knowledge” and he takes a stance in this respect, as he probably never did before, or not with such consistency. In the balance of truth, he puts the Bible, exemplified by Job’s tears, on the one side, and all the science, philosophy and theology on the other. To all appearances Spinoza seems to be Shestov’s greatest enemy— possibly greater than Aristotle, Kant, Hegel or scientific thought itself—because he created the conditions for the definitive affirmation of Western logos over the antilogos of the Bible. Spinoza was Jewish—and for Shestov, was a Jewish thinker who betrayed the truth of Bible. But that “betrayal” is nonetheless inherent in the human condition of the “Fall” and it concerns everyone (this was, in fact, one of the criticisms he made against Buber’s defense of the role of the tzadiq). The betrayal, as an original sin, is a condition for knowledge itself and an essential step in the path towards the hidden truth of the world. But this is a theory that is contained in the Bible and for Shestov the return to the “original Judaism” represents the rediscovery of this truth against all the opposing tendencies that have appeared throughout history, from Socrates to all the metaphysical, theological and scientific theories that have followed.

4.2 The Bible and the Original Sin: In Dialogue with Martin Buber Shestov met Buber for the first time in Frankfurt on April 30, 1928. On that occasion, Buber decided to publish a German translation of Shestov’s 1925

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article on Spinoza in the journal Die Kreatur of which he was one of the editors.16 From that moment on, an intense friendship started between the two as well as a long correspondence, since one lived in Paris and the other in Berlin, that lasted almost ten years and stopped only one year before Shestov’s death and Buber’s definitive departure for the Palestine.17 At that time, Buber was already a prominent intellectual within the Hebraic world and in other spheres too: he collaborated with or founded various journals, publishing houses and cultural societies, and he had also published diverse books as well as the German translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he started in 1925 with help of his friend Franz Rosenzweig and finished alone after Rosenzweig’s death. From the correspondence between Shestov and Buber emerges a deep reciprocal respect and the former’s special admiration for the latter—which sometimes, quite strangely for Shestov, verges on veneration—along with a whole realm of common interests and cultural references often focusing on biblical and religious themes. After the Frankfurt encounter, the two also met in Paris—Buber used to stop there as an intermediate stopover on his way to Pontigny, where every year international encounters of intellectuals, organized by Paul Desjardins were held. Both Buber and Shestov were often invited to participate in those encounters. Their meetings were always very amicable, they used to discuss many subjects: in particular, they shared their concern about the rise of Hitler and Hitlerism, about secularism and capitalism, and the perils of modernity (cf. Fondane [B1], 63–64). On one occasion, in 1937, after three years in which they had not been able to meet, Buber finally visited Shestov’s home as his guest. In the letters they exchanged, they often mention common acquaintances such as Berdyaev, Paul Desjardins, Max Horkheimer, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Hermann Cohen, and Franz Rosenzweig. But the aspect on which their conversation mostly focuses is unquestionably the Bible, from both an exegetic and a linguistic point of view. Shestov appears to be deeply admiring of Buber’s translating work, but at the same time he seems to expect a position on the issue of original sin that Buber does not offer. In his turn, Buber 16 Shestov’s article was published with the title “Kinder und Stiefkinder der Zeit” [The Children and Stepchildren of the Time], Die Kreatur 4 (1928): 369–396. 17 Thirty-five letters from Shestov to Buber and thirteen letters from Buber to Shestov are held at the Shestov Archive at the Sorbonne (Ms. 2122 [vol. 12], files 165–247, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris), while only a few letters sent by Buber to Shestov are kept at the Martin Buber Archive in Jerusalem. Unfortunately, the partial nature of the correspondence does not allow us to see Buber’s point of view in its entirety. A French edition of this correspondence was published in 2005 in Cahiers Léon Chestov (see Shestov 29/2005 [A2]).

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does not agree with Shestov’s opinion on the original sin as a “gnoseological sin,” that is, the pretense of man of accessing the truth of God, but Shestov often insists that he sees no conflict in Buber’s writings with his own stance.18 What Shestov particularly appreciates in Buber is the spirit in which he writes his texts and the fact that he always speaks about the first and last things. In a letter from April 3, 1935, however, Shestov contests Buber’s conception of the “sacramental existence in the world” or “pansacramentalism” within Hasidism, which to his mind closely resembles the Hegelian formula “what is real is rational.” Shestov “reproaches” Buber for the “pan-” but not for “sacramentalism.” While Shestov admits that he does not know Hasidism well, he imagines that any principle of reconciliation different from a “suffering struggle” cannot be in the truest spirit of Bible. The correspondence between the two also reveals Shestov’s intention to write a review of Buber’s last book Zwiesprache [Dialogue] (1932). Shestov was actually very eager to write a text on Buber, in order to spread his renown to the Russian and French worlds. But in his letters he appears cautious as he wants Buber to first read his review and share his thoughts about it. Three versions of the text eventually came out between 1933 and 1934 in Russian, French and German in the journals Putˈ, Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, and Orient und Occident, respectively.19 It is not just a review, however, but a synthesis of Shestov’s thought on Martin Buber. For Shestov, what best connotes Buber is his “seriousness of research”—Shestov employs this term (serˈëznostˈ iskanii) to mean, as he says, a Kierkegaardian or Nietzschean attitude of full involvement in one’s activity of writing. In Buber, according to Shestov, one specific book is no more important than another, and even those works that are directly related to the Hasidic tradition and the Bible, such as the Tales of the Hasidim (1928), do not differ greatly from those which apparently have nothing to do with Biblical or Hasidic themes, like I and Thou (1923) or Dialogue (1932). For Shestov, the Bible is present everywhere in Buber’s writings, perhaps even more in those texts that deal with the dialogical existence. Even the Buberian terms “meeting” and “relationship,” which are omnipresent in I and Thou and Dialogue, derive from the Hasidic world. In Buber, as Shestov argues, the main idea of “dialogue” as a preferred means to obtain union with God is opposed to any abstract principles of truth. In this sense, it is also inevitably 18 Shestov discusses this problem, in particular, in the letters to Buber of June 9 and September 22 and 29, 1932. 19 See the first appearance of this article in Russian: “Martin Buber,” Putˈ 39 ( June 1933): 67–77, also in Shestov 11/1964 (A1).

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opposed to intellectual knowledge (cf. Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 110). Shestov, however, admits that he did not find in Buber’s works an explicit position of this kind, which is nonetheless evident to his eyes (111). The first problem that Shestov identifies within Buber’s philosophy is the difficulty to compare the concept of “theophany” as it was understood in ancient times with the current common wisdom, which would never accept such an idea. For Shestov, “every attempt to ‘expound in contemporary language’ the biblical or the much later Hasidic teaching inevitably presupposes the intervention of ‘knowledge,’ that knowledge which contemporary man considers the only true kind” (112). In this respect, both Shestov and Buber acknowledge Spinoza to be a crucial figure in modern times precisely for having secularized God, or, in other words, for having translated “God” into “substance.” “In Spinoza,” Shestov writes, “the concept of sublimity and perfection is determined by his concept of the truth, and not vice versa” (113). At this point, he contrasts Buber’s affirmation that Hasidism was an answer to Spinoza (114). For Shestov, on the contrary, “even the Hasidim—although, as Buber rightly supposes, they had hardly heard of Spinoza—were, nevertheless, in a certain sense themselves infected with his ideas” (114). The Bible, in Shestov’s view, is the opposite of all this. In concluding his text, he seems to “warn” Buber or the Buberian reader that “Buber is true” as long as “one keeps in sight everything written by him and gives up the assumption that the present-day theophany has any superiority whatever over the theophany of men of former times” (115). The deepest Buberian truth, for Shestov, is that “theophanies may change, but God does not change” (117). In this sense, as Shestov concludes, Buber’s “seriousness” is more important than all his books. This incomprehension about the fundamental meaning of the original sin, and by extension of the whole Bible, emerges with more clarity in Shestov’s private accounts to Fondane about his meetings with Buber. While maintaining that Buber’s explanation of Hasidism, in which the “righteous ones” would escape the original sin, would not displease Spinoza, Shestov draws his own conclusion: I differ from Buber in that he would have liked to put aside the original hereditary sin. I know, just as he does, how absurd, shocking, and incredible the original, hereditary sin is. And I pointed it out to him. He answered that, for him, the original sin did not begin with the tree of Knowledge, but with the crime of Cain. That makes no sense to me. Sin is knowledge [ . . . ]. Knowledge and Freedom are implacably opposed. (Fondane [B1], 72–73)

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It was in one of his private conversations with Buber, in Paris, that Shestov said his famous sentence “What is Hitler, compared to the serpent of knowledge?” (64), which seems to be plainly and simply a challenge to Buber’s apparent indifference to such a question. To Buber’s reply, that he was not sure if it was useful to dwell on such questions or even “to kill the serpent,” Shestov added: “Precisely, and it is the serpent that is speaking through you, that prevents you” (64). The main impression resulting from the Shestov-Buber relationship is that, although admitting that he only knew about Hasidism through Buber, Shestov was never completely satisfied with the version he received from him, especially with regard to the role of tzadiq, which to his eyes “weakened” the tragic truth conveyed by the Bible. Shestov considered the Bible the most truthful and sacred of books, but he was not willing to interpret it in any way that was even closely related to a form of “Spinozism,” as he termed it (72). “Spinozism” for Shestov meant, above all, any form of immanent reconciliation between God and the natural and human world. In this very respect, his distance from Buber must be recognized and, possibly, with all Jewish philosophers who tried to find a feasible way, either in ethics or in existentialism, to “stitch together” such a structural divide between the truth of God and untruth of Man. On his part, Buber had probably overcome this type of radicalism that he had actually experienced in his youth: his path towards a dialogic philosophy, like Levinas’ “philosophy of alterity,” could not meet Shestov’s claims of the radically tragic truth of the Bible and of life itself. To my mind, it is misleading to see Shestov as a precursor of a Jewish existential philosophy, mainly represented by Buber, Levinas, and Rosenzweig.20 In fact, he appears to be both more radical and more “conservative” than any of the previous authors. Buber praised the Haskalah and had gone beyond any medieval radical mysticism. Moreover, he had no particular interest in developing a theory of knowledge out of his reading of the Bible. Shestov was the complete opposite. In this respect—if one may say so—he was “antimodern.” The very word “existentialism” expressed for him a different concept from Buber’s: for Shestov, it essentially meant “opposition,” “antithesis,” and irreducibility of the “single human” to any external truth or necessity. It is evident that Buber held a different order of ideas. Overall, it is not a moral Jewish philosophy that interests Shestov, but a gnoseological new paradigm—an “anti-Western” theory of truth. At the same time, because of his 20 For a parallel between Shestov, Rosenzweig, and Buber as Jewish thinkers, see Martin (C).

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placid temper, Buber would have never accepted a dialectical confrontation on this point. On the contrary, he appreciated Shestov’s “good heart” and, from this point of view, the friendship between the two was always deep and sincere.

4.3 The Last Encounter: Kierkegaard 1. In many of his talks with Benjamin Fondane, Shestov bitterly regrets and even manifests some shame for having become aware of the existence of Kierkegaard so late in life, that is, no earlier than 1928. He wonders how this could have happened and justifies himself by saying that in Russia at the beginning of twentieth century the Danish writer was unheard of, and, as he further adds, “even Berdyaev, who had read everything, did not know him” (Fondane [B1], 114).21 It is understandable that Shestov, who was used being “first,” as it were, in discovering authors and new interpretative trends, was disappointed with himself in this case for having ignored this author, although at the same time he was also among the first in France to write a critical study on him.22 21 According to Darˈya Lungina, who examined this issue of the failed reception of Kierkegaard in Russia in depth, Russian readers had many opportunities to become acquainted with Kierkegaard’s work from the 1880s onwards, but “each time he appeared not as an old acquaintance but as a new person. This stranger did not make a very imposing initial appearance; he spoke either in a very simple or in a very sophisticated manner, often contradicted himself and was hard to listen to” (Lungina 2009 [C], 247). Subsequently, Lungina adds, “failure to understand him gave rise to embarrassment. Trying to overcome this embarrassment, people hastened to find some justification for him, though more often than not they ended up condemning him [ . . . ]. Even today the process of becoming acquainted with him has not still been completed” (247). 22 Shestov’s ignorance about Kierkegaard up to 1928 is rather inexplicable. It is true that Kierkegaard did not appeal to the Russian audience of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the way Nietzsche did. But Russian translations of Kierkegaard’s work began to appear in Russia as early as the 1870s thanks to a Danish literary scholar living in Russia, Peter Emmanuel Hansen (1846–1930), who worked intensely to popularize Kierkegaard in Russia. Hansen attended literary circles in Moscow and St. Petersburg, he was a friend of Ivan Goncharov who introduced him to Lev Tolstoi, and he personally delivered some of his Kierkegaard translations to Lev Tolstoi who, it seems, greatly appreciated Kierkegaard, although his knowledge of his works was limited. Vladimir Solovˈëv too was aware of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, although he barely mentions his name in his works. In any case, the name of Kierkegaard—whether in small translations of his (mostly aesthetic) texts or excerpts of his works (such as Either-Or and A Seducer’s Diary), or in short analyses of his figure—appeared throughout the 1880s and 90s in journals such as Vestnik Evropy, Severnyi vestnik, Russkoe bogatstvo, and Russkii vestnik. The critical essays often presented him as a forerunner of Ibsen, but more “lyrical” and “sympathetic,” and yet a difficult author for a larger audience. Furthermore, Georg Brandes, who as a critic paid a lot of attention

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As we know, it was Edmund Husserl who suggested to Shestov, during their first meeting at a conference at the Philosophical Society in Amsterdam (April 15–23, 1928), that he should read the works of Kierkegaard. Immediately after that meeting, Shestov travelled to Frankfurt for another conference at the end of April 1928 with Buber and other philosophers and theologians, and there “everyone spoke about Kierkegaard” (114). At the end of his trip to Holland and Germany, Shestov began intensively reading Kierkegaard’s works as if to “catch up” on lost time, and in the space of a few years, between 1934 and 1938, he would write three articles and a whole book devoted to Kierkegaard.23 to Kierkegaard and held a public lecture on him in Copenhagen before moving to Berlin, wrote an entire work in Danish, the first monograph on Kierkegaard, that was translated into German in 1879 (Georg Brandes, Søren Kierkegaard: Ein literarisches Charakterbild [Leipzig: Barth, 1879]). It is very strange that Shestov—a careful reader of Brandes—was not aware of this book or of Brandes’ opinions on Kierkegaard, and that he did not come across Kierkegaard’s works during the time he spent in Berlin in 1896, at the same time as he discovered the works of Nietzsche. It is highly significant, however, that Shestov never heard about Kierkegaard during the numerous meetings he attended in Kiev, Moscow, and St. Petersburg in the first decade of 1900, and also that he said that none of his intellectual friends, such as Berdyaev, ever pronounced his name. At the beginning of his 1936 book, Shestov is ready to “swear” that during all the assemblies he attended in various philosophical-religious societies in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev, nobody ever mentioned—even by mistake—the name of Kierkegaard (cf. Shestov 9/2000 [A1], 634). This means that despite the articles and translations, the Russian intelligenty of the early twentieth century did not yet understand the full value of Kierkegaard or had not progressed from the image of his “innocuous” lyricism. The situation regarding Kierkegaard criticism was likely not very different in France in the first three decades of the century, since Shestov in his seven years in Paris (1921–1928) equally did not hear about the existence of the Danish philosopher at that time. In point of fact, until the end of the 1920s in France only a few (often superficial or misinformed) essays had been published on Kierkegaard and the translations of his works were just starting to appear. It is no mere chance, in fact, that Shestov came into contact with “Kierkegaard” via German thinkers (in his case, Husserl and Buber). Even before the full affirmation of the German “Kierkegaard Renaissance” of the late 1920s and ‘30s—in which authors like Heidegger, Jaspers, and Karl Barth (but also Löwith, Lukács, and Adorno) fully reevaluated his philosophy and placed it at the center of modernity—various translations and comments on Kierkegaard’s works already existed. On Kierkegaard’s early reception in Russia, see Lungina 2005 and 2009 (C) and Chertkov (C). 23 The three articles are the following. 1) “Gegelˈ ili Iov? Po povodu ekzistentsialˈnoi filosofii Kirgegarda” [Hegel or Job? On Kierkegaard’s Existential Philosophy], Putˈ 42 ( January– March 1934): 88–93. French translation: “Job ou Hegel? A propos de la philosophie existentielle de Kierkegaard,” Nouvelle revue française 240 (May 1935): 755–762, reprinted in Shestov 11/1964 (A1). 2) “Kirkhegard i Dostoevskii. Golosa vopiyushchikh v pustyne.” French translation: “Kierkegaard et Dostoïevsky. Les voix qui clament dans le desert,” Les cahiers du Sud 181 (March 1936): 179–200. 3) “Søren Kierkegaard, philosophe religieux” [Kierkegaard as Religious Philosopher], Les cahiers de Radio Paris 12, December 15, 1937,

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The first of these works, entitled “Hegel or Job? On Kierkegaard’s Existential Philosophy” (1934) (later included in the posthumous collection Speculation and Revelation), is intended as a short introduction to Kierkegaard in France from Shestov’s point of view. Shestov here declares Kierkegaard to be the most important and necessary thinker for modern times and that the entire origin of Heidegger’s thought is built on Kierkegaard’s ideas (indeed, the greatest compliment to Heidegger that Shestov ever made). Kierkegaard, in Shestov’s view, is the antipode of Hegel, the only real answer to Hegelian philosophy, and this is where his modernity lies. A similarly introductory character is found in the article “Kierkegaard as Religious Philosopher,” which originates from a series of five lectures over radio that Shestov gave in 1937.24 In this case, Shestov traces Kierkegaard’s whole historical-biographical profile and, since he is addressing a French audience, compares Kierkegaard to Pascal to facilitate an easier comprehension of the thinker. He then describes Kierkegaard’s controversial relationship with Hegel’s thought, which he first approves and later rejects, and finally links Kierkegaard’s subsequent path to the antiphilosopher par excellence, that is, the prophet Job, and ultimately to Abraham, to whom Kierkegaard’s work Fear and Trembling (1843) is devoted. This is the main line—from Hegel to Abraham, from reason to faith alone—in which Shestov inscribes his reading of Kierkegaard, a reading that continually shifts from Kierkegaard’s works to his diaries and in which thought and life are constantly intertwined. Shestov’s interpretation gives particular importance to the book The Concept of Anxiety (1844), from which he derives his main philosophical reading of Kierkegaard, namely identifying the original sin with the choice of the “tree of knowledge” over the “tree of life.” Based on this text, although somewhat forcing Kierkegaard’s thought, Shestov interprets the refusal of the “Greek” power of 1214–1242. Russian version: “Kirkhegard—religioznyi filosof,” Russkie zapiski 3 ( January 1938): 196–221. The book on Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, was first published in French in 1936 by the publisher J. Vrin, with the help of contributions from the committee of Shestov’s friends (see Chestov 9/1936 [A1]), and then in Russian, three years later (Shestov 9/1939 [A1]). The 1935 article “Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii” served as an introduction to this book. The last five sections (11–15) of the second chapter (“In the Bull of Phalaris”) of the book Athens and Jerusalem are also dedicated to Kierkegaard (see Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 185–227). 24 These lectures were held from October 21 to November 25, 1937, and then immediately published in the journal Les Cahiers de Radio Paris. In the same way as with the five lectures on Dostoevskii (see chapter III, §4), it was his elder daughter Tatʹyana to translate the text into French and also to read it on radio. As Shestov confided to Fondane, he did not love these two experiences on radio, mainly because of the limited time at his disposal (fifteen minutes for each lecture) (cf. Fondane [B1], 133).

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knowledge and of necessity, as well as the refusal of an equally Greek idea of morality, to the ultimate embracing of the Abrahamic faith as the crucial features of Kierkegaard’s philosophy. It was soon clear to many of Shestov’s friends (e.g., Husserl, Berdyaev, S. Bulgakov) that he might have an elective affinity with Kierkegaard, possibly more than with Pascal or Dostoevskii himself. Even if what Sergei Bulgakov polemically said about Shestov were true, that is, that he “vivisected” the authors he commented on as if they were “Versuchskaninchen [guinea pigs] for his own research” (cf. Bulgakov [B3] in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 443), in the case of Kierkegaard this process apparently happened without too much effort and with even greater naturalness.25 Of all the authors he commented upon and even those who he treated as his “alter-egos” (e.g., Nietzsche, Pascal, and, of course, Dostoevskii), Kierkegaard was possibly the closest to Shestov’s sensitivity—more Christian than Nietzsche, more modern than Pascal, and possibly more tragic than Dostoevskii—but still not entirely “Shestovian.” In many parts of his book, Shestov points out Kierkegaard’s difficulty in escaping the Western fascination with eternal truths and with the universal, which to a large extent makes him a philosophical theist like Thomas Aquinas. But when, in his La conscience malheureuse, Fondane criticizes Kierkegaard for more or less the same reason (cf. Fondane 2013 [B3], 253), Shestov will take Kierkegaard’s defense and will reproach his “disciple” Fondane for making “undeserved accusations” (Fondane [B1], 123). At the end of the 1930s, Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard, in its French version, had considerable impact on the so-called French “Kierkegaard Craze” that immediately followed the German Kierkegaard Renaissance. As Samuel Moyn points out, for its importance in spreading knowledge of Kierkegaard in France in this period, Shestov’s Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy was comparable only to Jean Wahl’s Études Kierkegaardiennes (see Moyn [C], 171).26 Nevertheless, like all his previous studies dedicated to a single author, 25 On Shestov and Kierkegaard, see in particular Asmus 1972 (B3), Berdyaev 1936b (B3), Fondane 1934 and 1937 (B3), Levinas (B3), Makolkin (B3), McLachlan 1986 and 2010 (B3), Patterson 1988 (B3), Pattison (B3), and Sokolov (B3). 26 Jean Wahl’s book Études kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Vrin, 1938)—which appeared two years after Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard and some months after Athens and Jerusalem—represented a decisive turning point in the dissemination of Kierkegaard’s philosophy in France and, consequently, in the more mature definition of French existentialism. Wahl and Shestov were in close contact, they read each other’s books and made reciprocal comments on their Kierkegaardian studies, although the correspondence on this has been lost (cf. BaranoffChestov 1993 [B1], 181–182). Speaking with Fondane, Shestov praises Wahl’s exten-

CHAPTER IV    Athens And Jerusalem: The Logic And The Thunder (1930–1938)

Shestov’s work was not a scholarly study on Kierkegaard, but rather an expression of his own thought. This was actually a fundamental misunderstanding that had always accompanied the criticism on Shestov and that applied also in the case of his work on Kierkegaard. Based on the format Shestov gave to his writings, they could appear historical or “scholarly” works but, in fact, they represented an unclassifiable genre in that they were original philosophical works concealed under the appearance of objective studies dedicated to other authors. The fact that this text was not primarily on Kierkegaard was also noticed by sive knowledge of Kierkegaard’s works but he also expresses disappointment that Wahl did not give sufficient importance to Kierkegaard’s question concerning the suspension of ethics. Moreover, it seemed to Shestov that Wahl often remained on the surface of the Kierkegaardian texts and never took a clear position (cf. Fondane [B1], 68, 140–141). It must be observed, however, that Wahl’s general approach to Kierkegaard’s thought is not dissimilar from Shestov’s. In fact, it starts from Kierkegaard’s rejection of Hegelian philosophy and of all rational philosophy to head towards an ongoing development of a “theology of the absurd” based on Abraham and Job, which is opposed to any moralism and to any “philosophy of religion,” and finally concludes that all Christianity is a paradox. Jean Wahl’s book, unlike Shestov’s, had an enormous and decisive impact on French intellectual culture (see Stewart [C], 397–400). Shestov himself confided to Fondane that he [Fondane] was the only one in France who talked about his own book, since even Jean Grenier’s review of it (see Grenier [B3]) ended up commenting more on Wahl’s work than on his (cf. Fondane [B1], 143). In two letters from the beginning of August to Lazarev and to Schloezer, Shestov describes the fact that he received a copy of Études kierkegaardiennes from Wahl with a comment from Wahl himself about the book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, which also said that he had read Athens and Jerusalem and “he found neither Athens nor Jerusalem” (cf., on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 213). Another fundamental study for the French reception of Kierkegaard would be Pierre Mesnard’s 1948 work: Pierre Mesnard, Le vrai visage de Kierkegaard (Paris: Beauchesne, 1948). According to Eric Pons, the French reception of Kierkegaard, which affected Jacques Maritain and other authors in a different way than the German philosophers were influenced by its reception in Germany (cf. Maritain [C]), is above all founded on a double confusion: on the one hand, the interpretation of Kierkegaard with a constant reference to his autobiographical journals which gave an image of him as a victim of psychological illness. On the other hand, the presentation of the author as a “German Kierkegaard” in a strict relationship with German philosophy and thought (cf. Eric Pons, “The French Reception of the Papirer,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook [2003]: 348). Judging from this, Shestov (and with him, let us not forget, Benjamin Fondane, whose writings on Kierkegaard—which Maritain read attentively—reprise and emphasize all Shestov’s ideas) certainly played an active part in creating such a prejudice. This and other clues lead one to think that Shestov’s role in Kierkegaard’s reception should not be underestimated, as it is plain in those who attentively read his and Fondane’s works, and who produced their own interpretation of Kierkegaard (e.g., Wahl, Buber, Berdyaev, G. Marcel, M. Henry, Maritain, and Camus, to name a few). Such influence is, perhaps, of no lesser importance than the one he exerted in Russia at the beginning of the century with his interpretation of Nietzsche (for a comparative view of Kierkegaardian readings within the existentialist authors, see Stewart [C]). On Kierkegaard’s reception in France, see also Teboul (C).

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Emmanuel Levinas, in his equally enthusiastic review of the book.27 According to James McLachlan, Levinas and Shestov mainly shared a radical “critique of Western thought as marked by the character of Greek philosophy and as ruled by a desire for totalization and the general in ‘eternal truths.’” (McLachlan 2010 [B3], 186) This common attempt at “escaping ontology,” in McLachlan’s view, would constitute the common ground of Shestov’s and Levinas’ appreciation of Kierkegaard, as well as an outline for Levinas’ future philosophical project. 2. Shestov’s personal tribute to Kierkegaard begins with an introduction that was also the subject of his final course at the Sorbonne28 in which he proposes the last of his parallels: in this case, the parallel between Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii. To a great extent, the book Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy represents a chance for Shestov to fully express his mature thought, with the addition of the most valuable piece—Kierkegaard. In his introduction, Shestov synthetizes his entire view in the simplest way. For him, the whole history of Western thought concerned a certain philosophical view of original sin. It all started with Anaximander’s saying, which links the birth of living beings to their own ruin and destruction. In that earliest statement of Western philosophy, for Shestov, a fundamental, metaphysical “sense of fault” is expressed. As he writes: “The appearance of particular things and mainly of living beings, of course, is considered as an impious audacity, for which their death, their destruction is the right retribution” (Shestov 9/2000 [A1], 618). “The idea of ‘birth’ and ‘destruction’—he continues—is the starting point of Greek philosophy and this same idea, I repeat, inevitably imposed itself on the founders of the religions and philosophies of the Far East” (618). In other words, the appearance of living beings and of a free individual conscience was something unnatural—a “lack,” a “vice” and a “sin within being” as Shestov says (619)— for it was too big to be accepted. In opposition to such a conscience, the human mind struggled to find a way to suppress this “sin” and therefore found the most 27 See Levinas (B3), 140, and McLachlan 2010 (B3) on Levinas’ review. 28 Shestov actually proposed this same course more than once, from 1932 up to his last teaching course in the winter of 1937. On Shestov’s last years at the Sorbonne there are various witness testimonies gathered by Natalˈya Baranova (see Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 154–156; see also Fondane [B1], 99, 130), which partly reveal the difficulties involved for Shestov, as he used to prepare extensively for his lessons, but his audience was also too variegated, often with few (from ten to twenty), or elderly, or not even particularly motivated pupils. Shestov’s sister Sofiya, his wife Anna, German Lovtskii, and sometimes his two daughters Tatˈyana and Natalˈya, regularly attended his lessons (cf. Baranoff–Chestov 1993 [B1], 155).

CHAPTER IV    Athens And Jerusalem: The Logic And The Thunder (1930–1938)

powerful means in choosing the “tree of knowledge” as opposed to the “tree of life.” The highest culmination and synthesis of this process is represented by Hegel’s philosophy. In Shestov’s view, Hegel could well have declared: “The serpent did not deceive man; the fruits of the tree of science have become the source of philosophy for all time.” “And we must recognize,” Shestov adds, “that from the historical point of view Hegel is right” (620). But the fact that there was a “winning part” in history, from Socrates to Hegel, does not mean that there would not be people who did not accept such a verdict. Along the lines of Belinskii’s unreasonable request concerning the rights of the “losers” (see chapter 1, §3 of this book), Shestov places his two main heroes of all time, Dostoevskii and Kierkegaard, who, from his point of view, are perfectly identical in this respect. Each, in fact, is the double of the other. Consciously or not (Dostoevskii—Shestov says—was not aware of this, but Kierkegaard indeed was), these two authors fought all their life against Hegel and Hegelianism (624). The philosophical scenario, at this point, is perfectly clear: knowledge (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) vs. faith (Abraham, Job); the naturality of the world (Spinoza and, later, the modern science) vs. the break with that naturality (the Bible); the unity of divine and human nature (Hegel) vs. the radical alterity of those natures which throws humanity into solitude and despair (Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii). For Shestov, “reason eagerly aspires to deliver humanity to the power of necessity, and the free act of creation of which the Scripture speaks not only does not satisfy reason, but irritates, disturbs and frightens it” (626). The executors of this aspiration are those Western philosophers who historically put into effect the inner meaning of Anaximander’s saying: “Aristotle twenty centuries ago, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel in modern times are possessed by the irresistible need to give themselves, to hand over humanity to necessity. And they do not at all suspect that the fall is precisely there: they see in knowledge not their ruin but their salvation” (627). When Kierkegaard realized all this, as Shestov puts it, he felt that the beginning of philosophy was not “wonder” and the teachings of Greek philosophers, but despair and the cry “De profundis ad te, Domine, clamavi” (627). He understood that in Job’s “private thought” there was a truth that could not be found in the smartest mind of a philosopher, and, finally, he realized that “knowledge, i.e., the disposition to accept everything that appears necessary [  .  .  .  ] inevitably leads humanity to its ruin” (627). Kierkegaard, at some point, took a clear stance in this regard and named his philosophy “existential philosophy”—a name Shestov does not completely approve of, but he admits that for Kierkegaard any label is meaningless (628)—in opposition

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to “speculative philosophy.” At this moment, he became Dostoevskii’s “double.” For Shestov, “not only their ideas, but their methods of seeking truth are common and equally distant from all that constitutes the content of speculative philosophy. Kierkegaard left Hegel for a ‘private thought’—Job. Dostoevskii did the same” (630). Both of them opposed a revealed truth to the speculative truth, and discovered that the most authentic human “sin” was not a kind of “moral disobedience,” but the “gnoseological mistake” of exchanging a living truth for a dead knowledge. Significantly, Shestov writes, for Kierkegaard (and for Dostoevskii), “the contrary of sin is not virtue, but freedom” (629). In his enthusiastic approval of such an interpretation of Kierkegaard, Benjamin Fondane even declared that “thanks to Shestov, Kierkegaard regains his original pureness” and that, after his death, “Shestov is there to continue his task” (Fondane 2013 [B3], 255, 276). Fondane was actually too influenced by Shestov’s position and his “learning” the Shestovian lesson easily becomes an extremization of it. In reality, Kierkegaard is not Shestov’s double, as Fondane advanced, but although the two certainly share many questions and philosophical concerns and also a general tragic sensitivity, there are still radical differences between the two that Fondane seems not to notice. As Berdyaev observed with regard to Shestov’s book on Kierkegaard—which he nonetheless considered Shestov’s best book along with Athens and Jerusalem29—“Kierkegaard is only an excellent occasion for the development of a theme that torments him himself and to which he devoted all his work” (Berdyaev 1936b [B3] in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 408). In fact, finding his (and Dostoevskii’s) “double” gives Shestov an opportunity to develop and express his philosophico-religious thought in the most accomplished form. Its evolution includes, in one single overview, the main “speculative” philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel), but also Dostoevskii. Implicitly, it also 29 According to Berdyaev, in this book, in identifying the question of the biblical Fall with the affirmation of knowledge in Western thought, Shestov develops a “whole compressed cosmogony” (Nikolai A. Berdyaev, “Lev Shestov and Kierkegaard,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 411) in which God is absolutely free, has unlimited possibilities and is not bound to any eternal truth. But Berdyaev also objects that the whole Bible, in Shestov’s view, is entirely reduced to the issue of the Fall in Genesis and to the figure of Job, whereas there is a crucial personality—in fact, the most important one—who Shestov completely ignores, and this is Moses. If he had to judge Moses, Berdyaev argues, the latter would not be so different from Socrates. As Berdyaev very critically concludes, within the Shestovian cosmogony, which is here expressed through Kierkegaard, “nowhere and in nothing one can see God’s action in the world. God acts exclusively through faith, but, as we have seen, no one really has faith. Freedom cannot be found anywhere” (411).

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contains all the rebels from the Underground, the other “rebels of thought” (from Plotinus to Nietzsche), who found the courage to receive the worst insult for a philosopher, that is, that of being misologos. Finally, at the start of this evolution are the most decisive biblical figures: Job and Abraham. To a large extent—and Berdyaev seems correct in this regard—Kierkegaard is the personality and figure who offers Shestov the possibility of bringing all his thought together and possibly taking it to a final unity. Shestov builds his entire reflection on Kierkegaard starting from the work Repetition (1843) from which he derives the uncompromising opposition between Hegel and Job as well as his “Jewish” reading of Kierkegaard, for the Danish thinker is the first—after Plotinus’ and Pascal’s early rebellions— to decisively open up a new path in Western philosophy. To some extent, Kierkegaard reversed a path initiated by Philo of Alexandria, which seemed irreversible: “After Philo—Shestov says—nobody ever dared to accept the Bible as it is in reality: everyone wanted to see in it an earlier expression of the Greek wisdom” (Shestov 9/2000 [A1], 642). Kierkegaard, in fact, as Shestov observes, never mentions Philo—he is the antithesis of him. Shestov reads Repetition entirely in the light of Kierkegaard’s journals and draws continuous parallels between the writer’s life and his work. Hence, an interpretation that connects Kierkegaard’s refusal of Hegelian philosophy with his personal suffering. Shestov’s reading—actually not unlike other French interpretations of the 1930s—is almost a biographical reading that makes suppositions on the author’s thought based on his personal and spiritual life, which Shestov derives from Kierkegaard’s journals, and emphasizes the aspects of existential pain and doubts. From this Shestovian perspective, Hegel gradually transformed from ally to enemy and, in fact, the worst enemy. The “suspension of ethics” and the faith in the same absurd state of affairs which the “private thinker” Job believed in are two key passages in this conversion from the “public” to the “private,” from official philosophy to tragedy, in a personal path that appears to be very similar—indeed, because it is interpreted in this way—to Shestov’s own path. There is no doubt that Kierkegaard emerges as Shestov’s “greatest hero” in that he fought, philosophically, the latest and most mature expressions of Western logos (Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, and Positivism). He did so completely, that is, pointing out an alternative “philosophical” path, in a way that Dostoevskii, who was not a philosopher, could not do. At the same time, with Kierkegaard, and through a new discovery of the figures of Job and Abraham, Shestov’s philosophy of tragedy makes a decisive shift into a philosophy of the

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absurd—and the very absurdity of God, is the main trait of Shestov’s late religious, Jewish faith and thought. Shestov’s reading of Kierkegaard is entirely biblical and anti-Socratic, where by “Bible” the author means the unconditioned faith of Abraham and Job. Moreover, the Christianity that is recognized in Kierkegaard concerns similarly unconditioned aspects of faith in St. Augustine and St. Paul, in particular the idea taken from the Epistle to the Romans 14:23, “Everything that does not come from faith is sin,” which Shestov reads also as: “the contrary of sin is not virtue but is faith.” (679) With no ethics, no virtue, no reward, and not even any consolation from reason, what descends from this “senseless paradox of faith”—as Kierkegaard defined it (674)—is only an infinite feeling of despair, anguish and, ultimately, of nothingness. This nothingness, which Kierkegaard according to Shestov identifies with a primordial state of innocence, and which lies at the origin and the end of everything as if it were in a circular process, produces in the human soul an unbearable fear, which in its turn generates the original sin and the fall. “The anguish of nothingness,” Shestov writes, “generates the original sin, which causes the fall of the first man: this is the fundamental idea of Kierkegaard’s work” (682). For Shestov—who mainly relies on the work The Concept of Anxiety (1844)— this anguish is essentially the fear of freedom, and it is here, in the possibility of avoiding such freedom, that the serpent finds its place in human history. Shestov himself, facing the “nothingness,” avoids any “mystic temptation”— and he claims that Kierkegaard, who “did not love the mystics” (686), made the same choice. Thus, Shestov turns his entire discourse to the question of the knowledge of truth and to the role of the “serpent” (i.e., knowledge, necessity, logic, and, ultimately, science), rather than to the religious experience of absolute that, for him, is already a “reward” and an escape from tragedy. Shestov thus confirms his fundamental idea of truth as “staying in the contradiction.” Any other solution that is not contradiction, be it logic or knowledge or even the “active presence of God” in this world, is deceitful to him and eventually it turns away from the authentic truth. As a consequence, Shestov’s reading of Kierkegaard turns out to be entirely tragic. Kierkegaard’s Christianity is also intrinsically tragic as it offers no way out to the human condition and human faith. In commenting Kierkegaard’s last works The Sickness unto Death (1849) and Practice in Christianity (1850), Shestov finds again that “cruelty” that he loved so much in his early years of activity when he commented on Dostoevskii and Nietzsche. It is the cruelty of Christianity, which in Shestov’s view does not

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offer any feasible solution. Shestov’s “Jewish Christianity,” the same he attributes to Kierkegaard, is no different from the Nietzschean amor fati—it is a sacrifice of Christ which brings humanity into the same sacrifice, into an unsolvable enigma and a place with no stability at all, where only the God of the impossible, the God of Abraham, can represent future hope (723). For Shestov, Christ does not bring happiness into this world, but he brings his own anguish, his own pain and sacrifice. In reading the Gospel, Kierkegaard is just like the “cruel genius” Dostoevskii with his characters: he takes away any hope and displays only the horrors and the lack of any consolation. Shestov, in fact, sees Kierkegaard’s attitude towards the Gospel in the same spirit as Dostoevskii’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. While (for St. Paul, Kierkegaard, Luther, and Shestov) the opposite of sin is faith, that is to say, an absolute and unconditioned freedom, nothing comforting or joyful can derive from this. At the same time, as Shestov explains using Kierkegaard’s words, the horrors of life and lack of consolation and of comfort are something that appears as such to the eyes of logic, within a rational understanding. The unbearable freedom Christ gave to the world, the same freedom for which he was condemned by the Inquisitor, is the tree of life to the eyes of God. God’s reply to humanity does not happen through the same “channel” of logic: “The thunder—Shestov says—is God’s reply to human wisdom, to our logic, and to our truth” (730). This thunder destroys all these impossibilities that “human wisdom—which is also human cowardice—has built up between itself and God” (730). Consequently, “all that is terrifying in the Bible is not terrifying, because it comes from God. On the contrary, the terrifying Bible attracts Kierkegaard with an irresistible force” (730). There is no relationship between the logic and the thunder, in the same way as there is no consequentiality between the logical situation of the Underground Man and his solutions—his screams, his inconsiderate requests—which are not solutions in any way. But this is also the state of things between the Greek philosophy and the truth of God: there is only a perfect incommunicability and an active contradiction. A thunder is not an answer to a logical question and logic itself cannot pose questions to a thunder. In his Kierkegaardian reading, Shestov very often takes his analysis back to the problem of knowledge and truth, that is, to the conflict between a “mute” Jerusalem and a “speaking” Athens, between a truth that asks questions and derives conclusions—as Job’s friends did—and a mute Abrahamitic faith that can only believe and hope in the hopelessness. Shestov sees and assigns to Kierkegaard his own views and the aims of his own conflict. Even more, he sees the Danish thinker as the first philosopher who not only lost faith in reason (like Plotinus) or discovered the absolute instability of

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human condition (like Pascal) and of human values and truths (like Nietzsche and Dostoevskii), but who also opened up a new philosophical-religious way in clear contrast with modern rationalism, idealism and scientific thought. Kierkegaard’s “cruelty,” which is not his own cruelty but that of the Scriptures—Shestov insists on this point many times—, had the power to reveal the true face of speculative philosophy: “Speculative philosophy was born from an immeasurable, infinite anguish facing the Nothing” (792). In other words, logic, rational knowledge, Greek wisdom, ethics, Christian theology and modern science are a single product of one terrible and unbearable fear of Nothingness. With such a conclusion, Shestov comes back to the point of departure and possibly the core of his entire philosophical research, that is, the exploration of the ultimate boundaries (or, as he used to say, “sources”) of metaphysics. Shestov carries on this investigation through a complete reconsideration of the history of Being from the perspective of the crisis of logos. He fully involves Kierkegaard in this battle, indeed beyond Kierkegaard’s explicit intentions and especially as far as the polemics against Western philosophy are concerned. (Kierkegaard, at least formally, manifested a greater respect than Shestov with regard to the classic Western philosophers.) Nevertheless, Shestov penetrates many authentically Kierkegaardian religious themes in depth and, in particular, he recognizes Kierkegaard’s extremely tragic attitude towards Christianity. Yet, Shestov never pursues any kind of interpretation on a properly religious basis. For example, he does not develop a positive investigation on a “philosophy of absolute faith” or on a “philosophy of nothingness”; as soon as his reasoning approaches such subjects, he immediately brings all the analysis on Kierkegaard back to his own criticism of the theory of knowledge within Western philosophy (he does so even at the end of his book).30 Even the recurring refrain of his Kierkegaardian reading, “everything is possible to God,” is not to be read in a strictly religious perspective, that is, for building a coherent religious discourse, but always returns to a negative dialectics against Western logos.

4.4 Étienne Gilson and the Spirit of Medieval Philosophy In the summer of 1934, at the request of the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, Shestov began to work on an article devoted to Étienne Gilson’s last book The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy.31 Shestov’s essay, which three years later 30 See, in particular, chapters 18–22. 31 See Étienne Gilson, L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale (Paris: Vrin, 1932).

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would constitute the third chapter of the book Athens and Jerusalem, appeared only in French language in two issues of the Revue philosophique between the end of 1935 and the beginning of 1936.32 In a letter to Adolʹf Lazarev, Shestov confesses that he did not agree with Gilson on many subjects: in particular, on the fact that Jewish people did not have a philosophical thought and that Scholasticism was, according to Gilson, of biblical derivation. Shestov also recalls that he had already treated this question in his book In Job’s Balance, especially when dealing with Philo of Alexandria’s “betrayal of the Bible.”33 The study on Gilson was finished by February 1935: Schloezer provided a French translation of it, which Shestov sent to Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in July of the same year, ready for the next two issues of the Revue philosophique. In March 1936, after reading the article, Étienne Gilson sent a letter to Shestov in which he expressed his sincere gratitude for this study on his work, but he also dissented on many crucial, and one might say classic, “Shestovian” points. As Gilson argued, it was not true that the antithesis between Athens and Jerusalem was as radical as Shestov posited, that is, that the two had nothing in common. In fact, Gilson wrote: “What is there in common between Athens and Jerusalem? Answer: Rome. This is the core of the debate [ . . . ]. Unlike you, I believe that God speaks on behalf of the Roman Church, that revelation continues through it [ . . . ]. There is more than arbitrariness in the Old Testament.” (É. Gilson’s letter to Shestov of March 11, 1936, quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 157) Speaking to Fondane about Gilson’s book, in October 1934, Shestov said: Excellent work, penetrating, erudite: he speaks of the metaphysics of the Exodus, but nothing of the metaphysics of the fall. Here, he no longer understands. Losing paradise for a fruit, for nothing! He does not dare to see that it is about Knowledge. The Greeks speak through him—and textual passages from Spinoza—and he believes he authorizes the Bible! (Fondane [B1], 67–68; Fondane’s italics)

About a year later, in the aftermath of the publication of his article, Shestov discussed with Fondane, and indirectly with Berdyaev, whether the excessively 32 See Léon Chestov, “Athènes et Jérusalem (A propos du livre de E. Gilson L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale),” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 11–12 (November– December 1935): 305–349; and 1–2 ( January–February 1936): 32-79. On Shestov and Gilson, see Del Noce (B3). 33 Cf. two letters to Adolʹf Lazarev from August 15 and 23, 1934, quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 148–149.

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erudite approach of some French academics, like Gilson and Wahl, was suited to the most urgent philosophical questions and, above all, to describing some authors like Pascal or Kierkegaard (68, 97). According to Shestov, the agreement between Catholic philosophy and Aristotle largely produced this deceitful effect with regard to the liveliest philosophical questions (156). Shestov’s interest in Gilson’s book does not lie in its historical parts, but, as he himself acknowledges, in its main philosophical premises in which Gilson advocates his own thought for the first time. In particular, the core of the question is the existence of a Judeo-Christian philosophy. For Gilson, it does exist and it is an equally rational philosophy, which aims at logical argumentation and demonstrable conclusions, but that is nonetheless based on biblical revelation. Of course, as Shestov argues, Gilson was fully aware that when the religious truths were revealed they were not “rational”—that is, when God created the world, no proofs or logical justifications were given to humanity for such an act. But—and this for Shestov is the main argument advanced by Gilson who, not by chance, relies on Lessing for support—, the revelation happened in order to become “rational” (Cf. Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 231). The revealed truth, which originally has no foundation, is then transformed in our reason into a “guaranteed truth.” For Shestov, Gilson goes even further than this and arrives at a declaration of the fundamental meaning of his work by saying that precisely when “being more authentically philosophical, philosophy becomes more Christian” (234). He also affirms that without a Greek philosophy, no Christian philosophy would have ever existed (235), since the latter, the medieval-Christian philosophy, provided an authentic metaphysics of Exodus by means of the Greek philosophical categories. Needless to say, Gilson’s thesis is diametrically opposed to Shestov’s. But Shestov does not maintain this thesis to be historically wrong. In fact, Gilson for him is a very accurate scholar as he simply reports what happened in history. Shestov is forced to admit that the main course of medieval philosophy followed neither Tertullian nor the misologos Plotinus, nor Peter Damiani, nor “that” St. Paul who preached the foolishness of Christ in opposition to the wisdom of the Gentiles and Greeks. But, in fact, medieval philosophy relied rather upon Philo of Alexandria, Clement of Alexandria, and later Hugh of Saint Victor, Anselm of Canterbury and, above all, upon the “genius of Thomas Aquinas” (254).34 All these philosophers believed in the fact that faith alone 34 To write this study on Gilson, Shestov read the works of Leibniz and Thomas Aquinas’ Summa theologiae with particular attention. He was very impressed by the latter, which he

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was not sufficient: not only was it necessary to transform it into knowledge and awareness of its contents, but also to derive those contents from knowledge itself (245). Moreover, as Shestov adds, although medieval philosophers reflected on sin more than any other thinkers in history, they never connected it with the fruits of the tree of knowledge (247). They did not follow Tertullian’s opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, but in fact strove to reconcile them or, better, to derive the second from the first. The introduction of allegorical interpretations of biblical texts, as Shestov observes, was a decisive step in this respect. In the end, as Gilson openly acknowledges, for most medieval philosophers “faith is only a ‘surrogate’ of knowledge, that is, an imperfect knowledge, a knowledge, so to speak, on credit (that is, not yet demonstrated)” (265). “Medieval philosophy,” Shestov concludes, “discredited the creative act and recognized at the same time that God was not capable of attributing the right value to the world that He created” (307). Gilson’s book The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy was above all an occasion for Shestov not so much to attack its author, whom he actually held in the highest consideration and who was not at all the target of his analysis, but rather to reflect once again on the path of Western philosophy to which Shestov devoted so much attention in the last twenty-five years of his life. The length of this essay reflects the importance he gave to this question. Shestov concludes his text averring that it is still possible to think of an authentic “Judeo-Christian” philosophy but that, for him, this is not the one that has been inaugurated by medieval philosophy, and prosecuted by modern philosophy from Descartes onward. To find a new way, in Shestov’s view, it is necessary to follow all those attempts that tried to break with ancient philosophy: starting from Tertullian, Plotinus, Peter Damiani, continuing with Luther’s fundamental work De servo arbitrio—which “made a foolish and desperate attempt at accomplishing the same task that Judeo-Christian philosophy considered essential” (333)—and ending with the experiences of Pascal, Nietzsche, Dostoevskii and Kierkegaard. Along this path, as Shestov declares, Kierkegaard perhaps represents the highest model, the one who abandoned Hegel to turn to the “private thinker” Job and, above all, the one who opposed his view on the “absurd” to the reason of the Greeks. As Shestov writes, “he substitutes the credo ut intelligam with the credo ut vivam” (346). Consequently, the true “thinker”—in his view—is not described more than once as a masterpiece and a “cathedral” for its attention to all the details and in its logical consequentiality. He also commented that it should be “recommended reading” in that it is important to know the best of one’s “adversaries.” Nonetheless, it was not “true,” but merely a wonderful “piece” (see, in this regard, Fondane [B1], 67).

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Socrates but Abraham. For Shestov, this is the only “philosophy” that can truly be termed “Judeo-Christian.”

4.5 Philosophers in Chains: At the Sources of Metaphysics 1. As Bernard Martin—a pioneer in spreading Shestov’s works in the Englishspeaking world—wrote: Athens and Jerusalem is the culmination of Shestov’s entire lifetime of intellectual inquiry and spiritual striving. It brings together all the diverse strands that had appeared in his earlier writings, which might appropriately be regarded in retrospect as prolegomena and preparation for the positive message of the great work on which Shestov’s permanent fame as a religious thinker will undoubtedly rest. (Martin 1966 [B3], 389–390)

Shestov himself in many ways considered this work in the same respect. The book appeared at the beginning of 1938, in French, for the publisher Vrin, and brought together a number of essays written in the ten preceding years and in some cases already published in Russian, in French and in German. The Russian version of this work would appear only in 1951, many years after Shestov’s death (see Shestov 10/1951 [A1]). The book is divided into four parts, with an introduction: 1) “On the Sources of Metaphysical Truths: Parmenides in Chains”; 2) “In the Bull of Phalaris: The Knowledge and Freedom of Will”; 3) “On Medieval Philosophy: Concupiscentia Irresistibilis (On E. Gilson’s book The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy)”; 4) “On the Second Dimension of Thought: Fight and Speculation (Sixty-Eight Aphorisms).” Most of these chapters (that is, the first, second, and fourth) were written before the book on Kierkegaard. In the book’s preface (written in April 1937), Shestov relates once more the entire history of philosophy according to his point of view, as if to provide a frame for his “new” thought that is expressed through the dialectic between “Jerusalem” and “Athens.” In the first place, he points out the continuity that marks the history of Western knowledge under an appearance of differences and discontinuities. In particular, contrary to what the histories of philosophy state, he sees no opposition between Spinoza and Kant. In fact, Kant’s Critiques, as Shestov maintains, “did not at all shake the foundations upon which the scientific thought of European humanity was based. The eternal truths, before and after Kant, went on shining like fixed stars above our heads”

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(Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 13). For Shestov, Kant and Leibniz, apparently so different from Spinoza, “did not take less care than Spinoza in protecting themselves from the contagion of the Bible” (15). Eventually, the best synthesis of the opposition between speculative philosophy and biblical philosophy lies in the two figures of Socrates and St. Paul: for the former the greatest good consisted of reasoning on virtue; while for the latter, in fact, “everything that does not come from faith is sin” (Romans 14:23). For Shestov, not only is this opposition destined to remain unresolvable, but it also leads to two radically different theological results. On the one hand, there is a God who is subject to the laws of necessity and of logic, that is, a “reasonable God,” meaning a God who obeys to reason. On the other, there is God whose meaning is: “Everything is possible” (Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 27). Despite the prohibitions imposed by Spinoza, this God is the one who, as Peter Damiani believed, can ensure that “what has been never was” (21). For Shestov, this is the essential source of the only possible authentic theology that may exist, that is, a philosophy of the absurd.35 In the opposite case, there is only a speculative philosophy masked with the adjective “religious.” The first chapter of the book Athens and Jerusalem, entitled “On the Sources of Metaphysical Truths (Parmenides in Chains),”36 is a long parable on the history of “human slavery” with regard to the idea of logical necessity. In this case, as in many of his writings after 1925—the year he wrote his essay on Descartes and Spinoza—Shestov reformulates his “history of philosophy” that is, in effect, a history concerning the theory of knowledge in Western thought. After his studies on Greek philosophy (1912–1919), the publication of Potestas Clavium (1923) and the essays on Pascal, Spinoza and Plotinus in the early 1920s, Shestov’s thought “comes to terms” as it were with his position on Western philosophy. The subsequent works—in particular many of the essays from In Job’s Balance and Athens and Jerusalem, but also long passages in the book on Kierkegaard—are often an occasion for him to present his interpretation again under different approaches, but with the same contents. In this 35 On Shestov’s “theology” and religious thought, based in particular on the work Athens and Jerusalem, see Bonetskaya 2014 (B3), Doughty (B3), Drozdek (B3), Horowitz-Martin (B3), Horowitz (B3), Khokhlov 2012 and 2013 (B3), Kurabtsev 1991 and 1994 (B3), Martin 1977 (B3), Neto 1995 (B3), Patterson 1995 (B3), Shirmanov 2008a and 2008b (B3), and Zakydalsky (B3). 36 This text appeared for the first time in French: “Parménide enchaîné. Des sources de la vérité métaphysique,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 7–8 ( July–August 1930): 13–85.

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specific essay, Shestov starts from a scene taken from Aristotle (Metaphysics I, 984b) describing Parmenides, along with the other great Greek philosophers, as being “compelled by truth itself ” (Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 31). For Aristotle, the father of classic Western metaphysics, at some point it is truth that holds power over the philosophers and not vice versa, for all philosophers are, as it were, “in chains”—they are forced to say what truth dictates to them. All resistance, in this respect, is pointless. Everything becomes a game ruled by necessity, which imposes its magic formula: “It is necessary to stop” (33). “Not only good but also truth want humanity on its knees” (33). After humanity, even God is submitted to necessity. For Shestov, this is the main achievement of Western thought and civilization. The death of Socrates is somehow a paradigmatic episode of the truth of the West, which makes no distinction and is true beyond the individual (50). For Aristotle, “truth is more precious than Plato, than Socrates, than anything in the world.” Truth, like necessity, “does not listen” and will never listen to anybody (49). The task of the most authentic philosophy, then, is to rebel against this truth. Plato was the one who, before any other, tried to return to the origin of metaphysics, beyond this “forcing necessity” (50–51). He tried to free Socrates from the power of eternal truth and of eternal necessity, but ultimately he failed, as he did not have the “means” or sufficient courage to abandon reason and to mistrust necessity. He preferred to find refuge in myth when he needed to talk about “unreasonable things.” Eventually, as Shestov concludes, “both Socrates and Plato did not dare to return to the source of ‘their’ truths; in front of all, they became like everyone else, like those polloi [many] to whom the disbelief is attributed, since they accept no truth other than the one that is proved and that constrains, the apparent, visible, and self-evident truth” (78). But since that time, the main duty of philosophy has become that of freeing Socrates, and although “Aristotle has obtained a complete victory over Plato” (79), philosophy, the real philosophy, has found its place in the Underground, awaiting the great battle, and in search of the real source of metaphysics. 2. In modern times, according to Shestov, all Western philosophy, even in its apparently divergent tendencies, converged into an enlarged form of Spinozism, thus bringing to an end a premise that was already inscribed in Socrates’ thought. This premise was the elimination of any form of freedom in knowledge, of extraneousness of truth (and of God) to the laws of nature, of discomfort of the human mind with regard to a truth that lies beyond its capacity and beyond its logic, and finally of free will itself. This is what Shestov means by “Spinozism.” The section entitled “In the Bull of Phalaris. The

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Knowledge and Freedom of Will,” written in 1932,37 deals precisely with this victory of Spinoza in the Western world—Spinoza who reabsorbed Socrates and Aristotle in his thought, but also “convinced” those who were apparently his opponents: Hegel and the idealists, and finally even Kant. Spinozism—that is, in Shestovian terms, the absolute primacy of reason (the tree of knowledge) over human freedom and the identification of a single substance, a single source of truth, including nature, God, humanity, and good—represented a decisive step in precluding any access to the original and free source of metaphysics or, in other words, to the tree of life. “From Socrates onwards,” Shestov writes, “we have forever renounced what constitutes the essential problem of knowledge and, at the same time, the metaphysical problem. The purpose of Socratic thought was precisely to preserve knowledge from any attempt at criticism” (122). The main task of philosophy, which Socrates announced and Spinoza brought to completion, consisted of convincing people that it is impossible to argue with Necessity and that, in order to avoid any pain, it is better to adore and venerate it in the same way as ancient people loved the gods (cf. 124). Socrates, as Shestov explains, declared that the virtuous man would be happy even in the bull of Phalaris, that is, facing the most terrifying horrors of reality. From that moment on, all the efforts of the philosophers would be focused precisely on disarming the bull of Phalaris by making it coincide with reason and knowledge, or as Hegel did, by identifying reality with rationality, that is, by producing a reasonable reality. In different ways, as Shestov points out, every philosopher addressed his thought towards this conclusion: when philosophy becomes at once “true” and “good,” and expels forever from its view the terrible reality of the bull of Phalaris, in that moment it no longer needs to demand the “impossible” from people. It is there that the path of Western philosophy comes to an end: when “the tree of knowledge has forever covered up the tree of life” (133). Only a few people in history—like Luther, Nietzsche and of course Kierkegaard—realized that the consolation of philosophy and science was only a way to conceal the truth and the horror (i.e., the bull of Phalaris) of real life.38 All these philosophers, and Kierkegaard in particular, had employed all their powers to “defeat Socrates’ spell” (200). 37 This text appeared in two parts, in 1933, as a separate article, in French, with the title “Dans le taureau de Phalaris,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 1–2 ( January–February 1933): 18–60; and 3–4 (March–April 1933): 252–308. 38 “Like Nietzsche,” Shestov observes, “Luther discovered with horror that, where Socrates and Spinoza found the supreme and only possible consolation, an abyss of eternal death opened up for man” (Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 170).

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To Shestov’s eyes, philosophy is therefore a huge construction that has been built up with the essential help of logic and of those self-evident truths that “constrain” the mind to assent to them, in order to avoid another, unacceptable, tragic truth, which can be found in the Bible and lies at the very sources of metaphysics. In the fourth and last part of Athens and Jerusalem, entitled “The Second Dimension of Thought,”39 Shestov sums up in sixty-eight aphorisms the main concepts of his philosophy and, in particular, he sets out the ultimate oppositions in terms of an alternative or “second” dimension of thought, mainly biblical, which fights from within a distorted conception of metaphysics. In his last years of activity, Shestov employed this word, “metaphysics,” in a new and different way from the past.40 In his “Nietzschean” years, he used to despise metaphysics and to define himself as an “antimetaphysician.” But, with time, he learned that his real targets were more the self-evident truths that belonged rather to the domain of logic and of scientific knowledge than to metaphysics. In fact, he perhaps unconsciously accepted Berdyaev’s objection that he was still a philosopher and even of a “metaphysical type,” precisely because he claimed that his tragic truth was universal and that the “Underground” was a place of essential opposition to the “wall” of science. The “sources of metaphysics”, for Shestov, were the place where it was possible to go back to the origin of the divergence between the tree of life and tree of knowledge; where, in effect, it was possible to revert to and restore the right direction for truth—from identifying reality and rationality, as Hegel did, to completely separating the two, as Kierkegaard did. In other words, Shestov’s plan consisted in unmasking the deceit of speculative philosophy, that is, the “philosophy of necessity,” to bring back a philosophy of tragedy which is, ultimately, a biblical, religious philosophy. 3. As has been observed, Sergei Bulgakov and Nikolai Berdyaev were two of the most severe critics of Shestov’s religious philosophy.41 On many occasions, 39 This fourth and final chapter of Athens and Jerusalem (cf. Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 348–413) had already appeared, in Russian, in two parts and in two different journals: “O vtorom izmerenii myshleniya” [On the Second Dimension of Thought (aphorisms 1–42)], Sovremennye zapiski 43 (1930): 311–352; and “Dobro zelo” [The Greatest Good (aphorisms 43–68)], Chisla 1 (1930): 169–188. This section of the book, in which every aphorism somehow expresses a classic Shestovian concept, is probably one of the best summaries of Shestov’s late thought. 40 See, in particular, aphorisms no. 15 and no. 16 of the chapter “The Second Dimension of Thought” (Shestov 10/2007 [A1], 360–365). 41 For an overview of the critical essays on Shestov, and in particular on his religious thought, that appeared on the journal Sovremennye zapiski between 1920 and 1940, see Aleksandr

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Berdyaev—who actually always acted as a sort of “critical voice” to Shestov’s work, but was also a regular and passionate reader of it—pointed out a number of major and “structural” weak points in his philosophical antisystem. In the first place, he objected that despite claiming to be antirational and antidogmatic, Shestov’s works were written in a perfectly rational style: they always had a thesis and produced argumentations with conclusions, and, in fact, they demanded to be believed as if they were an absolute and mandatory truth.42 But their “inner fault” was precisely that of not acknowledging their own rationality and metaphysics, and this lack of awareness undermined their value, since a philosophy that is a philosophy but does not accept this fact is a bad philosophy. The second main objection Berdyaev made was that not only is Shestov’s religious philosophy not a “philosophy,” but it is not even “religious,” since Shestov’s God of infinite possibility is not “God” in any way, and faith in that God is not faith in any way: all this, in fact, is something that never existed and will never exist. For Berdyaev, there is virtually no difference between the fact of being that kind of God43 and “not-being God” at all. This was also, more or less, Bulgakov’s position. But, most of all, Berdyaev accuses Shestov of not introducing or considering any distinction within different models of knowledge, which fact produces as a result a complete invalidation of knowledge itself, and even of the self-criticism of knowledge, especially since this (i.e., the critique of knowledge) is admittedly the most crucial point of all Shestov’s philosophy. Shestov never clearly replied to these well-founded objections, other than by saying that Berdyaev’s entire reasoning was affected by an “original sin” that led to those conclusions that appeared, in fact, obvious to Shestov himself. But in order to go beyond that obviousness, as it were, in order to see behind the logicalness of what “rationality” or “God” or “knowledge” are in themselves—or according to the way our reason is prepared to conceive it—it is necessary to reason in a different way, that is, to question the limits and boundaries of reason itself, in a way that must dialectically oppose something

A. Ermichëv, “Lev Shestov v otrazheniyakh ‘Sovremennykh zapisok,’” in Ermichëv (B2), 155–170. 42 Berdyaev recalls this argumentation also in a late letter he sent to Shestov on October 30, 1938, in which he rejects being associated with Schelling—as Shestov did—and claims that his main philosophical references were still Dostoevskii and Nietzsche (cf., on this, Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 223–224). 43 This is evident, for instance (as Berdyaev remarks many times in his articles on Shestov), in implicitly opposing Abraham to Moses and in praising absurdity vs. any form of divine epiphany in this world.

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other than itself, a different realm from reason itself.44 This was an argument that both Berdyaev and Bulgakov were unwilling to hear, whereas with regard to this point Shestov found the best interlocutor in Husserl. In this respect, Shestov’s philosophy of tragedy as a philosophy claiming contradiction and discontinuity within knowledge itself—a philosophical theme that would have great success in the 1960s and ‘70s, and not by chance in the wake of the full reception of Heidegger’s Nietzsche, was more likely to have its best listeners and interlocutors in the post-Heideggerian existential-phenomenological philosophers. In fact, it took a whole revolution and a reconsideration of the history of Being—a revolution to which Shestov himself contributed—within twentieth-century philosophy that was based along the axis “KierkegaardNietzsche-Heidegger” (with the hidden but decisive participation of Husserl himself). From this point of view, Shestov was “in a class of his own” in the philosophies of his time that occurred before all this took place, that is, in Russian religious philosophy and also in French existentialism, which did not have the “means” to interact seriously with a “philosophy of contradiction” that was as radical as Shestov’s (to the extent of impeding philosophy itself). On the contrary, the same philosophy was more likely to be understood and accepted by the post-Heideggerian wave of thinkers—for example, by authors like Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Henry, and Emil Cioran.45 This does not contradict the fact that Berdyaev’s objections are all formally correct and well posed. But it also explains why Shestov so often declared that Husserl was the “only person” to understand the core of his gnoseological argumentation.

44 A stimulating debate with three voices—Louis Shein, Stanley Grean, and Donald Wiebe— was held at the beginning of the 1980s precisely on the role and value of reason in Shestov. The core of the discussion was about whether and to what extent Shestov granted value to reason and science as means of comprehension of this world. Grean saw in Shestov’s “antirationalism” a distinction between “science” and “scientism” for he [Shestov] condemned only the latter, whereas Shein and Wiebe pointed more to a complete irrationality in Shestov’s attitude towards human knowledge (see Shein 1979 [B3], Grean [B3], and Wiebe [B3]). In my view, Shestov was never really interested in making such distinctions. He was too completely absorbed in the metaphysical question of the ultimate boundaries of knowledge to have any concern with clarifying his position about the “inferior degrees” of such a problem and the “everyday” value of knowledge, which he essentially considered as an obvious fact. For Shestov, scientific knowledge is true for its own purposes, but is not equally “true” with regard to its origin and foundation. Not by chance, this might well be a Husserlian position on the same issue. 45 For an analysis of this, see §3 of the concluding chapter of this book.

Conclusion

1. Reception and Legacy of Shestov’s Philosophy 1. In the histories on Russian thought as well as in the scholarship on Russian philosophy, Lev Shestov is often labelled a “déraciné”—an unrooted, unaligned, and isolated thinker. This definition can hardly be disputed since it was Shestov who first put himself in the position of not adhering to anything: his entire thought was constructed to not follow any preestablished path and to not match any existing frame of thought. He was always very careful to not fall into this “trap,” that is, to not be co-opted or recruited into any official current of thought. Despite this, he was never completely isolated, but often took part in gatherings of intellectuals, and he was always surrounded by many true friends, even among the intellectuals. From the beginning of his career in Russia, he was a part of the Mir iskusstva circle, he met the rising group of the Symbolists, he went to the philosophical meetings in “Ivanov’s tower” and attended many assemblies in various philosophical-religious societies in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Kiev. He was “there,” one could say, where the ideas circulated and where intellectuals discussed the most delicate themes of Russian society, and yet he often stood aside in those debates, always manifesting a critical attitude towards any of them. Ten or twenty years later, nearly the same story was repeated in Europe, where he met some of the major intellectuals of his times: André Gide, Jacques Rivière, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, André Malraux, Jules de Gaultier, Gabriel Marcel, Jean Paulhan, Charles du Bos, Henri Bergson, as well as Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, and many others. His role in these relationships was often that of “devil’s advocate” as he never indulged in any compromise or stepped back from his uncompliant, often harsh attitude in dialoguing with others.1 It was 1 See Berdyaev’s opinion on this: “Dialogue with L. Shestov is difficult, since he is not a man of dialogue, he is a man of monologue” (Berdyaev 1936a [B3], 50).

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never easy to deal with him from a theoretical point of view. This was true even for his closest friends, such as Berdyaev. Almost any conversation with Shestov would end in failure or misunderstanding.2 All the major Russian historians and scholars of the Silver Age acknowledged Shestov’s unyielding and oppositional nature, which contrasted oddly with his very generous and kind attitude in his personal relations. The result, for them, was objective difficulty in placing his thought and his role within what was actually a fruitful and fecund season for Russian intellectual history—a season which he was nonetheless a part of. It may come as no surprise, then, that in such a milestone of Russian religious historiography as The Ways of Russian Theology (1937), Georgii Florovskii did not mention Shestov at all—not even among the group of “opponents of dogma” (Vasilii Rozanov and Nikolai Minskii) in the section of the book dedicated to the Russian religious renaissance. It seems, as it were, that Shestov was “too much” of an idiosyncratic figure to even be raised to the rank of “adversary” of Florovskii’s views.3 By the same token, in his History of Russian Philosophy (1951)4 Nikolai Losskii dismissed Shestov’s philosophy in a dozen lines,5 merely quoting Apotheosis of Groundlessness and Athens and Jerusalem as examples of their author’s “extreme skepticism” and of his belief in an “ideal of unrealizable 2 According to Semën Frank, this was also due to the inner, uncompromising nature of Shestov’s thought. As Frank puts it, Shestov developed a “philosophie irrésponsable” for, as he writes, “with respect to such a view, disputes are impossible” (Semën L. Frank, “O Lˈve Shestove,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 171). 3 Florovskii’s work is undoubtedly tied to a strong theological premise, i.e., the return of the entire Russian intellectual tradition to the legacy of the early Christian Church Fathers, so as to restore an ancient Byzantine tradition that had been broken with in the sixteenth century. In this respect, Berdyaev—a former close friend of Florovskii’s—in a 1937 article vehemently protested against the way he was portrayed in the book and against the objectivity of the book itself (see Nikolai A. Berdyaev, “Ortodoksiya i chelovechnostˈ,” Putˈ 53 [April–July 1937]: 52–65). Florovskii’s views on Shestov can be found in a 1930 article he dedicated to him, in which he rejects the separation between “Athens” and “Jerusalem,” whose origin Florovskii indicates in Luther’s reformation and, later, in German idealism. The return to the patristic legacy and to the authenticity of the Revelation, for Florovskii (unlike for Shestov) means also embracing Greek metaphysics as this was put to the service of Christian dogma (see Georgii Florovskii, “Spor o nemetskom idealizme,” Putˈ 25 [1930]: 51–80). 4 This book appeared first in English in 1951 (see Florovsky 1951) and then in Russian in 1994 (nearly thirty years after the author’s death, which occurred in 1965) with the Moscow publishing house Progress. 5 In the same book—to give just a few examples for comparison—he devoted fifty-two pages to Vladimir Solovˈëv, forty-one to Sergei Bulgakov, twenty-seven to Semën Frank, and eighteen to Pavel Florenskii. Even Vladimir Ern, an author who died young and published few works, was treated at greater length by Nikolai Losskii than Shestov was.

Conclusion

superlogical absolute knowledge” that denies the law of contradiction (cf. Lossky 1951 [C], 326). These harsh and seemingly dismissive judgments should perhaps be put in context, as they do not fully reflect Losskii’s opinion on Shestov. Since Losskii wrote his work with a non-Russian audience in mind, he probably set himself the goal of providing his foreign readers with a certain coherent view on Russian intellectual historical development that possibly adhered to his own views. To this extent, Shestov did not certainly fit the purpose and was consequently “hidden” by the author. However, back in 1939, a few months after Shestov’s death, Losskii had already written an article in Paris for the journal Putˈ that took into account all the works produced in his lifetime, in which he expressed a detailed, nonsuperficial opinion on Shestov (see Losskii [B3]). In this article, Losskii argues that Shestov is not a “skeptic” as he is commonly considered to be, but rather an opponent of the “law of the uniformity of nature” (145), that is, he does not deny the laws of causality, but he wants to find the human freedom within them.6 On the contrary, the point Losskii cannot absolutely accept in Shestov, the one in which “he goes too far” (145), is his rejection of the law of identity and contradiction, especially when it is applied to God. Yet, for Losskii, as far as the “last religious truths” are concerned, Shestov maintained and defended “positive statements,” in particular with regard to the “living, creatively active individual personality” (145). Nikolai Berdyaev’s seminal work The Russian Idea (The Main Problems of Russian Thought in the 19th and early 20th centuries), first published in 1946, is to be considered no less a history of Russian philosophy than Losskii’s book, in that it is guided by an equal aim of tracing, or regaining, the lineage of the “true” path of Russian philosophical identity, albeit in this case an antinomic and a dialectical one (as is the thesis of Berdyaev’s book), throughout the development of history, and also provides an overview of all Russian thinkers. Berdyaev manages, not without effort, to carve out a small place for Shestov within the destiny of the “Russian idea.” Although admitting that “he stood apart from the main channel of Russian thought,” Berdyaev acknowledges Shestov to be a piece of the “multiform Russian Renaissance of the beginning of the century” as “an original and notable thinker [ . . . ] who fought against the general obligations of morals and of logic” (Berdyaev 1992 [C], 249). But he also criticizes 6 “Actually, when Shestov fights against compulsory universal judgments, he seeks freedom not from truth, but from the laws of nature. He does not need to destroy science, but to force it to express its generalizations into a more modest, not apodictic form, so as to clear the way for religious truths and the teachings about the power of the spirit” (Losskii [B3], 145).

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Shestov, whom he famously defines “a person of a single idea,” for being “always much more powerful in denial than in affirmation, the latter being with him comparatively meager” (249).7 The considerations expressed by Vasilii Zenˈkovskii are entirely different in tone and content. In his monumental History of Russian Philosophy (1948– 1950),8 he starts the twelve-page section on Shestov by claiming that his thought is “much more profound and significant” than Berdyaev’s (Zenkovsky [C], 780). By immediately setting the focus of Shestov’s research in the conflict between secularism and religious philosophy, Zenˈkovskii maintains that “Shestov cannot be correctly understood as distinct from the inner dialectic of Russian philosophy. His creative activity is a kind of culmination of the long and intense struggle of Russian thought against secularism” (782). In this regard, Zenˈkovskii declares that “Shestov is the high point in this basic movement of Russian thought” (782). According to Kåre Mjør, Zenˈkovskii’s enthusiastic approval of Shestov may be motivated by his intention to point out a Russian way towards a “system” in philosophy, different from the German idealistic system but somehow still related to it (cf. Mjør [C], 277–278).9 For Zenˈkovskii, Shestov’s “antisecularism” should be seen as “the philosophic terrain for the construction of a system which ‘takes as its point of departure the fact that God is.’” “Shestov’s unforgettable contribution,” Zenˈkovskii continues, “lies in his antisecularism and his ardent preaching of a religious philosophy built upon faith and Revelation” (Zenkovsky [C], 791). To some extent, Zenˈkovskii succeeds where others failed or did not even make any attempts, 7 For an in-depth analysis of the intellectual relationship between Berdyaev and Shestov, see the dedicated appendix 2, at the end of this book. 8 Vasilii Zenˈkovskii (1881–1962), like Florovskii and Shestov himself, emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1920, and after a number of years ultimately joined the community of other Russian philosophers in Paris. His History, a two-volume work of nearly 1000 pages that was published between 1948 and 1950, is considered by many to be the most complete historical study of Russian philosophy, not only of his time but also of the present day. Regarding the interesting and complex figure of Zenˈkovskii in relation to the genesis of this work as well as for a general overview of the historiography of Russian philosophy, see Kåre Johan Mjør’s essay “Vasilii Zenˈkovskii and the History of Russian Philosophy,” in Mjør (C), 253–296. 9 As Mjør also argues, “Zenˈkovskii’s idea of philosophy as a systematic endeavour was not shared to the same extent by Russian nineteenth-century thinkers, and not even by all Silver age philosophers [ . . . ]. Much of the literature Zenˈkovskii analyses may have been written for a different purpose than constructing a system. And I would like to suggest that the systematic character that seems to be characteristic of nearly all Russian philosophers, according to Zenˈkovskii’s interpretations, is very much the result of his own approach” (278–279).

Conclusion

that is, in taming Shestov’s thought and bringing it back into more customary paths: in this case, the building or reconstruction of an original Russian religious philosophy. To obtain this, Zenˈkovskii must obviously minimize all the “irrational aspects” of Shestov, and he is actually obliged to specify more than once that what may seem too “extreme” or “excessive” in his thought is, in fact, “submerged in the significance and creative depth of his basic ‘undertaking’” (791). The situation is no different as far as the specific articles dedicated to Shestov are concerned. During his Russian period, Shestov actually received considerable attention from critics and his works were always widely reviewed. This is no surprise, since his ability to write in an elegant and attractive style was always his universally praised trademark. But this “gift” was also a double-edged sword: as Berdyaev asserted (cf.  Berdyaev 1992 [C], 250), his “thought”— as opposed to his “books”—has been always largely misunderstood. Many expected to find a literary critic in him but then discovered he was a philosopher, whereas, in their turn, the philosophers—even those who were potentially closer to him10—did not find enough of a philosophical system in his works to make them interesting to their eyes. For this reason, perhaps, aside from the book reviews and a general appreciation of his style and of his inspirations, while he was living in Russia Shestov had only three major studies dedicated to him that sought to constructively analyze his thought as a whole and to put it in a dialogue with other writers and tendencies of his time. One study was written by Berdyaev in 1905, “Tragediya i obydennostˈ” [Tragedy and the Everyday] (Berdyaev 1905 [B3]), another by Ivanov-Razumnik in 1908, O smysle zhizni [On the Meaning of Life] (Ivanov-Razumnik [B3]), and the last by Boris Griftsov in 1911, Tri myslitelya: V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovskii, L. Shestov [Three Thinkers: V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovskii, L. Shestov] (Griftsov [B3]). Berdyaev—whose study has been already examined in depth in chapter one—originally defined Shestov’s philosophy as a “psychological metaphysics.” Berdyaev considered this stance to be truthful and authentically philosophical, at least as a starting point: he sympathized with the “psychological method,” the rebellion against any rationalistic system, and he even conceded that Shestov’s intuitions about the hidden psychology of Tolstoi, Dostoevskii and Nietzsche were true. Ultimately, however, he pointed out a number of decisive risks in 10 This is certainly the case of Sergei Bulgakov, who was Shestov’s lifelong friend but could never find a way to interact with his thought (cf. Bulgakov’s explanation of this in Bulgakov 1939 [B3]). On the Shestov-Bulgakov relationship, see the proceedings of an interesting roundtable that was recently held in Moscow: Kozyrev-Vorozhikhina 2018 (B3).

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Shestov’s “apotheosis of groundlessness,” in which “everything is equally possible and impossible” and in which we fall “into the kingdom of darkness” (Berdyaev 1905 [B3] in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 128). Fundamentally, for Berdyaev, Shestov’s thought—although born from a very good premise—is a missed opportunity for philosophy to arrive at the ontological problems of creativity and freedom. This criticism is also not far removed from the one Andrei Belyi advanced regarding Shestov.11 Ivanov-Razumnik highly valued Shestov’s contribution to the development of Russian intellectual history and he included Shestov’s philosophy, along with the artistic work of Sologub and Andreev, within the “immanent subjectivism” phase of Russian thought (which he considered himself to belong to). In this regard, Ivanov-Razumnik stated that all three authors—Sologub, Andreev, and Shestov—“could well have said of themselves: ‘We all came from Ivan Karamazov’” (Ivanov-Razumnik [B3], 5), since he identified their three world conceptions as deriving directly from Ivan Karamazov’s “cursed questions”—“this brilliant philosopher created by Dostoevskii” (4). According to Ivanov-Razumnik, due to a number of historical factors (e.g., Positivism, Marxism, Tolstoism, Aestheticism), a real answer to Ivan Karamazov arrived quite late in Russia: this happened with Nikolai Mikhailovskii, first, and then in a full way with these three authors.12 But however important Shestov was for the development of “immanent subjectivism” in Russia, his uncompromising “underground psychology” is still inacceptable. For Ivanov-Razumnik, it must be overcome because following Shestov’s thought as it is leads simply to a sterile and unproductive conclusion: “No one can stay with L. Shestov, but everyone must go through it” (249). Immanent subjectivism, in Ivanov-Razumnik’s view, is a valuable position in that it accepts the world without finding any false consolation in idealistic positions, but it eventually goes beyond the mere desperation to build a new and positive social awareness out of skepticism. In a way, for Ivanov-Razumnik, Shestov was not able to anticipate this “second phase,” the pars construens, but remained still in his “underground.” As a consequence, he

11 With his typical emphatic style, Belyi criticized Shestov—whose books he nonetheless defined as “wonderful”—for being inconclusive with his constant “logical negations” that finally annulled themselves and, moreover, he did not recognize the positive outcomes that were implicit in Shestov’s rightful criticism of rationality. For Belyi, there is something decisive Shestov did not acknowledge: “I have a special word for this (may Shestov forgive me!), the word is ‘symbolism.’ But then Shestov, in turn, has always the same word: ‘adogmatism’” (Andrei Belyi, “Shestov. Nachala i kontsy” [1908], in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 161). 12 See, on this, the introduction to Ivanov-Razumnik’s book: Ivanov-Razumnik (B3), 3–18.

Conclusion

was just “an unconscious ideologue of decadence” for “those who did not reach any worldview, who want to save themselves from any obligation” (251). The most positive and nearly supportive study that was written on Shestov while he was in Russia was the one by Boris Griftsov (1885–1950)—a literary critic and theorist, who later became famous for his studies on French literature and on Balzac in particular. Perhaps because of his affinity with French culture, which possibly made of him an existentialist ante litteram, Griftsov was able to grasp some of the deepest Shestovian positions without dwelling on Shestov’s nihilistic tendencies that were deprecated by so many. In fact, Griftsov read Shestov’s early works from the perspective of the “limits of literature” (Griftsov [B3], 147) and, eventually, of the ultimate “silence of reason” (148). Significantly, he wrote that literature for Shestov is neither a “craft” nor a “task” but rather “a combustion, by which one lives more than all everyday passions and incidents” (148). For Griftsov, Shestov also went beyond Nietzsche in this search for the ultimate limit. By this token, and differently from the general opinion, Griftsov considered The Apotheosis of Groundlessness to be Shestov’s best work (165). He acknowledged Berdyaev’s objections to it to be true, that is, that absolute skepticism would eventually coincide with absolute dogmatism, but in the case of Shestov this objection is “hardly addressed to the right person” (165). Griftsov seems to identify as “strong points” that which others identified as Shestov’s weakest points. This was possible because he saw that Shestov did not want to build any particular positive philosophy, but intended only to explore those fields of mind and creativity where no solution and no theory was achievable. This radical intentionality was the key for Griftsov in placing his trust in Shestov’s purpose. Only such honesty, the honesty of groundlessness, can lead philosophy to a paradoxical “true metaphysics.” Oddly enough, Boris Griftsov commented on Shestov’s most extreme negative stances with a clear feeling of hope and positivity. He was the first—perhaps along with only Rozanov—in the prerevolutionary “Russian” half of Shestov’s career to approach Shestov in this way: a way that would find more followers in Europe in the ensuing years. 2. So far, a selected survey has been proposed on the reception of Shestov’s work among the main coeval Russian critics, particularly—but not only—insofar as the histories of Russian thought are concerned.13 Oddly enough, with the sole 13 Other histories from the beginning of the twentieth century (e.g., by Evgenii Bobrov, Gustav Shpet, Ernst Radlov, and Boris Yakovenko) have not been taken into account as they were issued too early to fully see the development of Shestov’s output. The early Soviet histo-

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exception of Zenˈkovskii’s history, Shestov can hardly find a place even among those histories presenting Russian philosophy’s nature as being essentially religious and antitheoretical or antiepistemological (Florovskii’s, Losskii’s, Berdyaev’s). In all other cases (i.e., articles and reviews dedicated to him)—as has been observed—Shestov was seen at most as an original, unconventional thinker, certainly with a good “initial spark,” but ultimately incapable of fitting into a productive tradition (be it Sophiology or Symbolism, neo-Kantianism, academic philosophy, literary criticism or other). Even those who admired the basic premises of his work (e.g., Berdyaev and Ivanov-Razumnik, not to mention Mikhailovskii and Merezhkovskii) ultimately recognized it as unproductive or too nihilistic. In this regard, and mostly by his own choice, he was destined to stand apart from his generation. Given all these premises, speaking of a legacy of “Shestov’s philosophy”— as the title of this section implies—might seem at least paradoxical or provocative. But there are other arguments that are capable of viewing Shestov’s déracinement from a different perspective. On the one hand, as was explained in the first chapter of this book, Shestov’s isolation is more apparent than real. He actually influenced his own generation more than they were willing to acknowledge.14 He was the first, or among the first, in many aspects (e.g., a particular reading of Nietzsche, Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Shakespeare, Chekhov; a criticism of eighteenth-century Idealism; the stance of an “individual philosophy”, a nonutilitarian but “negative” conception of art), and many took their cues from him, although they often turned to other directions. As Schloezer recalled, in many cases writers and intellectuals used his quotes and ideas without mentioning his name or, in fact, claiming to have discovered what Shestov had discovered before them: but, to Schloezer’s great surprise, Shestov was never angry or envious about this, as he was always focused on the diffusion of the ideas rather than in their ownership.15 Most of all, he helped the ries of Russian philosophy were also not considered as they were not interested in treating Shestov’s philosophy since he was manifestly opposed to their materialistic ideological requirements. 14 According to Georgii Adamovich, had he wanted, with his style and his ideas Shestov could have been the greatest literary critic of his time in Russia, and he would have obtained clear recognition for that: he should have merely given his audience a bit more of what they expected—more historical detail, more objectivity, and a suitable ideological view for those years. In any case, for Adamovich, Shestov was one of the most remarkable intellectuals of prerevolutionary Russia (cf. Adamovich 2016 [B3], 209–210). 15 As Schloezer writes: “His complete indifference to his ‘rights,’ I confess, sometimes even annoyed me a little; I was indignant any time I encountered anywhere thoughts, characteristic expressions, examples, that were borrowed from him without specifying the source.

Conclusion

Russian intellectual world from the turn of the century to develop to the greatest degree a Nietzschean-Dostoevskian conscience within the new tendency of the post-Solovˈëvian religious philosophy of that time. This was his largely neglected but crucial legacy in Russia. On the other hand, it is a completely different story once he moved to France. After he emigrated to Paris, and thanks to the fact that his writings were almost immediately translated into French (with the decisive assistance of his friend Boris de Schloezer), he grasped the opportunity of having, as it were, a “second career” and a brand new beginning even beyond the strict circle of the Russian émigré community, although he nonetheless frequented it assiduously and contributed to its growth. In that moment, in the early 1920s, he was the first Russian speculative philosopher to gain genuine recognition abroad, and he also had a tremendous impact in spreading Russian literature in France. The works of Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, in particular, enjoyed a significant revival and achieved new comprehension among French readers thanks to Shestov. By that time, he was unquestionably considered a philosopher. While he was living permanently in Paris he came in contact with contemporary professional philosophers like Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Jean Wahl, Jacques Maritain, Lucien LévyBruhl, Max Scheler, Henri Bergson, Gabriel Marcel, Jules de Gaultier, as well as important writers and literary critics like André Gide, Jacques Rivière, Georges Bataille, André Malraux, Albert Camus, Jean Paulhan, and others. One of the most incredible things about Shestov is that, although he was “the last to arrive” in Paris, he managed to make the French readers familiar with the thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Buber, Scheler, and also Kierkegaard. He committed himself to spreading the ideas of all these authors (with translations in French, lectures, etc.) and he actually succeeded quite well in doing so.16 Indeed, Shestov in France was an even greater divulger of the works of others than he was a promoter of his own. There is no hazard in saying that he decisively contributed to creating an intellectual atmosphere that fostered the rise of French

I was angry that readers sometimes took secondhand and in a weakened version the very thing that they ignored in Shestov’s books. But in such cases, Shestov ardently defended the author against my attacks [ . . . ]. I think, however, that even now the influence exerted by Shestov on others’ minds is much wider and deeper than he himself assumed in his solitude” (Boris Shlëtser, “Pamyati L. I. Shestova” 1939a [B3], in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 440). 16 For instance, he contributed in a decisive way to organizing Husserl’s visit to Paris and his lectures at the Sorbonne in February 1929, from which the Cartesian Meditations originated. It is Husserl himself who relates this fact in a letter of July 18, 1928 to Roman Ingarden (quoted in Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 14–15).

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existentialism.17 Moreover, since by that time he was an older man, he was now dealing with a younger generation and for the first time he found himself in a position of exerting his influence as a “master.” As a result, in subsequent years—like Berdyaev—he entered the history of Western philosophy within the tradition of philosophical existentialism, along with figures such as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Jaspers. While Shestov’s friends Boris de Schloezer, Benjamin Fondane, and Adolʹf Lazarev contributed in a substantial way to disseminating his work, Rachel Bespaloff, Georges Bataille, and Albert Camus were, with Fondane, among the first to be influenced by Shestov’s philosophy as a part of development of their own thought, although sometimes in a controversial way. In The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus gave important recognition to Shestov’s thought and addressed it in the same way as Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, and the whole existential-phenomenological tradition. In a particularly famous and widely shared passage, Camus writes about Shestov: Chestov, for his part, through a wonderfully monotonous work, constantly straining toward the same truths, tirelessly demonstrates that the tightest system, the most universal rationalism always stumbles eventually on the irrational human thought. None of the ironic facts or ridiculous contradictions that depreciate the reason escapes him. One thing only interests him, and that is exception, whether in the domain of the heart or of the mind. Through the Dostoevskian experiences of the condemned man, the exacerbated adventures of the Nietzschean mind, Hamlet’s imprecations, or the bitter aristocracy of an Ibsen, he tracks down, illuminates and magnifies the human revolt against the irremediable. He refuses the reason its reasons and begins to advance with some decision only in the middle of that colorless desert where all certainties have become stones. (Camus 1991 [C], 23, 25)

Camus’ view of Shestov had an important effect on Western intellectual history. Shestov automatically entered the collective mind as an existential philosopher, a tragic thinker, and a thinker of the absurd. The same “absurd” that 17 On the French legacy of Shestov, see the recent study by Kseniya Vorozhikhina, Lev Shestov i ego frantsuzskie posledovateli (2016) (Vorozhikina [B2]), along with Ramona Fotiade’s wellknown contributions to this subject (Fotiade 2001, 2006, and 2016 [with F. Schwab] [B2]). On the rise of existentialism in France in 1930s, see Fox-Muraton (C).

Conclusion

at the beginning of the century was despised and dismissed as unproductive and nihilistic by the critics of that time, when needs and expectations were different, at a certain point ultimately had its revenge starting from the 1950s. This was a time when even the most pessimistic existential stances gained philosophical appreciation. Shestov’s books were read and commented on throughout the world thanks also to their translation into many languages. By that time, the hopelessness of their content was acceptable and even fruitful: not only in France, but also in Germany, Italy, Spain, South America, and even Japan, many studies and interpretations of Shestov’s thought appeared, often concerning a discussion on the nature of existentialism and tragic thought. Needless to say, Shestov’s renown and dissemination was always strictly tied to that of Dostoevskii, and conversely Dostoevskii received special philosophical attention thanks to Shestov and the peculiar connotation of his reading. But Dostoevskii and Nietzsche were not the most important authors to connote Shestov. His works Athens and Jerusalem, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, and The Apotheosis of Groundlessness gave him a reputation as an existential and religious philosopher. Along with Camus’ reading of Shestov as a “philosopher of the absurd,” all this left significant traces in the subsequent reception of Yves Bonnefoy, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Maurice Blanchot, Eugène Ionesco, Emil Cioran, Michel Henry, and, most importantly from a philosophical point of view, Gilles Deleuze.18 In the English-speaking world, D. H. Lawrence, John Middleton Murry, David Gascoyne, and Isaiah Berlin quoted or commented on his work with admiration.19 Each of these authors, in their 18 All these authors referred to Shestov, some in longer and others in shorter texts or quotations (see, on this, also Fotiade [B1], 111–131). But their Shestovian heritage is generally evident beyond the length of their explicit acknowledgment. The two texts the French existentialist poet Yves Bonnefoy wrote on Shestov can be found in Bonnefoy 1967 and 1996 [B3]. Regarding the effect of Shestov’s legacy on Vladimir Jankélévitch, see the study Ramona Fotiade and Françoise Schwab dedicated to it, in Fotiade-Schwab 2016 [B2]. Blanchot referred to Shestov in his 1971 work L’Amitié [Friendship] in particular, mainly referring back to Camus’ ideas. Ionesco, Cioran, and Henry manifested sporadically and mostly indirectly their admiration for Shestov, whereas Deleuze quoted Shestov briefly but significantly in his Difference and Repetition (1968) and in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980, with Félix Guattari). In particular, Difference and Repetition, which can be considered Deleuze’s most philosophical and “metaphysical” work, takes on Shestov’s ideas as one of its deep and crucial elements. 19 See D. H. Lawrence, “Foreword,” in Shestov’s The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (Lawrence [B3]), John Middleton Murry, “Introduction,” in Shestov 5/1916 (A1), Gascoyne (B3), Gascoyne (C), and Berlin (C). Although in different ways, all these authors actually viewed Shestov with sincere admiration—not so much as a destroyer but rather as a builder of a true

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own way, demonstrated a different attitude towards Shestov from the one he used to have from his contemporaries. Over the years, Shestov became seen by many as a master and his “philosophy of tragedy” and the aphoristic style that was so troubling at the beginning of century seem by now to have entered the common consciousness, at least within the philosophical existentialism of the second half of the century. 3. Over the past three decades, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a “second renaissance” of religious philosophy has occurred in Russia, with new translations and editions of the Russian religious philosophers’ works and also with the birth of academic journals entirely dedicated to this topic.20 During this time, due to a need to redefine a paradigm of national thought, many new histories of Russian philosophy have been published and quite often they have focused on religious tradition. In a survey of this phenomenon carried out by Alyssa DeBlasio in 2014 (see DeBlasio [C], 84–99), Shestov’s name appears among the top five highest ranked philosophers in terms of approximate distribution of pages dedicated to him, preceded only by Vladimir Solovˈëv, Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Pavel Florenskii (95–96). Even considering that many of these works focus on religious tradition, as we saw earlier, Shestov was never considered in this way in the equally religion-focused classic histories. After seventy years, evidently, his reputation has acquired a different consideration from the one that Florovskii or Nikolai Losskii, or even his friend Berdyaev, were keen to accord him. This is certainly due, on the one hand, to the vast international audience he reached over the years, which made him an outstanding and “unavoidable” figure. On the other hand, according to Edith Clowes, nowadays there is also a distinct awareness that has matured over the years that speculative/metaphysical philosophy developed in a certain way in Russia—that is, in a close bond with art, literature, and with ethical questions— and that Shestov was a key figure in this process.21 In my opinion, Shestov’s “existential philosophy” (cf. Gascoyne [B3], 131), and an authentically Russian thought, independent from European Idealism (Lawrence [B3], 10). 20 In her work, The End of Russian Philosophy. Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century, Alyssa DeBlasio traces the main directions of the historiography of philosophy in Russia from the late 1980s to present times, highlighting the effects and “countereffects” of the broader return to Russian religious philosophy during the immediate post-Soviet period. See DeBlasio 2014 (C). 21 In Clowes’ view, Shestov succeeded in the difficult task of inviting the Russian reader to the ultimate metaphysical challenge: “Shestov’s questions were easily accessible on some level to educated Russian readers, especially university students. In the 1840s Herzen had

Conclusion

fame is also tied to a more surreptitious and transversal reason. Berdyaev, along with Shestov’s other Russian contemporaries, was mostly concerned with the consistency of his thought, that is, its difficult balance between antimoralism, antihistoricity, fideism, theology, and the quest for or lack of a philosophical system (and this seemed to be, in fact, the main obstacle to him fitting the ideals of the Silver age). Nonetheless, Shestov’s thought has spread throughout the world in a unique way. In some senses, it has raised the opposite problem to that of “consistency,” that is, the deconstruction and crisis of reason. Whether in literature or in theology, or in existential thought, in the second half of the twentieth century and in an absolutely supernational scenario, Shestov’s name has increasingly become a standpoint and an “icon” of this view—that is, that of an irreducible crisis of objective values and of a radically troubling question on the ultimate nature of humanity. None of the available “existential philosophies” was capable of wiping the slate clean so as to eradicate all “philosophy” and leave only the “existential” in the way that Shestov’s philosophy could. If the philosophical question was about “crisis,” however far one was willing to push the problem, for once Shestov was not out of place but in fact fitted in perfectly. The scholarship on Shestov has always swung in various directions: literature, skepticism, existentialism, fideism, religious philosophy. But one fact is certain: that despite many misunderstandings, in the short time he has continued to gain in popularity and has received major recognition over the years. The number of studies on him has consistently increased over the last twenty to thirty years, and over the last ten to fifteen years in particular a number of monographs have appeared—especially, but not only, in Russian language— and the number of translations and editions of his works has increased even more: in particular, in Russian, French, and Italian. After more than a century of “Nietzscheanism”—of which Shestov was in fact one of the main promoters—, the contemporary reader is no longer easily impressed by antimoralist stances and the crisis of reason within “tragic thought” has also become a cornerstone in official philosophy. As has been frequently observed in this work, called for a philosophical ‘dilettante’ to bring philosophical questions to the broad public. Once again, in the 1850s, Chernyshevsky had sought a writer who could teach Russian readers to think philosophically. Dostoevsky had been that writer, although clearly not the one Chernyshevsky had had in mind. In the 1890s, it was Nietzsche who seemed to emerge from Dostoevsky’s underground and to echo the nadryv of Dostoevskian characters. Still, it was Shestov who became the first truly popular Russian philosopher” (Clowes 2004 [C], 153). On the same topic, see also Clowes 2003 (C).

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on many occasions Shestov was ahead of his times and his repetitive style does not seem to undermine the fact that his thought remains fresh and interesting, and does not appear likely to become quickly outmoded. This, in my opinion, is not so much a matter of style or of content, but has to do with a critical attitude that tackles philosophy at its very roots. The secret of Shestov’s freshness, the “great impact” of his thought which is capable of expressing the most important things with the simplest words (as Evgeniya Gertsyk once said),22 lies in his philosophical attitude of capturing in everything he deals with the question of truth at its core, namely its logical and metaphysical “necessity,” and in his unwavering determination to investigate what is “behind” it. This is what made him first and foremost a philosopher and what saved him from temporary conceptual or historical fashions. But the investigation of the last foundation of reason raises a recurring question about the nature of his relationship with philosophy itself and about what kind of philosopher he is. Among the various debates on his presumed or possible philosophico-ideological affiliations, this is an issue that reemerged with constant regularity in his regard.

2. The Question of Irrationalism and of “Antiphilosophy” From the beginning of his career, the most common criticism of Shestov concerned his reputed skepticism or nihilism, or else (with slight variations of meaning) his irrationalism. There are almost no reviews of his early books that do not raise such an objection. Some completely despised his “skeptical attitude”—defining it as decadent, unproductive, and even dangerous—, while others could only just tolerate it, and those who might possibly appreciate it were ultimately not willing to support it to the degree Shestov seemed to demand, that is, his bespochvennostˈ. One of the most notable statements on Shestov’s skepticism was made by Vladimir Ern in his defense of Vyacheslav Ivanov following Shestov’s article on him. Ern held Shestov’s skepticism to be a mystification of culture as such, because Shestov adopted “Diogenes’ position in a controversy with Plato,” in which he aimed “to correct Plato, erase the historical significance of the results of his demystification, and also, in his own way, return to the myth” (Ern [C], 186).23 However, all the sharp attacks to which Shestov was subjected in Russia in this regard did not seem to undermine his 22 Cf. Gertsyk (B1), 99–100. 23 In defending Ivanov’s “inspiration,” Ern defines Shestov—just like any “skeptic”—as a representative of the primitive state of thought who made an alliance with the “confessors of the most extreme cave bottom” (i.e., the materialists) who deny the “faces of reality, i.e., her

Conclusion

certainty that he was not a skeptic. On the contrary, he always perceived himself as a seeker of truth—someone who built up something rather than someone who destroyed existing beliefs.24 In this respect, D. H. Lawrence was among the first to judge Shestov’s thought in a constructive way.25 A similar destiny awaited him in France, albeit with less sternness, where figures who initially sympathized with his thought (e.g., Gabriel Marcel, André Malraux, Jacques Maritain, Jules de Gaultier, and Jean Wahl) later realized that there was nothing constructive and possibly nothing appealing in it. Such criticism regarding his philosophical skepticism seems to accompany Shestov’s scholarship up to our own times, in which a large number of studies still focus on the “irrational issue” as well as on his attitude of “philosophizing against philosophy” (Berdyaev was among the first to coin this expression). First of all, clarification is needed among the limitless definitions of irrationalism. In the weakest sense of the word, it can be regarded as a criticism of the decisive role of reason in cognition (which can no doubt include large numbers of Western philosophers who, at least partially, raised such a doubt or question in their works); in the strongest sense, it is a denial of reason as such and a positive stance for irrational (i.e., beyond reason: nonconsequential, illogical, contradictory) beliefs or viewpoints. Between these two extremes there is a myriad of positions in which Shestov can surely find his place.26 With Shestov, however, the problem does not seem exactly that of finding his “right” place within the uncountable ways of irrationalism. When this happened, Shestov was the first to reject such affiliations and to refuse almost systematically any “positive landing place” for his thought. This happened because Shestov’s thought, rather than fitting a definition, is in fact oriented to making a contradiction stand. In the two poles of rational and irrational, of “reason” and bright appearance, so dear to poets, and sometimes enlightening eccentrics like Plato with a living gaze of truth” (Ern [C], 186). 24 See, on this, Evgeniya Gertsyk: “I remember his [Shestov’s] agitation: ‘How can I be a skeptic?’—after he told me about some criticism on him—‘when the only thing I do is to speak about the great hope, and it is the perishing man who stands on the verge of a discovery, that his days are the great eves’” (Gertsyk [B1], 109–110). 25 “‘Everything is possible’—this is his really central cry. It is not nihilism. It is only a shaking free of the human psyche from old bonds. The positive central idea is that the human psyche, or soul, really believes in itself, and in nothing else” (D. H. Lawrence, “Foreword,” in Shestov 4/1920 [A1], 10). 26 According to Nikolai Losskii, for example, Shestov is not a true skeptic: in fact, he believes in sciences (chemistry, biology, etc.) and he does not deny the law of causality. But, on a metaphysical level, in his search for the “last truths” he inevitably must criticize the existing philosophical theories of knowledge (Losskii [B3], 144–145).

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“antireason,” Shestov seems definitely more interested in keeping the fight alive rather than making the one win over the other.27 This was the major difficulty in placing his thought, in finding alliances for it, and so on. For a battle to be always engaged, the two opponents must stand strong and perfectly “healthy” in their opposite sides—this was what interested Shestov most. The search for irrationalism was never Shestov’s only concern. If this had been so, he could easily have found many ready-made solutions and allies, in Russia and abroad. World philosophy has always been full of irrationalist stances: from skepticism to myth to mysticism. But Shestov always openly despised those stances and when someone applied the label “mystic” to him, he revolted against it.28 As has been widely demonstrated throughout this work, Shestov’s philosophy is made of the juxtaposition of the two warring parts together, and not of support for only one. On the contrary, if he hypothetically had to keep only one of the two, it would unquestionably be “reason” and not “antireason.” Shestov’s last paradox, in fact, is that he never joined or sympathized with any of the various irrationalist or religious movements in Russia. As Dmitrii Mirskii observed, any religious view, and even symbolism, was useless to him: his God and his truth were both unreachable and, just like the point in mathematics, neither had any effect on our reality.29 On the contrary, he always steadfastly regarded 27 Frederick Copleston—who in his seminal work Philosophy in Russia (1986) gives a generally positive account of Shestov—describes Shestov’s philosophy as a perfect balance of reason and faith, in which by affirming the entire value of reason, faith turns out to be stronger in its antithesis to reason and transcendent goal. He writes: “If we were to pay attention simply to Shestov’s criticism of scientism and of rationalist philosophy, we might receive the impression that he is doing his best to spread skepticism, ethical relativism and the idea that human life and history are devoid of meaning. What he is actually doing, however, is to present his readers with an option between rationalism or the worship of science (positivism) on the one hand and faith in the God of the Bible on the other” (Copleston [C], 396–397). With his markedly Kierkegaardian reading, in which Shestov’s “either-or” attitude is emphasized and put at the core of his thought, Copleston considers Shestov is ultimately a mystic or spiritual thinker, even though he is aware that Shestov himself would not agree with this interpretation. 28 “They write ‘mystic’ to get rid of me”—he once said to Fondane while referring to a book by Jean Cassou, Grandeur et Infamie de Tolstoï (Paris: Grasset, 1932), in which Cassou wrote: “the great Russian mystic, Lev Shestov” (cf. Fondane [B1], 95). 29 “To a superficial observer Shestov has all the appearance of a Nihilist and a Sceptic. And this is to a certain extent true, for though the inner kernel of his philosophy is profoundly religious and pious, it has and can have no practical bearing. The Symbolist’s mentality is entirely alien to him—the things of this world are an inferior reality, which have no relation to the one real reality. They are indifferent, adiaphora, and religious standards can in no way be brought down to measure them. Truth to Shestov is a mathematical point of no dimensions, which can have no action in the external world” (Mirsky [C], 174).

Conclusion

Western science and thought as his firm standpoint—the one to fight against true enough, but his reference point nevertheless. The question of “irrationalism” is one that classically involved the entire Russian thought with respect to Western thought, and that arose in the debates between Slavophiles and Westernizers in the first half of the nineteenth century.30 Here again, among the varieties of positions, the one that should be maintained as far as Shestov is concerned is Semën Frank’s fruitful and actually very lucid observation that “the Russian way of thinking is absolutely antirationalist. This antirationalism, however, is not identical with irrationalism, that is to say some kind of Romantic and lyrical vagueness, a logical disorder of spiritual life. It does not involve either a tendency to deny science or an inability to carry out a scientific research.”31 “Antirationalism” (as opposed to the previously defined “irrationalism”) would be, then, a critique from “within” of Western philosophical logos in its claim of being the only legitimate ruler over the domain of truth, but it does not contradict the achievements of the same logos. In her work on the genesis and peculiarity of Russian philosophy Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy (2004), Edith Clowes traces some of the main differences between the path of development of Russian philosophy and that of the major European traditions. Among these differences, the classic philosophical paradigms of abstractness, systematicity, and logical argumentation are expanded to include more vital questions, that is, questions of life and creativity, and there is above all a claim for the legitimacy of subjective knowledge and truth. Hence the importance of literature as a source for philosophy itself.32 The criticism of rational thought is not meant, then, as a dismissal of it, but as a doubt regarding its unicity and claim to be the only legitimate way to truth. This is also Aleksei Losev’s point in his 30 One of the most recent works about the question of an alleged “Russian irrationalism” is Olga Tabachnikova’s Russian Irrationalism from Pushkin to Brodsky (Tabachnikova [C]), in which the author identifies a number of reciprocal relations between rationalism and irrationalism, as well as between Russia and the West in the same regard. 31 Semën L. Frank, Russkoe mirovozzrenie (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1996), 165. 32 As Edith Clowes puts it: “Because speculative philosophy in Russia developed in close contact with literature, Fiction’s Overcoat takes this particular relationship both as its point of departure and its chief focus. I argue that Russian philosophy in its own original way emerged from the ‘overcoat’ of an already well-established literary culture that offered alternatives to systematic Western philosophy” (Clowes 2004 [C], 5). In this respect, according to Clowes, Shestov “is the first Russian philosopher to see this preference in language style—and, by implication, style of thought—as part of a national consciousness. Indeed, it is a cultural dividing line between Russians and Europeans” (147).

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article on Russian philosophy (1918): “Does cognition happen only through rational thought?” He added: “Whoever values the qualities of systematicity, logical refinement, and clarity of dialectic in philosophy—scientific qualities, in short—can ignore Russian philosophy without undue distress.”33 Losev certainly meant what he said as his ensuing works, with his articulated dialectics, did extend such a logical paradigm up to the boundaries of Western philosophy itself in the territories of myth and music, but always as a logical overcoming of classic reason. For Boris Groys, however, Shestov goes far beyond all this. In his Introduction to Antiphilosophy (2012), Groys argues that Shestov’s protest against the evidence of reason as well as his general attitude of discrediting everything that has a positive value, far from being simply nihilistic or destructive stances instead corresponded to a deliberate strategy of survival for philosophy itself. Shestov adopted such a strategy in order to escape the inevitable destiny of fall that all classic philosophies have to undergo in modernity, in which the “sciences—both natural and human—had occupied the whole terrain of modern thought” (Groys [B3], 48).34 In point of fact, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Vasilii Rozanov identified in Shestov’s aphoristic 33 Aleksei F. Losev, “Russkaya filosofiya,” in Filosofiya, Mifologiya, Kulˈtura (Moscow: Izd. Politicheskoi literatury, 1991), 209. Also quoted in Clowes 2004 (C), 2. 34 According to Groys, “Shestov’s strategy of a ‘poor,’ reduced, limited discourse is akin to several artistic and literary strategies of the twentieth century. We need only recall the late Tolstoy, painting after Cézanne, or poetry after Mallarmé” (Groys [B3], 49). Unlike Groys, I think that Shestov did not consciously adopt a “strategy” of any kind. His repetitive patterns are not directed, as Groys implies, at building a peculiar “aesthetics” or “antiphilosophy”: not even by the faintest analogy can he be compared to minimalist art and music, and to the pleasure of repetition—as Groys argues. As I have tried to demonstrate in this book, he was genuinely interested in a problem—i.e., the foundation of logos and of being (or, as he named it: the second dimension of thought)—that from Parmenides onward always represented an inner, though mostly implicit or unexpressed part of Western philosophy. The impossibility of developing this problem in the same way as all other philosophical issues are developed (the latter, in fact, lie within the domain of being) forms an integral part of the problem itself. This difficulty of positing the “nothing,” but of being unable to talk about the nothing without the categories of what “nothing is not” (i.e., being) is, in my view, at the root of Shestov’s repetitions as well as of the “extreme monotony” and “un-development” of his thought (as Groys puts it). Shestov is facing an ultimate limit, as it were, beyond which he structurally cannot go. Consequently, he “stutters,” he repeats the same arguments about that limit, he continually names all those who were in the same situation as him (Dostoevskii, Kierkegaard, etc.), as he finds himself in a position of no longer being able to go on. For this reason, in my opinion, it should not be called an “antiphilosophy strategy” as it is, instead, the very problem of the foundation of philosophical metaphysics—a question that from Parmenides to Heidegger has always existed within Western thought and that Shestov intercepted in its main references, although he developed it with his own cultural categories.

Conclusion

and nonsystematic style an important way of renewing philosophy from old and outdated schemes. According to Rozanov, in Shestov philosophy is transformed from a “system of thought” or “a number of systems of thought” into a “human system” or “a number of human systems.”35 Rozanov revealed himself to be more interested in this formal value of Shestov’s philosophy than in its contents when he changed the expression “apotheosis of groundlessness” into “apotheosis of a-systematicity” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 131–132). What was peculiar about Shestov’s philosophy, however, was not its unconventional style or communicative strategies (in which regard, indeed, Rozanov was incomparably more innovative than him). The reason why he “deserved” such a label of “skeptic/irrationalist,” was the uncompromising modality with which he defended his position against any kind of “alliance”, rather than the general “antirational” and “antimoralist” premises of his point of view (which were, in fact, appreciated by many). According to Fondane, the perpetual discomfort of a knowledge that—as Shestov loved to repeat—lost the ground from under its feet is one of Shestov’s main philosophical features. For Shestov, tragedy is to remain in the contradiction, that is, of a knowledge that seeks problems rather than solutions. Hence the meaning of one of Shestov’s favorite sentences from Pascal: “Chercher en gémissant” [to seek through suffering]. The perennial anguish of knowledge does not demand allies or compromises, but only negative conclusions and a deep sense of instability: “It is in order to achieve this end—Fondane writes—that Shestov, just like Nietzsche, abandons philosophical language” (Fondane 2013 [B3], 281). As Gustav Shpet noted, his skepticism became most apparent in this modality.36 In his article 35 Vasilii V. Rozanov, “Novye vkusy v filosofii,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 135. 36 In a letter to Natalʹya Guchkova in 1912, Shpet wrote: “Shestov is very difficult to understand, not because he writes badly but because of his special way of drawing negative conclusions that most people take for skepticism and pessimism—meanwhile I know of no other person who is searching more intensely for or is more desirous of truth” (Shpet 2005 [B3], 66–67). In another text from 1917—previously unpublished and recently edited by Tatˈyana Shchedrina—Shpet openly commented on Shestov’s “skepticism.” Here Shpet distinguished Shestov’s position both from any form of modern relativism or skepticism and from ancient Greek skepticism, ascribing it instead to Nietzsche’s opposition to any traditional morality. Shpet writes: “Someone in our literature has already called L. Shestov a skeptic. This is both wrong and true. When the term skepticism implies here modern skepticism and relativism, this qualification is not correct. Modern skepticism despairs of attaining the truth and, therefore, simply denies it; it is negativistic. Relativism proclaims the relativity of the truth ‘of all’ and ‘in general,’ but only in order to give the appearance of truth to its own judgments. The skepticism of the ancients—of the academics, of Sextus Empiricus—is completely different. They simply were not attracted to the truth, not ‘interested,’ truth was

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“The Skeptic and His Soul” (1919), despite denying skepticism the status of “theory” (and instead conceding to it only that of “co-theory”), Shpet implicitly acknowledged—possibly including also Shestov’s position—that it has a specific philosophical goal, namely the question of the source of knowledge and its possible criteria of objectivity. As Tatˈyana Shchedrina observed in this regard, Shpet “argues that the substantial basis of skepticism is a metaphysical premise that allows for the existence of a ‘thing in itself ’ or a real-absolute [ . . . ] and makes an affirmative conclusion that metaphysics is a failure of philosophy” (Shchedrina 2004 [B3], 189). The fight between reason and antireason in Shestov has specific traits. He does not maintain, in fact, that the former (e.g., Aristotelian logic, Kantian metaphysics, modern science) is false in what it demonstrates, but rather that it cannot claim to be an absolute form of knowledge. Since there seems to be another space besides that of “truth” and “necessity,” which is the freedom to not accept that truth and that necessity, this second space is necessarily termed “absurdity” or “antirationality.” The italics in “necessarily” demonstrates once again the impossibility of escaping logic in this kind of reasoning, which is exactly the same impossibility that Shestov experienced and struggled with. Logic is everything as long as we stay in the domain of reason, and Shestov actually never abandoned this domain. Nevertheless, he always fiercely fought against it. How is that possible? What is the meaning of all this?

3. The (Neo-)Platonic Paradigm: Shestov’s “Third Sailing” I want to discuss here two impressions that are perhaps not exactly false but certainly misleading and that recur in the studies on Shestov. The first is that he lacks historical objectivity, and consequently he is a poor scholar (whether he is seen as a literary critic or as an historian of philosophy).37 The second is that he indifferent to them; this is indifference. In the first plan it is morality; and all is sub specie moralitatis. But the ancient moralists of the Hellenistic era, like the Christian moralists and like the overwhelming majority of new age moralists, sought a positive solution to moral issues. Nietzsche and some before him deny it. And this is the true moral! It is here that Shestov must come, too! It is both his strength and his weakness: 1) it is his strength: in that he reveals morality, where the general masses try to get rid of it by making “assessments.” And 2) it is his weakness: in that he introduces it where it doesn’t actually exist—since he is afraid that morals might penetrate” (Gustav G. Shpet, “Rabochie zametki k statˈyam L. I. Shestova ‘Memento mori’ i ‘Samoochevidnye istiny,’” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 288). 37 Boris Groys pushes this concept even further: “In all of Shestov’s writings, the same quotations are repeated time and again: from Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Spinoza, Tertullian, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and Husserl. But the overall work of these authors is never ana-

Conclusion

is an irrationalist, and consequently he is a bad philosopher. These impressions are not without reason. It is true, for instance, that one should probably never rely on Shestov’s books for historical or entirely objective information about the authors he discusses; nor could one derive a coherent philosophical system from his thought, which continually calls for and praises contradiction. All this is obviously true. In a way, it does not require confutation as Shestov never claimed to be a literary critic, a historian or a systematic philosopher. “Let people then reproach us no longer for want of clarity, since we make no profession of it,” he loved to repeat with Pascal (Pensées, 751). In fact, he probably thought that those two fields had already been sufficiently covered and practiced. He used to read works by specialized critics he esteemed, such as Mikhailovskii, Aikhenvalˈd, Gershenzon, and—however strange this might seem—he relied on the philosophical views that could explain the world most adequately, that is, logic and the theory of knowledge. Before becoming “Shestov” or, in other words, had he not been the Shestov we have come to know, he would have probably been (as he indeed was, up to a certain point) a man who believed in science and in Kantian philosophy as the most reliable sources of knowledge. Actually, as far as mere knowledge of this world is concerned, without Shestov having any further concern to search for an ultimate truth, one might even suggest that he is a “positive” thinker. In all his fights against science, he never claimed science to be false or unnecessary, or contradictory in itself. He always said the opposite, in fact.38 The greatest philosophical problem, for Shestov, arose from the fact that science, or science/philosophy, or again the Western logos, is absolutely true and necessary, and nobody can deny that. Without this assumption, no philosophy of tragedy would be possible. Therefore, before experiencing and positing the contradiction, Shestov is a man who believes in lyzed, their ‘systems’ are never reconstructed, described or interpreted. Only an expression, a sentence, sometimes even a word, is taken up and cited repeatedly as the key to a certain attitude or a certain problem” (Groys [B3], 37). As emerges from the rest of his essay, Groys does not actually mean that this tendency is a negative quality per se, but that—as was stated before—he sees it as a precise “stylistic” strategy and a deliberate choice to create an “antiphilosophy.” 38 There is a crucial passage from the conversations he held with Fondane in which Shestov explains this point and, possibly, a decisive part of his theory of knowledge: “I know very well that the ‘fact,’ precisely because it is posited by logic, is omnipotent; if it was not omnipotent, there would be innumerable doors. But its omnipotence prevents me from finding the doors; thus I can only shout, only knock, where there is no door [ . . . ]. If I struggle, it is not against something, but against myself, it is in me that I must kill the truth of the ‘fact.’ I knock even though I do not know where God is” (Fondane [B1], 81).

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the logic that establishes the objective facts of the world: he believes in science, in history, and even in morals. This means that all those stances are true and noncontradictory in their own fields or according to their own rules—the rules of the principle of identity and of noncontradiction. When he recognizes the occurrence of tragedy—that is, when he recognizes, as Fondane brilliantly puts it, a “fault within being”39—he still keeps those stances as true, as long as they are considered in their own side and for the purpose they were created for. But as they face a tragic alterity, that is, another state of things arises in front of them, Shestov finds himself in a new realm where it is “impossible to make a decision,” as he used to say often. This impossibility of the Underground Man/Shestov, according to Gilles Deleuze who gave an insightful interpretation of it, is neither subjective nor objective: it is “the Untimely, neither temporal nor eternal” (Deleuze [C], 173).40 It is here, in this extralogical and extratemporal place, that Shestov is engaged in his “second dimension of thought.” This does not mean that the first dimension— the usual scientific world—is false, but that, in a given situation, it comes across its own contradiction. This contradiction originates from the awareness that even the strongest and most solid epistemic “value,” that is, necessity or “2+2=4,” is originally and forever “valued.” This is, in fact, the most important Nietzschean lesson that Shestov learned and that he soon applied to knowledge rather than to morals. The same awareness of “2+2=4” is the other side, or second dimension, of “2+2=4.” What derives from it is the Underground Man’s “2+2=5,” which as a mere “calculation” is simply false, and nobody—not least 39 “The domain of Shestov’s tragedy—Fondane writes—is then the domain of the ‘wretched conscience’ [conscience malheureuse] that guesses, foresees, that there is something beyond conscience and beyond sorrow [malheur]. Without a doubt, it is unhappy through its own fault, but it is like stopping halfway, if one were to posit like Heidegger did, who nevertheless followed Kierkegaard, that there is an error in being, a culpability, without trying to find out what this error is. The error in being, says Heidegger (who his disciples praise for not having recourse to the old metaphysics) is the feeling of its primordial shortcoming, of its finiteness [ . . . ]. This ‘error,’ which Heidegger has stolen from Kierkegaard—but which has ceased to be sin and become only a secular error—is now nothing but a meaningless word” (Benjamin Fondane, “Chestov, Kierkegaard et le serpent,” in Fondane 2013 [B3], 275; Fondane’s italics). This passage represents one of the cores of Fondane’s interpretation of Shestov in his book La conscience malheureuse as well as Shestov’s full continuity with Kierkegaard, according to Fondane: “It is not Kierkegaard’s ‘ideas’ that Shestov endeavours to save, but Kierkegaard himself ” (276). 40 “Ah Shestov, with the questions he poses, the ill will he manifests, the powerlessness to think he puts into thought and the double dimension he develops in these demanding questions concerning at once both the most radical beginning and the most stubborn repetition” (Deleuze [C], 173).

Conclusion

Shestov—would contest this. But it is, at the same time, also true: not in itself, but as seen like “another” external, unnatural point of view—the scream of horror of the Underground Man. That “man” recognizes that he has another opposite logos, which lies exclusively in the “distance” from the “2+2=4.” This should not happen in a world full of necessity, where necessity is the only truth—and for Shestov, I repeat, it is truth: all his argumentations against the necessity of reason are built in a way that reinforces the power of reason. In this, Shestov is neither a symbolist nor an “existential thinker” in the most classic meaning of the word. Rather, he is a paradoxical writer who makes his enemy stronger the more he attacks it. As has been stated before, Shestov is not against the “2+2=4” (after all, he was formerly a mathematician!), which is undeniably true. But he finds out that to acknowledge that truth ultimately means that one must be outside it. This is an old argument in philosophy. As Wittgenstein put it at the end of his Tractatus, “The sense of the world must lie outside the world” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, §6.41).41 In the same way, albeit making a significant leap forward with respect to Wittgenstein, one could concur with Shestov that the “sense of meaning” must lie outside the meaning: that is, it must be something “other than” meaning.42 In order to speak the truth, in fact, one must already possess the truth. But when it comes to exploring the origin (the sense) of that truth it is impossible to use the same means—that is, truth—otherwise it would be a petitio principii, and an error of formal logic. On this level of reasoning, one needs to rely on something beyond logos, bearing in mind that the logos comes

41 Wittgenstein continues in this way: “In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it nonaccidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. David Francis Pears and Brian McGuiness [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961], §6.41). 42 A parallel between Shestov and Wittgenstein is not completely inappropriate. While Boris Groys also acknowledged that the two shared a heretical view of philosophy (cf. Groys [B3], 41), in my opinion there is a way in which their theories of knowledge can stand together, albeit on different sides. On the whole, both agreed on the rigid demarcation between what can and what cannot be expressed by a logic discourse (cf. Tractatus, §6.42) and, above all, both faithfully respected this assumption. In such a radical alternative of what lies inside or outside our rational/linguistic world, in the consequent notion of mysticism, in the meaninglessness of skepticism (cf. Tractatus, §6.51), and in the unattainable and “totally Other” God, there are possibly some common premises for a dialogue between the two.

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afterwards. It is, then, something beyond even Plato’s “second sailing.”43 In the same way as for Socrates—in Plato’s Phaedo (99d–101d)—the need for a second sailing was a result of the insufficiency of the first, for Shestov the need, as it were, for a “third sailing” arose from the intellect’s inability to explain itself. But while Augustine employed the category of faith to engage his further “third sailing,”44 Shestov remains where he was, where Plato probably never arrived (but Plotinus certainly did), that is, at the very edge of reason, but with an eye on the lack of logos itself. By means of logos, in fact, he faces the empty origin of logos: this, in the end, is what his bespochvennostˈ is. Here, Sergei Bulgakov and Vasilii Zenˈkovskii were right in saying that Shestov never really inaugurated a religious philosophy, that he remained overall within rationality, and that faith for him was always a “negative category” rather than a feasible possibility.45 Unlike St. Augustine’s, Shestov’s “third sailing” is thus still a rational sailing and, properly speaking, it is a “philosophy of tragedy.” 43 In the Phaedo, Plato outlines an intellectual biography of Socrates articulated in different phases: the last of them, named δεύτεϱος πλοῦς [deuteros plous], the “second sailing,” began when Socrates renounced natural philosophy for a dialogue-oriented philosophy that led him to the “forms” and to the intelligible world. The metaphor of the “second sailing” refers to the practice of using oars (in the metaphor: the reason) to reach a destination in absence of wind (i.e., nature) for sailing, as well as to the fifth book of the Odyssey in which the hero rejects heavenly life on Calypso’s island and attempts to cross the abyss on a raft and get to Ithaca. 44 The expression “third sailing” with reference to St. Augustine—particularly to his Comment to the Gospel of St. John—was used by the Italian historian of philosophy Giovanni Reale to mean a solution of continuity between Platonic thought and Christian philosophy. According to Reale, for Augustine the “raft” that is needed after becoming aware of the insufficiency of reason to deal with the realm of soul is the same leap of faith, as well as a different theory of love, in the sense of Agape, that would represent something new with respect to the Platonic Eros. See Agostino, Amore assoluto e “terza navigazione,” ed. Giovanni Reale (Milan: Rusconi, 1994). 45 Given their religious interests, in their commemorative articles on Shestov both Zenˈkovskii and Bulgakov insisted on this point: i.e., that Shestov never truly confronted the Christian dogma because—as Zenˈkovskii stated—he always “preferred to remain outside the wall of faith and Revelation” (Vasilii V. Zenˈkovskii, “Pamyati L. I. Shestova,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 434). A proof of this is that “he studied the philosophers, but not the theologians, whereas he only needed the latter” (435). Also for Bulgakov, Shestov never accomplished a religious philosophy for which he would have needed some form of dogma, but instead remained committed to a form of relativistic philosophy: “Therefore”—Bulgakov writes— “about Shestov’s philosophical nihilism (as well as his predecessors) it can be said that he himself is only one of the possible varieties of rationalism (or ‘speculative philosophy’) and, moreover, is not one of the best” (Sergei N. Bulgakov, “Nekotorye cherty religioznogo mirovozzreniya L. I. Shestova,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 448).

Conclusion

Philosophy of tragedy as a philosophy of contradiction is not an illogical stance or something that lies, in principle, outside the path of Western philosophy. Nor is it a way out from rationality as it represents, on the contrary, the attempt of rationality itself to investigate its own foundations, and Shestov always put this issue in these terms: as a criticism of the philosophy of knowledge and an opening towards a new level (or source) of metaphysics. Philosophizing against philosophy—a definition that was often applied to Shestov—means exactly this. It is actually a classic philosophical problem, although not all the Western philosophers have engaged it. Indeed, Neoplatonism was the philosophical current that more explicitly dealt with this problem, which in some ways pervades all of Augustine’s thought. In twentieth-century philosophy, Husserl and Heidegger somehow stopped at the very edge of this question. For Husserl, considering the overall premises of his phenomenological project, it was not necessary to arrive to this question, even in his last work The Crisis of European Sciences (1936). But he listened with deep attention to Shestov’s point. As Shestov reported, in fact, Husserl was “the only one” to understand this issue (cf. Fondane [B1], 81). In the case of Heidegger, the situation is different. While, on the one hand, Shestov himself acknowledged that Heidegger’s lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929) shared some similarities with his positions or, to put it better, with some premises for an inner collapse of Heidegger’s own system,46 on the other hand, the text in which Heidegger most decisively arrived at a reconsideration of the entire question on the foundation of Being as 46 Shestov never wrote a text on Heidegger. His few mentions of him, especially in his talks with Fondane, reveal a fundamental ambivalence. On the one hand, Shestov recognizes that Heidegger’s radical critique of reason implicitly searches for an external principle to lean on. In fact, Shestov writes, since Heidegger “shows that reason cannot criticize itself ” then “philosophy should oppose to reason a totally independent principle” (Fondane [B1], 55). But it is not clear to Shestov where and if Heidegger might find such a principle. In fact, he concludes, “after all, we cannot know where Heidegger’s philosophy will end up” (55). Shestov also referred to his meeting with Heidegger in Freiburg in November 1928 (in Husserl’s house), in which Shestov quoted to him a number of Heidegger’s own texts that he believed would make his system collapse. Shestov always wondered if his remarks from that meeting had any effect on Heidegger’s famous inaugural lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” (held at the University of Freiburg on July 24, 1929) in which, Shestov said, there seemed to be “something that had collapsed” (114). At the end of this observation, he acknowledged Heidegger’s thought to be certainly more indebted to Kierkegaard’s philosophy than Husserl’s thought was. Yet, he concluded, “I am still waiting for him [Heidegger]” (114). In effect, this attitude of waiting for the future developments Heidegger’s thought is perhaps the most correct interpretation of Shestov’s view of Heidegger. But still, in the immediately ensuing years, Shestov did not appreciate Heidegger’s analyses on Hölderlin and the language of poetry (cf. 156).

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“other” from Being was probably “Anaximander’s Saying” (1846)—a chapter of his Holzwege [Off the Beaten Track], which was published in 1950—and thus appeared after Shestov’s death.47 However, one of the continental philosophers who probably went further in treating this question was Gilles Deleuze. Not by chance, Deleuze’s thought, like that of many other European contemporary philosophers, stemmed from Nietzsche, just as Shestov’s did. In a way, all Deleuze’s works dealt with the problem of examining the “other side of logos” as well as with those “disjunctive devices” (see The Logic of Sense, 1969) that allowed the shift from our logical world to the back of it, as it were. Difference and Repetition is perhaps the work that is most directly related to this problem: not by chance, Shestov is quoted in this book, and plays a more than marginal role. However, Deleuze’s exploration of the irrational comes to quite different conclusions from Shestov’s. In the end, the two differ substantially not just in their style, but also in content and theoretical outcomes. It is always the “existential stance”—which deliberately, or, as it were, “technically,” forbids any progress in the understanding of that which lies beyond rationality—that establishes the difference between Shestov’s thought and other philosophies of “difference” or of “nonidentity.” The idea of “life” that Shestov holds as a decisive counter of reason is never a concept, but always a situation or event. In this regard, in his critique of rationality he is still closer to a philosopher like Kierkegaard than to postmodern thinkers or to a philosopher like Deleuze. The “limits of logic” are also a logical problem that analytic philosophy investigated in the last century as the logical construction of the world. In this case, however, this must be seen as a considerable reduction with regard to Shestov’s perspective and it has nothing to do with it, other than by analogy. 47 See Martin Heidegger, “Anaximander’s Saying,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242–281. Heidegger’s conclusion is substantially different from Shestov’s, but—through the fragment of Anaximander (DK 12B1), considered by Heidegger as the most ancient word of Western thought—he came to analyze the Greek notion of “necessity” [khreon] as the early word for Being and as Being’s fundamental trait. Heidegger “translated” Anaximander’s word khreon into German as Brauch [usage] and considered this to be the authentic philosophical translation of the concept. This awareness—i.e., that necessity was a usage—is what sparked off Western metaphysics, in that it connected what was originally “disconnected” (adixia, according to Heidegger’s interpretation). The “oblivion” of such a disconnection, the oblivion of the original “difference” within Being is, for Heidegger, the event of metaphysics itself, i.e., the moment in which the Western history of the world begins. In this history, for Heidegger, the original “difference” is excluded from the beginning.

Conclusion

Indeed, exploring the foundation of logic as being outside logic could lead to a chasm. The way to avoid this was to formalize this “further world” that would possibly remain beyond logic. Such a task was generally pursued by reducing the “intension” to an “extension,” 48 mainly in two ways: with the formal truth of Alfred Tarski; and with the logic of the “possible worlds” of David Lewis (i.e., in short, intension as a possible extension that creates a “world”). Intension as such is represented by all those intralinguistic sentences that are presupposed in a true or false sentence: for example, “(It is true that) P is Q.” To avoid weakening the logic itself, those sentences were generally reduced to “sets,” except in those logics, the so-called “fuzzy logics,” in which the “open sets” are continually redefined, so that they are “true” up to a certain point. In this way, there are propositions that did not exist before, and afterwards did. This is only an example of the question of limits and foundation of logic in contemporary philosophy. As previously stated, it is comparable only by analogy to what Shestov was trying to explore. Of course, he was considering something very different than an attempt to include contradiction in a “multivalued logic.” He put the human conscience into the most irresolute comparison with the logic knowledge: he searched, as it were, for what lies behind the character of necessity of “intension.” In a way, far from reducing intension to the particular objects of this world (as a contemporary logical view does), he proceeded in the opposite direction: he opened intension up to its initial occurrence, and it was there that he found the contradiction of groundlessness—not a logical contradiction, but a metaphysical one. This overall quest for the foundations of logical knowledge says one thing very clearly: in metaphysics there has always been a problem of determining the last limit of logos. This problem can be addressed in the following terms: once logos can be adopted, this means it was already there. To find its real beginning means finding another mode than logos. When Plato tries to approach such an origin, at the conclusion of his Republic (10.614–10.621), he needs to rely on the Myth of Er. In the same way, when the “second Heidegger” tackles the origin of logos he has to lean on Homer, the poets, and the original, unconditioned Dichtung [poetic word]. It is by this same path that Shestov arrives—first through Nietzsche, then through a medieval and Neoplatonic 48 In the language of logic, the words intension and extension indicate the reference of a term or of a concept. Intension refers to the internal content of the term or concept constituting its formal definition (i.e., the set of all possible things that could be described by it); extension indicates the particular objects the term or concept denotes (i.e., the set of all actual things indicated by the same term or concept).

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conception of the divine as the “totally Other”—at his “God.” God for him, in fact, is essentially a counter and an alternative to logos. For this reason, he was not and could never be a “theologian,” which fact Sergei Bulgakov understood very well.49 This is Shestov’s fundamental issue, a question in the philosophy of knowledge, and it is here that must be also placed his (otherwise scarcely understandable) “agreement” with his master Husserl, who was also interested in establishing the gnoseological field and terms for this problem.50 However, it would be a mistake to merely identify and reduce Shestov’s philosophy to the quest for an “ultimate level” in the foundation of knowledge, as long as one does not acknowledge that this foundation does not occur in oneself as another “thought” or “narrative.” Even though this foundation happens to be the Bible or the realm of God, it must not be understood as “myth” or as a mere alternative to rationality. There is a fundamentally existential stance that pervades any of Shestov’s arguments: whether he—along with the Underground Man—talks about the desperate struggle with the “stone wall” or with the “2+2=4,” he is always thinking of Pascal’s “Je n’approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gémissant” [I approve only of those who seek through suffering]. Shestov’s search is a search towards a last limit in the philosophy of knowledge, but only as long as this is manifested as an “existential struggle” in a manner not far removed from Ippolit’s “confession” in Dostoevskii’s The Idiot or in Tolstoi’s own Confession. If Shestov never liked the adjective “existential” with reference to his philosophy, it is mainly because was thinking of other official and structured “existential philosophies” of his time that had nothing to do with what he had in mind.51 He relied, in fact, on Nietzsche, Dostoevskii, Plotinus, Kierkegaard, Pascal mainly because their tragedy appeared (at least to Shestov’s eyes) as an unsolvable tragedy of life. All those authors were experiencing real pain, from which a philosophical quest originated. The same “detachment” from logos—which is essential to unfold the truth of logos itself and from which tragedy derives—is to be found in life and not elsewhere. This is why Shestov gives his approval to Kierkegaard and not to Heidegger: because 49 See Sergei N. Bulgakov, “Nekotorye cherty religioznogo mirovozzreniya L. I. Shestova,” in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 446–448. 50 For an analysis of this controversial yet crucial relationship, see appendix 1, at the end of this book. 51 See Boris Groys’ point of view on this: “There is no logic of development in Shestov, no creative evolution, no transcending [ . . . ] in short, no cultural producing in the customary sense of the word [ . . . ]. The poetics of Shestov’s texts has scarcely anything to do with the ‘creative’ poetics of existentialism” (Groys [B3], 47).

Conclusion

he sees no real proximity with the tragic thought in “existential analytics.”52 In effect, as long as Shestov writes books of philosophy, his tragic thought is still “thought” and still a philosophical issue. But in his project of a shift from logos to what lies before (or beyond) logos, he demands that an “existential fact” be involved or, better, that this fact be the very “rift” that determined the new situation. This is his ultimate border of logos and the only feasible way out from it: not theurgy, as was the case for Florenskii, or myth for Losev, nor a religious philosophy based on Revelation as was the case for Zenˈkovskii, but an actual existential stance (but not—at least for Shestov—based on any available European existential philosophy). Consciously or not, many of the philosophers of the Russian Silver Age referred to an overall (Neo-)Platonic paradigm:53 i.e., to an essential “double-sided” world in which the caesura between the two sides did not mean a mere “shift” from an “under-“ to an “upper-world,” but a substantial difference, as it were, in their essence, between the two worlds. The nature of this difference is what differentiates the Silver Age philosophers from each other rather than the general philosophical paradigm of thought. For Solov’ëv, Florenskii, and Bulgakov, for instance, the difference is essentially of a physical and metaphysical kind, and Florenskii even developed a whole mathematical theory to demonstrate this.54 For Shestov, in fact, the “displacement” is of an entirely existential nature,55 where the “existential event” is to be considered essentially as an “outside” (i.e., a last result and an opposition) with respect both to physics and to 52 Shestov’s distance from Heidegger and, on the contrary, his perfect continuity with Kierkegaard is also Fondane’s opinion: see “Chestov, Kierkegaard et le serpent,” in Fondane 2013 (B3), 275–277. 53 The prefix “neo-” between brackets—here and in the title of this section—means that not all the Russian religious philosophers acknowledged a distinct difference between a Platonic textual tradition and the nonwritten theories of the subsequent Neoplatonic philosophy. In fact, all Russian Slavophile and Silver Age metaphysics refers more to a generally PseudoDionysian and Neoplatonic tradition than to a “Platonic one,” strictly speaking—and philosophers like Shestov or Losev were clearly aware of this. However, other thinkers, for instance Florenskii, along with his “master” Sergei Trubetskoi, usually used the name “Plato” or “Platonic” for those references or nonwritten theories that were to be ascribed to Plotinus or Proclus, or Iamblichus, or to Neoplatonism in general. On this question, see my essay: Andrea Oppo, “Platone e Kant nell’epistemologia di Florenskij,” in Il pensiero polifonico di Pavel Florenskij, eds. Silvano Tagliagambe, Massimiliano Spano, Andrea Oppo (Cagliari: PFTS University Press, 2018), 383–413. 54 See Pavel A. Florenskii, Mnimosti v geometrii [Imaginaries in Geometry] (Moscow: Pomorʹe, 1922). 55 Although in his last two works, Shestov would mostly translate this existential stance into a religious and biblical one.

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metaphysics.56 In this respect, Berdyaev was definitely the Russian philosopher who could be considered the closest to Shestov.57 Yet what divided the two was the degree of “radicalism” that Shestov accorded to such an existential (and religious) stance—a degree that Berdyaev could not accept, as he undoubtedly placed more faith than Shestov in the value of ideas.58 One must never forget that Shestov’s entire philosophical path starts from a “secret letter” by Belinskii (cf. chapter 1, §3 of this book). With Belinskii—hence, the cruciality of this passage that Shestov quoted so many times in his oeuvre—he demands that life and philosophy take responsibility for all the victims of life conditions and of history; namely, all the rejected ones. Also, in the same “letter” he discovered that “disharmony is the condition of harmony.” It is this hiatus (i.e., calling to account what is rejected, and finding in the disharmony the “other side” of being) that is capable of displaying the tragedy of truth. Shestov’s tragedy is essentially a “gnoseological tragedy,” in that it challenges the theory of knowledge. But in order to happen it requires an existential event—as understood in a Shestovian way, that is, something that contradicts knowledge and eventually truth itself. Shestov reads the whole evangelical story through this lens: it is right because it is “crucified,” he says, that truth is truth (see the aphorism “Cur Deus homo?” in Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 187). When Dostoevskii forgot this, that is, the actual meaning of the Gospel, even he lost the truth (cf. Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 221). The final truth, then, is a “living contradiction”—it is something unsolvable by definition. Like the agony of Christ, it has to be this way in order to be true.59 Shestov’s “third sailing” is the discovery and endurance of a living contradiction. It is the discovery that the last “warrant” of the truthfulness of 56 This is precisely the aspect of Shestov that so impressed Gilles Deleuze, for whom the Underground Man, in Shestov’s reading, is “the outcome of the Critique of Pure Reason in the sense of both culmination and exit” (Deleuze [C], 361). 57 This “existential option” as the inescapable condition to access the true knowledge of the world (and in Shestov’s case, that would imply the contradiction of knowledge itself) is also the reason why Shestov could interact quite naturally with Husserl, Heidegger, or Max Scheler (all of whom had a similar stance in their philosophy of knowledge), but not with the theologians, like Florenskii and Bulgakov, or with a metaphysician like Solov’ëv. Also, in my view, in the “existential option” lies the essential reason for Berdyaev’s conflict with Florenskii. 58 See the 1923 letter to Berdyaev in which Shestov points out the main reason for their division: “I argue with You, when you turn experience into ‘Truth,’ through the medium of the prerequisites of mind [ . . . ]. This disagreement explains all our disagreements. You enrich ideas, but I cannot endure the deification of ideas” (Shestov 17/1961 [A2], 257). 59 This is one of the central notions expressed by Shestov in his essay on Pascal: Shestov 8/1993 (A1), 287–288.

Conclusion

knowledge is the human person—and this (as is the “existential shift” of this understanding) is a living, suffering, and rejected person. It is, with Shestov’s Dostoevskii, the Underground Man. “Why ‘2+2=4’? Because it is me who evaluates it”—he could well say. The foundation of any logical necessity is the human person who says “yes” or “no.” This is clearly a paradox. But Shestov’s reflection on the Underground Man is entirely played on this level. In existential terms, the “underground” is the place of the discovery of this paradox— the experience that reveals and makes the paradox true; or rather, more than just “true” but—he would say, like Plotinus—“τὸ τιμιώτατον” [to timiotaton], i.e., “that which matters most.” In epistemological terms, the underground is the “behind” of reason because it marks the fundamental distance between an apparently founded result, the “value,” and the unfounded “valuer”—man. If the latter (man) is the ultimate “warrant,” then what is man? While a chasm seems to open up before us with this question, some recent tendencies, especially in Russian scholarship on Shestov, may be beneficial in addressing the fundamental question on “humanism” as the truest result of Shestovian thought.60 The presence of God in this case, rather than a feasible means to achieve a religious understanding of the world, is a necessary paradigm for such a third philosophical exploration: the quest for the limits of knowledge. God here is essentially the other than logos, and faith is what remains of the absence of reason. This is not naïve skepticism, as Shestov did not doubt the “first dimension;” nor is it irrationalism, since he led reason coherently up to its final border and never abandoned it during this path. It is rather the logical limit of reason, a necessary limit because it is not placed on the same level as reason but instead is placed before it, as it were, where a “before” must logically exist, just as, for an analytic philosopher like Hilary Putnam, an “objective value” must exist before any “statement of fact.”61 Ultimately, that value is established by the person who values. But what lies behind that person? This tragic question reveals the groundlessness, in Shestov’s terms. The radicality in which he poses this question, for Deleuze, is inevitable: it is here, Deleuze 60 See, in particular, Batova, Kudishina, Kurabtsev, Lashov (B2). Among the various ways to interpret Shestov, that of exploring a new humanism seems to me one of the most fruitful and perhaps most faithful to Shestov’s intentions. Shestov’s most fundamental question, in fact, the one that possibly underlies everything else, is “Who is man?”—and God, after all, is involved in his quest mainly to answer that question. 61 See Putnam’s crucial essay about this question: Hilary Putnam, “Fact and Value,” in Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [1st ed. 1981]), 127–149.

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says, that Shestov’s question “discovers its properly ontological import, the (non-)being of the question which cannot be reduced to the nonbeing of the negative” (Deleuze [C], 137). For Deleuze, the meaning of Shestov’s philosophy of tragedy is that “there are no ultimate or original responses or solutions, there are only problems-questions, in the guise of a mask behind every mask and a displacement behind every place” (137). Shestov arrived at this point, that is, he found his path towards the exploration of the aporetic nature of truth, starting from Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values. But he linked to it a specific Russian Neoplatonic sensitivity for “philosophy as crisis of logos” that he drew, at least implicitly, from Solovˈëv and the Slavophile tradition, but also from the whole cultural atmosphere of fin de siècle Russia. In a much more determined way than Plato could do or even wished to do, Neoplatonism set up the limits of logos precisely by considering it as a reflected image of reality. By so doing, the crisis of logos was affirmed, in such a way that logos itself—“by definition,” so to speak—was no longer able to describe the truest and most ultimate reality. Shestov reached this point in particular through Luther and Augustine (Luther who, in fact, disconnected from Thomas Aquinas and harked back to Augustine), both of whom should be pinpointed at the deepest core of his philosophical development. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, who were also imbued with this protestant religious-philosophical tension, gave Shestov an example of a peculiarly individual conflict within this view. Finally, Plotinus and Pascal provided a more general apophatic and “double” philosophical framework to Shestov’s position. All these, together, must be considered Shestov’s main philosophical references. In his own way, through this Christian, Neoplatonic, and Lutheran path, Shestov would rediscover his Jewish roots. He would in fact find an original synthesis of Christianity and Judaism in the idea of faith as the counter of reason within this fundamentally Neoplatonic frame of an aporetic logos. His originality lies in the fact that Athens and Jerusalem do not stand on the same level, there is a discontinuous relationship between them: Athens is the truth in opposition to the truth behind it—Jerusalem. No resolution or compromise is possible between the two truths that stand in an irreducible conflict, because both are true and antithetic, but also ineluctably tied to each other. The most authentic and perhaps only goal of all of Shestov’s work was not to build an alternative (whether nihilist or religious, or literary-existential) paradigm of thought—which, in effect, he never created (although, in his own times there were many examples for pursuing that way). His intent, instead, was to investigate the ultimate aporetic nature of Western logos.

Conclusion

His place within Western philosophy lies among those thinkers (who are, as a matter of fact, very few) who investigated not so much the foundations of the meaning of things, but rather the origin of the foundations of being, namely, what comes before being itself. As Berdyaev suspected, he was paradoxically a “metaphysician.” But his metaphysics is adequate to the object he tackled, that is, what comes before being and knowledge. For such an “apophatic metaphysics” (like Plotinus’ discourse on the One) must be totally inadequate to the usual knowledge of our world. I presume this was Shestov’s “metaphysical point” that Edmund Husserl was so interested in during their long conversations, of which we unfortunately have no record. Just as the furthest and most inaccessible places on Earth are rarely visited by people, this “ultimate metaphysics” is a scarcely frequented field in philosophy. Yet, as a part of the Neoplatonic tradition—most notably expressed in Plotinus—demonstrated, it is still rational thought, still Western philosophy.

4. Afterword: Reading between the Lines With such an “extreme” thinker as Shestov, there are probably only two options. Either we dismiss his thought like so many commentators did, that is, as a thought made of personal obsessions, recurring themes, and—as Berdyaev used to say—of only “one fundamental [osnovnaya] idea” that he applied every time to different authors and problems; or, for whatever reason, we trust in his “idea” and his “subjective critique.” There are cases in which, as Paul Rostenne observed with reference to Shestov, in order to understand a writer, the reader must look not at his errors but at his courage in seeking new ways that stem from the awareness of the finitude of any system of human knowledge, for “there is neither a theology nor a morality that is capable of fully grasping human reality and, even less, divine reality” (cf. Rostenne 1964 [B3], 339). Undoubtedly, Shestov had his own way of dealing with literary and philosophical issues. In this regard, Rostenne affirmed that “it is absolutely necessary to learn to read between the lines” of Shestov’s thought, even of his repetitions or “historical unreliability” (340). In the same way, his lifelong friend and translator, but also one of his finest critics, Boris de Schloezer, warned his readers that in merely retaining the literal meaning of Shestov’s texts “one inevitably overlooks the essence” (Schloezer 1966a [B3], 7).62 62 Boris de Schloezer explicitly deals with the problem of “how to read Shestov” in his introduction to the French edition of The Philosophy of Tragedy and The Apotheosis of Groundlessness

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Some of Shestov’s closest friends—as for example Benjamin Fondane, Boris de Schloezer, and Georgii Adamovich63—were aware of this fact: that he often concealed his real thoughts and intentions under an opposite attitude. He often insisted on the negative side to highlight the positive one. He seemed critical when he was sympathetic, and detached or self-centered when he was actually deeply concerned and generously open to others.64 Only in this light it is possible to understand the particular relationships he had—with Tolstoi, Berdyaev, and Husserl, to give just a few examples—where nothing was quite what it appeared to be: he attacked Tolstoi while the latter was in fact his “hero;” he sternly criticized Berdyaev and Husserl, who he used explicitly to call his “friend” and “master.” Furthermore, he preached antimorality and subjectivism—at least “philosophically”—but in his life he was (as everyone actually remembers him) the most loveable, open-minded, and generous man. He showed no interest in politics but his rare analyses in that field were always illuminating and often “hit the mark.” He never openly professed a religion or committed himself to a religious practice, but his views on Judaism and Christianity were striking and original, and showed passion and a deep concern with finding the crucial questions that linked the two traditions. A reader who relied solely on what he expressed in his texts would probably never get to the bottom of such contradictions. Shestov’s ideas, in fact, were never concerned with a first level of the meaning of things but, once again, as if in a second dimension of thought, they always displayed a cutoff point of facts and of meaning itself. It is my opinion that, within this “ultimate” level—the crisis of logos (which is the crisis of epistemic logos, but also the crisis of morals and of (see Schloezer 1966a [B3], 7–20). 63 In his essay “Vyacheslav Ivanov i Lev Shestov,” Adamovich maintains that however subjective and incomplete they may be, Shestov’s readings, or better his “guesses and hints” on Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Chekhov, and Pushkin, nonetheless say something very important that transcends an objective view of those authors and goes beyond the same goal of literary criticism (see Adamovich 2016 [B3], 209). 64 On the latter aspect, there is a very significant testimony by Boris de Schloezer who precisely describes Shestov’s acute sensitivity—albeit in his own way—about historical events and the pain of the people: see Boris Shlëtser, “Pamyati L. I. Shestova,” in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 437. Schloezer also recalls Shestov’s extraordinary generosity towards people (a fact that was actually acknowledged by everyone who met him in person): “Shestov’s soul was completely open. This person, so complex, rich and strong, turned out to be completely devoid of egocentrism and self-love, and Shestov really became ‘everything for everyone,’ not by softness or sensitivity, not passively, but effectively [ . . . ]. Now, when I think about him, the image that arises to me above all is not that of an ingenious thinker, but one of an exceptionally responsive person aspiring to help everyone” (439).

Conclusion

art)65—Shestov reached many right conclusions. Because of this “detached view,” perhaps, many of his intuitions were confirmed by history as they survived an ideological opposition in their own times: I am mostly thinking of Nietzsche’s and Dostoevskii’s tragic interpretations here. But it would be interesting to also reconsider in this light, for example, his judgments on Judaism and Christianity, on Russian culture and thought, as well as his “alternative” analyses of Luther, Kierkegaard, Chekhov, Solovˈëv, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Ibsen, and, most of all, of Plotinus—this key figure of Shestov’s entire thought. From his disenchanted point of view—and putting aside for a moment the usual scheme he applied to those authors (i.e., a tragic turning point that follows an early idealistic phase)—he always recognized something highly significant and original in the figures he considered. To affirm that Shestov “was right” beyond his personal obsessions and his repetitive schemes is perhaps a hazardous supposition and clearly a “mot de sympathie” towards him. In all cases, however, he was not interested in producing an objective view on things, just as he was not interested in the facts of history, or in art and literature per se, in theology, in ideologies, or even in gaining any practical advantage in his life.66 This should be sufficient to at least suspend any judgment that requires such content from his activity and works. He was, in fact, looking for something else: essentially, he sought a world of intuitions that lay behind the authors themselves. For him, everything that was authentically true originated from a “sudden” detachment (an eksaiphnos ekstasis, as he repeated in accordance with Plotinus’ words) from the necessity of truth, as well as from anything that all the positive theories and beliefs might offer. When all these theories are already beyond our consideration, and when only the most essential part of the human soul remains (in what, with regard to Shestov, Deleuze called the “eternal displacement”),67 Shestov, with his peculiarly “subjective critique” and with his wholehearted sincerity, very often—and similarly to Lev Tolstoi—achieves the result of being, paradoxically, a credible witness.

65 In a Shestovian meaning, this crisis occurs when a “theory” is not interesting as a theory but for what makes it possible, i.e., for the basis of the theory itself. 66 On the fact that Shestov admittedly did not search for objectivity, see Schloezer’s observations in Boris Shlëtser, “Lev Shestov. K 70-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya” (Schloezer 1936 [B3]), in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 422–426. 67 See Deleuze (C), 137.

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Appendices

The choice of assigning to the appendix section the following three essays concerning Shestov’s relationships with Edmund Husserl, Nikolai Berdyaev, and Benjamin Fondane should not be seen as a diminution of their importance. On the contrary, these essays have been excluded from the generally chronological development of this book precisely because they appear too relevant to belong to a particular “phase” or time of Shestov’s thought. Not only did these three relationships continue throughout a large or highly significant part of his life, but they also had a transversal meaning within it. Edmund Husserl was, in many ways, a “master” to Shestov (or, at least, Shestov considered him so). Nikolai Berdyaev was “the friend” who accompanied his life through all its changes and new beginnings. Benjamin Fondane was Shestov’s “disciple,” and most likely his only one. Understanding Shestov from these three perspectives—his “teacher,” his “fellow traveler,” and his “follower”—gives a better understanding of his philosophical figure as a whole, with all its original premises, its conflicts, and its outcomes. Above all, in a particularly valuable way, it allows us to see, at a single glance, where his philosophical path started and where it arrived.

I

Shestov and Husserl

1. In his conversations with Fondane, Shestov mentions Edmund Husserl a number of times,1 often referring to him as his “master.” It is evident from the tone of these quotes as well as from the letters they exchanged that the two shared a sincere, possibly uncommon friendship, and that they also greatly esteemed each other. But, as far as Husserl’s texts and ideas were concerned, Shestov was always very critical. In reality, he never assimilated a single notion from Husserl into his own thought, and he never really dealt with his entire oeuvre or with his more specifically phenomenological theory. In all circumstances, Husserl seemed more an adversary than a master to Shestov. On many occasions, Shestov ranked him as his greatest philosophical enemy: the one he “had to fight.” It is not simple, therefore, to figure out the real nature of this “master-disciple” relationship and of what teaching Husserl may have provided him. But Shestov apparently saw the situation from a different perspective. “It is good to read one’s adversaries, and to admire them,” he said to Benjamin Fondane in 1934 (Fondane [B1], 67). Since André Malraux could not understand his attacks on Husserl, Shestov remarked: “I realized that Malraux did not understand anything about this. We must not underestimate our opponents. And Husserl, who I fought, has been a master for me, my master. Without him, 1 In the index of Rencontres avec Léon Chestov (Fondane [B1]) the name of Husserl has nearly as many entries as the most quoted names of Berdyaev, Dostoevskii, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard. Natalˈya Baranova’s second book The Life of Lev Shestov also contains numerous pages and quotations concerning Husserl. The relationship between Shestov and Husserl has been dealt with in a few contemporary studies. Among these, see, in particular, Valevicius (B2), 99–120; Szepieniec (B3); Chubarov (B3); Porus 2006 (B3); Preobrazhenskii (B3); and R. Fotiade, “Evidence et conscience,” in Struve-Laurent (B2), 111–125.

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I would not have had the courage to fight against the self-evidences!” (67).2 A year later, in 1935, he said: “I met Husserl, my master after Dostoevskii, my true master” (80). And also (in recalling a conversation they had): “‘And whatever you do, I am your pupil,’ said Shestov to Husserl who, aged seventy, could not understand that he could have a disciple, or even a ‘counterdisciple’ in this old Russian philosopher, who was nearing his sixties” (101). This paradoxical apprenticeship must be understood in the wider context of Shestov’s thought, which, as a tragic thought, is actually filled with such antipodal elements. The role of Husserl in Shestov’s life and the development of his thought is neither obvious nor simple to understand. On the one hand, we have at our disposal the written texts, three essays in total, that Shestov devoted to Husserl between 1917 and 1938 (the latter on the occasion of Husserl’s death)—whereas Husserl did not write anything on Shestov, nor even mentioned him in his texts. Shestov’s essays treat Husserl not as a friend, nor as a teacher, but as a real opponent—except perhaps for some gentler tones in the last text he wrote, but this was also due to the circumstances. In these works, there is seemingly no sense of continuity between the two, but only a clear statement of what for Shestov philosophy should not be: that is, Husserl’s theory of knowledge. On the other hand, however, there is an entirely different—largely unwritten—story that tells of an extraordinary friendship and esteem between the two; of long conversations they continued throughout the night;3 and—speaking of their philosophical positions—of a perfect balance of opposites. This parallel story is traceable through their correspondence, through the scattered memories of their friends, and through the testimonies of Fondane, Natalˈya Baranova, and of Shestov himself. It seemed strange to many that Shestov and Husserl—two such different personalities—could get along together as they did. It was incomprehensible to Husserl himself, who, when they were in Freiburg (on November 1928), once introduced Shestov to some American philosophers who went to find 2 Here Shestov is mentioning an ongoing personal process that started with all the essays collected in his book Potestas Clavium in which he identified in the self-evidence of reason, i.e., in the inescapable “necessity” underlying it, the key element around which an entire Western civilization arose and developed. Shestov acknowledged this fact with a better awareness than in his previous output, starting from his study on Western philosophy and in his first essay on Husserl. 3 See Benjamin Fondane’s description of Shestov’s visit to Husserl in Freiburg (Germany) in November 1928: “Shestov and Husserl spent the whole night talking together and began again the following day, even more intently. Husserl’s wife said: ‘It is impossible to separate them anymore—they are like two lovers’” (Fondane [B1], 94).

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

him in this way: “Let me introduce you to Lev Shestov [ . . . ]. This is the man who dared to write the most violent criticism ever made against me—and this is the reason for our friendship” (94). Shestov tried more than once to explain this anomaly, actually not always in a convincing way, or, in other words, in his explanation he often employed the paradox that Husserl was so close to him precisely because he was the best at defending the exigencies of reason, that is, he built up such a solid rational construction that suddenly there was a real necessity to fight against it. To some extent, in Shestov’s view, Husserl “provoked” and obliged him to “take the field” in this regard: “It is your autonomous self-evidences—Shestov jokingly told Husserl during their first meeting in April 1928—outside reason and man, that would be true even if man did not exist, it is them that pushed me. . . . And so, if ever in the next life I am accused of having fought against the self-evidences, I will not fail to hold you responsible for it! It is you who will be burned in my stead!” (93). The first of the three articles Shestov dedicated to Husserl’s thought was published in 1917 with the title “Memento Mori. On Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Knowledge.”4 According to Natalˈya Baranova, it was probably the philosopher Gustav Shpet—a friend of Shestov and a student of Husserl, whose courses he attended at the University of Göttingen in 1912–1913—who introduced Shestov to Husserl’s philosophy. Shestov’s critique of Husserl is exclusively based on two works: Logische Untersuchungen [Logical Investigations] (1900–1901) and Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft [Philosophy as Rigorous Science] (1911). In his analyses of Husserl, Shestov hardly deals with the question of phenomenological intuition, or with the problem of intentionality, and even less with the Husserl’s questions regarding the structures of consciousness. The core of Shestov’s criticism focuses on a more general issue: that is, the rationality of phenomenology and the scientific status of philosophy. It is the latter question, in particular, that seems to preoccupy Shestov most in his article “Memento mori.” Husserl is the last and most perfect representative of a tendency that, starting from Greek philosophy onward, aimed at making philosophy the science par excellence. According to Shestov, in the eternal dispute between whether to define philosophy as wisdom or as science, Husserl with no doubts opted for the second option (cf. Shestov 7/2007 [A1], 204–206). For Shestov, in making this choice “Husserl adopts his problem from Greek philosophy” 4 Lev I. Shestov, “Memento mori. Po povodu teorii poznaniya Edmunda Gusserlya,” Voprosy filosofii i psikhologii 139–140 (September–December 1917): 1–68.

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(212). His thought is the direct derivation of Aristotle and the antithesis of Plotinus’ view for whom, as Shestov repeats, philosophy is “that which matters most” [to timiotaton] (209). This opposition between Plotinus’ view and almost the entire classic Western tradition, of which Husserl represents the peak and the latest example, accompanies all of Shestov’s reasoning. Unlike his predecessors, unlike Plato and Aristotle, Husserl no longer needs metaphysics. His theory of knowledge is perfectly self-sufficient in that it can renounce God and the Forms and still save itself from relativism (226–227). With a strict analysis of the Logical Investigations, Shestov is interested in following Husserl’s struggle against psychological relativism. In fact, according to Shestov, Husserl eventually wins his fight. He succeeds in making the gnoseological point of view win over the psychological one. Moreover, his victory is even more decisive than that of other philosophers in history because he needs nothing other than evidence itself—no external bonds, no justification, no theory of forms—to prove his argument. In a way, Shestov provocatively suggests, “it is possible to say that this is what his theory of knowledge aspires to: to abolishing any theory of knowledge. This, indeed, would be the supreme triumph of rationalism, as it would finally reveal that reason does not need any justification, as it can, in fact, justify everything” (232). Shestov takes Husserl’s position to the limit in order to highlight the nature of the problem he is interested in. He aims at finding a way out from this dominion of the self-evidence of reason. Unlike Husserl, he posits the irreducible antithesis between reason and reality (241). For Shestov, to conciliate rationality with reality, the ideal with the individual, by linking them back to a single category of being with equal rights, “is not the solution, but an eclipse of the problem” (241). What seems to bother Shestov most in Husserl’s Logical Investigations is the idea that “2x2=4” is meant to exist even if not a single human were alive in this world. This conclusion has the power to annihilate every individual, including Socrates. Once again, Shestov needs to rely on Plotinus to respond with the fact that Socrates himself is to timiotaton, not the evidence or the “idea” of Socrates. For Plotinus, Shestov writes, “without the living Socrates, philosophy itself is useless” (245). But science, and Husserl with it, is in no way willing to admit this (247). In Shestov’s view, there is one main problem in Western thought (of which Husserl is an exemplary guardian), that is, the absolutism of reason, which ignores and despises the timiotaton (248). In effect, as Shestov acknowledges at the end of his essay, the timiotaton has really no words to oppose to Husserl’s “self-evidences” in the same way as Dostoevskii’s Christ had nothing to say to the

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

Grand Inquisitor (266). But nonetheless it is there—it exists, and it is the most worthy thing. 2. Making Husserl the ultimate champion of Positivism—as Shestov apparently did—might seem to those who are familiar with his efforts to fight against precisely this view of science unfair at the very least. To all appearances, however, Shestov seems to neglect this aspect of Husserl’s thought as well as his historical role in opposing certain philosophical tendencies that might well be considered antithetical to Shestov. In other words, if Shestov’s goal was to counter a theory of truth based on logical or scientific evidence, he had plenty of better targets in his day than Husserl. This might also be the reason why Max Scheler was so disappointed with Shestov’s article that he exclaimed: “Why did you attack Husserl so impetuously?”5 The inconsistency of Shestov’s remarks towards Husserl’s philosophy are also the major point in Gustav Shpet’s defense of his mentor against Shestov’s criticism. Shpet wrote a prompt rebuttal to Shestov’s article, probably around 1917–1918, in which he responded point by point to each of his arguments.6 While it is not possible to analyze all Shpet’s counterobjections here in detail,7 it is interesting to observe the conclusions at which he arrives. These conclusions regard Shestov more than Husserl. For Shpet, what Shestov makes Husserl say, that is, that “that science will solve ‘all questions that concern humanity!’” is simply false. In fact, Shpet objects, “it will solve only its own questions in its own statement; science, for example, raises the question of the growth of an idea, the conditions of that growth, etc., but the Shestovian interpretation suggests something else” (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 5 This episode is quoted by Shestov himself in his third article on Husserl, Shestov 11/1982 (A1), 267 (in German in Shestov’s text). 6 This text remained unpublished during the author’s life. In 2010 Tatʹyana Shchedrina edited this manuscript, entitled “Rabochie zametki k statʹyam L. I. Shestova ‘Memento mori (po povodu teorii poznaniya Edmunda Gusserlya)’ i ‘Samoochevidnye istiny’” [Working Notes on L. I. Shestov’s Articles “Memento Mori (On Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Knowledge)” and “Self-Evident Truths”] (see Shpet 2010 [B3], 210–221). She subsequently reprinted it in the collection of essays L. I. Shestov: Pro et contra (Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 279–290). On the relationships between Shestov and Shpet, see Shchedrina (B3), Denn-Shchedrina-Pruzhinin (B3), and Porus 2006 (B3). The available correspondence between the two friends, Shestov and Shpet, can be found in Shestov 28/1999 (A2) and in Shchedrina 2005 (C). 7 These are based on two main argumentations: on the one hand, Shestov’s alleged misunderstanding of Husserl’s thought; on the other, the lack of clarification of Shestov’s own “positive” thought (i.e., that which remains beyond its constantly negative affirmations). In fact, as Shpet maintains, had the latter been expressed, it would probably not be too distant from Husserl’s position.

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280). It is true, as Shpet observes, that sometimes Shestov defends relativistic assertions that Husserl openly attacks, but “he never proves its relativism nor does he deny Husserl” (282). In most cases, however, he is on the same side as Husserl: he does not want the world knowledge that Husserl also does not want. Overall, Shpet ironically argues, Shestov’s is a valuable article: to attack phenomenology in such a way, and yet not thereby reach the goal is indicative! [ . . . ] If I have correctly conveyed Shestov’s positive thought, then I will allow myself to welcome Shestov as a new Husserlian! [ . . . ] After all, Husserl wants only one thing: to not pass philosophy off as knowledge, strictly speaking. But Shestov does not want this either. Once again he is a Husserlian, or... or “hammering at an open door” as the Russian idiom phrases it! (282)

In Shpet’s view, phenomenology has nothing to do with the quest for the “last truth,” as Shestov would imply (285), which makes Husserl and Shestov two complementary figures who simply search for different things. They are antipodal because one (Husserl) investigates the deepest nature of knowledge, while the other, Shestov, studies the ultimate limits and the outside of knowledge. But they are not in contradiction. The real difference between them, according to Shpet, is that Shestov has no interest in providing philosophical argumentations or explanations, on the contrary he “is only interested in ‘how morality is possible,’ and he easily destroys the epistemologists, showing not only the insufficiency of their constructions for the ‘science of morality,’ but especially for morality itself ” (288). “He likes gnoseological questions,” Shpet says, “but he criticizes gnoseological norms in terms of their application to morality” (288). This is, for Shpet, Shestov’s main fault: shifting gnoseology into the field of morality (290). The difficulty of dialoguing with Shestov, according to his friend Gustav Shpet, would thus lie in this fact: that he is never interested in the subject of thought, but only in the “subject” expressing that thought; “He is a psychologist in the best and most accurate sense” (287). Shestov’s article “Memento mori” appeared right in the midst of the Russian Revolution and, possibly because of this, it did not attract a lot of attention. But when, in 1926, it was translated into French,8 and incidentally 8 Léon Chestov, “Memento mori. A propos de la théorie de la connaissance d’Edmond Husserl,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 1–2 ( January–February 1926): 5–62.

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

it also happened to be one of the first works to introduce Husserl’s thought in France, it raised an intense debate on the German philosopher among his French audience. One author who felt the urgency of replying to Shestov to defend Husserl from his attacks was the Alsatian philosopher and theologian Jean Hering.9 In his article “Sub specie aeternitatis,”10 Hering assumed a generally dogmatic—and even theological—point of view to support his defense. In turn, Shestov was invited to immediately reply to Jean Hering’s article, both in French and in German translation.11 In a long and well-structured reasoning, Shestov disproves Hering’s dogmatic view with the fact that Husserl would be the first to not assume all the religious and “wise” concerns Hering attributes to him. Shestov here repeats his well-known arguments against Husserl: first of all, the separation he makes between philosophy as truth and philosophy as wisdom, in which only the first really rules and matters. For Shestov, this is not at all a mistake or a weak point in Husserl’s philosophy, but is in fact its greatest merit. Husserl is a “very great philosopher of the modern period”—as Shestov would state at the end of his last article on him (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 293)— precisely by virtue of this fact. Hence Shestov’s deep tendency to develop a tragic view on life and a tragic thought from such a view is evident. Not only his own position, but also his adversary’s point of view must be the most radical 9 Jean Hering (1890–1966) was first a student of Husserl at the University of Göttingen, where he was also acquainted with Alexandre Koyré, Roman Ingarden, and Edith Stein, and later on in the 1920s—when he was appointed maître de conferences for New Testament theology at the University of Strasbourg—he played an important role in spreading Husserl’s philosophy in France. Hering made his career as a theologian, but he always maintained close relations with Husserl, who he regularly visited in Freiburg, often with Ingarden. In particular, Hering had an active role in connecting Emmanuel Levinas (who was his student at Strasbourg) with Husserl and in arranging the translation of Husserl’s Paris lectures, with the help of Levinas and Koyré, which resulted in the publication of the Méditations cartésiennes in 1931. Hering also became known to the public, however, because of his dispute with Shestov, between 1926 and 1927, regarding his defense of Husserl from Shestov’s attacks. On the history of this debate between Hering and Shestov as well as on the influence of these two “pioneers” in introducing Husserl to France, see Dupont 2015 (C) and 2014 (C), 110–118. On the early reception of phenomenology in France, see Dupont 2014 (C). 10 Jean Hering, “Sub specie aeternitatis: Eine Erwiderung auf L. Schestovs Artikel ‘Memento mori,’ enthaltend eine Kritik an der Husserlschen Philosophie,” Philosophischer Anzeiger 2, no. 1 (1927): 53–72. 11 Lev I. Shestov, “Chto takoe istina? (Otvet na statʹyu J. Hering ob avtore)” [What Is Truth? (Reply to J. Hering’s Article on the Author)], Sovremennye zapiski 30 (1927): 286–326. The same article had vast repercussions thanks to its two translations in French and in German, which appeared at almost the same time in the journals Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 1, no. 1 (1927): 36–74; and in Philosophischer Anzeiger 2, no. 1 (1927): 73–114. This text was later included in Shestov’s collection of essays In Job’s Balance: Shestov 8/1929 (A1).

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one. In this respect, even Husserl belongs to the tragic. Significantly, along the same lines, Shestov turns his reply to Hering to a different subject: the logos of Husserl vs. the logos of Job and of Christ. It is not the same logos: but only such opposites—unlike all the “intermediates”—can stand in this opposition. Instantly, Husserl is no longer the subject of Shestov’s essay. For three-quarters of its length, in fact, this article is dedicated to the history of Greek philosophy from this exact point of view: the inner fight, within Western philosophy, between an epistemic and a tragic view. The first was pursued by Aristotle and by Western science (Shestov names: Euclid, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Newton, Lobachevskii, and Einstein), and by Husserl (cf. Shestov 8/1993 [A1], 379). The second, having its main premises in Platonic thought, found its most courageous representative in Plotinus (383). It should not seem strange that in an essay on Husserl, Shestov dedicates three-quarters of the space to Greek philosophy and, perhaps, one-quarter of the latter to Plotinus. Shestov sees Plotinus as Husserl’s most authentic antithesis—the only philosopher who can stand up to him in this tragic logic of antipodes. In Shestov’s view, Plotinus was the one who, after having used reason as his most trusted ally, at a certain point radically doubts it. From his doubt, he derived the conviction that truth has no need of any justification or any foundation. It can stand alone, on nothing. As Shestov concludes: “This was, with Plotinus, the last point of arrival of Greek philosophy, the same philosophy that during ten centuries strived to submit the human spirit to reason and necessity. It was to reach this point that Plotinus started his ‘great and extreme’ struggle” (402). Shestov took his reply to Hering very seriously, and this article is perhaps one of the best summaries of his thought, in which it is possible to follow its entire philosophical path, from Nietzsche to Dostoevskii, to Greek philosophy and finally to the Bible. Indeed, he gave the article the most emblematically philosophical title: “What is truth?” Shestov’s truth, however, as a tragic truth, does not merely side with Plotinus, as one might think. It does not exclude Husserl but, on the contrary, as Shestov states in his conclusion, it includes him as an essential part of it (cf. 402). According to Christian Dupont, this Hering-Shestov debate, since it was among the first regarding Husserl in France, in many ways influenced the French reception of Husserl and of phenomenology: for instance, it opened the way—later followed by Jean-Luc Marion—to a religious development of phenomenology. Moreover, Dupont writes, “Hering and Shestov may also have been partly responsible for the tendency among later French interpreters to conflate Husserlian and Hegelian phenomenologies” (Dupont 2015 [C], 145). Shestov’s position on Husserl certainly exerted a decisive influence on

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

Fondane who, in his analysis on the German philosopher, followed and partly radicalized Shestov’s point of view in comparing a Husserlian “transcendental idealism” to an authentic “existential thought.”12 The first meeting between Shestov and Husserl took place after both the article “Memento mori” and the debate with Hering had already occurred. Husserl was well aware of all of these texts, as he had a personal interest in what was, to all intents and purposes, a first introduction of his thought to the French audience. This meeting happened in Amsterdam, in April 1928, where Shestov and Husserl were both invited to hold lectures at the Philosophical Society of Amsterdam: Shestov was surprised that Husserl himself should wish to meet in person with this Russian philosopher who had so fiercely attacked him in his writings. The two would meet again a few more times between 1928 and 1930, in Freiburg and in Paris.13 On these occasions, as Husserl’s letters to Shestov prove, their debate moved increasingly towards an intimate friendship and also mutual assistance in finding connections in France and Germany for their lectures and publications. It was Shestov, for instance, who helped decisively in making Husserl’s first 12 In a 1929 article he dedicated to Husserl and in his book La conscience malheureuse (1936), while starting from Shestov’s criticism regarding the separation in Husserl between philosophy/science and philosophy/wisdom, Fondane develops the same point turning Husserl’s Meditations into a conflict—as he writes in La conscience malheureuse—between “une pensée philosophique qui se pense et qui se regarde penser et vivre” and “une pensée en tant qu’existence” [a philosophical thought that thinks itself and looks at itself thinking and living, and a thought as existence] (Fondane 2013 [B3], 51; Fondane’s), which is the same as the difference between a phenomenological and an existential philosophy. However acknowledging the radical difference of Husserl’s phenomenology with the Kantian criticism and of course with empiricism, in terms of making more room for the human conscience, Fondane still defends individual freedom within the existential space, from the absolute claims of Husserlian evidences. In this regard, while contesting Max Scheler’s opinion about the similarities between Husserl’s and Bergson’s intuition, Fondane writes, “We are facing here a philosophy of intuition that has nothing to do with Bergson’s intuition, in spite of the identity of the word [ . . . ]. In Bergson it is about a dynamic, irrational and antirational act standing in the middle of a concrete experience [ . . . ]. Nothing of that in Husserl: intuition is an intellectual act and a psychic point that only aims at absolute knowledge, at ideal and extratemporal things that are not only independent from the real (which is however suspended) but from the same reason” (335–336). On Fondane as a reader of Husserl, see Monseu (C). 13 Shestov himself writes extensively about his first and subsequent meetings with Husserl in his third and last article on the German philosopher: see Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 267–272. More information about the Shestov-Husserl friendship and about their meetings can be found in their correspondence (Husserl [B1]); in Natalˈya Baranova (Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 9–66); and in Karl Schuhmann, ed., Husserl-Chronik. Denk- und Lebensweg Edmund Husserls (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977).

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lecture in France, at the Sorbonne, possible.14 Through Husserl, Shestov also had the opportunity to meet and establish a personal relationship with Heidegger, Wilhelm Baumgardner, Fritz Kaufmann, Max Scheler, and other German disciples of Husserl. In their conversations, they exchanged information about their respective sources: Shestov talked to Husserl about Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, but also about Nietzsche and in particular Plotinus, about whom—as Shestov reports (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 285)—Husserl knew almost nothing; and most importantly Husserl introduced Shestov to Kierkegaard, whose name and thought (to his great shame) he had never heard of before 1928–1929. Shestov recalled this fact, and his endless gratitude to Husserl for it, many times. Shestov describes Husserl as an openminded man: they diverged in their views on the definition of philosophy, but when Shestov once quoted to him an expression by Aristotle on Plato being “forced by truth itself ” to believe that Socrates had been poisoned, Husserl was nonetheless attracted by Shestov’s rebellion against this necessity “as though, in the depths of his being, he had already long since recognized that the Aristotelian ‘forced by truth itself ’ contained a kind of falsehood or betrayal” (272). Overall, in Shestov’s words about Husserl it is always surprising to read that he felt Husserl completely understood him. He stressed the fact that Husserl was capable of grasping the very core of what he tried to say in his writings, like no other was able to do: “He is the only man in the world that I could imagine did not have to understand my questions. And he is one of the few to have understood, or better!, to have heard these questions” (Fondane [B1], 93–94).15 A particularly meaningful sentence from an author who, despite the seeming clarity of his texts, always complained about others’ incomprehension. It is equally remarkable that such a unique understanding of Shestov’s thought came from an author who appeared antipodal to him. The very term “antipode” was used, in fact, by Husserl himself in addressing Shestov in an amicable way in one of his letters (“Dear antipode

14 This is attested to by Husserl himself in a letter to Roman Ingarden from July 18, 1928 (see Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 14–15). 15 In a conversation with Fondane (1936), Shestov repeated the same idea this time in contrast to Max Scheler who was a believer and a “catholic Husserlian,” and turned phenomenology into a religious philosophy but, according to Shestov, “he never understood Husserl” (and Husserl himself, as Shestov reports, “did not appreciate him”). On the contrary, “Husserl understood, and he did understand my problems even though he was neither a believer nor a catholic” (Fondane [B1], 110).

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

[ . . . ]”).16 In the same letter Husserl, as was his wont, goes straight to the point and declares the most crucial convergence between him and Shestov: You know how seriously I take your efforts to disclose the world of God (Gotteswelt) for yourself and for all of us; a world in which one can live and die authentically, even though your ways could never become my ways. Thoughts like yours, however, which have their origin in the deepest personal necessity, I take no less seriously than my own of which I can say that they also present an absolute must for me.17

While Husserl’s words displaying a “world of God” (Gotteswelt)—as the place for “personal authenticity” and a sort of higher existential synthesis of the well-known “world of Life” (Lebenswelt) in his phenomenology—are not devoid of consequences, since they reveal “another Husserl,” a Husserl who was almost certainly influenced by Shestov, there is also another aspect that emerges from Husserl’s way of addressing his friend. Three years later, in response to Shestov’s request for permission to dedicate his imminent book to him,18 Husserl reveals his deep admiration for Shestov with the most unequivocal words: That a text in which an anima candida like yours reveals its deepest desire, hope and insight should not appeal to my heart and not to bring me joy as a dedication—that I should first read it and then give my permission?! No, I am writing right away even before having read any more than the title. The name Shestov is enough; he himself naturally and essentially always the same, who will not write a single word unless it is in a devout cast of mind—within his calling, within his vocation.19 16 This appellative was not exclusively used for Shestov, as Husserl—in a 1931 letter to Ingarden—adopted it also to address Scheler and Heidegger, whom he called his “antipodes,” but in this case (unlike in Shestov’s case) with a negative meaning (“Briefe an Roman Ingarden” [Letter to Roman Ingarden], April 19, 1931, in Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 3, ed. K. Schuhmann [Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994], 273). 17 Edmund Husserl’s letter to Lev Shestov ( July 3, 1929) (Ms. 2117 [vol. 7], file 204, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). 18 In the end, this book was never published. Parts of it were later incorporated into Athens and Jerusalem and into Speculation and Revelation. 19 Edmund Husserl’s letter to Lev Shestov (April 14, 1931) (Ms. 2118 [vol. 8], file 189, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris).

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Husserl is more focused on who writes rather than on what is written. Once more, on this occasion he reveals himself to share with Shestov a decisive belief—that is, the “Kierkegaardian” lesson of existential singularity representing the most essential part in philosophy. Beyond everything else, Shestov and Husserl shared also a deep bond because of their common Jewish roots. They used to talk about this. In particular, in a letter dated May 29, 1933, Husserl expresses all his preoccupation regarding the new political situation in Germany that has already caused problems for him, his son and his son-in-law.20 The last essay Shestov wrote on Husserl represented a special case not only because it was composed on the occasion of Husserl’s death, but also because it would be Shestov’s last article—in a way, it has been said, his own swan song—as he would die shortly after having written this text in memory of his friend.21 The general tone of this article is different from his 1917 essay. While in the central part of the essay, Shestov revisits—with a gentler tone—a number of argumentations from his first article on Husserl to explain the reason for his fight “against” his self-evidence, the beginning and end are filled with considerations of a different nature. At the beginning of the article, he recalls his first meeting with Husserl and his long conversations with him, whereas at the end he discusses the role of Kierkegaard (somehow identifying himself with the Danish philosopher) as Husserl’s real antipode. He also wonders why it was right of Husserl to suggest he should read the works of Kierkegaard. Shestov arrives at a conclusion that is in some ways original to him. He describes Kierkegaard (along with Nietzsche) and Husserl as equivalent—the two antithetic sides of the same true knowledge, where all the pieces in the middle represent the inauthentic parts. It is possible to understand and judge Husserl—Shestov writes—only if one grasps his profound inner relation to Kierkegaard. Husserl submits to the compulsion of truth and finds his revelation in the self-evidence of reason; Kierkegaard, his heart full of “fear and trembling,” seeks his revelation at that point where reason sees the beginning of a realm of eternal nothingness. (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 291) 20 Edmund Husserl’s letter to Lev Shestov (May 29, 1933) (Ms. 2119 [vol. 9], file 146, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). This is the last letter from Husserl to Shestov kept in the Archive. 21 Lev I. Shestov, “Pamyati velikogo filosofa. Edmund Gusserlʹ,” Russkie zapiski 12 (December 1938): 126–145; and 13 ( January 1939): 107–116. The same text was then added to the posthumously published collection Speculation and Revelation: Shestov 11/1964 (A1).

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

In the Kierkegaardian Entweder-Oder [Either-Or], Shestov argues (288–289), one of the two places is for Husserl—not for Kant or Aristotle.22 Husserl’s greatness, in his view, coincides with a great radicality that makes him an extreme thinker.23 In this sense, for Shestov, the fact that it was right for Husserl to direct him towards Kierkegaard is not casual but it is, on the contrary, full of consequences. As he puts it, only a perfectly polar opposition can reveal the shape of truth: this is why Heidegger did not belong there.24 Precisely with regard to Heidegger, it is possible to understand this seemingly contradictory alliance between Shestov and Husserl. That which Husserl overall did not accept about Heidegger, that is, the ontological primacy of the Dasein, was at least intuitively the same thing Shestov refused in Heidegger when he defined his Sein und Zeit “a quite a-philosophical contraband” (Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 20). As Husserl made clear in his 1931 Berlin lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology” [Phänomenologie 22 Shestov makes this point clear in Shestov 11/1982 (A1), 280–281. Contrary to what he previously affirmed in 1917, Shestov now compares Husserl to Kant. In fact, he maintains that Husserl is close to Plato in the radicality of their choices, whereas Aristotle and Kant stand in those “temperate zones of human and cosmic life” that “are not in the least like the poles or the equator” (280). 23 “His Einstellung [attitude], as he calls it, is directed not only against contemporary philosophy but also against Kant, who, despite the radical character of his ‘critique of pure reason,’ could not resist introducing a contraband into his philosophy—the postulates concerning God, the immortality of the soul, and freedom. Husserl, faithful to the tasks which he set himself, remains closer to Plato” (281). 24 In a letter to Max Eitingon from June 14, 1928, quoted by Natalˈya Baranova, Shestov clearly affirms this: “I have already mastered Heidegger [probably Being and Time, n.b.]. It is actually an extremely interesting book. But it is not phenomenology, it is an attempt to pass in the domain of philosophy, under the flag of phenomenology, a quite a-philosophical contraband” (Baranoff-Chestov 1993 [B1], 20). In the same letter, Shestov wonders with some curiosity what Husserl possibly thought of Being and Time (20). While he probably never had an answer to his question during his lifetime, a quite detailed statement by Husserl about Heidegger’s Being and Time would come from his posthumously published “Randbemerkungen Husserls zu Heideggers Sein und Zeit und Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik” [Husserl’s Marginal Notes on Heidegger’s Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics] (Husserl Studies 11, nos. 1–2 [1994]: 3–63), which also unequivocally reveals the rupture between the master and disciple with regard to phenomenology. In this respect, in more than one place in his last piece of writing on Husserl, Shestov asks himself the question “Why did Husserl refer me so insistently to Kierkegaard?” (see, for instance, Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 285) In a conversation with Fondane from 1936, Shestov also advanced the hypothesis that Husserl wanted him to read Kierkegaard so as “to better understand Heidegger” (Fondane [B1], 114 [Fondane’s italics]) or, to put it differently (my supposition, considering the context of that specific dialogue with Fondane), to understand Heidegger’s limits.

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und Antropologie], only phenomenology—as a clearly distinct position from concrete human existence in the world—can save a true anthropological horizon from a “philosophical anthropologism.” This fundamental “discontinuous view” according to which the purity of transcendental phenomenology can reveal the existence of an alternative human domain—which the Heideggerian existential analytics, according both to Husserl and Shestov, would not preserve—was probably the main point in common between the two friends, although Shestov was certainly more interested in that revelation whereas Husserl was focused on what stood before it. Husserl was never tender with those who attacked phenomenology: he usually strongly defended his positions against any kind of weakening of the phenomenological instances.25 If he did not do so with Shestov, it must mean that those attacks did not truly undermine “his” theory but instead they opened it to another wider perspective lying beyond and above it—which was precisely what Shestov intended. On the contrary, Husserl considered the Heideggerian thesis of the “oblivion of being” as antiphenomenological. There must be a complete resistance against “necessity” or a complete submission to it for there to be a real quest for truth. Together, they disclose the face of tragedy. Without one of the two, there is no tragedy. But there is no tragedy either without finding and reaching those opposite poles. Only with tragedy, for Shestov, is there truth. As always when he mentions tragedy, Shestov is speaking of the tragedy of contradiction, of the active impossibility of going on (in one’s knowledge, in one’s life), and not of something else. To him, this impossibility is truth and represents salvation. 3. The whole debate on Shestov as an interpreter of Husserl reveals a number of incongruities that were rightly noted by Shpet and Hering. On the one hand, Shestov fiercely attacks Husserl’s theory of knowledge, but he never really interacts with it and one might even doubt whether he fully understood it (given its complexity that goes far beyond Shestov’s remarks).26 On the other hand, 25 His most strenuous defenses of phenomenology can be found in his lecture “Phenomenology and Anthropology”—the text of which was published for the first time in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2, no. 1 (1941): 1–14—and in the postscript [Nachwort] to Ideas: see “Nachwort zu meinen Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie [Postscript to My Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy],” Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 11 (1930): 549–570. 26 In a certain way, more even than Shestov did, Fondane examined some specific aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology, in particular the phenomenological reduction, and yet he still reaffirmed and extended Shestov’s point of view (cf. Fondane [C]).

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

if one excludes Shestov’s own contradictions, as Shpet argued in his article, it is possible to even venture a guess that Shestov’s position is after all “Husserlian.” Shpet demonstrates this in his essay, but Shestov himself offers many clues for such a conclusion, especially when he affirms that he had to fight Husserl’s theory of knowledge precisely because it was so perfect and unassailable to him. When Shestov admits that he finds Husserl’s theory to be the most convincing he ever encountered, this would appear to prove one of Shpet’s suspicions—namely that Shestov is, paradoxically, Husserlian—and would at least give a sense to his recognition of Husserl as a master. But Shestov still attacks or, as he says, “has to” attack Husserl, despite the fact that his theory of knowledge is convincing: it is thus an attack without internal argumentations, a desperate attack. What is the meaning of this? What both Shpet and Hering apparently did not notice is that Shestov’s interaction with texts and authors is never conducted on the same level as the examined content (or author). A possible meaning of Ramona Fotiade’s brilliant expression defining Shestov’s philosophy as “la pensée du dehors” leads to exactly such a discontinuous (to employ a Florenskian term) attitude in Shestov’s thought. He used to examine a text not to talk about that text, but in order to grasp about something beyond it. An author or problem, in Shestov’s analysis, is never that author or that problem. In his reply, in fact, the only real “argument” he gave to Hering (and to Husserl) is not an internal and direct argument, but is the alternative world of Plotinus. Shestov changes the subject, as it were: he—the “Husserlian”— seeks a way out from Husserl. Contemporary epistemologists would say that Shestov’s position is one of externalism. But Shestov’s “externalism” is of a different nature as it is the quest for an exteriority to that which is already external in his case, the most truthful external point of view he found: the self-evidence of reason in the way Husserl posited it.27 For Shestov, philosophy as timiotaton, 27 While externalist epistemologists, in contrasting subjectivistic points of view, search for an “external output” (as they call it) as a better “warrant” to our knowledge, in Shestov’s case he searches for an exteriority to that external output (which is what Husserl’s self-evidence of reason is to him). The external output to the “external output” turns out once again to be the subject. But this Shestovian subject, which we know to be the Underground Man, is not merely whatever subjective point of view there is in the world. Shestov’s entire history demonstrates that he could not grant a degree of truth to subjectivism as such, i.e, to any subjectivity. As Berdyaev rightly observed, Shestov’s subjectivism was rather a “psychological metaphysics” so that even the “capricious” Underground Man is undoubtedly a universal figure. The Underground Man argues that the only way to preserve one’s free will, one’s right to exist, is to beat one’s head against the stone wall (i.e., mathematical certainty). For Shestov, the act of beating one’s head against the stone wall, although it is neither a concept

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in the Plotinian way, means the quest for an outside of Husserl’s philosophy. This is what Shestov objected to Husserl, both in his own writings and in their private conversations: as if to say, “where is the outside of your philosophy—as there must be one?” Or, in more Shestovian words, “where is your tragedy?” It could be suggested that Husserl was profoundly interested in this perspective Shestov proposed to him. In point of fact, Shestov himself once stated that Husserl was “the only one” to understand the distinction he made between the simultaneous values of a necessary act and of an absurd act: in other words, between the decisive importance of logic and the equal importance of giving up on logic.28 It is noteworthy that Husserl never openly replied to him using his phenomenological thought as a basis (as Shpet and Hering tried to do on his behalf), but instead was rather more conciliatory—he aimed at seeing the “bigger picture” by pointing out a “personal need” that transcends the different ways to arrive at knowledge and, in this respect, he often turned the focus of their conversations to Kierkegaard. This is more or less the meaning of Husserl’s aforementioned words to Shestov “my ways are not your ways” but

nor a universal truth, is nonetheless an act full of meaning for all humanity—for a wholly human truth. As long as this act claims such truth (as Berdyaev objected to Shestov and as Shestov reluctantly had to acknowledge), to some extent it also has some metaphysical value. Shestov is interested neither in solving specific psychological problems nor in a psychology that cannot lead to a “tragic truth” for everyone. He is not prepared to accept that there is no tragedy in this world or that some can just be happy as they are, and that is “their” truth. If so (as he once observed with regard to Solovʹëv: cf. Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 223), they would be wrong. Just as Shestov’s philosophy is not mere relativism, nor is it mere psychologism, but instead a universal philosophy of tragedy. Only in this respect can his being authentically Kierkegaardian be understood. 28 In a crucial passage of his conversations with Fondane, Shestov explains his relationship with Husserl in comparison to the one Dostoevskii had with his “master” Solovʹëv. “It is remarkable that nobody understands such a simple thing,” he begins. “Without logic it is impossible to take a single step; it is impossible to make a single affirmation! [ . . . ] There is always a logic that posits the fact, which sanctifies the fact and makes it eternal,” Shestov writes (Fondane [B1], 80–81). However, in the same way as Dostoevskii, with his Brothers Karamazov, “had” to detach himself from Solovʹëv’s ideas, so Shestov was obliged to contest Husserl’s philosophy, which he nonetheless believed in. In quoting a criticism of Gabriel Marcel who accused his philosophy of theoretical impotence, as if it were (as in Marcel’s example) one who “knocks where is no door,” Shestov claims that the very “omnipotence of logic,” which demands to knock where there is already a door, at a certain point “prevents the doors from being found” (81), or uses another kind of doors. For this reason, it is equally necessary to knock where there are no doors. “Husserl—Shestov affirmed—was the only one to understand the distinction I made between these two facts” (81).

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl

nonetheless “we are headed in the same direction.”29 What this “same direction” might be is less obvious to understand, but logically speaking is the one in which Husserl’s phenomenology is the most correct theory of knowledge and Shestov’s falsification of it is also a truth included in a wider view on the same theory. Beyond their friendship or perhaps precisely because of it, Husserl also expressed his personal disappointment at Shestov’s severe criticism. From Husserl’s words, as reported by Shestov, his surprising doubtful and “existential” attitude can be seen. As Husserl said to Shestov, You have turned me into a stone statue, raised me onto a lofty pedestal, and then with hammer blows you have shattered this statue to bits. But am I really so lapidary? You don’t seem to have noticed what compelled me to formulate in such a radical way the question of the nature of knowledge, modifying the dominant theories of knowledge which previously had satisfied me as much as any other philosopher. The more deeply I probed into the basic problems of logic, the more I felt that our science, our knowledge, is shaking, tottering. And finally, to my own indescribable horror, I convinced myself that if contemporary philosophy has said the last word about the nature of knowledge, then we have no knowledge [ . . . ]. But you did not want to see in my struggle, in my impetuous “either-or,” an expression of what it in fact was—namely the consciousness that [ . . . ] one fine day all our knowledge will crumble and we will find ourselves standing amid the miserable ruins of former greatness. (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 269)

Husserl, as it appears from this passage, did not avoid confronting Shestov’s objections: he understood that the point at issue was more to do with “finding a place for Kierkegaard” in his theory of knowledge than explaining more clearly to Shestov what concepts like “intentionality” or “consciousness” meant within his phenomenology. Even more interestingly, Shestov was more attracted to the absence of Kierkegaard in Husserl than to his presence in Heidegger. In other words, it was the perfect self-sufficiency of Husserl’s thought, a thought “without Kierkegaard,” that attracted him more than any compromises that came from those philosophies 29 This concept is both contained in Husserl’s letter from July 3, 1929 and in Shestov’s memories (cf. Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 272).

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(e.g., Heidegger’s, Jaspers’ or Scheler’s) that opened up to a greater or lesser degree to a tragic view, but not in the radical way Shestov aimed at. To him, a tragic perspective was more visible from Husserl’s point of view than from that of others. Thus we can understand Shestov’s definition of him as the “great philosopher,” which was not ironic at all, but was something Shestov deeply believed in. In this logic of “antipodes,” there is Kierkegaard and there is Husserl, and Shestov as a “Husserlian” (as Shpet paradoxically suggested) stands with Kierkegaard. Other intermediate stances are not considered, just as other theories of knowledge less wide and complete than Husserl’s are also not acceptable.30 Shestov believes in Husserl in a way he did not believe in Taine or in Kant, to give a few examples. But once he recognized Husserl’s truth, he has to find an “outside” of it, because the tragic, double thought is the only one that can be true. Without contradiction, as Florenskii observed in the second letter (“The Doubt”) of his masterpiece The Pillar and Ground of Truth (1914), there is no real truth. Shestov would not accept Florenskii’s logical setting of this problem, but this is essentially his position too. Husserl, the antipode of Shestov, was an integral part of this truth: in this precise meaning, he was his “master.” For his part, Husserl did not seem affected by Shestov’s influence, at least in the contents of his thought. But as Christian Dupont argues, in Husserl some pale traces of Shestov nonetheless exist—and he offers convincing proof of this: One also is led to wonder whether something of Shestov’s critiques prompted Husserl to add the following bold charge to the opening of his Paris lectures. After all, he knew that Shestov would be in the audience. “First, anyone who truly wants to become a philosopher,” 30 This logic of the coincidentia oppositorum, but also of the necessity of individuating the “opposites,” leads Shestov to produce his last paradox, as he says: “There is a profound inner kinship between Husserl’s teaching, on the one hand, and that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, on the other” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 282). At the end of this text, Shestov firmly maintains that there must exist both Husserl and Kierkegaard, “the Kierkegaard-Husserl ‘either-or,’” so that there may be true knowledge (292–293). Implicitly, Shestov acknowledges that many other “in-between” philosophers are not of the same value as those two. This point was also remarked on more occasions by Fondane who declares Husserl to be “one thousand times braver than Heidegger” in that he denied existence rather than conciliating with its mortal enemy (Fondane 2013 [B3], 198). In this respect, i.e., in this radicality—as Fondane again asserts—Husserl not only went beyond Heidegger but also beyond Bergson, Scheler, and N. Hartmann—whereas he still stands a step behind Pascal and Nietzsche (cf. Fondane [C], 343). Fondane also highlights the codependence of Husserl and Shestov, for had one of the two not existed it would have been necessary to invent him (343).

Appendices I    Shestov and Husserl Husserl advises, “must ‘at some point in his life’ withdraw into himself and attempt, within himself, to overthrow all of the sciences that had been accepted up to that time and try to rebuild them. Philosophy—wisdom [sagesse]—is in some respects the philosopher’s personal affair. It must be constituted as his own, it must be his wisdom, his knowledge which, although tending towards the universal, is acquired by him and he must be able to justify each of stages from the ground up, by building them upon his absolute intuitions.” (Dupont 2015 [C], 147)

According to Dupont, Husserl’s pairing of the words Weisheit [wisdom] and Philosophie did not occur in the introduction to his 1922 London lectures and this could mean that, on this occasion in Paris, this difference may have been directed at Shestov who, in his article “Memento mori,” had accused Husserl precisely of separating and opposing these two concepts. (147) More than once, Husserl maintained that he and Shestov had different goals in philosophy. But another time, as Shestov recalls, Husserl told him: “What you do, I call it science” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 272, Shestov’s note). In effect, Husserl’s opening words to the Paris lecture, with his definition of philosophy as “one’s personal affair” and as “one’s wisdom,” may seem at least unusual for him and, at the same time, they closely resemble Shestov’s definition of philosophy as to timiotaton.

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II

Shestov and Berdyaev

1. The lives of Lev Shestov (Kiev, 1866—Paris, 1938) and of Nikolai Berdyaev (Kiev, 1874—Paris, 1948) seem to follow parallel paths, so numerous are the similarities between them.1 Both were born in Kiev; and during similar periods both lived first in St. Petersburg, then in Moscow (during the Great War and the Bolshevik Revolution) and finally in Paris. They first became acquainted in 19022 in Kiev, and their friendship ended only with the death of Shestov, in Paris, in 1938. Indeed, it was in Paris—during the 1920s and ‘30s, when the French capital was at the height of its importance as the center of European intellectual culture—that these two philosophers contributed so significantly to the establishment in the West of a free and independent Russian school of thought which was nonetheless firmly rooted in Russian tradition. In the early years of the 1920s, Berdyaev transferred to Paris the Religious-Philosophical Academy (Religiozno-filosofskaya Akademiya) that he had originally set up in Berlin with the intention of pursuing the activities of the Free Academy of Spiritual Culture in Moscow. In 1925 he founded Putʹ, a journal which 1 This appendix largely reflects, with a number of integrations, my article “Shestov and Berdyaev. A Comparison of Two Russian Philosophers” (Oppo 2008 [B3]). There are a few more contributions on the same subject, starting from the pioneering works from 1968 and 1964 by James Wernham and by Sergei Levtskii (Wernham [B2] and Levtskii [B3]), to the most recent ones such as Boldareva (B3), Fotiade 1998 (B3), Kudishina 2007 (B2), Rubin (B3), Vizgin (B3), and Anton Aryakovskii, “Léon Chestov et Nicolas Berdiaev: une amitié orageuse,” in Struve-Laurent (B2), 141–153. 2 The date of their first meeting is confirmed by a letter exchange Shestov had with his wife while he was in Kiev, between the end of 1902 and the beginning of 1903. In two of these letters he mentions his “first contact” with the Kievan intellectuals, in particular Sergei Bulgakov, Nikolai Berdyaev, Vasilii V. Vodovozov, and Mark Ratner (see Ms. 2111-1, The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris).

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

continued to be published until 1940, and in which a number of exiled Russian intellectuals were able to freely express their ideas. And lastly, he also organized, at the Russian Centre on Boulevard Montparnasse, the first ecumenical encounters between Orthodox, Catholic, and protestant Christians, with the involvement of well-known personalities such as Jacques Maritain, Louis Gillet and Sergei Bulgakov, to name just a few. These meetings were followed by lectures in nearly every European country, attended by some of the most important philosophers and theologists of the time: from Charles du Bos and Étienne Gilson, Gabriel Marcel, to André Gide, Karl Barth, André Malraux and Emmanuel Mounier. Berdyaev felt particular affinity with the latter, and collaborated with him on the periodical Esprit. For his part, Shestov, although preferring to operate in private rather than in public, also followed and participated in many of Berdyaev’s initiatives, forming important friendships with philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Jules de Gaultier. His friendship with Jacques Rivière brought him into the sphere of the Nouvelle revue française—of which Rivière was director during that period and which was the veritable hub of French and European culture—thus enabling Shestov to contribute significantly to making Dostoevskii’s beliefs and works known in the West. Within a short space of time, both Berdyaev and Shestov became acclaimed in Europe as the two leading representatives of Russian existentialist thought. While the impact that the endeavors of these two philosophers had on the spread of culture in France is now clear; and while various studies on their thinking appeared—particularly during the 1950s, when the concept of existentialism gained ground nearly everywhere—the intellectual ties which bound the two, however, are not as clear, particularly insofar as their respective philosophies are concerned. On this subject, in fact, the two philosophers published a number of papers, for the most part in Russian, which formed a sort of intellectual repartee or sparring match, beginning during the period when both lived in Russia, and continuing over the years. Bound, as they were, by a profound amity which was perhaps deepened by their sense of a shared destiny, they nonetheless, during the entire time they knew each other, had lively arguments on the thematics and on the philosophical interests which they shared—a fundamental divergence which they never resolved. As Berdyaev, recalling his past, said: Somewhat later I met another man, who came to be a great and lifelong friend of mine, and whose friendship I valued immensely. He was Lev Shestov. I regarded him then and regard him now as one of

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Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev the most remarkable men I was ever privileged to meet. His books were just beginning to appear, and I was particularly interested in his work on Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. We disagreed on many issues, but we were preoccupied with and disturbed by similar problems. Every time we met I was conscious of real companionship with him, of a kind of existential communion, of a common concern. (Berdyaev 1950 [C], 125–126)

In 1935, while speaking to Fondane, Shestov remembered with joy and levity his first meeting with Berdyaev at a party, but he also commented on the difficulties in understanding each other throughout the years.3 The two men often met in St. Petersburg—then at the height of the turn-of-the-century “religious renaissance”—to discuss various topics of interest to intellectual circles. One such circle was the famous “Ivanov’s Tower,” a group of very diverse personalities such as Berdyaev, Shestov, Bulgakov, Gershenzon and the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov himself, who met at the latter’s turreted house. Unlike the Slavophile and Westernizer circles, which were united by a single idea, Ivanov’s group was brought together by an authentic and profound desire for renewal, for suppression of prejudice, and for a disinterested search for the truth. Almost always, in such encounters, Berdyaev and Shestov found themselves arguing the same issue from opposing corners, the one accusing his opponent of excessive dogmatism, and the other denouncing his adversary’s obstinate skepticism. A series of letters exchanged between 1922 and 19244—when Berdyaev, having been exiled by the Russian government, was in Berlin prior to joining Shestov permanently in Paris—provides a good illustration not only of their controversial relationship, but also of their deep friendship. Shestov, during this time, was trying to help Berdyaev establish himself and find work in the French capital. Referring to a book on Pascal, which Shestov had just published, Berdyaev wrote: The book is very interesting, very well written, but provokes a sharp protest on my part. You persist in refusing to admit that the 3

Shestov said: “We never got on with each other. We always bicker with each other, we shout . . . and he reproaches me constantly for Shestovizing the authors I talk about; he claims that neither Dostoevskii nor Tolstoi, nor Kierkegaard have ever said what I make them say. I answer him each time that he does me too much honour, and that, if I had really invented all that I assert, I should burst with pride” (Fondane [B1], 87). 4 On the correspondence between Shestov and Berdyaev, see Shestov 17/1961 (A2) and above all Shestov 22/1981 (A2).

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev folly of Pascal and of the Apostle Paul was a folly in Christ. You have transformed grace into darkness and horror [ . . . ]. Your translator, Schloezer, who shares your opinions, has written an account of my book on Dostoevskii in Sovremennye zapiski. It is to be noted that what he says about me and against me could be said against every believer, every Christian. He does not accept the fact of faith itself. Religion seems static and immobile to him. I think that it is atheism and skepticism which are static and immobile. I see a way out (which is what you object to above all), because I am a believing Christian, and I take my faith seriously, to the very end.5 Shestov’s reply, some months later, naturally argued the opposite: I disagree with you when, by means of a premise based entirely on reason, you transform an experience into a “truth.” [ . . . ] Only the experience of death or the experience of tragedy opens man’s eyes to the vanity of all earthly gifts, including morals. For you, that is all “darkness”; for me, on the contrary, the horror is that truth which men worship as though in adoration of an idol, since an idol may be made not only of wood, but also of ideas.6

The debate between the two friendly adversaries was destined to continue in Paris during the years which followed, particularly during the informal gatherings of friends (so famous, according to Pierre Pascal,7 that they were known as “Berdyaev’s Sundays”), as well as during numerous private encounters. Berdyaev was undoubtedly more intimately acquainted with Shestov’s personal life than others from the Russian émigré community were: he often visited his home and the two helped each other every time they were in need. To understand such proximity, one can read a number of enjoyable anecdotes 5 See Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 322–323 (quoting N. A. Berdyaev’s private letters to Shestov, Berlin, late 1923). Berdyaev continued: “In the end, only one thing exists which is worth concerning oneself with in life, and that is seeking the exit, and movement exists only in the person who finds this. And you, and Schloezer, and all the people like you, rise up against those who attribute a positive meaning to life. But attributing a positive meaning to life is, precisely, the defining characteristic of every religion” (323). 6 Baranoff-Chestov 1991 (B1), 324 (quoting L. Shestov’s private letter to Berdyaev, Paris, March 1924). 7 On this subject, Pierre Pascal wrote: “The pleasure, for the average listener, was in the confrontations between Berdyaev and Shestov. Something was lacking when Shestov wasn’t there” (Baranoff-Chestov 1991 [B1], 334, quoting Pascal [C], 17–18).

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Shestov told about Berdyaev’s visits to his house, their prolonged and fierce quarrels, and Berdyaev as an “example of perfection” in the eyes of Shestov’s wife, Anna Berezovskaya.8 There were also, however, a number of “official” confrontations, in public or in journals, in which the two debated on specific subjects. The first of this series of written confrontations concerned an article about Shestov, written by Berdyaev and entitled “Tragedy and the Everyday,”9 later incorporated into his book Sub Specie Aeternitatis that was published in 1907 in St. Petersburg. In the same year, Shestov’s riposte promptly appeared in his article “The Praise of Folly (On Berdyaev’s Book Sub Specie Aeternitatis).”10 This was the first time Shestov tackled the theme of folly in such explicit terms and with direct reference to Berdyaev; he would broach this subject again, some years later, in a text on William James (see Shestov 6/2002 [A1], 234–253). “Not derisively, like the famous Erasmus of Rotterdam in earlier times”, began Shestov’s article, “but sincerely, from the depths of my heart, I begin my eulogy to folly. Berdyaev’s new book has helped me enormously. He could, had he so wished, have chosen the title The Praise of Folly, as his long-dead colleague once did, since its purpose defies common sense” (Shestov 5/1996 [A1], 225). Berdyaev’s work consisted of a collection of articles written over a period of six years, and thus revealed the author’s changing convictions in many senses. For Shestov, in the first article “The Fight for Idealism,” Berdyaev still adhered closely to the Kantian point of view, “that, as we know, acknowledges wisdom and all the virtues that accompany it” (225). Afterwards, the author progressively evolved and at the end of the book, openly declared war on wisdom, not pitting it against the usual “folly,” however, but against “Great Reason.” “Evolution” was a characteristic which could be seen to some extent in all intellectuals, according to Shestov, and there were numerous examples of 8 Shestov, who was also a great raconteur, said to Fondane: “You know that, in my home, the model of all virtues is Berdyaev. . . . ‘Berdyaev here . . . Berdyaev there.’ He is held up to me as an example. ‘You see, you’ve never come to anything, you’ve never been wise, what did you get out of all this?’” (Fondane [B1], 104) “It’s since that time—Shestov wryly explained with regard to their early years of knowledge—that he has become an example to my wife’s eyes: ‘Do like Berdyaev, Berdyaev would not do that, Berdyaev says you can eat this, drink that, or not, etc.’ All I had to do was agree with Berdyaev that he would say that the coffee was metaphysical for my wife to allow me to drink it.’” “Mrs. Shestov”—Fondane writes—“who is there, laughs heartily, and I turn to her: ‘Confidentially,’ I say to her, ‘I prefer Shestov’s philosophy to Berdyaev’s philosophy.’ ‘Me too,’ she says. This time it’s Shestov who laughs. Mrs. Shestov adds: ‘Every time Berdyaev comes here, they have frightful quarrels. They both turn red. It’s been going on for thirty years’” (87–88). 9 See Berdyaev 1905 (B3). 10 Lev I. Shestov, “Pokhvala gluposti. Po povodu knigi Nikolaya Berdyaeva ‘Sub Specie Aeternitatis’,” Fakely 2 (1907): 137–162 (later included in Shestov 5/1908 [A1]).

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

this: not only Berdyaev, but also Sergei Bulgakov converted to Christianity after having gone through a period of Marxism and economic materialism; not to mention Merezhkovskii, who also embraced Christianity without reservations, having abandoned, almost overnight, his previous convictions. In reality, looking closely—as Shestov added (cf. 226–227)—one could see they were still the same: they had changed direction too suddenly to be truly different, at heart. Rather like when an elderly man learns a new language and everyone can recognize that he is a foreigner from his accent, when these converts enunciated the word “Christ” they did so with the same intonation as they had once pronounced “Marx” (227). In this way, declared the author, a well-tuned ear could distinguish how much more Christian was Rozanov—who did not believe in Christ and did not accept the Gospel, but who grew up with and was educated in the precepts of Christian piety, never knowing the seductiveness of Darwinism or Marxism—than Berdyaev, Bulgakov, or Merezhkovskii, whose Kantian or metaphysical, Nietzschean or Christian beliefs changed nothing. They were destined to remain the same, despite the labels under which they presented themselves from time to time. Thus Berdyaev, in the end, could not and never would change his true nature, which was to contemplate the world sub specie aeternitatis, as the Spinoza-inspired title of his book declared; that is, to return, finally, to a solid berth which ultimately gave him the feeling of having the earth firmly beneath his feet. He was a writer of great talent, and that talent derived principally from “audacity” [derznovenie], his greatest quality; but once he had lost that—as almost always happens—the fount of his inspiration would dry up. The same applied to folly, which, in principle, Berdyaev used as a bulwark against ratio, singing its praises and glorifying it; but when the time came to go further, and fully acknowledge all its claims, he preferred to shelter behind the more reassuring and familiar “common sense.” A striking example of this was the article “Leontˈev, Philosopher of Reactionary Romanticism,” which, for Shestov, was one of the best in the anthology in question. In Shestov’s view, Berdyaev showed himself to be strongly attracted by Leontˈev’s personality, by the supreme liberty of his spirit, by the delicacy of his thinking and by his great originality, but nevertheless refused to accept or approve him entirely, since to do so would be too risky: in such an instance, a categorical imperative came into play which demanded that he take account only of the sole, eternal truth, when forming his judgment. Thus, the approbation and fascination Berdyaev felt momentarily for the capricious but subtle and desirable/attractive folly in Leontˈev’s work returned docilely to

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their place, and he chose, instead, caution. “The article—wrote Shestov—, so auspiciously begun, ends with a tentative truce between Folly and Wisdom, in which all the advantages are on the side of the latter. Berdyaev simply cannot fully admit that Folly has its own legitimate rights, outside all control, and beyond all limitation [ . . . ]. Almost all of Berdyaev’s articles follow the same pattern” (230). According to Shestov, ambivalence thus appeared to be Berdyaev’s fundamental characteristic. At the outset of his articles, on the one hand, Berdyaev railed with unequalled scorn against good sense, casting it from its pedestal and replacing it with liberating and triumphant folly. It was but a brief triumph, however. Towards the end “Berdyaev invariably softens and restores to common sense, if not all, then at least a part of what it has always been acknowledged to deserve” (230). For these reasons, his book made everyone agree. It was a well-constructed book, produced with wisdom by a human mind which had based its theories and ideas on a thorough study of reality. This fundamental shrewdness, capable of uniting folly and sense in a solid yet artificial alliance, was one of Berdyaev’s basic characteristics. Berdyaev’s “human creation,” his intention, Shestov implied, was to open the doors to a moderate folly that could add interest to a common sense as “deathly boring, grumpy as an old bigot” (230). But truth [istina], for Shestov, was far removed from all that. Truth could never be equated with a “human creation”—all that sprang from the mind of man as a representation of the truth was, for the philosopher, automatically a lie [lozhʹ]. One must go beyond that, to where good sense cannot undermine folly. Folly [glupostʹ] was, in itself, the origin, purity and fount of creation, a divine gift; yet it also indicated the way to truth. Berdyaev, and many others like him, were fully aware of this, but feared the “leap into the void,” frightened of losing the advantages that common sense guaranteed to all, and so each invented a gentle, tamed madness—in effect, a reasoned folly, which suited his own particular case. Berdyaev barred himself from the experience of truth, the free and unconditional openness to folly; in the final analysis he made everything contingent on ideas and morals—in other words, on reason and the realm of common sense. In the article he dedicated to Merezhkovskii, “On a New Religious Conscience,” Berdyaev dealt with the relationship between faith and reason, and all the dualisms related to it: science and divine creation; flesh and spirit; the pagan appeal of the world and Christian renunciation. Even though, as Shestov said, these problems in themselves are of great interest,

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

both Berdyaev and Merezhkovskii systematically reduced them to a moral in the manner of Dostoevskii (although in so doing—Shestov added—proving that they had not understood Dostoevskii), and neither author realized that “the fundamental problem of humanity is not actually a moral problem” (222). Shestov described Merezhkovskii as a very cultured man, whose works represented an imposing amount of labor and effort, “and yet the way in which he posed, and then resolved, the problem of Flesh and Spirit, of Heaven and Earth, is not particularly fundamental” (234). In other words, to demonstrate the sanctity of the Flesh and the Spirit, and of Heaven and Earth, he did not put any particular strain on the spirit, since even if one could provide even more convincing evidence to substantiate one’s argument, the fundamental debate would nonetheless remain open. “The Spirit is holy”—added Shestov—“the Flesh is holy, but what guarantee is there for us that what we have sanctified will remain holy in the face of eternity? And what if [ . . . ], knowing neither good nor evil, joy nor suffering, sanctity nor vice—in short, without knowledge of the human condition—this God were the beginning and the fount of life?” (234). Berdyaev, it would appear, never asked himself such a question, according to Shestov: “His basic premise [ . . . ] is a hypothesis: that he will always find whatever he needs” (234). His faith was as solid as granite, and in this he resembled the critic Mikhailovskii, who had recently died and to whom Berdyaev dedicated another article of his book, paying tribute to him, expressing his gratitude, and acknowledging the spiritual kinship which bound him and others of his generation to the great critic. That Berdyaev should feel profoundly bound to Mikhailovskii was not particularly strange, Shestov remarked, since one had only to note that both shared complete faith in a universal moral order which was the natural result of man’s ideas on what should or should not be, to understand how similar in their thinking the two actually were. Both were utterly certain that the only truth was “pravda‑truth”, in other words, truth originating from justice and morals. Neither could ever admit the contrary: that real truth [istina] was one thing, and justice-truth (pravda) another. This being so, Shestov observed, they were unquestionably mistaken on one point in particular: “It is only through a misunderstanding that Berdyaev, Merezhkovskii and Bulgakov believe themselves to be Dostoevskii’s successors” (236). Finally, Shestov touched on the article dealing specifically with himself: “Tragedy and the Everyday.” In response, he wrote: With regard to my book The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, he numbers me among the skeptics, and with regard to The Philosophy of

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Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev Tragedy, he classifies me as a pessimist. For that matter, other critics also attribute me with these sins. I would like to take this opportunity to declare (since there is no call here for debate) that, at the moment when, for the first time, I saw myself described as a skeptic and a pessimist, I quite simply had to rub my eyes in astonishment. (237)

Are skeptics, Shestov asked, perhaps those who do not believe in the great existing philosophies? Was it possible that “the man who seeks truth, but does not define as truth the first mistake he comes across” (238) would be defined as a skeptic? Berdyaev himself, Shestov asserted, continually changed opinion, going from one extreme to the other, yet no one ever thought of accusing him of skepticism, since the ideas he advanced from time to time were presented as true and absolute, even though they might be revealed shortly afterwards as fallacy. Thus the point, said Shestov, was not the skepticism, but something else: the point, clearly, was to maintain a fundamental “shrewdness” and to color every new-found idea with a dogmatism that could shield it from absolute doubt, from radical groundlessness: specifically, from folly. This type of “movable dogmatism” (238), as Shestov called it, was typical of Berdyaev and of all those who, like him, were not daring enough to run the risk of true folly, without transforming it into “Great Reason,” or into something else which was nonetheless akin to good sense, or to common sense. Real folly was something different: it had little to do with the cautious creations of a man determined, by any means, to reduce everything to reason. “Berdyaev often repeats the follies that everyone acknowledges—widespread follies, habitual in a way,” concluded Shestov. “In my opinion, it makes no sense. Habitual follies are as like as two drops of water to intelligent things. So, is it worth worrying about them?” (239). In another article, written a few months before his death, entitled “Nikolai Berdyaev. Gnosis and Existential Philosophy” (1938),11 Shestov revisited the theme of folly, extending it this time to include the concept of freedom. Having recognized Berdyaev’s merit in having won himself a place among the greatest of his contemporary existential philosophers, such as Jaspers, Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger, Shestov turned his attention to his friend’s latest work, Spirit and Reality, exposing some of the claims contained therein. First and foremost, although Berdyaev referred to Kierkegaard as the inspiration for 11 Lev I. Shestov, “Nikolai Berdyaev. Gnozis i ekzistentsialʹnaya filosofiya” [Nikolai Berdyaev. Gnosis and Existential Philosophy],  Sovremennye zapiski 67 (October 1938): 196–229. The same article was subsequently included in Shestov’s posthumous book Speculation and Revelation (Shestov 11/1964 [A1]).

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

his theories, the sources were, in truth, quite different. According to Shestov, the main influence was Jakob Böhme’s philosophy, which had been the trigger for a clear attempt by contemporary German philosophers to return to Kantian principles. It was, in fact, to Kant that Berdyaev referred with such insistence in his later works. Berdyaev’s philosophical development over the last few years had evolved from his initial theocentric or Christian standpoint to a “theandric” one. But the latest “novelty,” said Shestov, was that the importance of man became ever greater, while that of God was weakened progressively, to such a point that “the formula itself begins to lose its stability and threatens to be turned around: God-manhood is ready to be converted into ‘man-Godhood’” (Shestov 11/1982 [A1], 234). Thus although, on the one hand, Berdyaev— in the manner of Dostoevskii’s Grand Inquisitor—glorified freedom as God’s greatest gift to man, on the other hand he did so from a strongly Gnostic viewpoint, basing his theories on the great German mystics such as Jakob Böhme, Meister Eckhart, Angelus Silesius, Johannes Tauler, and so forth. In other words, he included even the concept of God-given freedom in the greater category of “spiritual understanding.” “Knowledge, every knowledge, every ‘gnosis,’ presupposes a formed experience—finished, final. All of the judgments of Berdyaev that have just been quoted can rightly be called knowledge precisely because this form—the form of universality and necessity—is undoubtedly inherent in them” (237). This was the latest novelty in Berdyaev’s thinking, as could be understood more by the tone than by the content: he may have talked of Ivan Karamazov’s “brilliant dialectic,” said Shestov (235), but unlike Kierkegaard, Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, he did not like to ponder on the searing questions of existence, preferring, instead, to concentrate on answers and ready-made solutions. “He even avoids the term ‘horrors of life,’ and never mentions irreparability” (239). For the same reason, “the fundamental task of philosophy (according to Berdyaev: Christian philosophy) is, in the first place, theodicy” (243). The dreadful possibility which these “existential Gnostic philosophers” (whether Christian or not) wished to avoid at all costs was that, beyond folly and freedom, there existed an even more worrying concept: “nothingness” (251). This, however, was not a nothingness which would come before God and over which He would have no power, as these philosophers would have wished (thereby returning knowledge, and in particular knowledge of good, to its position of supremacy). Rather, as Shestov made clear, it was a nothingness, which corresponded to God himself, with its fundamental quality being, so to speak, incomprehensibility. Fear, the impossibility of bearing the direct

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sight of this “nothingness,” of this God, rather than a search for truth, was the true source of this type of philosophy. This was why these thinkers, Berdyaev included, were in such haste to invent a reasoned folly and a fettered freedom, Shestov explained. In reality however, he continued, man was created free by God, and that freedom lay precisely in the fact that man had no need for either knowledge or for distinction between good and evil: “Paradisical ignorance is by no means poorer than the knowledge of a fallen man. It is qualitatively different and endlessly richer and fuller in content than all our knowledge” (257–258). In this way, existential philosophy, unlike speculative philosophy, does not seek knowledge and “does not see in the final and only path to truth. For this philosophy knowledge itself is transformed into a problem, becomes problematic” (258). This work perhaps represents Shestov’s clearest and most mature point of view about Berdyaev. He overall recognizes in him an “antitragic” and even gnostic thinker, and in this regard Shestov places him at the opposite sides of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. For Shestov, Berdyaev is “first and foremost, a teacher and a philosopher of culture. His task is to raise the level of human consciousness and to direct the interests of people to high, but nevertheless realizable, ideals. In this he sees the destiny of man; in this he also sees his own destiny as a writer and preacher” (263). 2. In 1936, on the occasion of Shestov’s seventieth birthday, Berdyaev published in the magazine Put’ a short article dedicated to him, which summarized in a few concise points his basic opinion on his friend and fellow citizen’s philosophy (see Berdyaev 1936a [B3]). “We are old friends with L. Shestov—Berdyaev wrote—and here already for thirty years we have led with him a dialogue about God, about good and evil, about knowledge. This dialogue often was a fierce, though also friendly dispute. Dialogue with L. Shestov is difficult, since he is not a man of dialogue, he is a man of monologue.” (50) Nonetheless, he added, that very aspect was the source of his strength as a thinker, allowing him to condense extraordinary power and concentration into a single theme, and making his arguments both well thought-out and profoundly based on experience. Shestov’s basic theme, according to Berdyaev, was both religious and biblical, as became clear in the concluding period of his oeuvre: “In God he wants to find free life, to be freed from the fetters of necessity, from the laws of logic and morals, which he makes responsible for the tragic fate of man” (50). Interestingly, Berdyaev pointed out that Nietzsche had influenced Shestov more than any other author, although he was not Nietzschean in the usual sense of the term. According to Berdyaev, it was precisely that commixture

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

of Nietzschean spirit with biblical themes, that willingness to debate religious questions with the reasoning germane to philosophy, which gave rise to the “intrinsic restlessness” in Shestov’s thinking, and made him a philosopher in arms against philosophy itself: “He is always setting in opposition Hellenic philosophy vs. the Bible, Athens and Jerusalem, but he orients himself chiefly in the sphere of Hellenic philosophy, in the Athenians, whereas his Biblical thoughts and words are comparatively brief ” (51). In the end, this manner of proceeding, said Berdyaev, placed the true interest of Shestovian thought predominantly in the sphere of existence, from which it derived. At the same time—he said in another article on Shestov from the same year (1936)—only negative philosophy was expressed and given space in his works, while the positive philosophy “is indigent and short, and it could perhaps fit on half a page” (Berdyaev 1936b [B3], 376). This was made clear in the most beautiful—according to Berdyaev— of Shestov’s books, Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, in which the Russian philosopher declared that no cognitive act could be defined as authentic knowledge, and claimed, like Luther, that only faith could be recognized as such. No other refuge from the strength of necessity existed. But, asked Berdyaev, how and by whom could such a faith possibly ever be held? Reading L. Shestov gives the impression that faith is impossible and that no one has it, with the exception of Abraham alone, who held the knife over his beloved son Isaac. L. Shestov does not believe that so-called “believers” have faith. Even the great saints do not have it. No one that moves mountains. Faith does not depend on man, it is sent by God. To nearly no one does God give faith, for He did not give it to Kierkegaard, nor did He give it to any of Shestov’s tragic heroes. The sole pathway appears hidden. L. Shestov composed for himself a maximalist concept about faith, under which it is rendered impossible and that no one can have it. (377)

For Berdyaev, even Shestov’s most successful book—in which he managed to establish a link between his own personal legend and that of the creation of the world, and the fall from grace—demonstrated clearly how futile his proposition was; as contradictory as it was sterile. “L. Shestov preaches the passivity of man. Man for him is sinful, but not culpable because he is not responsible, because he is passive. God alone is active, but God discloses nothing about Himself in the world” (382). “The chief philosophical error of L. Shestov that I

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see—Berdyaev added further—is in this, that he does not make distinctions in the forms and levels of knowledge” (382). Berdyaev returned to these concepts two years later, with another short article written on the occasion of Shestov’s death, in 1938. This article, “The Fundamental Idea of the Philosophy of Lev Shestov” (Berdyaev 1938–39 [B3]), had, given the circumstances, a much different tone to previous articles, and perhaps for that very reason it was easier to understand, from Berdyaev’s point of view, the differences and points in common between the two authors. It was exactly with this premise (“now there is a need to speak of him differently and to honour his memory” [44]) that Berdyaev’s article opened, asserting that Shestov was a thinker “who philosophized with his whole being, for whom philosophy was not an academic specialty but a matter of life and death” (44). In this sense, his philosophy could be defined as existential, even though he disliked this label, precisely because it did not make the process of cognition objective, but bound it indissolubly to the judgement of man. Thus, “existential philosophy signifies a keeping in mind of the existential nature of the philosophizing subject, a subject who includes his existential experience in his philosophy. This type of philosophy presupposes that the mystery of being is comprehensible only in human existence” (44). Equally, for Shestov, the human tragedy, the terror and suffering of existence, were at the root of philosophy: and that very element, in truth, had always belonged to all those who could be called authentic philosophers. Spinoza, for example, recalled Berdyaev, could have been—and to a great extent was— Shestov’s “adversary” par excellence, due to the impression of frigid objectivity, which his thinking could give. Yet Shestov, while harshly criticizing him, saw in him something that went beyond his amor Dei intellectualis, seeing perhaps another “travelling companion” for whom philosophy was above all the stuff of life, and often cited him in his works, at times almost with the same reverence as he accorded to his lifelong “heroes”—Nietzsche, Dostoevskii, Luther, Pascal, and biblical characters such as Abraham, Job, and Isaiah. To this list is added, in an almost casual way but with a fundamental impact, the name of Kierkegaard, whose works Shestov only discovered during the last years of his life. He never understood, remarked Berdyaev, how he had managed to remain unaware of and underrate Kierkegaard for so many years, and he suddenly became aware how similar, if not identical, their paths had been. “He went from Nietzsche to the Bible,” Berdyaev commented. “More and more he turned to biblical revelation. The conflict between biblical revelation and Greek philosophy became the fundamental theme of his thinking” (45).

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

Everything came second to this theme, on which he wrote, spoke and thought for an entire life. To such an extent, indeed, that “he could consider the world and evaluate the thinking of others exclusively from within his theme” (45), that is to say, the fact that man’s fall from grace was related to knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. “Man ceased to feed on the Tree of Life and began to feed on the Tree of Knowledge. And so Shestov attacks the power of knowledge, which subordinates man to law, and he does so in the name of the liberation of life” (46). For all that, according to Berdyaev, Shestov cannot be defined as an irrationalist in the absolute sense of the term. Rather, for him, it was a matter of imposing limits on God through the use of reason: it was this which he considered unacceptable. Over against the domain of necessity, the domain of reason, stands God. God is not bound by anything, He is not subject to anything. For God all things are possible. Here Shestov poses a problem that had already disturbed the scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages. Is God subordinate to reason, the truth and the good, or is only that true and good which God considers such? (46)

The first point of view originated with Plato, and reached its zenith with St. Thomas Aquinas, said Berdyaev; the second, on the other hand, began with Duns Scotus, to whom, in fact, Shestov made frequent reference in his reflections. Indeed, this was the starting point for his analyses comparing Athens to Jerusalem, Abraham and Job to Socrates and Aristotle, and finally the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to the God of theologists and philosophers. In a certain way, the entire story Shestov narrated is based on how it could happen that faith in God could be replaced by faith in reason and in science/knowledge. True faith, on the contrary, specifically required the irrational, as, for example, Kierkegaard and the Apostle Paul often made clear. In this sense, “Shestov brought to expression, with great radicalism, a truly existing and eternal problem” (47). But it was the way in which he did so, Berdyaev repeated, that perplexed so many of his readers—among them Unamuno, despite the instinctive affinity he felt towards him. The difficulty consisted in the inexpressiveness of words regarding what Shestov thought about the basic theme of his life, the inexpressiveness of the most important thing. He frequently had resort to the

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Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev negative form of expression and was more successful with it. What he struggled against was clear. But the positive form of expression was more difficult. (47)

Yet it was true, Berdyaev added, that this very characteristic perhaps enabled Shestov to grasp the true crux of existential philosophy: that the communicable content of knowledge was of secondary value only, while logical and rational thought remained existential. His inconsistency lay in the fact that he was a philosopher, i.e., a man of thought and knowledge, and while he denied knowledge, he came to know the tragedy of human existence. Against the tyranny of reason, against the power of knowledge, which drove man out of paradise, he battled on the territory of this very knowledge with the weapons of this very same reason. (47)

Therein, for Berdyaev, lay the difficulty of a philosophy—such as Shestov’s—intended to be authentic existentialism. Yet also therein lay the merit of Shestov, who fought all his life in favor of the unique and unrepeatable individual. His true adversary was thus Hegel and the Hegelian universal Spirit, and his greatest allies Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii. It was this which could rightly be called Shestov’s fundamental theme, according to Berdyaev: it was his sole idea, in the context of which he coherently, perseveringly—and, on occasion, obstinately—considered everything, invariably reaching the heart of the problem. It was not by chance, observed Berdyaev, that he wrote his most profound and successful books (Athens and Jerusalem and Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy) in the final intense and hectic years of his life, when he felt most deeply within himself the triumph of the universal spirit over bodily infirmity. He concluded: Now is not the time to criticize the philosophy of my old friend Lev Shestov. I would like to say only one thing. I have a great sympathy for Shestov’s problematic, and the motive of his struggle against the power exercised over human life by the “universal” is dear to me. But I have always had another view than he in the evaluation of knowledge, in that I do not see in it the source of the necessity hanging over our life. Only existentialist philosophy can explain what the case here is. Lev Shestov’s books help give an answer to the basic question of human existence; in them there is existential significance. (48)

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

Some years after the appearance of this article—which was later added as the preface to the posthumous edition of Shestov’s book Speculation and Revelation—Berdyaev revisited, in what was perhaps his most important work, The Russian Idea (1946), the topic of his friend and travelling companion. He wrote of Shestov: In contrast to Ivanov, Shestov was a person with a single idea; he was a man of one subject which governed him entirely and which he put into everything he wrote. He was not so much a Hellene as a Jew; he represented Jerusalem, not Athens. He was a product of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche [ . . . ]. Being a philosopher himself he quarrels with philosophers, with Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, with Spinoza, Kant and Hegel. His heroes are just a few people who have passed through shattering experiences; they are Isaiah, the Apostle Paul, Pascal, Luther, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. (Berdyaev 1992 [C])

Finally, Berdyaev acknowledged that Shestov belonged to the “Russian idea,” with his call for divine and human liberty, and above all with his pursuit of the Dostoevskian themes on the underlying nature man, and the conflict between man and earthly harmony. Taking this central Shestovian theme of the unremitting and tragic opposition between the individual and universal harmony, and using it as the ultimate proof of Shestov’s affiliation with the Russian spirit and idea, Berdyaev revealed what was, in his opinion, the core of Shestov’s identity: The most captivating aspect in L. Shestov is that throughout the extent of his literary activity he never accommodated himself to anything nor anyone, he never vulgarized his thought, he never tried to socially conform it. In this is a mark of his nobility. Without having belonged to any current he nonetheless belongs to the Russian spiritual renaissance of the early XX Century and he is one of the most unique thinkers of this epoch. (Berdyaev 1936a [B3], 52)

3. The reasons for the two philosophers’ differing theories appear most clearly in their own words. Berdyaev reproved Shestov for not having given sufficient weight to the problem of knowledge in his thinking, expounding at length in the “pars destruens” phase, but following up with very little (“perhaps half a page”, said Berdyaev) in the positive phase. For his part, Shestov appeared more to criticize the intentions, or, to put it better, the implied premises, of Berdyaev’s

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philosophy, which appeared to him to lack courage, bowing too easily to compromise, and always ready, so to speak, to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds: by safeguarding both the rights of man and the necessary truths, one never made a stand for either side.12 Perhaps because of that very ambiguity which, to his mind, was present in Berdyaev’s thinking, Shestov’s tone, with reference to his friend, often appeared even harsher than the tone he used in referring to those he knew should really have been his true adversaries—Hegel or Kant, for example, or Solovˈëv, among his fellow Russian thinkers. Berdyaev never spoke with similar harshness of Shestov, and, indeed, often referred to them both as being basically on the same side, even in the field of philosophy. In his works, Berdyaev also cited Shestov in a positive and constructive manner more often than he did in a negative manner. Yet, at the same time, his words convey how, in the end, he found Shestovian thought sterile and introversive, and not to be relied on. This picture of the situation shows clearly that the conditions for true dialogue between the two never existed, especially given Shestov’s rough-hewn nature, always ripe for a fight and ready to argue his point, and more prone to monologue, as Berdyaev said, than to confrontation. Here ends the speculative relation between the two philosophers, but there remains an important personal and historical postscript, which must not be omitted. Shestov died shortly before the start of the Second World War, while Berdyaev died ten years later. It was that last decade, the worst of his life, which most deeply marked the philosopher. This was the beginning of a period of indigence and stress for him, with all the difficulties consequent on being a Russian exile in wartime France. In his autobiography, he evoked his isolation from even his fellow emigrant countrymen, with whom he had once shared so much from a cultural and professional, or personal point of view. In some cases, Berdyaev spoke of a simple cooling of relations, in others of outright betrayal, naming, among others, Merezhkovskii, Pëtr Struve, Anton Kartashov, Boris Zaitsev, and also Sergei Bulgakov. Indeed, it is in this regard that Berdyaev, on more than one occasion, brought to mind the person who, unlike the others, was always close to him and remained his greatest friend: “The only exception is Lev Shestov, with whom my 12 In various parts of his works, Shestov maintains that the main, so to speak, “pragmatic” principle of philosophy—expressed most exemplarily in Aristotle—has always been “moderation,” i.e., the Aristotelian phronesis. In Shestov’s view, this a principle mostly directed towards the consolidation of the “power of keys” rather than towards the quest of truth. See, on this, aphorism no. 24, “Aurea mediocritas,” in Shestov 7/2007 (A1), 106–108; and Shestov 12/1966 (A1), 223–225.

Appendices II    Shestov and Berdyaev

friendship has grown stronger and deeper since the Kiev and Moscow days, and he is the only person with whom I could speak about matters that are of the greatest importance to us both” (Berdyaev 1950 [C], 279). While writing this personal note in the margins of his life story, Berdyaev could not certainly forget the fact that when he was accused of defending the Soviet ideology in 1935, Shestov was among those few who signed a public letter in defense of him, in the Russian émigré daily newspaper Poslednie novosti (see Shestov 16/1935 [A2]). This was typical of Shestov, that is, separating personal friendship from philosophical problems. He may not agree with Berdyaev’s philosophical conclusions, but he esteemed his research, his talent, and considered him as one of his best friends. From a philosophical point of view, the relationship between Shestov and Berdyaev is a history of incomprehension. The strangest fact, however, is that if one looks at the other possible theoretical dialogues or connections they could have had in Russia in their day, it is unlikely one would find another personality that would be as akin to them as they were to each other. Their views concerning humanism and freedom, their deeply existential philosophies originated from a common source, which may be called a sort of radical humanism—a peculiar view on humanity, that was perhaps foreign to all other Silver Age philosophers. They were looking at and speaking of the same thing but with opposite goals: Berdyaev aimed at building something in that field; Shestov with all his will wanted to stress the complete and perpetual impossibility of such a task. Because of this, they could not really interact. Each was also the most critical voice towards the other. As if in a “negative mirror,” the one reflected the weaknesses of the other, and this is probably the most relevant theoretical bond they ultimately had. But, from a wider point of view, they were also true “fellow travelers,” with a similar gaze towards life, in a way that means possibly more than their respective and divergent philosophical ideas did.

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III

Shestov and Fondane

1. The renowned dictum that Shestov would find in Benjamin Fondane his “only disciple” was spread by Shestov himself, as a joking prediction for the future to come, in a conversation with his brother-in-law German Lovtskii and with Fondane, in March 1935 (see Fondane [B1], 76). It is undeniable, however, that over the years this “joke” turned out in many ways to be true. While Shestov exerted a significant—though mostly unexposed—influence in twentieth-century philosophy, both in Russia and in Europe, anticipating many tendencies in the reception of Dostoevskii and Nietzsche, as well as in the diffusion of an existential trend in European philosophy and of a religious Jewish thought, it is not as simple to observe a direct affiliation to his thought in the explicit terms of a “Shestovian philosophy.” On the one hand, there can be no surprise about this for many of the reasons expressed in the concluding chapter of this book, but mainly because Shestov’s thought is intrinsically reluctant to enroll “adepts” and to build any transmissible system or content. On the other hand, there is even greater surprise in seeing that, despite lacking many disciples, at least one solid receptor of his ideas existed. No one was willing to follow Shestov up to the extreme and uncomfortable consequences of his thought like Fondane was, and no one like him—for the short time he had left to live after Shestov’s death—contributed more to spreading and promoting the works of his master.1 Fondane, a young Jewish Romanian poet and critic, met Shestov for the first time in 1924 in Paris, where he had moved a year earlier from Bucharest, to

1 On this aspect, see Geneviève Piron, “Le rôle de Fondane dans la diffusion de la pensée de Chestov en France,” in Piron 2010 (B3).

Appendices III    Shestov and Fondane

which he returned at the war’s end.2 At that time, Fondane was twenty-six years old and Shestov was fifty-eight. They met in the house of Jules de Gaultier. Until that moment, Fondane had only read Shestov’s French book Les révélations de la mort (1923) [The Revelations of Death] and had written six articles in Romanian on it.3 As he later said about that meeting: “I was completely unaware whether he [Shestov] was alive or dead, from our century or from the previous one. I never imagined him anywhere but, perhaps, in Russia. And suddenly, in front of me, there was this tall, dry, lean old man in Gaultier’s old-fashioned living room. My emotion was sharp, and as such I expressed it, I believe” (Fondane [B1], 41). On that occasion, Fondane acted as a sort of “translator” as Shestov’s French was not clear to Gaultier’s ear. From then on, Fondane started to frequent Shestov’s house and, at first, he was regarded as a friend of Shestov’s daughter Tatˈyana. Fondane did not know much about philosophy except for the Nietzschean version of Gaultier, that is, the early Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy. With Shestov’s encouragement, he learned to consider Nietzsche and Dostoevskii from another, tragic perspective. Shestov gave Fondane a French copy of his Dostoevskii and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, and Fondane’s comments on it impressed him so much that he exclaimed that for the first time he felt that someone had understood the real problem he posed, beyond the clarity of his style (43). Around 1929, in particular, the two started to correspond on a regular basis: the early acquaintanceship became a friendship and a disciple-master relationship. Fondane, in fact, wanted to be Shestov’s disciple and acted as a real one in all ways: he wanted to learn as much as he could and, 2 Benjamin Fondane (Benjamin Fundoianu, pseudonym of Benjamin Wechsler) was born in 1898 in Iași (Romania) and died in the Nazi German camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. During World War I he was active in Romania and Moldavia as a poet, a literary and film critic, and a promoter of the avant-garde. After he moved to Paris, in 1923, he began a second career as a Jewish existentialist philosopher, a follower of Surrealism, and a critic of Baudelaire and Rimbaud. He was a disciple of Shestov, Emil Cioran, Jacques Maritain, David Gascoyne, and Victoria Ocampo. Among other publications, he is the author of the works: La conscience malheureuse [The Unhappy Conscience, 1936], Faux traité d’esthétique [False Treatise on Aesthetics, 1938], Baudelaire et l’expérience du gouffre [Baudelaire and the Experience of the Chasm, 1947], and Rencontres avec Léon Chestov [Conversations with Lev Shestov, 1982]. On Benjamin Fondane, see in particular the monographic studies of Kluback (C), Hyde (C), Jutrin 2001, 2009, and 2011 (C), Finkenthal (C), and Salazar-Ferrer 2004 (C). For a complete bibliography of his works and a full list of studies on him, see the website of the Société d’étude Benjamin Fondane (https://www.benjaminfondane.com/) which also edits the journal Cahiers Benjamin Fondane. 3 See Benjamin Fundoianu, “Léon Chestov,” Adevĕrul literar (Bucharest: August–September 1923). Fondane’s articles concerned Shestov’s book in French Les révélations de la mort. Dostoïevski-Tolstoï, preface and trans. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Plon, 1923).

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at a certain point, he began to take notes of their conversations. He felt that “nobody had really understood Shestov’s thought, that his works were either little read or not read at all, that he lived in an absolute and terrifying solitude” (43). As he wrote: “I was the only one allowed to hear and understand him, and [ . . . ] if I did not decide to write down his interviews, nobody would do it” (43). Fondane decided to transcribe this report of their conversations—whether private meetings or letters—in 1934, through all the materials (letters and memories from their meetings) he kept from February 1929 up to Shestov’s death on November 20, 1938. After this event, however, Fondane’s life was not easy: World War II started, and Fondane would leave on a journey of no return. As he declared to his friend Victoria Ocampo, he sensed he would not come back: for this reason, he left her the manuscript of Conversations, begging her to keep it and publish it in the event that he was not able to do so himself (cf. Fondane’s letter to Victoria Ocampo from June 18, 1939, in Fondane [B1], 251–253). The difficult destiny of both Shestov’s and Fondane’s works after the War, despite the efforts made by their friends Boris de Schloezer, Claude Sernet and Emil Cioran to share the importance of their writings, is the reason why this text was only edited and published in 1982, thanks to the editorial work of Natalˈya Baranova and Michel Carassou.4 The Conversations are an incredible source of information about Shestov, but also about Fondane and the Parisian life of the early 1930s—an extraordinary time in which intellectuals of different extractions met and exchanged ideas with great ease. This work reveals an otherwise unknown part of Shestov’s life: his friendship with Husserl, Berdyaev, and Buber, the sometimes difficult relationships with the French intellectuals, his frequentation of the Russian émigré community, his decisive “encounter” with Kierkegaard’s works (suggested to him by Husserl), his memories from a past Russian life, and a number of important testimonies from his youth and early years of activity. But, most of all, this book displays this deep, particular friendship between Shestov and his younger disciple Fondane. On the one hand it seemed it was Fondane who most benefited in terms of learning of notions and ideas, but, on the other hand, through the “ears” and the “mirror” of Fondane, Shestov becomes a new, different personality: in a way more flexible, less monolithic, more open to different views and thoughts.5 4 On the complex history of this manuscript, which would be published nearly forty years after Fondane’s death, see “Notes des éditeurs,” in Fondane (B1), 259–260. 5 On the relationship between Shestov and Fondane, there are numerous studies thanks to the joined efforts of the Shestov Studies Society and the Société d’étude Benjamin

Appendices III    Shestov and Fondane

2. From the first article he dedicated to Shestov in French, “Un philosophe tragique” (1929), up to the last one he published in 1938, Fondane made a significant effort to divulge and interpret Shestov’s thought, with special attention to making it understandable for French audiences.6 Without exaggeration, Boris de Scholezer once told Shestov that his philosophy had a better chance of becoming known in the world through Fondane than through his own writings (cf. Fondane [B1], 143). With regard to Shestov’s works, Fondane’s tone is generally laudatory and apologetic. But the articles in particular that were meant to introduce Shestov to those who did not yet know him have the character of a summary of his thought (see, in particular, Fondane 1929b and 1938a [B3]). The major themes of the central phase of Shestov’s research are evidenced here, often with direct quotations from his works. Above all, Fondane mostly considers the three books that were issued or written in 1920s: Potestas Clavium, In Job’s Balance, and—even though this came a bit later—Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Starting from these works, and in the wake of Shestov’s most famous heroes (Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Pascal, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Plotinus), Fondane reconstructs the fundamental passages of his mentor’s philosophy, matter-of-factly, without risking too much of an interpretation going beyond Shestov’s own self-understanding. Fondane considers Shestov entirely as a philosopher (in this respect, he is much less interested in Shestov’s analyses on literature produced in his prerevolutionary life in Russia and he prefers not to mention Shestov’s references to Russian novels). Following the general outline offered in Potestas Clavium, he places him in a precise role within the history of philosophy: that is, the one who revived the neglected tradition of philosophy as a “preparation for death” (Plato) and as “that which matters most” (Plotinus). In Fondane’s article “Léon Chestov et la lutte contre les évidences” (1938), Shestov is seen—just like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Pascal—as the one who developed an authentic existential philosophy of those who “cherchent en gémissant” (Pascal) and do not aim at casting a “light on Being” (cf. Fondane [B1], 214). For Fondane, Shestov “with Kierkegaard and

6

Fondane, whose two journals (Cahiers Léon Chestov and Cahiers Benjamin Fondane) have often explored the connections between the two authors. Further studies can be found in Fotiade 2001 and 2006 (B2), Bowman (B3), Lucescu-Boutcher (B3), Piron 2010 (B3), Sazeeva 2006 and 2010 (B3), and Vorozhikhina 2014a (B3). See also Michel Carassou, “Chestov lecteur de Fondane,” in Struve-Laurent (B2), 179–188; “Benjamin Fondane, le disciple inésperé,” in Fotiade 2009b (B3), 118–125; and chapter 4 (“Benzhamen Fondan. ‘Neshchastnoe soznanie’”) of Kseniya Vorozhikhina’s book Lev Shestov i ego frantsuzskie posledovateli (Vorozhikhina [B2], 86–131). For a list of Fondane’s writings on Shestov, see Fondane (B3).

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with Nietzsche, is the philosopher who most contributed to the transvaluation of all our values” (217, Fondane’s italics). In this respect, Fondane suggests that Shestov’s philosophy “begins precisely in the point where that of Heidegger ended” (213). With such an affirmation, Fondane aims to point out Shestov’s definitive elimination of Greek tradition and his will to approach and overcome the ultimate limits of Western logos—which he probably did not see as clearly in Heidegger’s thought. Quoting a crucial passage from Potestas Clavium, Fondane maintains that for Shestov “philosophy only begins when man loses all the criteria of truth, when he senses that there can be no criterion in it, and that one is not even needed” (248). But Heidegger—as Fondane points out in his article “Chestov, Kierkegaard et le serpent”—never abandoned such criteria: “Heidegger’s freedom is only a freedom to death, a freedom to obey necessity. Because, although Heidegger falls under Kierkegaard, he cannot abandon Kant; he is writing a book on Kant and not on Kierkegaard” (Fondane 2013 [B3], 252). Hence, Fondane sees Shestov and Kierkegaard as a perfect match, the one a “double” of the other, even considering the latter less audacious than Shestov in fearlessly dismissing all seduction of knowledge (cf. 268–272). Shestov actually disproved this excess of criticism towards Kierkegaard and “reproached” Fondane for being too severe in this regard, as Kierkegaard’s prudence did not mean lack of courage (see Fondane [B1], 123). Nevertheless, Fondane confirmed his view on the Kierkegaardian heritage being alive in Shestov: “Since Kierkegaard is dead, Shestov is there continuing his task. It is not Kierkegaard’s ideas that Shestov seeks to save—but Kierkegaard himself ” (Fondane 2013 [B3], 276). Fondane’s entire reasoning in his philosophy of “unhappy conscience” is based on overcoming the evidence of reason, but also on overcoming the “concepts” themselves. For him, the ultimate goal of philosophy is to disclose the “human as such,” in a direction that was opened above all by Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevskii, and Shestov. Although following the same path as Shestov, Fondane reveals a possibly more humanistic concern than his—and this might be the slightest nuance of a difference between the two—in the need to find the place and rights for the existing individual to be a “single person,” with that person’s positive and creative attributes and specificities. Fondane’s call is, overall, a call for the dignity of the human to be a “poet” and for poetry to be an activity acting against any generality (“omnitude,” he says with Dostoevskii and with Shestov). “Against this ‘omnitude’—Fondane concludes in his La conscience malheureuse—on which the trap of reason is constructed, Shestov, like Pascal, Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii, will counter with man alone, and perhaps even man alone before God” (307).

Appendices III    Shestov and Fondane

The article “Sur les rives de l’Ilissus,” written after Shestov’s death and intended as an introduction to the possible publication of the Rencontres, is different from the other works on Shestov. Fondane’s narrative reflects the amicable spirit of their conversations: it is a text full of anecdotes and highly enlightening of Shestov’s innermost thoughts. It reveals that Shestov was content with Fondane’s studies on him, as he felt that only he and Husserl had understood the “question as such” that he posed (see “Sur les rives de l’Ilissus” in Fondane [B1], 32). The “question,” the one that tormented him all his life, was that of the perfect opposition of two irreducible truths, on different planes of understanding yet still radically opposed: the truth of facts and logic, and the truth of the one who judges and stands before those facts, that is, the existing individual.7 The irreducibility of this contradiction along with the necessity of overcoming it led one to the most authentic philosophical research. From this point on, once reason has got rid of its most fundamental premise—the principle of noncontradiction, it is possible for Fondane “to know not only the philosophia vera, but, beyond it, the optima” (21). Shestov’s ultimate doubt— according to Fondane who quotes Shestov’s words—was the following: “What we take for the truth, is it truly from the source of the truth that we went to take it?” (32). 3. As Michael Finkenthal observed, “throughout his life, Fondane echoed the Shestovian themes, in all his prose writings.”8 Most importantly, one may add, he did so “till the end” and without compromise. This is the most particular 7 As Fondane reports, Shestov provided a vivid example of this: “When Hitler had Austria under his heel, Shestov was very downcast and he said to me: ‘It’s a fact. I am forced to accept it. But no one will ever be able to persuade me that this fact is worthy of the predicate of truth’” (Fondane [B1], 29). In its simplicity and dramatic force, this example perhaps displays the main focus of Shestov’s view of the problem of knowledge: any fact, while being true as a fact, is not automatically “truth” as such. For truth (or, a more authentic philosophical search for truth) begins where the “truth of facts” (but also the truth of logic) ends. Since the truth of facts appears to be the most necessary and constraining—and this is undeniable even to Shestov— it is natural to extend it to the whole concept of truth. But here, for Shestov, is the biggest mistake. He is not actually talking about a moral judgment (or “value”) on facts deserving the predicate of truth more than “factual truth,” but he is rather implying that constriction per se (whether factual or purely logical) is ultimately a deceit. When he mentions Hitler, in such a context, he does not speak only about “absolute evil” but also, more figuratively, about the brutal force of constriction, which to him most exemplifies the serpent of knowledge (cf., on this, a conversation Shestov had with Martin Buber, in Fondane [B1], 64). In his view, in fact, the most authentic, the “most worthy” philosophy begins where the “less worthy” (though not at all false) philosophy of logos, of necessity and of facts has exhausted its duty. 8 Michael Finkenthal, “Shestov and Fondane’s Search for Metasophia” (Finkenthal [B2], 85).

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reason why he can be rightly labelled “Shestov’s only disciple.” Unlike other missed disciples, like Georges Bataille,9 Rachel Bespaloff,10 and Gabriel Marcel,11 who all followed Shestov up to a certain point to later recant their 9

Shestov and Bataille had an intense interaction between 1923 and 1925. Shestov was a decisive mentor to his younger friend, suggesting to him the reading of many authors: most notably Nietzsche, but also Dostoevskii, Tolstoi, Pascal, and Plato. In particular, Shestov directed Bataille to a disenchanted reading of Nietzsche, which would be crucial to his thought. In 1925, Bataille helped Shestov’s eldest daughter Tatˈyana in the French translation of the book on Tolstoi and Nietzsche. After 1925, however, Bataille interrupted his intercourse with Shestov probably for political reasons, as he embraced Marxism and materialism, and did not follow Shestov’s ongoing religious interests. On Shestov and Bataille, see the works of Michel Surya: Georges Bataille, la mort à l’oeuvre (Paris: Librairie Séghier, 1988) and “L’Arbitraire après tout. De la ‘philosophie’ de Léon Chestov à la ‘philosophie’ de Georges Bataille,” in Georges Bataille après tout, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Belin, 1995), 213–231. See also Camille Morando, “Chestov et Bataille—l’assentiment à la philosophie de la tragédie,” in Morando (B3), 259–269; and the chapter 3 “Zhorzh Batai. Toska po nevozmozhnomu,” in Vorozhikhina (B2), 68–85. 10 On the controversial relationship between Shestov and Rachel Bespaloff, as seen in particular through Fondane’s eyes, see Monique Jutrin’s article “Bespaloff, Chestov, Fondane—différends et connivences,” in Jutrin (B3), 237–248; and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, “‘La vérité que nous sommes . . .’ Rachel Bespaloff et Benjamin Fondane devant Chestov,” in Fotiade 2009b (B3), 137–150. It is well known that neither Shestov nor Fondane appreciated Bespaloff ’s chapter on Shestov in her book Cheminements et Carrefours (1938). But it was in the aftermath of Shestov’s death—which occurred in the same year as the book was published—that there was a clarification of that controversy in the dialogue between Bespaloff and Fondane. In short, Bespaloff ’s view is possibly even more tragic than Shestov’s and Fondane’s. For she does not see in the (Shestovian and Fondanian) irresolute contrast between the rebellion of individual existence and the obedience demanded by absolute reason the most authentic understanding of human tragedy. “For me,” as she says in a long letter to Fondane from 1936 (quoted in Jutrin’s article) in which she comments on his La conscience malheureuse, “the more I go, the more it seems to me that, under the misfortune [malheur] of conscience, there is at first the misfortune of existence itself. Before being ‘overwhelmed with his own knowledge,’ existence succumbs under its own weight” ( Jutrin [B3], 241). In this respect, as Jutrin argues, “although Bespaloff in no way contests the utility of the insurrection against the absolutism of reason, she equally considers reason not necessarily as an enemy, as it can be a panacea for trying to solve the tragedy of existence, providing it an ‘alibi’” (241). On the other hand, Bespaloff reproaches Shestov with the same argument he used with his enemies: she blames him for being too much a philosopher—too speculative to accomplish his own destiny. In conclusion, Monique Jutrin maintains how, particularly in her reading of Iliad, Bespaloff points out a deep identity beneath the opposites—an identity he calls “ethic thought” which she eventually makes coincide with the “tragic thought” displayed by poetry, religion, and the Bible (247). She was never satisfied with Shestov’s antitheses, although she shared his general fight, and she searched for a synthesis beyond or “before” them pointing straight to the concrete individual. 11 On Marcel’s disappointment with Shestov’s thought, after his initial fascination with it, accusing it of being a search for nothing or, as it were, a “knocking where there are no doors,”

Appendices III    Shestov and Fondane

mentor, Fondane absorbed the Shestovian teaching without any filter or “little adjustment,” and applied it to his entire speculation. In this respect, Fondane’s learning from Shestov is probably not relevant so much for what he wrote— often with an apologetic intent—on his master’s texts, as for the way in which he developed his thoughts and ideas, for example about those authors Shestov never explicitly or completely dealt with (like, for instance, Heidegger, Freud, Baudelaire, Gide, or Bergson). Furthermore, on some occasions Fondane brought to light some sensitive questions within the Shestovian readings that Shestov himself, whether consciously or not, avoided confronting. This is the case of the ambiguities in Shestov with regard to Nietzsche concerning his atheism and his concept of tragedy. As Olivier Salazar-Ferrer points out, in The Unhappy Conscience Fondane—somehow taking back some of Bespaloff ’s arguments—openly depicts Nietzsche as an “ambiguous ally,” whose atheism derived directly from the “serpent of knowledge.”12 Even tragedy, according to Fondane, is not the same concept in Shestov and Nietzsche. Unlike Nietzsche, tragedy for Fondane (and for Shestov, according to Fondane) lies beyond any reasoning on values, as it is a subjectively perceived conflict between an aspiration to an infinite possibility by means of faith and a rational conscience obeying the laws of knowledge (see Salazar-Ferrer [B3], 130–131). From another perspective, Fondane’s work does not end with the reception and divulgation of Shestov’s ideas. As Kseniya Vorozhikhina argues, “while trying to clarify Shestov’s ideas, Fondane builds his own philosophy.” Accordingly, “basing himself on the concepts of Shestov’s teachings— Vorozhikhina adds—he solves the philosophical problems that his teacher indicates and, at the same time, he uses the ideas of the Russian thinker for his own purposes, that is, the study of poetic creativity (through the example of Rimbaud and Baudelaire) and the ‘justification’ of poetry” (Vorozhikhina [B2], 108). Indeed, what he took from Shestov was an introduction to the philosophical world that was quite extraneous to him before then. He learned the Shestovian “negative” lesson in depth: that is, the fundamental mistrust of any kind of “system,” abstract categories, or general laws. But, in particular after Shestov’s death, he went back to his interest for poetry and literature, to which he tried to apply Shestov’s “tragic teachings.” In the subsequent years, therefore, he wrote the book False Treatise of Aesthetics (1938) and the unfinished see the famous anecdote told by Shestov himself to Fondane: Fondane (B1), 79. See also Viktor P. Vizgin, “Shestov i Marsel’,” in Shchedrina 2016a (B2), 165–182. 12 See Olivier Salazar-Ferrer, “Fondane et Nietzsche: une alliance paradoxale” (Salazar-Ferrer [B3], 127).

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work Baudelaire and the Experience of the Chasm (1947), which reflect this shift from philosophy to a philosophy of literature (with a specific treatment of literature that was not typical of Shestov)13 or, in other words, from the content of tragic-existential philosophy to its results for the individual life and for a poetic approach to it.14 Fondane’s intention, however, was not to give up on philosophy as is demonstrated by an article he wrote in March 1944, a month before his arrest, entitled “Le lundi existential et le dimanche de l’histoire” [The Existential Monday and the Sunday of History], which would be part of an anthology on existential thought: L’existence (published in 1945 by Jean Grenier). In this article, Fondane returned to considering the path of contemporary existential philosophies—from Jaspers to Marcel, to Heidegger and to Sartre—for he concluded that the majority of those philosophies, and in particular those who came after World War II, forgot the “existing real” in favor of a reflection on the consciousness that thinks about existence. Unfortunately, as another unexpected tragedy entered his life, Fondane did not have time to better explore his intuitions for a philosophy of the existing individual and for an authentic poetic thought.

13 According to Kseniya Vorozhikhina, in his False Treatise of Aesthetics, “using the example of the surrealistic movement, he [Fondane] analyzes the mistakes that poetry has been making for two thousand years. Poetry, according to Fondane, just like philosophy, has become increasingly universal and rational; like philosophy, it has become detached from a direct connection with reality and is the result of speculation, so it does not deal with its main task— the consolidation and communication of existential experiences” (Vorozhikhina [B2], 104). 14 As Finkenthal puts it, “Benjamin Fondane, who began his philosophical career as a disciple of an existential philosopher, became therefore himself a philosopher in search of new ways and means to counteract the ‘tyranny of reason.’ One of the ways he explored was that of a ‘poetical thinking’ in guise of philosophy: in his already mentioned False Treatise of Aesthetics, Fondane dwelled upon the deep meaning of the poetical act and its implication for a possibly new philosophy of the existence” (Finkenthal [B2], 148). Significantly, as it emerges from the last entries of his Rencontres, Fondane was anxious to hear Shestov’s opinion on his False Treatise of Aesthetics. But the book was issued in autumn 1938 and Fondane sent Shestov a copy only about two weeks before his death. Shestov thanked him wholeheartedly but, from that moment onward, he was not in a condition to read it (see Fondane [B1], 167).

Bibliography and Works Cited

A. Shestov’s Works This bibliography lists all of Lev Shestov’s works in the original Russian language1 and available in translations in French and in English (only the first translation, in chronological order, is considered).2 The works written by Shestov are divided here in two parts—books (A1) and articles and correspondence (A2)—and are set in two different orders following, in the case of A1, the classification made by Natalʹya Baranova (see Baranoff-Chestov 1975 [B1]), and in the case of A2, the date of publication of those texts.3 Since the large majority of Shestov’s essays were first published individually in journals and then collected in volumes (by the author himself or posthumously), in the A2 section I only considered those writings by Shestov (articles, long essays,

1 The first entry relates to the adopted edition for citations in this book, whereas the second entry is the first original publication. 2 Since Shestov’s writings were translated into several languages during his lifetime, the choice of narrowing down this bibliography to just the translations in French and English was made for convenience only, and is not intended to deny the huge influence that Shestov’s works actually had in other countries such as Germany, Italy, Spain, or Japan, as well as many countries in South America. 3 The two parts mostly follow the bibliography published by Shestov’s second daughter, Natalʹya Baranova-Shestova (see Baranoff-Chestov 1975 [B1]), but with some significant updates. From 1975 to the present time, many editions of Shestov’s correspondence have been issued as well as some unpublished manuscripts and book translations. Among these new issues, in particular, the Lectures on the History of Greek Philosophy (published in 2001) can be considered to all intents and purposes as the thirteenth volume of Shestov’s output, in addition to the twelve other books already established in Natalʹya Baranova’s classification.

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Bibliography and Works Cited

correspondence) that were not included in any of his published books.4 The book section (A1) cites only the title (in Russian, with the English translation) when a work was conceived as a monograph; on the contrary, when a volume was a collection of essays (previously published in journals, or in some cases never published before), every chapter/essay is also listed.

A.1 Books 1) Shekspir i ego kritik Brandes [Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes]. In Apofeoz bespochvennosti [Collected Works], edited by O. Kolesnikov, 7–206. Moscow: AST, 2000. [1st ed. Saint Petersburg: Mendelevich, 1898.] [Léon Chestov] Shakespeare et son critique Brandès. Translated by Emma Guillet. Paris: Le bruit du temps, 2017. 2) Dobro v uchenii gr. Tolstogo i Fr. Nittsshe. Filosofiya i propoved′ [The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche. Philosophy and Preaching]. In Kolesnikov 2000, 207–307. [Léon Chestov] L’idée de bien chez Tolstoï et Nietzsche (philosophie et prédication). Translated by Tatiana Beresovski-Chestov et Georges Bataille. Paris: Ed. du Siècle, 1925. The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching. In Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, translated by Bernard Martin, 1–140. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969. 3) Dostoevskii i Nittsshe. Filosofiya tragedii [Dostoevskii and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy]. In Kolesnikov 2000, 308–451. [Léon Chestov] La Philosophie de la Tragédie. Dostoïevsky et Nietzsche. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Ed. de la Pléiade, 1926. Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, 141–322. Translated by Spencer E. Roberts. In Martin 1969. 4 The references to the first appearance in journals of the articles later collected in a volume have been provided in the notes throughout this book. The first four entries of section A2 are those indicated by Natalʹya Baranova and concern the early journalistic phase of Shestov’s activity, during which he collaborated with the Kievan magazines Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo and Kievskoe slovo. However, through a careful study of the unpublished correspondence dating from 1895-1898 between Shestov and Varvara Malakhieva-Mirovich (held in the Shakhovskii-Shikov family archive)  and a review of the indexes of the magazine  Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo, Kseniya Vorozhikhina has recently discovered that this collaboration was far more extensive in length and time, and lasted from 1895 to 1900. During this period, Shestov produced several short articles and reviews on literary, legal, financial, and civil topics, published under a pseudonym or under just his initials. Although the authorship of all of these texts is not confirmed, they amount to more than twenty (for a complete list and a brief analysis of these articles, see Vorozhikhina 2019 [B3]).

Bibliography and Works Cited 4) Apofeoz bespochvennosti (opyt adogmaticheskogo myshleniya) [Apotheosis of Groundlessness (An Experiment in Adogmatic Thought)]. In Kolesnikov 2000, 452–616. Contents: “Predislovie” [Preface]; “Chastʹ 1-aya i 2-aya (168 aforizmov)” [Part 1 and 2 (168 Aphorisms)]; “Prilozheniya” [Appendices]: “‘Yulii Tsezarʹ’ Shekspira” [Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar]; “Vlast′ idei (Po povodu knigi: D. Merezhkovskii, ‘Lev Tolstoi i Dostoevskii’)” [The Power of Ideas (On the Book: D. Merezhkovskii, Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevskii). [Léon Chestov] Sur les confins de la vie. L’Apothéose du dépaysement. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Ed. de la Pléiade, 1927.5 All Things are Possible. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky. Introduction by D. H. Lawrence. London: Martin Secker, 1920.6 5) Nachala i kontsy (sbornik statei) [Beginnings and Endings. A Collection of Essays)]. In Sochineniya v dvukh tomakh, vol. 2. Tomsk: Izd. “Vodolei,” 1996, 181–272. [1st ed. Saint Petersburg: Stasyulevich, 1908.] Contents: “Tvorchestvo iz nichego. A. P. Chekhov” [Creation from Nothing: A. P. Chekhov]; “Prorocheskii dar. K 25-letiyu smerti Dostoevskogo” [The Gift of Prophecy: For the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of Dostoevskii’s Death]; “Pokhvala gluposti. Po povodu knigi Nikolaya Berdyaeva ‘Sub Specie Aeternitatis’” [In Praise of Folly: On the Occasion of Nikolai Berdyaev’s Book Sub Specie Aeternitatis]; “Predposlednie slova (11 aforizmov)” [Penultimate Words (11 Aphorisms)]. [Léon Chestov] Les commencements et les fins. Translated by Boris de Schloezer and Sylvie Luneau. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1987. Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays. Introduction by John Middleton Murry. Dublin and London: Maunsel and Co., 1916. 6) Velikie kanuny [The Great Vigils]. Moscow: AST-Khranitelʹ, 2002. [1st ed. Saint Petersburg: Shipovnik, 1911.] Contents: “Predislovie (10 aforizmov)” [Preface (10 Aphorisms)]; “Filosofiya i teoriya poznaniya (14 aforizmov)” [Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge (14 Aphorisms)]; “Razrushayushchii i sozidayushchii miry. Po povodu 80-letnego yubileya Tolstogo” [He who Builds and Destroys the Worlds: On the Occasion of Tolstoi’s Eightieth Anniversary]; “Pobedy i porazheniya. Zhiznʹ i tvorchestvo Genrikha Ibsena” [Victories and Defeats. Henrik Ibsen’s Life and Work]; “Poeziya i proza Fëdora Sologuba” [Fëdor Sologub’s Poetry and Prose]; “Logika religioznogo tvorchestva. Pamyati V. Dzhemsa” [The Logic of Religious Creation. In Memory of William James]. [Léon Chestov] Les grandes veilles. Translated by Sylvie Luneau and Nathalie Sretovitch. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1985.

5 6

This edition does not include the appendix on Merezhkovskii. This edition does not include either the Preface or the two appendices on Shakespeare and on Merezhkovskii.

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Bibliography and Works Cited 7) Potestas Clavium (Vlastʹ klyuchei) [The Power of Keys]. Moscow: AST-Khranitelʹ, 2007. [1st ed. Berlin: Skify, 1923.] Contents: “Tysyacha i odna nochʹ. Vmesto predisloviya” [A Thousand and One Nights: By way of a Preface]; “Chastʹ 1-aya i 2-aya (39 aforizmov)” [Part 1 and 2 (39 Aphorisms)]; “Memento mori (Po povodu teorii poznaniya Edmunda Gusserlya)” [Memento Mori (On Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Knowledge)]; “Vyacheslav Velikolepnyi. K kharakteristike russkogo upadochnichestva” [The Magnificent Vyacheslav: On the Specificity of Russian Decadentism]; “O kornyakh veshchei” [On the Roots of Things]. [Léon Chestov] Le pouvoir des clefs (Potestas clavium). Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Ed. de la Pléiade, 1928. Potestas clavium. Translated by Bernard Martin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1968.7 8) Na vesakh Iova. Stranstvovaniya po dusham [In Job’s Balance: Peregrinations through the Souls]. In Sochineniya v 2-kh tomakh, vol. 2, edited by Anatolii V. Akhutin. Moscow: Izd. Nauka, 1993. [1st ed. Paris: Sovremennye zapiski, 1929.] Contents: “Nauka i svobodnoe issledovanie. Vmesto predisloviya” [Science and Free Investigation: By way of a Preface]; “Chastʹ 1-aya: Otkroveniya smerti (1. Preodolenie samoochevidnostei. K 100-letiyu rozhdeniya F. M. Dostoevskogo. 2. Na strashnom sude. Poslednie proizvedeniya Tolstogo)” [Part 1: The Revelations of Death (1. Overcoming Self-Evidences: On the Occasion of the Centenary of Dostoevskii’s Birth. 2. In the Last Judgment. Tolstoi’s Last Works)]; “Chast′ 2-aya: Derznoveniya i pokornosti (52 aforizma)” [Part 2: Audacities and Submissions (52 Aphorisms)]; “Chastʹ 3-aya: K filosofii istorii (1. Synovʹya i pasynki vremeni. Istoricheskii zhrebii Spinozy. 2. Gefsimanskaya nochʹ. Filosofiya Paskalya. 3. Neistovye rechi. Ob ekstazakh Plotina. 4. Chto takoe istina? Ob etike i ontologii. Otvet na statʹyu J. Hering’a)” [Part 3: Towards a Philosophy of History (1. Legitimate and Illegitimate Children of Time. Spinoza’s Historical Fate. 2. The Night of Gethsemane: The Philosophy of Pascal. 3. Exasperated Discourses: On Plotinus’s Ecstasies. 4. What Is Truth? On Ethics and Ontology: Reply to J. Hering’s Article)]. [Léon Chestov] Sur la balance de Job. Pérégrinations à travers les âmes. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Flammarion, 1971.8 In Job’s Balance. Translated by Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney. London: Ed. Dent & Sons, 1932.9

7

The essay “Vyacheslav Velikolepnyi” [The Magnificent Vyacheslav] was omitted both in the English and in the French edition, which instead included the essay “Chto takoe istina?” [What Is Truth?] (taken from Na vesakh Iova [In Job’s Balance]). 8 This edition does not include the essay “Chto takoe istina?” [What Is Truth?] (already included in Chestov 7/1928 [A1]). A partial French translation of this book (only the first part) was already issued in 1923 with the title: Les révélations de la mort. Dostoïevski-Tolstoï, trans. Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Plon, 1923). 9 This edition does not include the essay “Chto takoe istina?” [What Is Truth?] (later included in Shestov 7/1968 [A1]).

Bibliography and Works Cited 9) Kirgegard i ekzistentsialʹnaya filosofiya (glas vopiyushchego v pustyne) [Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy (Voice in the Wilderness)]. In Kolesnikov 2000, 617–830. [1st ed. Paris: Dom knigi i Sovremennye zapiski, 1939.] Contents: “Vmesto predisloviya. Kirgegard i Dostoevskii” [By way of a Preface: Kierkegaard and Dostoevskii]; “22 glavy” [22 Chapters]; “Vmesto poslesloviya. Kirgegard—religioznyi filosof ” [By way of a Postface: Kierkegaard as a Religious Philosopher].10 [Léon Chestov] Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle. Vox clamantis in deserto. Translated by Tatiana Rageot and Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Ed. Les Amis de Léon Chestov et Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1936.11 Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Translated by Elinor Hewitt. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969. 10) Afiny i Ierusalim [Athens and Jerusalem]. Moscow: AST-Khranitelʹ, 2007. [1st ed. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1951.].12 Contents: “Predislovie” [Preface]; “Chastʹ 1-aya: Ob istochnikakh metafizicheskikh istin. Skovannyi Parmenid” [Part 1: On the Sources of Metaphysical Truths: Parmenides in Chains]; “Chastʹ 2-aya: V Falariiskom byke. Znanie i svoboda voli” [Part 2: In the Bull of Phalaris: The Knowledge and Freedom of Will]; “Chastʹ 3-aya: O srednevekovoi filosofii. Concupiscentia irresistibilis (Po povodu knigi E. Zhilʹsona Dukh srednevekovoi filosofii)” [Part 3: On Medieval Philosophy: Concupiscentia irresistibilis (On E. Gilson’s book The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy)]; “Chastʹ 4-aya: O vtorom izmerenii myshleniya. Borʹba i umozrenie (68 aforizmov)” [Part 4: On the Second Dimension of Thought: Fight and Speculation (68 Aphorisms)]. [Léon Chestov] Athènes et Jérusalem. Un essai de philosophie religieuse. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1938. Athens and Jerusalem. Translated by Bernard Martin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1966. 11) Umozrenie i otkrovenie. Religioznaya filosofiya Vladimira Solovʹëva i drugie statʹi [Speculation and Revelation: The Religious Philosophy of Vladimir Solovʹëv and Other Essays]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1964. [1st ed.] Contents: “O vechnoi knige. Pamyati M. O. Gershenzona” [On the Eternal Book: In Memory of M. O. Gershenzon]; “Umozrenie i apokalipsis. Religioznaya filosofiya Vl. Solovʹëva” [Speculation and Apocalypse: The Religious Philosophy of Vl. Solovʹëv]; “V. V. Rozanov”; “Dve knigi Rikharda Kronera” [Two Books by Richard Kroner]; “Martin Buber”; “N. F. Fëdorov”; “Gegelʹ ili Iov. Po povodu ekzistentsialʹnoi filosofii Kirgegarda” [Hegel or Job: On Kierkegaard’s Existential Philosophy]; “Mif i istina. K metafizike poznaniya. Po povodu knigi ‘Primitivnaya mifologiya,’ L. Levi-Bryulʹ” [Myth and Truth: For a Metaphysics of Knowledge: On L. Lévy-Bruhl’s Book The Primitive Mythology];

10 This postface was not included in the 1939 edition but only in the 2000 AST work collection, and also in Shestov 11/1964 (A1). 11 The French edition appeared three years earlier than the Russian edition. 12 The Russian edition appeared twelve years after the 1938 French edition.

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Bibliography and Works Cited “Yasnaya Polyana i Astapovo. K 25-letiyu so dnya smerti L. Tolstogo” [Yasnaya Polyana and Astapovo: On the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of L. Tolstoi’s Death]; “O ‘pererozhdenii ubezhdenii’ u Dostoevskogo” [On the “Change of Convictions” in Dostoevskii]; “Sine effusione sanguinis. O filosofskoi chestnosti. Po povodu knigi ‘Vernunft und Existenz’ K. Yaspersa” [Sine effusione sanguinis: On the Honesty of Philosophy: On K. Jaspers’s book Reason and Existenz]; “Kirkegard—religioznyi filosof ” [Kierkegaard as a Religious Philosopher]; “Nikolai Berdyaev. Gnozis i ekzistentsialʹnaya filosofiya” [Nikolai Berdyaev: Gnosis and Existential Philosophy]; “Pamyati velikogo filosofa. Edmund Gusserlʹ” [In Memory of a Great Philosopher: Edmund Husserl]; “A. S. Pushkin.” [Léon Chestov] Spéculation et révélation. Translated by Boris de Schloezer and Sylvie Luneau. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1981. Speculation and Revelation. Translated by Bernard Martin. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1982.13 12) Sola fide—Tolʹko veroi [Sola fide—By Faith Alone]. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1966. Contents: “Chastʹ 1-aya: Grecheskaya i srednevekovaya filosofiya” [Part 1: The Greek and Medieval Philosophy]; “Chastʹ 2-aya: Lyuter i tserkovʹ” [Part 2: Luther and the Church].14 [Léon Chestov] “Sola fide. Philosophie grecque et médiévale.” Translated by T. Troyanoff. Revue de théologie et de philosophie 2 (1957a): 81–94; [Léon Chestov] Sola fide, Luther et l’Église. Translated by Sophie Sève. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1957b.15 13) Lektsii po istorii grecheskoi filosofii [Lectures on the History of Greek Philosophy]. Edited by Anatolii V. Akhutin. Moscow-Paris: Russkii putʹ—YMCA-Press, 2001. [1st ed.]16

A.2 Articles and Correspondence 1) “Voprosy sovesti” [Questions of Conscience]. Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo 336, December 5, 1895, 2 (signed as “Chërnyi”). 13 This edition does not include the essays: “Hegel or Job. On Kierkegaard’s Existential Philosophy,” “N. F. Fëdorov,” and “A. S. Pushkin.” 14 This posthumously published book originates from a series of manuscripts, dated 1911– 1914, that were found after Shestov’s death (Ms. 2109, files 82–87: The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris). These manuscripts, which were probably aimed at a full book project, partly converged in the subsequent volume In Job’s Balance. The rest of them were included in this text, which forms the twelfth volume of the Complete Works Series according to Natalʹya Baranova’s classification. From a chronological point of view, however, it should be placed as the seventh volume of the series (on this, see also Piron [B2], 394). 15 These two translations represent, respectively, part 1 and part 2 of the Russian edition. 16 This book is the first edition of a then unpublished typed manuscript (Ms. 2110-2-2, file 95: The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris), written around 1918–1919, which relates to a course on the history of Greek philosophy that Shestov held in Kiev in 1918/1919.

Bibliography and Works Cited 2) “Georg Brandes o Gamlete” [Georg Brandes on Hamlet]. Kievskoe slovo 2855, December 22, 1895, 2–3 (signed as “L. Sh.”). [This article has been reprinted in Russkaya ideya (2017), electronic journal, edited by Kseniya V. Vorozhikhina and Boris V. Mezhuev. https://politconservatism.ru/articles/georg-brandes-o-gamlete.] 3) “Zhurnalʹnoe obozrenie (O Vl. Solovʹëve)” [ Journal Review (On Vl. Solovʹëv)]. Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo 9 ( January 9, 1896): 2 (signed as “Chitatelʹ”). 4) “Zhurnalʹnoe obozrenie (Idealizm i simvolizm ‘Severnogo vestnika’)” [ Journal Review (Idealism and Symbolism of the Severnyi vestnik)]. Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo 67 (March 7, 1896): 2–3 (signed as “Chitatelʹ”). 5) “Znachenie Pushkina dlya nashego vremeni” [The Meaning of Pushkin for Our Time]. Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo 144 (May 26, 1899): 1–2 (signed as “L. Sh.”). 6) “O knige Merezhkovskogo ‘Lev Tolstoi i Dostoevskii’” [On Merezhkovskii’s Book Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevskii]. Mir iskusstva 8–9 (1901): 132–136. 7) “Literaturnyi setsession (o zhurnale ‘Voprosy zhizni,’ yanvarʹ–iyunʹ 1905)” [Literary Secession (On the Journal Voprosy zhizni, January–June 1905)]. Nasha zhiznʹ 160 ( July 15, 1905): 2–3. 8) “Avtobiografiya” [Autobiography]. In Pervye literaturnye shagi. Avtobiografii sovremennykh russkikh pisatelei [First Literary Steps: Autobiographies of Contemporary Russian Writers], edited by Fëdor F. Fidler, 173–176. Moscow: Sytin, 1911. 9) “Zhar-ptitsy: k kharakteristike russkoi ideologii” [Firebirds: For a Specificity of Russian Ideology]. Vozrozhdenie 12 ( June 1918).17 [Léon Chestov], “Les oiseaux de feu. Particularités des idéologies russes.” In Chestov 2015 (A2), 95–112. 10) Chto takoe russkii bol′shevism? [What Is Russian Bolshevism?]. Berlin: Skify, 1920.18 [Léon Chestov]. “Qu’est-ce que le bolchevisme?” Le Mercure de France 533 (1920a): 257–290.19 17 This short article, published in 1918, was not included in Natalʹya Baranova’s bibliography of Shestov’s works. It was “rediscovered” and published again in the journal Znamya 8 (1991): 189–193, edited by Aleksandr Ermichëv. In 2015 it was translated into French, with the title “Les oiseaux de feu. Particularités des idéologies russes,” and included in Chestov 34/2015 [A2]. 18 This original Russian text, edited in March 1920, was never distributed or put on sale. The article appeared for the first time in French in the same year (1920). An available Russian edition of this text can be found in Istoriya filosofii 8 (2001): 97–121. 19 Later also included in Chestov 34/2015 (A2), 35–94.

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Bibliography and Works Cited 11) “O vechnom i prekhodyashchem (9 aforizmov)” [On the Eternal and the Transient (9 Aphorisms)]. Zveno 12 (April 23, 1923): 2. 12) “Vozmozhnoe i deistvitelʹnoe (7 aforizmov)” [The Possible and The Real (7 Aphorisms)]. Zveno 15 (May 14, 1923): 2. 13) “Dernier salut [À la mémoire de Jacques Rivière]” [The Last Goodbye (In Memory of Jacques Rivière)]. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. La nouvelle revue française 139 (April 1925): 674–678.20 14) “Ob istochnikakh misticheskogo opyta Plotina (O dobrodetelyakh i zvezdakh)” [On the Sources of the Mystical Experience of Plotinus (On Virtues and Stars)]. Dni 948 (March 7, 1926): 3. 15) “Menacing Barbarians of Today.” The Aryan Path 8 (1934): 488–495.21 “Ugroza sovremennykh varvarov.” Vesti. AN SSSR 5 (1991): 123–131. [Léon Chestov]. “Les menaces des barbares d’aujourd’hui.” In Chestov 34/2015 (A2), 113–131. 16) “Pisʹmo v redaktsiyu” [Letter to the Newspaper]. Poslednie novosti 5091 (March 2, 1935): 4. 17) “Iz perepiski N. A. Berdyaeva, S. N. Bulgakova i L. I. Shestova” [From the Correspondence of N. A. Berdyaev, S. N. Bulgakov, and L. I. Shestov]. Mosty 8 (1961): 255–261. 18) “Itogi i kommentarii” [Results and Comments]. Vozdushnye puti 4 (1965): 139–143. 19) “Neizdannye pisʹma Lʹva Shestova [Pisʹma k zhene, k docheryam i k A. Lazarevu (1920– 1938)]” [Unpublished Letters of Lev Shestov (Letters to his Wife, to his Daughters, and to A. Lazarev)]. Russkaya myslʹ 2727 (February 27, 1969). 20) “Dnevnik myslei” [ Journal of Thoughts]. Kontinent 8 (1976): 235–252. 21) “Idealizm i simvolizm ‘Severnogo vestnika’” [Idealism and Symbolism of the Severnyi vestnik]. Russian Literature Triquarterly 16 (1979): 323–324.

20 This text was published only in French and it was later included in the French edition of Speculation and Revelation (cf. Chestov 11/1981 [A1]). A Russian edition appeared in 1977: Shestov, Lev I. “Poslednii privet. Pamyati Zhaka Rivʹera.” Novyi zhurnal 128 (1977): 88–92. 21 Shestov produced this article at the request of the Anglo-Indian journal of theology The Aryan Path, issued in Bombay and London. For this reason, it appeared for the first time in English in August 1934. The Russian and French versions appeared subsequently, many years later.

Bibliography and Works Cited 22) “Berdyaev N.-Shestov L.: Perepiska i vospominaniya” [Berdyaev N.-Shestov L.: Correspondence and Memoirs]. Edited by Natalʹya Baranov-Shestov. Kontinent 30 (1981): 293–313. 23) Turgenev. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1982.22 24) “Lev Shestov: pisʹma Mikhailu Gershenzonu” [Lev Shestov: Letters to Mikhail Gershenzon]. Edited by Vera Proskurina. Evreiskii zhurnal 2 (1992): 97–116. 25) “Perepiska L. I. Shestova s A. M. Remizovym” [Correspondence Between L. I. Shestov and A. M. Remizov]. Russkaya literatura 2–4 (1992): 133–169, 158–197; 92–133; 1, 3, and 4 (1993): 170–181,112–121, 146–158; 1–2 (1994): 159–174, 136–185. 26) “Rokovoe nasledie: o misticheskom opyte Plotina” [The Fatal Legacy: On Plotinus’s Mystical Experience]. Edited by Martine van Goubergen. Minuvshee 9 (1992): 151–231. 27) “Bulgakov-Shestov, Shestov-Bulgakov.” Edited by Mark Raev. Novyi zhurnal 200 (1995): 311–314. 28) “Pisʹma G. G. Shpetu” [Letters to G. G. Shpet]. In Tvorcheskoe nasledie G. G. Shpeta i filosofiya XX veka, edited by Olʹga G. Mazaeva, 212–229. Tomsk: Vodolei, 1999. 29) “Correspondance Léon Chestov-Martin Buber” [Correspondence Lev Shestov-Martin Buber]. Edited by Michaela Willeke and Anne Laurent. Cahiers Léon Chestov/The Lev Shestov Journal 4–5 (2005): 42–81. 30) “Perepiska Lʹva Shestova s V. Ivanovym” [Correspondence between Lev Shestov and V. Ivanov]. Edited by Geneviève Piron. Simvol 53–54 (2009): 421–433. 31) Perepiska Lʹva Shestova s Borisom Shlёtserom [Correspondence between Lev Shestov and Boris de Schloezer]. Edited by Olga Tabachnikova. Paris: YMCA-Press, 2011. 32) “A. M. Remizov i L. I. Shestov: iz perepiski pisatelya i filosofa (1933–1938).” Edited by Kristina Ruzhinskaite. Revue des études slaves 84, no. 1/2: Mosaïque slave: Communications de la délégation française au Congrès international des slavistes, Minsk, 20–27 août 2013 (2013): 287–300. https://journals.openedition.org/res/1094. 22 A partial version of this Russian text had already appeared in 1961: Shestov, Lev I. “Turgenev.” Vozdushnye puti 2 (1961): 261–268.

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Bibliography and Works Cited 33) Istselenie dlya neistselimykh: Epistolyarnyi dialog Lʹva Shestova i Maksa Eitingona [Healing the Incurables: The Epistolary Dialogue Between Lev Shestov and Max Eitingon]. Edited by Vladimir Khazan and Elena Il′ina. Tomsk: Vodolei, 2014. 34) [Léon Chestov] Qu’est-ce que le bolchevisme? [What Is Bolshevism?] Translated by Sophie Benech. Paris: Le bruit du temps, 2015.23 35) Manuscripts. The Lev Shestov Archive, Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, Paris, France. Accessed March 11–14, 2019. 36) Manuscripts. The Lev Shestov Collection [Correspondence, Genealogical, and General Materials], Amherst Center for Russian Studies, Amherst College, MA (US).

B. Selected Studies on Shestov The following lists—in alphabetical order and in three different sections—a bibliography of critical studies on Lev Shestov in Russian, French, and English. This selection includes biographies, memoirs, specific journals, bibliographies [B1], books [B2], and articles and book chapters [B3] devoted to Shestov. It is perhaps superfluous to say that this bibliography is far from being exhaustive: the amount of studies on Shestov—throughout the world and in various languages—is so abundant as to make the task of compiling a complete list of the scholarship on his work almost impossible. Even Natalʹya Baranova’s Bibliography (covering a period up to 1978), which aimed to be exhaustive, was not in fact complete.24 Even when simply attempting to “track down” the studies that have been produced on Shestov throughout the world, it is always surprising to discover how numerous they are, in different fields (philosophy, literature, history, theology) and in various languages. It was also difficult to make the decision to limit the bibliographical entries to Russian, French, and English, as Shestov is a truly international author and should be considered in a wider context than even these three main languages are able to cover. Despite this, I tried to collect here the most significant studies for a useful and updated Shestovian bibliography: from the early years to present times. To make this 23 This book is a collection of the only three essays Shestov dedicated to political subjects: “What is Russian Bolshevism?,” “Firebirds: For a Specificity of Russian Ideology,” and “Menacing Barbarians of Today” (cf. Shestov Shestov 10/1920 [A2], 9/1918 [A2], and Shestov 15/1934 [A2]). 24 According to Geneviève Piron, at least ten entries are missing (cf. Piron 2010 [B2], 406–407).

Bibliography and Works Cited

possible and to not extend the list beyond reason, I did not include very short articles, or book introductions and book reviews (unless they were written by prominent figures of the twentieth century, such as D. H. Lawrence or Emmanuel Levinas) and, for the most part, I did not mention the authors who contributed to the chapters of an already listed collective book (I am referring here, in particular, to the single book chapters in Struve 1996 [B2], Fotiade 2006 [B2], Fotiade 2009 [B3]), and Shchedrina 2016a, 2016b [B2]). These essays—which often turn out to be some of the most interesting—have been quoted, in large part, throughout the text. For many of these entries I am indebted to Natalʹya Baranova’s Bibliographie des études sur Léon Chestov (updated until 1978), as well as to the bibliographical information offered by the Shestov Studies Society25 and by the rich and precious MUN Libraries Capelin catalogue.26 I am also indebted to many valuable and accurate studies that have been published in the last ten to fifteen years, such as those by Ramona Fotiade, Geneviève Piron, Tatʹyana Shchedrina, and Kseniya Vorozhikhina. The three sections will help readers to orient themselves among different needs they may have (biographical, monographic, specific issues, intertextual). But it is perhaps equally useful to give some general indications to better detect the “hidden paths” in these lists, both in a chronological and in a historico-philological sense. In section B1, the most complete information about Lev Shestov’s life and output is still offered by the two-volume work Vie de Léon Chestov, written in 1975 by his daughter: Natalʹya L. Baranova-Shestova (Nathalie BaranoffChestov). This book contains not only the facts and events of Shestov’s life, but also carries out a full analysis of it according to the recollections of his contemporaries and an examination of Shestov’s most significant correspondence with his family and friends. Three years later, Natal′ya Baranova compiled also a bibliography both of Shestov’s works and of the studies on him.27 A more 25 Since 1997 the society has published the bilingual (English/French) journal Cahiers Léon Chestov/The Lev Shestov Journal (editorial board: Ramona Fotiade and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer). 26 See entry in the B1section. 27 Needless to say, two works like these, i.e., a biography and a complete bibliography of works written by the author’s daughter all with firsthand sources, are priceless and highly useful scholarship instruments. However, they are not flawless. Sometimes there are inaccuracies or gaps, both in the events of Shestov’s life and in his bibliography, that recent studies and publications can help to fill. I have made my best efforts throughout this book to integrate what is missing in Natalʹya Baranova’s works, which nonetheless remain the leading point of reference for any research on Shestov.

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recent biography was written by Ramona Fotiade (2016): this work is enriched with a considerable number of illustrations, dozens of unpublished documents and other fresh new materials about Shestov’s life. More or less extensive biographical information about Shestov is also contained in the memoirs of German Lovtskii, Aaron Shteinberg, Evgeniya Gertsyk, Varvara MalakhievaMirovich, Aleksei Remizov, Nikolai Berdyaev, and, most of all, of Benjamin Fondane, whose text Rencontres avec Léon Chestov is an absolute benchmark for any Shestovian scholar. In sections B2 and B3, an evaluation of Shestov’s philosophy from his contemporaries can be found, most significantly, in all of N. Berdyaev’s, B. Schloezer’s and B. Fondane’s writings, but also in R. Ivanov-Razumnik, B. Griftsov, A. Zakrzhevskii, S. Frank, G. Fedotov, G. Shpet, S. Bulgakov, J. de Gaultier, R. Bespaloff, A. Lazareff, and in the already quoted anthology of essays on Shestov Pro et contra, edited by T. Shchedrina (2016b [B2]) (which includes essays by many of the previously mentioned authors). In this section there are also a number of literary interpretations of Shestov’s thought, offered by writers or poets like D. H. Lawrence, Viktor Erofeev, Albert Camus, Czesław Miłosz, Yves Bonnefoy, and David Gascoyne. The modern scholarship on Lev Shestov is quite extensive. In the last twenty years, in particular, there has been a sudden increase in such studies, especially in Russian and French. Some of the most recent books (B2) entirely dedicated to Shestov are: Fotiade (2006), Lamiroy, Philonenko and Piron in French, Finkenthal and Beaumont in English, and Apreleva-Shirmanov, Ermichëv, Kudishina, Kurabtsev, Lashov, Shchedrina (2016a and 2016b), and Vorozhikhina in Russian. As far as the recent articles about him are concerned (B3), there are different tendencies: some focus on the general issue of “humanism” (Batova, Kurabtsev, Kuvakin, Lashov); others try to set Shestov’s thought in a wider philosophical context (Clowes, Evlampiev, Groys, Motroshilova, Taputʹ) or to explore its literary and intertextual connections (Fotiade, Papernyi, Senderovich, Tabachnikova); some investigate the genesis of his works from a historical and philological point of view (Morozova, Piron, Shchedrina, Vorozhikina), and others deal with the religious philosophy and the Jewish legacy connected, in particular, with Shestov’s second phase of thought (David, Desmond, Drozdek, Horowitz, Khokhlov, Kornblatt, Langton, Neto, Rubin, Shirmanov).

B.1 Biographies, Memoirs, Specific Journals, and Bibliographies Baranoff-Chestov, Nathalie [Baranova-Shestova, Natalʹya L.]. Bibliographie des oeuvres de Léon Chéstov. Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves, 1975.

Bibliography and Works Cited _____. Bibliographie des études sur Léon Chestov (Paris: Institut d’Études Slaves), 1978. _____. Vie de Léon Chestov. Vol. 1: L’Homme du souterrain 1866–1929. Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1991. _____. Vie de Léon Chestov. Vol. 2: “Les dernières années 1928–1938.” Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 1993. (Russian edition: Baranova-Shestova, Natal′ya L. Zhizn′ L′va Shestova. 2 vols. Paris: La Presse Libre, 1983.) Berdyaev, Nikolai A. Samopoznanie. Opyt filosofskoi avtobiografii. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1949. (Pages on Shestov: 97, 103, 110, 133, 15, 171, 235, 299, 338, 341.) Cahiers Léon Chestov/The Lev Shestov Journal (1997–[en cours]) Glasgow (French Department, University of Glasgow, G12 8QL). Société d’Études Léon Chestov. (Editorial board: Ramona Fotiade and Olivier Salazar-Ferrer.) Fondane, Benjamin. Rencontres avec Léon Chestov. Paris: Éditions Plasma, 1982. Fotiade, Ramona, ed. Léon Chestov (1866–1938): La pensée du dehors. Paris: Éditions de Le bruit du temps, 2016. Gertsyk, Evgeniya K. Vospominaniya: N. Berdyaev, L. Shestov, S. Bulgakov, M. Voloshin, A. Gertsyk, 99–116. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1973. Husserl, Edmund. “Pisʹma k Lʹvu Shestovu.” Logos 7 (1996): 141–144. “Lev Shestov Bibliography,” Memorial University Libraries—Capelin Online Public Access Catalogue. https://capelin.library.mun.ca/v/shestov.28 Lovtskii, German L. “Lev Shestov po moim vospominaniyam,” Grani 45 (1960): 81; and 46 (1961): 136–137. _____. “Filosof bibleiskogo otkroveniya (K 100-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya Lʹva Shestova).” Novyi zhurnal 85 (1966): 208–230. Lundberg, Evgenii G. Zapiski pisatelya (1917–1920). Vol. 1. Berlin: Ogonʹki, 1922. Malakhieva-Mirovich, Varvara G. “O prekhodyashchem i vechnom. Dnevnikovyie zapisi (1930– 1934).” Novyi mir 6 (2011): 130–149. _____. Mayatnik zhizni moei: 1930–1954. Мoscow: АST Publishing, 2016. Piron, Geneviève. “Bibliographie.” In Piron 2010 [B2], 404–420. Remizov, Aleksei M. Kukkha. Rozanovy pis′ma. Saint Petersburg: Nauka, 2011. Shchedrina, Tatʹyana G. “Izbrannaya bibliografiya trudov o L. I. Shestove.” In Shchedrina 2016a [B2], 371–452. Shteinberg, Aaron. “Lev Shestov.” Syntaxis 28 (1990): 44–82. _____. Druzʹia moikh rannikh let (1911–1928), Paris: Syntaxis, 1991. Vorozhikhina, Kseniya V. “Bibliografiya rabot L. I. Shestova.” In Shchedrina 2016a [B2], 366–370. 28 This is, to the best of my knowledge, the most complete bibliography of Shestov’s works. It is available in an open access catalogue with about 900 entries covering books, articles, book chapters, and reviews in all languages.

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B.2 Books on Shestov Apreleva, Viktoriya A., and Yaroslav I. Shirmanov. Filosofiya Lʹva Shestova kak Bogoiskatelʹstvo. Riga: Sanktum, 2013. Batova, Natalʹya K. Gumanizm filosofii L. Shestova. Magadan: Mezhdunar. ped. un-t, 1994. _____. Vyazʹ dushi moei: o filosofii Lʹva Shestova. Moscow: KMK Sci. Press, 2000. Beaumont, Matthew. Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Dësilets, André. Léon Chestov. Des paradoxe de la philosophie. Quebec: Éditions du Beffroi, 1984. Ermichëv, Aleksandr A, ed. Derznoveniya i pokornosti L′va Shestova: sbornik statei nauchnoi konferentsii k 150-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya filosofa. Saint Petersburg: RKhGA, 2016. Finkenthal, Michael. Lev Shestov: Existential Philosopher and Religious Thinker. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010. Fotiade, Ramona, ed. The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. _____. Conceptions of the Absurd: From Surrealism to Chestov’s and Fondane’s Existential Thought. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, Legenda, 2001. Fotiade, Ramona, and Françoise Schwab. Léon Chestov, Vladimir Jankélévitch: du tragique à l’ineffable. Sarrebruck: Éditions Universitaires Européenne, 2016. Kudishina, Anna A. Ekzistentsializm i gumanizm v Rossii: Lev Shestov i Nikolai Berdyaev. Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2007. Kurabtsev, Vasilii L. Miry svobody i chudes Lʹva Shestova. Moscow: RGO, 2005. Lamiroy, Maxime. Chestov, la lutte contre l’idéalisme. Brussels: Éditions Lamiroy, 2016 Lashov, Vladimir V. Gumanizm Lʹva Shestova. Moscow: RGO, 2002. _____. Metafizika russkoi literatury Lʹva Shestova. Moscow: RGO, 2009. Mailov, Anatolii I. Lev Shestov kak problema (Kategoriya deistvitelʹnosti i grekhopadenie). Saint Petersburg: RKhGI, 1995. Morozova, Tatʹyana V. “Filosofiya tragedii” i tragediya filosofa: zhiznʹ i tvorchestvo L. Shestova. Novosibirsk: Izd. Novosibirskogo universiteta, 1995. Philonenko, Alexis. La philosophie du malheur. Chestov et les problèmes de la philosophie existentielle. Vol. 1. Paris: J. Vrin, 1998. _____. Chestov et la question existentielle. Nice: Les Éditions Ovadia, 2016. Piron, Geneviève. Léon Chestov, philosophe du déracinement. Lausanne: Éditions L’Âge d’Homme, 2010. Polyakov, Sergei A. Filosofiya Lʹva Shestova. Opyt strukturno-istoricheskogo analiza. Moscow: Shkola budushchego, 1999. Rostenne, Paul. Léon Chestov. Philosophie et liberté. Bordeaux: Éditions Bière, 1994. Shchedrina, Tat′yana G., ed. Lev Isaakovich Shestov. Series: “Filosofiya Rossii pervoi poloviny XX veka.” Moscow: Politicheskaya entsiklopediya, 2016a. _____, ed. L. I. Shestov: Pro et Contra. Saint Petersburg: RKhGA, 2016b. Shein, Louis. The Philosophy of Lev Shestov (1866–1938): A Russian Religious Existentialist. Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991.

Bibliography and Works Cited Struve, Nikita, and Alice Laurent, eds. Léon Chestov: Un philosophe pas comme les autres? Vol. 3 of Cahiers de l’immigration russe. Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1996. Valevicius, Andrius. Lev Shestov and His Times: Encounters with Brandes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Tchekhov, Ibsen, Nietzsche and Husserl. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 1993. Vorozhikhina, Kseniya V. Lev Shestov i ego frantsuzskie posledovateli. Moscow: IF RAN, 2016. Wernham, James C. S. Two Russian Thinkers: An Essay in Berdyaev and Shestov. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968.

B.3 Articles and Book Chapters on Shestov Acouturier, Michel. “Le Dostoïevski de Chestov.” In Diagonales Dostoevskïennes: mélanges en l’honneur de Jacques Catteau, edited by Marie-Aude Albert, 77–86. Paris: Presses de L’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2002. Adamovich, Georgii V. “Po povodu statʹi Shestova ‘Tvorchestvo iz nichevo.’” Mosty 5 (1960): 117–120. _____. “Vyacheslav Ivanov i Lev Shestov.” In Odinochestvo i svoboda: Esse, 200–216. MoscowBerlin: Direct-Media, 2016. Akhutin, Anatolii V. “Odinokii myslitelʹ.” Introduction to Sochineniya v 2-kh tomakh, by Lev I. Shestov, edited by Anatolii V. Akhutin, vol. 1, 3–17. Moscow: Izd. Nauka, 1993. _____. “O vtorom izmerenii myshleniya. L. Shestov i filosofiya.” In Tyazhba o bytii, 272–283. Moscow: Russkoe fenomenologicheskoe obshchestvo, 1997. _____. “Emigrantskie gody Lʹva Shestova: myshlenie dvukh izmerenii.” In Russkoe zarubezhʹe: istoriya i sovremennostʹ, vol. 1: K 90-letiyu akademika E. P. Chelysheva, edited by Tatʹyana G. Petrova, 143–155. Moscow: INION RAN, 2011. Asmus, Valentin F. “Lev Shestov i Kʹerkegor: Ob otnoshenii Lʹva Shestova k zachinatelyu evropeiskogo ekzistentsializma.” Filosofskie nauki 4 (1972): 72–80. _____. “Existential Philosophy: Its Intentions and Results (Lev Shestov as Its Adept and Critic).” Russian Studies in Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006): 5–33. Babanov, Aleksei V. “Tvorchestvo Lʹva Shestova kak filosofskaya etika.” Eticheskaya myslʹ 15, no. 2 (2015): 39–54. Bedard, André. “La nuit libératrice ou Léon Chestov: Kiev 1866—Paris 1938.” Science et esprit 25, no. 2 (May–September 1973): 255–291. Berdyaev, Nikolai A. “Tragediya i obydennostʹ.” Voprosy zhizni 3 (March 1905): 255–288. Also in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 80–104. _____. Sub specie aeternitatis. Opyty filosofskie, literaturnye i sotsialʹnye, 247–275. Saint Petersburg: Pirozhkov, 1907. _____. “Drevo zhizni i drevo poznaniya (L. Shestov. ‘Na vesakh Iova’).” Putʹ 18 (September– October 1929): 88–106. Also in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 361–377. _____. “Lev Shestov. Po sluchayu ego semidesyatiletiya.” Putʹ 50 ( January–April 1936a): 50–52. Also in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 414–416.

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Bibliography and Works Cited _____. “Lev Shestov i Kirkegard.” Sovremennie zapiski 62 (September–December 1936b): 376– 381. Also in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 408–414. _____. “Osnovnaya ideya filosofii Lʹva Shestova.” Putʹ 58 (November–December 1938–January 1939): 44–48. Also in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 427–431. Bespaloff, Rachel. Cheminements et carrefours. Julien Green, André Malraux, Gabriel Marcel, Kierkegaard, Chestov devant Nietzsche, 201–250. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2004. [1st ed. 1938.] Blagova, Tatʹyana I., and Boris V Emelʹyanov. Filosofemy Dostoevskogo: tri interpretatsii (L. Shestov, N. Berdyaev, B. Vysheslavtsev). Ekaterinburg: Izd. Uralʹskogo universiteta, 2003. Boldareva, Viktoriya N. “Putʹ k personalizmu: filosofiya L. Shestova kak katalizator ‘pereotsenki vesgo’ v mysli rannego N. Berdyaeva.” Vestnik PSTGU 65, no. 3 (2016): 73–86. Bonetskaya, Natalʹya K. “L. Shestov i F. Nitsshe.” Voprosy filosofii 8 (2008): 113–133. _____. “Lev Shestov kak bogoslov: teologiya ‘velikoi i poslednei borʹby.’” Vestnik Pravoslav. Svyato-Tikhonov. gumanitar. un-ta, seriya 1 “Bogoslovie. Filosofiya,” 52, no. 2 (2014): 78–97. Bonnefoy, Yves. “À l’impossible tenu: la liberté de Dieu et celle de l’écrivain dans la pensée de Chestov.” In Léon Chestov: un philosophe pas comme les autres?, edited by Nikita Struve and Alice Laurent, 13–17. Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1996. _____. “L’obstination de Chestov.” Preface to Athènes et Jérusalem, by Léon Chestov, 5–16. Paris: Flammarion, 1967. Bowman, Frank. “Irredentist Existentialism: Fondane and Shestov.” Yale French Studies 16: Foray Through Existentialism (1955): 111–117. Bulgakov, Sergei N. “Nekotorye cherty religioznogo mirovozzreniya L. I. Shestova.” Sovremennye zapiski 68 ( January–June 1939): 305–323. Also in Shchedrina 2016b (B2), 441–456. Bykova, Marina F. “Lev Shestov: A Russian Existentialist.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 55, no. 5 (2017): 305–309. Carassou, Michel. “Chestov lecteur de Fondane.” In Léon Chestov: un philosophe pas comme les autres?, edited by Nikita Struve and Alice Laurent, 179–188. Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 1996. _____. “Benjamin Fondane, le disciple inésperé.” In “Léon Chestov–Jean Luc Nancy.” Europe: Revue littéraire, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 87, no. 960 (April 2009): 118–125. Christensen, Peter G. “Lev Shestov’s Existentialism and Artistic Creativity in Boris de Schloezer’s Mon nom est personne.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 249–258. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Chubarov, Igorʹ M. “Istoriya lyubvi Lʹva Shestova k Edmundu Gusserlyu, rasskazannaya im samim: Predislovie k publikatsii.” Logos 7 (1996): 134–140. Clark, Roland. “Lev Shestov and the Crisis of Modernity.” Studia Archaeus 11–12 (2008): 233–248. Clowes, Edith W. “Philosophy as Tragedy: Shestov and His Russian Audience.” In  Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy, 130–154. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Bibliography and Works Cited Curtis, James M. “Shestov’s Use of Nietzsche in His Interpretation of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 17 (1975): 289–302. David, Julia. “De la tradition juive à la critique sociale: la ‘pensée du retour’ chez Léon Chestov, Benjamin Fondane et Benny Lévy.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 52, no. 139 ( July– September 2007): 27–45. Del Noce, Augusto. “Thomism and the Critique of Rationalism: Gilson and Shestov.” Translated by Adrian Walker. Communio 25 (Winter 1998): 732–745. Denn, Mariza [Dennes, Maryse], Tatʹyana G. Shchedrina, Boris I. Pruzhinin. “Gustav Shpet i Lev Shestov: druzʹya i antipody (dve interpretatsii fenomenologii Edmunda Gusserlya).” Filosofskii zhurnal 9, no. 4 (2016): 176–185. Desmond, William. “God Beyond the Whole: Between Solov’ëv and Shestov.” In Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and Philosophy, 167–199. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. _____. “Murdering Sleep: Shestov and Macbeth.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 67–78. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Dimitrova, Nina I. “Lev Shestov, Lev Tolstoi i otkroveniya smerti.” Solov′ëvskie issledovaniya 40, no. 4 (2013): 153–164. Doughty, Mark. “Lev Shestov’s God.” Eastern Churches Review 2, no. 4 (August 1969): 406–412. Drozdek, Adam. “Shestov: Faith against reason.” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 63, no. 3 (October 2007): 473–493. Ermichëv, Aleksandr A., “Do Shestova . . . (Gazetnye vystupleniya L. I. Shestova 1895– 1899 gg.).” Voprosy filosofii 11 (2016). http://vphil.ru/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1530. Erofeev, Viktor V. “Ostaetsya odno: proizvol (filosofiya odinochestva i literaturno-esteticheskoe kredo Lʹva Shestova).” Voprosy literatury 10 (1975): 153–188. Evdokimova, Svetlana. “Philosophy’s Enemies: Chekhov and Shestov.” In Anton Chekhov through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers: Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov, edited by Olga Tabachnikova, 219–245. London: Anthem Press, 2012. Evlampiev, Igorʹ I., “Absolyut kak tsarstvo absurda: L. Shestov.” In Istoriya russkoi metafiziki v XIX–XX vekakh. Russkaya filosofiya v poiskakh absolyuta, vol. 1, 259–296. Saint Petersburg: Aleteiya, 2000. Fedotov, Georgii P. “L. Shestov. ‘Na vesakh Iova.’” Chisla 2–3 (September–December 1930): 259–263. Filatov, Aleksandr V. “Lev Shestov—Egoizm kak vazhneishaya cherta tragicheskoi lichnosti.” Vestnik TGU 94, no. 2 (2011): 256–259. Finkenthal, Michael. “Shestov and Fondane’s Search for Metasophia.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 79–87. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Fondane, Benjamin. “Un philosophe tragique: Léon Chestov.” Europe 19 ( January 1929a): 142–150. _____. “Le Procès de la raison. Chestov, témoin à charge.” Cahiers de l’étoile 2 (1929b): 344–364.

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Bibliography and Works Cited _____.“Léon Chestov, Søren Kierkegaard et le serpent.” Cahiers du Sud 164 (September 1934): 534–554. Also in La Conscience malheureuse, 251–277. Paris: Verdier, 2013. [1st ed. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1936.] _____.“À propos du livre de Léon Chestov: Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle.” Revue de philosophie 37 (September–October 1937): 381–414. Also in Fondane 1982 (B1), 183–212. _____. “Léon Chestov et la lutte contre les évidences.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 126, no. 7/8 ( July–August 1938a): 13–50. _____. “Léon Chestov.” Cahiers du Sud (Marseille) 17, no. 210 (November 1938b): 877–878. _____. “Sur les rives de l’Ilissus. Après la mort de Léon Chestov.” In Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, 11–37. Paris: Éditions Plasma, 1982. _____. “Léon Chestov à la recherche du Judaïsme perdu.” In Entre Jérusalem et Athènes. Benjamin Fondane à la recherche du Judaïsme perdu, edited by Monique Jutrin, 195–198. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2009. _____. “Léon Chestov, témoin à charge.” In La conscience malheureuse, 279–308. Paris: Verdier, 2013. [1st ed. Paris: Denoël et Steele, 1936.] Fotiade, Ramona. “Léon Chestov et Nicolas Berdiaev: le dialogue sur la liberté.” Courants d’Ombres 5 (1998): 32–43. _____. “Des rives de l’Ilissus aux rives de Babylone: la tragédie grecque face au tragique existential.” Cahiers Léon Chestov/The Lev Shestov Journal 8 (2008): 5–25. _____ (et al.). Léon Chestov—Jean Luc Nancy. Europe: Revue littéraire 87, no. 960 (April 2009b). _____. “L’Apothéose du déracinement. l’exil et la subversion de la raison.” Cahiers Léon Chestov/ The Lev Shestov Journal 11 (2010): 3–20. _____. “Foi et raison chez Léon Chestov et Blaise Pascal.” Cahiers Léon Chestov/The Lev Shestov Journal 17 (2017): 15–29. Frank, Semën L. “Lev Shestov.” In Iz istorii russkoi filosofskoi mysli kontsa XIX i nachala XX veka: Antologiia, 157–158. New York–Washington, DC: Inter-Language Literary Associates, 1965. Gal′tseva, Renata A. “The Lawsuit against Reason as the Task of Saving the Individual (Lev Shestov’s Epistemological Utopianism).” Russian Studies in Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006): 34–58. Gascoyne, David. “Léon Chestov.” In Journal 1936–37; Death of an Explorer, 125–146. London: The Enitharmon Press, 1980. Gaultier de, Jules. “Introduction à Léon Chestov.” Introduction to L’idée de bien chez Tolstoï et Nietzsche, by Lev Shestov, 7–31. Translated by Tatiana Rageot-Chestov and Georges Bataille. Paris: J. Vrin, 1949. [1st ed. Paris: Ed. du Siècle, 1925.] Grean, Stanley. “Comment on Louis J. Shein’s Article ‘Philosophy of Infinite Possibility: Examination of Lev Shestov’s Weltanschauung.’” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 6, no. 2 ( June 1983): 152–157. Grenier, Jean. “Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle par Léon Chestov.” La nouvelle revue française 278 (November 1936): 906–908. Griftsov, Boris A. Tri myslitelya: V. Rozanov, D. Merezhkovskii, L. Shestov, 144–189. Moscow: V. M. Sablin, 1911.

Bibliography and Works Cited Groys, Boris. “Leo Shestov.” In Introduction to Antiphilosophy, 33–49. Translated by David Fernbach. London-New York: Verso, 2012. Horowitz, Brian, and Bernard Martin. “The Demolition of Reason in Lev Shestov’s ‘Athens and Jerusalem.’” Poetics Today 19, no. 2: Hellenism and Hebraism Reconsidered: The Poetics of Cultural Influence and Exchange (Summer 1998): part 2, 221–233. Horowitz, Brian. “The Tension of Athens & Jerusalem in the Philosophy of Lev Shestov.” The Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 156–173. Ivanov-Razumnik, V. O smysle zhizni. F. Sologub, L. Andreev, L. Shestov, 162–255. Saint Petersburg: Stasyulevich, 1910. [1st ed. 1908.] Jijina-Ogden, Marina. “Paradoxes and Aphorisms in Lev Shestov’s All Things Are Possible.” Cahiers Leon Chestov—The Lev Shestov Journal 15 (2015a): 52–65. _____. “Readings of Dostoevsky in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy.” The Oxford Philosopher (2015b). https://theoxfordphilosopher.com/2015/11/20/readings-of‐ dostoevsky-in-shestov/. _____. “Readings of Nietzsche in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy by Lev Shestov.” Cyclops Journal 1 (April 2016). http://www.cyclopsjournal.org. _____. “Facing the Absurd: On Lev Shestov’s Angel of Death.” European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counselling 21, no. 1 (2019). https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/jTdJpbtJacRMNTwNmvbm/full?target=10.1080/13642537.2018.1563907. Jutrin, Monique. “Bespaloff, Chestov, Fondane—différends et connivences.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 237–248. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Kalinnikov, Leonard A. “Problema istiny: transtsendentalizm I. Kanta v spore s ontologizmom V. Erna i P. Florenskogo i aktsidentalizmom L. Shestova.” Kantovskii sbornik 21 (1999): 141–195. Kallas, Endel. “Lev Shestov: Martin Luther through Russian Eyes.” Currents in Theology and Mission 15, no. 5 (October 1988): 431–437. Khokhlov, Anton M. “Istolkovanie bibleiskogo skazaniya o grekhopadenii v filosofii Lʹva Shestova.” Vestnik RGGU 17, no. 97 (2012): 54–62. _____. “Lev Shestov i Paul′ Tillikh: analitika ekzistentsialʹnoi trevogi.” Filosofkie nauki 7 (2013): 105–115. _____. “Tyazhba ob irratsionalʹnom: Lev Shestov i Alʹber Kamyu.” Vestnik RGGU 11, no. 112 (2013): 81–89. Kline, George L. “Skepticism and Faith in Shestov’s Early Critique of Rationalism.” Studies in East European Thought 63, no. 1: Fifty Years of Studies (February 2011): 15–29. Kohler, Gun-Britt. “Mezhdu adogmatizmom i ‘nouveau roman.’ Intertekstualʹnye reministsentsii ko Lʹvu Shestovu v romane ‘Mon nom est personne’ (Moë imya—nikto) Borisa Shlëtsera (1969).” Vestnik molodykh uchenykh 5 (2004): 65–78. Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. “The Apotheosis of Exile: Jews and the Russian Religious Renaissance (The Case of Lev Shestov).” Symposium 57, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 127–136.

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Bibliography and Works Cited Kozyrev, Aleksei P., and Kseniya V. Vorozhikhina. “Dnevnik. Pisʹmo. Lichnoe svidetelʹstvo: Lev Shestov—S. N. Bulgakov.” Filosofskii zhurnal 11, no. 1 (2018): 125–142. Kurabtsev, Vasilii L. “Ierusalim Lʹva Shestova.” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriya 7 “Filosofiya,” 5 (1991): 56–75. _____. “Po tu storonu Nichto (Kontseptsiya dukhovnosti v religiozno-ekzistentsialʹnom uchenii Lʹva Shestova).” Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik ’93 (1994): 143–152. _____. “Angely i besy (Lev Shestov i filosofiya F. M. Dostoevskogo).” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriya 7 “Filosofiya,” 4 (2003): 3–17. _____. “Lev Shestov i mirovaya filosofiya (Itogi ‘stranstvovanii po dusham’).” Voprosy filosofii 12 (2004): 109–122. _____. “Filosofskaya biografiya Lʹva Shestova i osobennosti ego filosofii.” Voprosy filosofii 4 (2006a): 128–143. _____. “‘The Wisest of Men’ (Lev Shestov and Ancient Philosophy).” Russian Studies in Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006b): 75–91. Kuvakin, Valerii A. “Ekzistentsializm L. Shestova—vnutrennii krizis ekzistentsializma v Rossii nachala XX veka.” In Religioznaya filosofiya v Rossii. Nachalo XX veka, 224–255. Moscow: Myslʹ, 1980. _____. “Oproverzheniya i predpolozheniya Lʹva Shestova.” Filosofskie nauki 2–3 (1990): 54–65. Langton, Daniel R. “Modern Jewish Philosophical Approaches to the Apostle Paul: Spinoza, Shestov, and Taubes.” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2, no. 2 (2008): 114–139. Lashov, Vladimir V. “Radikalʹnyi gumanizm Lʹva Shestova.” Zdravyi smysl 3, no. 24 (2002): 35–39. _____. “Lev Shestov i russkaya literatura.” Zdravyi smysl 3, no. 40 (2006): 46–52. _____. “Lev Shestov i Nikolai Gogol’.” Nauch. vedomosti Belgorod. gos. un-ta, seriya “Filosofiya, Sotsiologiya. Pravo,” 10, no. 16 (2009a): 211–216. _____. “Lev Shestov i Fёdor Dostoevskii.” Analitika kulʹturologii 15 (2009b): 126–139. _____. “Lev Shestov i Ivan Turgenev.” Vestnik Leningrad. Gos. Un-ta im. A. S. Pushkina 2, no. 1 (2010): 148–155. Lawrence, D. H. “Foreword.” Foreward to All Things are Possible, by Lev I. Shestov, 7–12. London: Martin Secker, 1920. Lazareff, Adolphe [Adol′f M. Lazarev]. Vie et connaissance, 9–20. Paris: J. Vrin, 1948. Levinas, Emmanuel. “Léon Chestov. Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Vox clamantis in deserto).” Revue des études juives 2 (1937): 139–141. Levtskii, Sergei A. “Ekzistentsialʹnyi dialog (N. Berdyaev i L. Shestov).” Novyi zhurnal 75 (1964): 218–227. Lindberg, Carter. “Chestov’s Luther.” Lutheran Quarterly 27, no. 3 (August 2013): 343–344. Losskii, Nikolai O. “Lev Shestov kak filosof.” Russkie zapiski 15 (March 1939): 131–146. Lossky, Véronique. “L’homme devant Dieu chez Lev Šestov et Marina Cvetaeva.” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 29, no. 3/4 (1988): 519–532. Lubardić, Bogdan M. “Philosophy of Life: Lev Shestov and Apophatic Deconstruction of Reason.” Philotheos 10 (2010): 223–260.

Bibliography and Works Cited Lucescu-Boutcher, Arta. “Shestov and Fondane: Life beyond Morals.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 6, no. 1 (Spring–Summer 1994): 79–86. Makolkin, Anna. “Russian, Stalinist and Soviet Re-Readings of Kierkegaard: Lev Shestov and Piama Gaidenko.” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 44, nos. 1/2 (March–June 2002): 79–96. Martin, Bernard. “Lev Shestov: a Russian Jewish Existentialist.” Theology Today 23, no. 3 (October 1966): 386–402. _____. “The Biblical Existentialism of Lev Shestov.” In Proceedings of the Sixth World Congress of Jewish Studies: The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 13–19 August 1973, vol. 3, 90–99. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies, 1977. McLachlan, James M. “Shestov’s Reading and Misreading of Kierkegaard.” Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes 28, no. 2 ( June 1986): 174–186. _____. “Beyond the Self, beyond Ontology: Levinas’ Reading of Shestov’s Reading of Kierkegaard.” Comparative and Continental Philosophy 2, no. 2 (November 2010): 179–196. Maslov, Gleb N. Strategii myshleniya i deistviya v russkoi filosofii nachala veka: Lev Shestov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Belyi. Moscow: Dialog-MGU, 1997. Miłosz, Czesław. “Shestov, or The Purity of Despair.” In Emperor of the Earth. Modes of Eccentric Vision, 99–119. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Morando, Camille. “Chestov et Bataille—l’assentiment à la philosophie de la tragédie.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 259– 269. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Motroshilova, Nelli V. “Parabola zhiznennoi sudʹby Lʹva Shestova.” Voprosy filosofii 1 (1989): 129–143. _____. Mysliteli Rossii i filosofiya Zapada (V. Solovʹёv, S. Frank, L. Shestov), 382–447. Moscow: Respublika: Kulʹturnaya Revolutsiya, 2007. _____. “Lev Shestov on Shakespeare’s Tragedy Julius Caesar.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 55, no. 5 (2017): 310–319. Neto, José Maria. “Is there a Jewish Philosophy? Lev Shestov and Steven Schwarzschild as Representatives of Two Antithetical Post-Kantian Answers.” Archivio di filosofia 1, no. 3 (1993): 405–420. _____. The Christianization of Pyrrhonism. Scepticism and Faith in Pascal, Kierkegaard and Shestov, 90–119. London & Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995. Oppo, Andrea. “A Loss of Truth: A Tragic Turning Point at the Beginning of Shestov’s Philosophy.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 103–116. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. _____. “Shestov and Berdyaev. A Comparison of Two Russian Philosophers.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 25 (2008). http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/25/Oppo25.shtml. _____. “A ‘Kantian’ Shakespeare. The Defence of Morality in Shestov’s First Work.” The Slavic and East European Journal 58, no. 4 (2014): 573–589.

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Bibliography and Works Cited _____. “Shestov i Solovʹёv: antipody russkoi religioznoi filosofii.” Solovʹёvskie issledovaniya 65, no. 1 (2020): 79–90. Papernyi, Vladimir M. “Lev Shestov i russkaya kulʹtura.” Evrei v kulʹture russkogo zarubezhʹya 2 (1993): 122–140. _____. “Lev Shestov: religioznaya filosofiya kak literaturnaya kritika i kak literatura.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 12 (2005). http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/12/paperni12.shtml. Patterson, David. “Šestov’s Second Dimension: In Job’s Balances.” The Slavic and East European Journal 22, no. 2 (Summer 1978): 141–152. _____. “The Unity of Existential Philosophy and Literature as Revealed by Shestov’s Approach to Dostoevsky.” Studies in Soviet Thought 19, no. 3 (April 1979): 219–231. _____. “Shestov, Kierkegaard, and the Origin of Nothingness: Reflections on the Fall.” The American Benedictine Review 39 (March 1988): 15–30. _____. “Shestov’s Return from Athens to Jerusalem.” In Exile: The Sense of Alienation in Modern Russian Letters, 94–114. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pattison, George. “Lev Shestov: Kierkegaard in the Ox of Phalaris.” In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, edited by Jon Stewart, 355–374. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Philonenko, Alexis. “Chestov ou la lutte contre la raison.” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 72, no. 4 (October–December 1967): 465–485. Piron, Geneviève. “Lev Šestov et la critique subjective.” In Contributions Suisses au XIII congrès mondial des slavistes à Ljubljana, edited by Patrick Sériot, 199–220. Bern: Peter Lang, 2003. _____. “Léon Chestov et ‘Viacheslav le Magnifique.’” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 157–172. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. _____. “Aux sources de l’inspiration: Chestov et l’esthétique (à partir des carnets de notes inédits).” Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 10 (2007): 108–118. _____. “Polemika L. I. Shestova s V. I. Ivanovym: borʹba v platonovskoi peshchere.” Simvol 53–54 (2008): 421–434. _____. “Le rôle de Fondane dans la diffusion de la pensée de Chestov en France.” Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 13 (2010): 101–115. _____. “Léon Chestov interprète de Tolstoï, dans ses carnets, ses œuvres publiées et face à l’Histoire.” (Actes du Colloque international: L’œuvre de Léon Tolstoï, Bilan du XIXe siècle européen). In Un autre Tolstoï, edited by Catherine Depretto, 217–227. Paris: Institut d’études slaves, 2012. Polyakov, Sergei A. “Russkaya ideologiya i russkaya utopiya filosofii Lʹva Shestova.” In Filosofskii vek. Alʹmanakh 5 (1998): 265–278. Porus, Vladimir N. “Spor o ratsionalizme: filosofiya i kulʹtura (E. Gusserlʹ, L. Shestov i G. Shpet).” In Gustav Shpet i sovremennaya filosofiya gumanitarnogo znaniya, edited by Tatʹyana G. Shchedrina, 146–168. Moscow: Yazyki slavyanskikh kulʹtur, 2006. _____. “V. Solovʹëv i L. Shestov: edinstvo v tragedii.” Voprosy filosofii 2 (2004): 148–159. [English translation in: Russian Studies in Philosophy 44, no. 4 (2006): 59–74.]

Bibliography and Works Cited Preobrazhenskii, German M. “Lev Shestov i Edmund Gusserlʹ o zadachakh filosofii.” Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Filosofiya. Psikhologiya. Sotsiologiya 2, no. 14 (2013): 15–24. Regeczi, Ildiko. “Chekhov and the Philosophy of the Turn of the Century. Chekhov and Shestov.” Studia Slavica Hungaricae 42 (1997): 387–400. Remizov, Aleksei. “Shish elovyi.” Chisla 9 (May–December 1933): 57–83. (Pages on Shestov: 61–66.) _____. “Rozanovy pisʹma.” (1905–1917) Okno 2 ( July 1923): 121–193. (Pages on Shestov: 134, 148, 152, 161.) Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer. “Shestov’s Interpretation of Nietzsche.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 133–142. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Rostenne, Paul. “Léon Chestov.” In Les grands courants de la pensée mondiale contemporaine, 6 vols., edited by Michele Federico Sciacca, vol. 1, 333–358. Paris-Milan: FischbacherMarzorati, 1964. Rubin, Dominic. “N. Berdyaev, M. Gershenzon and L. Shestov: Jewish and Russian nihilists of the Spirit.” In Holy Russia, Sacred Israel: Jewish-Christian Encounters in Russian Religious Thought, 153–226. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010. Salazar-Ferrer, Olivier. “Fondane et Nietzsche: une alliance paradoxale.” In The Tragic Discourse: Shestov and Fondane’s Existential Thought, edited by Ramona Fotiade, 117–132. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006. Sazeeva, Irina B. “Afiny i Ierusalim v filosofii L. Shestova i B. Fondana.” In Pravoslavie i gumanitarnoe znanie: XV Rozhdestvenskie pravoslavno-filosofskie chteniya, 281–286. Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskii gumanitarnyi tsentr, 2006. _____. “Poiski smysla bytiya v filosofii Lʹva Shestova i Benzhamena Fondana.” In XIX Rozhdestvenskie pravoslavno-filosofskie chteniya, 331–338. Nizhnii Novgorod: Nizhegorodskii gos. ped. universitet, 2010. _____. “Antiistorizm Lʹva Shestova.” Filosofskii polilog 3 (2018): 60–71. Schloezer, Boris de. “Un penseur russe: Léon Chestov.” Mercure de France 583 (October 1922): 82–115. _____. [Boris F. Shlëtser]. “Paskalʹ i kniga o nёm Shestova.” Zveno 25 ( July 23, 1923): 2–3. _____. [Boris F. Shlëtser]. “Lev Shestov. K 70-letiyu so dnya rozhdeniya.” Poslednie novosti 5439 (13 February 1936): 3. _____ [Boris F. Shlëtser]. “Pamyati L. I. Shestova.” Poslednie novosti 6500 (13 January 1939a): 3. _____ [Boris F. Shlëtser]. “Kirkegard i Shestov.” Poslednie novosti 6709 (10 August 1939b): 2. _____. “Leon Chestov.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 149 (1959): 355–362. _____. “Préface.” Preface to Les Révelations de la mort, by Lev Shestov, iii–xxxvii. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Plon, 1958. _____. “Lecture de Chestov.” Introduction to La philosophie de la tragédie: Sur les confins de la vie, by Lev Shestov, 7–20. Translated by Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Flammarion, 1966a.

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Bibliography and Works Cited _____. “Preface.” Preface to L’Homme pris au piège: Puchkine-Tolstoï-Tchékov, by Lev Shestov, 7–12. Translated by Boris de Schloezer & Sylvie Luneau. Paris: U. G. E., 1966b. Senderovich, Savely. “Shestov—Chekhov, Chekhov—Shestov.” In Anton Chekhov through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers. Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov, edited by Olga Tabachnikova, 199–217. London: Anthem Press, 2012. Senderovich, Savely, and Elena Shvarts. “Kto Kanta nagolovu bʹёt (K teme ‘Lev Shestov i literatura 20-go veka’).” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 12 (2005): http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/12/ senderovich12.shtml. Shchedrina, Tat′yana G., “‘Zasluzhennyi sobesednik’ (Obshchenie Gustava Shpeta s Lʹvom Shestovym).” In “Ya pishu kak ekho drugogo.” Ocherki intellektualʹnoi biografii Gustava Shpeta, 183–191. Moscow: Progress-Traditsiya, 2004. Shchedrina, Tatʹyana G., and Pruzhinin, Boris I. “Istorizm Lʹva Shestova i Gustava Shpeta (ob ekzistentsialʹnom izmerenii fenomenologii).” Voprosy filosofii 11 (2016): 119–124. Shein, Louis J. “Lev Shestov: A Russian Existentialist.” Russian Review 26, no. 3 ( July 1967): 278–285. _____. “The Philosophy of Infinite Possibility: An Examination of Lev Shestov’s Weltanschauung.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 2, no. 1 (1979): 59–68. Shirmanov, Yaroslav I. “Bog, vera i razum v filosofii Lʹva Shestova.” Religiovedenie 3 (2008a): 100–103. _____. “K voprosu o religioznykh predstavleniyakh Lʹva Shestova.” Izvestiya Uralʹskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, seriya 3 “Obshchestvennye nauki,” 6, no. 61 (2008b): 107–112. Shitov, Sergei I. “Filosofiya tragedii Lʹva Shestova.” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriya 7 “Filosofiya,” 2 (1993): 35–42. Shpet, Gustav G., Gustav Shpet: zhiznʹ v pisʹmakh. Epistolyarnoe nasledie, edited by Tatʹyana G. Shchedrina, 323–604. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005. _____. “Zametki o Shestove.” In Filosofskaya kritika: otzyvy, retsenzii, obzory, edited by Tatʹyana G. Shchedrina, 210–221. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010 (also in Shchedrina 2016b [B2], 279–290). Sineokaya, Yuliya V. “V mire net nichego nevozmozhnogo? (L. Shestov o filosofii F. Nitsshe).” In Fridrikh Nitsshe i filosofiya v Rossii, edited by Nelli Motroshilova and Yuliya Sineokaya, 75–84. Saint Petersburg: RKhGI, 1999. _____ (and Anton M. Khokhlov). “Lev Shestov’s Philosophy of Freedom.” Studies in East European Thought 68, no. 2–3 ( June 2016): 213–227. _____. “In the Circle of Non-Vengeance: Lev Shestov and Friedrich Nietzsche.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 55, no. 5 (2017): 350–363. Sokolov, B. G. “Dvizhenie ‘protiv’: Sёren Kʹerkegor i Lev Shestov.” In Russkaya i evropeiskaya filosofiya: puti skhozhdeniya, 80–92. Saint Petersburg: Kafedra, 1997. Stepanov, Andrei. “Lev Shestov on Chekhov.” In Anton Chekhov through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers. Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov, edited by Olga Tabachnikova, 169–174. London: Anthem Press, 2012.

Bibliography and Works Cited Sviridovskaya, Nina D. “Boris Shlëtser: vvedenie v tvorchestvo.” Nauchnyi vestnik Moskovskoi konservatorii 1 (2010): 137–153. Szepieniec, Katarzyna. “Husserl and Shestov: Philosophical Antipodes.” Argument 4, no. 1 (2014): 135–153. Tabachnikova, Olga. “Treatment of Aesthetics in Lev Shestov’s Search for God.” In Aesthetics as a Religious Factor in Eastern and Western Christianity, edited by William van den Bercken and Jonathan Sutton, 179–195. Leuven-Paris-Dudley, Ma: Peeters, 2005. _____. “Anticipating Modern Trends: Lev Shestov—Between Literary Criticism and Existential Philosophy.” Australian Slavonic and East European Studies 22, no. 1/2 (2008a): 105–119. _____. “‘Dialogues with Dostoevsky’ from Two Corners: Lev Shestov versus André Gide.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal 42 (2008b): 55–76. _____. “Poperëk miroporyadka: Lev Shestov, Marina Tsvetaeva i Venedikt Erofeev.” Toronto Slavic Quarterly 26 (2008c): http://sites.utoronto.ca/tsq/26/tabachnikova26.shtml. _____. “Russian Jews in Exile from Bolshevik Russia: The Case of Lev Shestov as an Example of Russian-Jewish Existential Compromise.” East European Jewish Affairs 38, no. 2 (August 2008d): 185–200. _____. “Nikolai Gogolʹ v interpretatsii Lʹva Shestova” [Nikolai Gogol in the Interpretation of Lev Shestov]. In Gogolʹ i 20 vek [Gogol and the Twentieth Century], Proceedings of the international conference organized by the ELTE doctoral program “Russian literature between East and West,” edited by Zsuzsa Hetenyi, Ágnes Dukkon, and Zsuzsanna Kalafatics, 221– 231. Budapest: Dolce Filologia, 2010. _____. “The Russian Diaspora in the Context of French Culture: The Correspondence between Lev Shestov and Boris de Schloezer.” In Other Voices: Three Centuries of Cultural Dialogue between France, Britain and Russia, edited by Graham Roberts, 203–234. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011. _____. “Between Tragedy and Aesthetics: Shestov’s Reading of Chekhov—A Gaze Directed Within.” In Anton Chekhov through the Eyes of Russian Thinkers. Vasilii Rozanov, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii and Lev Shestov, edited by Olga Tabachnikova, 175–197. London: Anthem Press, 2012a. _____. “Cultural Anxieties of Russian-Jewish émigrés: Max Eitingon and Lev Shestov.” In Russian Jewish Diaspora and European Culture (1917–1937), edited by Jörg Schulte, Olga Tabachnikova and Peter Wagstaff, 127–146. Leiden-Boston-Tokyo: Brill, 2012b. Taputʹ, Aleksei V. “O prirode moralʹnoi svobody v filosofii I. Kanta i L. Shestova.” In Modeli mira. Issledovaniya po logike argumentatsii i istorii filosofii, edited by Vladimir N. Bryushinkin, 176– 183. Kaliningrad: Izd-vo Kaliningradskogo Gos. Univ., 2004. _____. “Sootnoshenie prekrasnogo i dobrogo v otsenke L. Shestova i I. Kanta.” In Argumentatsiya i interpretatsii. Issledovaniya po logike, istorii filosofii i sotsialʹnoi filosofii, edited by Vladimir N. Bryushinkin. Kaliningrad: Baltiiskii Federal′nyi Universitet, 2006. Van Goubergen, Martine, and Jonathan Sutton. “Concerning Lev Shestov’s Conception of Ethics.” Studies in East European Thought 48, nos. 2–4 (1996): 223-229.

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Bibliography and Works Cited _____. “Berdyaev i Shestov: spor ob ekzistentsialʹnoi filosofii.” Polignozis 3 (2000): 120–127. Vizgin, Viktor P. “Razum na vesakh otkroveniya: Lev Shestov i sovremennaya myslʹ.” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 28 (1997): 379–390. Vorozhikhina, Kseniya V. “Lev Shestov i psikhoanaliz.” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriya 7 “Filosofiya,” 3 (2012): 28–38. _____. “Lev Shestov i Zhorzh Batai o prirode filosofskogo neznaniya.” Vestnik Moskovskogo universiteta, seriya 7 “Filosofiya,” 2 (2014): 15–23. _____. “Benzhamen Fondan—uchenik Lʹva Shestova.” Filosofiya i kul′tura 2 (2014a): 271–283. _____. “Boris Shlëtser i Lev Shestov.” Istoriko-filosofskii ezhegodnik 2013 (2014b): 353–365. _____. “‘Vechnye istiny’ i svoboda ot razuma. O nekotorykh chertakh filosofii Lʹva Shestova na primere knigi Afiny i Ierusalim.” Filosofskii Zhurnal/Philosophy Journal 3, no. 8 (2015): 78–91. _____. “Lev Shestov’s Ideas in the French Philosophical and Cultural Context.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 55, no. 5 (2017): 364–375. _____. “Lev Shestov kak publitsist i literaturnyi kritik (1895–1900 gg.). Neizvestnye statʹi filosofa.” Istoriya filosofii 24, no. 1 (2019): 58–71. Weingrad, Michael. “New Encounters with Shestov.” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 11 (2002): 49–62. Wiebe, Donald. “Being Faithful and Being Reasonable as Mutually Exclusive: A Comment on Shein’s and Grean’s Interpretation of Shestov.” Ultimate Reality and Meaning 7, no. 2 ( June 1984): 165–168. Zakrzhevskii, Aleksandr K. Podpolʹe. Psikhologicheskie paralleli (Fedor Dostoevskii, Leonid Andreev, Fedor Sologub, Lev Shestov, Aleksei Remizov, Mikhail Pantyukhov), 55–69. Kiev: Izd. Zhurnala ‘Iskusstvo,’ 1911. Zakydalsky, Taras D. “Lev Shestov and Religious Thought.” In Russian Thought after Communism: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage, edited by James Scanlan, 153–164. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1994. Zenʹkovskii, Vasilii V. “Filosofskoe tvorchestvo L. I. Shestova.” Filosofskaya i sotsiologicheskaya mysl′ 1 (1991): 78–85.

C. Further References Belinsky, Vissarion G. Selected Philosophical Works. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1948. Berdyaev, Nikolai A. “Russkii dukhovnyi renessans nachala XX v. i zhurnal ‘Putʹ.’” Putʹ 49 (1935): 3–22. _____. Dream and Reality. An Essay in Autobiography. Translated by Katharine Lampert. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950. _____. Tipy religioznoi mysli v Rossii. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1989. _____. The Russian Idea. Translated by R. M. French. Hudson: Lindisfarne Press, 1992. Berger, Benjamin Lyle. “Qohelet and the Exigencies of the Absurd.” Biblical Interpretation 9, no. 2 (2001): 141–179.

Bibliography and Works Cited Berlin, Isaiah. Russian Thinkers. Edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly. New York: Viking Press, 1978. Bonetskaya, Natal′ya K. Tsar′-Devitsa. Fenomen Evgenii Gertsyk na fone epokhi. Moscow: Izd. Tsentrpoligraf, 2012. Bonnefoy, Yves, ed. Boris de Schloezer. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/Pandors Editions, 1981. Brandes, Georg. William Shakespeare. Munich: Langen, 1896. Bryner, Cyril. “Shakespeare among the Slavs.” ELH 8, no. 2 ( June 1941): 107–118. Bunin, Ivan A. “Chekhov.” In Sobranie sochinenii v desyati tomakh, vol. 10, 211–240. Berlin: Petropolis, 1935. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage, 1991. [1st French ed. Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris: Gallimard, 1942.] Chertkov, Leonid. “Søren Kierkegaard in Russian Literature.” Kierkegaardiana 13 (1984): 128–148. Clowes, Edith W. The Revolution of Moral Consciousness. Nietzsche in Russian Literature, 1890– 1914. DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1988. _____. “The Argument against Philosophy and the Formation of a Modern Russian Poetic Discourse.” The Comparatist 27 (May 2003): 41–55. _____. Fiction’s Overcoat: Russian Literary Culture and the Question of Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. Copleston, Frederick. Philosophy in Russia from Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev. Tunbridge Wells and Indiana: Search Press & University of Notre Dame Press, 1986. Davidson, Pamela. “Vladimir Solov’ev and the Ideal of Prophecy.” The Slavonic and East European Review 78, no. 4 (October 2000): 643–670. DeBlasio, Alyssa. The End of Russian Philosophy: Tradition and Transition at the Turn of the 21st Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Translated by Paul Patton. New York-London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Dupont, Christian Y. “Jean Hering and the Introduction of Husserl’s Phenomenology to France.” Studia Phaenomenologica 15 (2015): 129–153. _____. Phenomenology in French Philosophy: Early Encounters. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Ern, Vladimir F. “O velikolepii i skeptitsizme (k kharakteristike adogmatizma).” Khristianskaya mysl′ 3–4 (1917): 162–186. Esclapez, Christine. La musique comme parole des corps: Boris de Schloezer, André Souris et André Boucourechliev: essai. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. Evlampiev, Igor′ I. Istoriya russkoi filosofii. Moscow: Vysshaya Shkola, 2002. Finkenthal, Michael. Benjamin Fondane: A Poet-Philosopher Caught Between the Sunday of History and the Existential Monday. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology. In The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky. Vol. 1. Edited by Richard S. Haugh and translated by Robert L. Nichols. Belmont: Nordland Publishing Company, 1979.

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Bibliography and Works Cited Fondane, Benjamin. “Edmund Husserl et l’oeuf de Colomb du réel (de la philosophie phénoménologique allemande).” L’Europe 78 ( June 15, 1929): 331–344. Fox-Muraton, Mélissa. “Philosophy of Existence in France in the 1930s.” In Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach, edited by Arne Grøn, René Rosfort, and K. Brian Söderquist, 7–26. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. Frese Witt, Mary Ann, ed. Nietzsche and the Rebirth of the Tragic. Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. Gascoyne, David. Existential Writings. Oxford: Amate Press, 2001. Gaultier de, Jules. “De l’éthique à l’esthétique à travers la mystique.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 105 ( January–June 1928): 385–427. Gorky, Maksim. Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy. Translated by S. S. Koteliansky and L. Woolf. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920. Grillaert, Nel. What the God-seekers Found in Nietzsche. The Reception of Nietzsche’s Übermensch by the Philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance. New York: Brill-Rodopi, 2008. Hamburg, Gary M., and Randall A. Poole. A History of Russian Philosophy 1830–1930: Faith, Reason, and the Defense of Human Dignity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Heller, Michel. “Premier avertissement: un coup de fouet. L’histoire de l’expulsion des personnalités culturelles hors de l’Union soviétique en 1922.” Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 20, no. 2 (1979): 131–172. Heyer, René. “Actualité pascalienne: Présentation d’ouvrages.” Revue des sciences religieuses 88, no. 2 (April 2014): 253–259. Horowitz, Brian. “A Jewish-Christian Rift in Twentieth-Century Russian Philosophy: N. A. Berdiaev and M. O. Gershenzon.” The Russian Review 53, no. 4 (October 1994): 497–514. _____. Russian Idea-Jewish Presence: Essays on Russian-Jewish Intellectual Life. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Hyde, John K. “Lev Šestov’s French Apologist Benjamin Fondane.” The Slavic and East European Journal 14, no. 1 (Spring 1970): 24–32. Jutrin, Monique. “Benjamin Fondane: un ‘Ulisse juif.’” Foi et vie 100, no. 5 (December 2001): 19–29. _____. “Rediscovering Rachel Bespaloff.” In Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944, edited by Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler, 260–263. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. _____, ed. Entre Jérusalem et Athènes. Benjamin Fondane à la recherche du Judaïsme perdu. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2009. _____. Avec Benjamin Fondane au-delà de l’histoire. Paris: Parole et Silence, 2011. Ionaitis, Ol′ga B., ed. Fridrikh Nitsshe i russkaya filosofiya. Ekaterinburg: Izd. Ural′skogo Universiteta, 2000. _____. Neoplatonizm v russkoi srednevekovoi filosofii. Ekaterinburg: Izd. Ural’skogo Universiteta, 2003.

Bibliography and Works Cited Kline, George L. Religious and Anti-Religious Thought in Russia, 73–90. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Kluback, William. Benjamin Fondane: A Poet in Exile. Oxford: Peter Lang, 1996. Kuvakin, Valerii A., Mysliteli Rossi. Izbrannye lektsii po istorii russkoi filosofii. Moscow: RGO, 2005. Levin, Yurii D. Shekspir i russkaia literatura XIX-go veka. Leningrad: Nauka, 1988. Likhachëv, Dmitrii S. Russkoe iskusstvo ot drevnosti do avangarda. Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1992. Livak, Leonid. Russian Émigrés in the Intellectual and Literary Life of Interwar France: A Bibliographical Essay. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010. Lossky, Nikolay O. History of Russian Philosophy, 325–326. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1952. Lungina, Dar′ya A. [Darya Loungina]. “Russia’s Acquaintance with Kierkegaard.” Russian Studies in Philosophy 43, no. 4 (2005): 50–70. _____. “Russia: Kierkegaard’s Reception through Tsarism, Communism and Liberation.” In Kierkegaard’s International Reception, vol. 2: Southern, Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Jon Stewart, 247–283. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. Malakhieva-Mirovich, Varvara G. Khrizalida. Stikhotvoreniya. Moscow: Vodolei, 2013. Maritain, Jacques. “From Existential Existentialism to Academic Existentialism.” The Sewanee Review 56, no. 2 (Spring 1948): 210–229. Martin, Bernard. Great Twentieth-Century Jewish Philosophers: Shestov, Rosenzweig, Buber, with Selections from Their Writings. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Maslin, Mikhail A., et al. Istoriya russkoi filosofii. Uchebnik. Moscow: Respublika, 2001. Motroshilova, Nelli V., and Yuliya V. Sineokaya, eds. Fridrikh Nitsshe i filosofiya v Rossii. Saint Petersburg: RKhGI, 1999. Mirsky, Dmitrii S. Contemporary Russian Literature, 172–175. New York: Alfred Knopf Inc., 1926. Mjør, Kåre Johan. Reformulating Russia: The Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers. Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2011. Monseu, Nicholas. “Conscience malheureuse et conscience intentionnelle: Fondane lecteur de Husserl et de Levinas.” Cahiers Benjamin Fondane 8 (2005). https://www.benjaminfondane.com/un_article_cahier-Conscience_malheureuse_et_conscience_intentionnelle___ Fondane_lecteur_de_Husserl_et_de_Levinas-229-1-1-0-1.html. Moyn, Samuel. The Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Neher, André. “Pensée biblique et non-philosophie.” Les Études philosophiques 2: Pensée juive et philosophie (April–June 1984): 145–156. Parfenov, Alexandr, and Joseph G. Price. Russian Essays on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. London: Associated University Presses, 1998. Pascal, Pierre. “Souvenir sur Berdjaev. L’homme.” In Colloque Berdjaev, edited by the Association Nicolas Berdiaev. Paris: Institutes d’Études Slaves, Sorbonne, 1978. Pyman, Avril. A History of Russian Symbolism, 139–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. [1st ed. 1994.]

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Bibliography and Works Cited Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer, ed. Nietzsche in Russia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. _____, ed. Nietzsche and Soviet Culture. Ally and Adversary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Rubin, Dominic. Holy Russia, Sacred Israel: Jewish-Christian Encounters in Russian Religious Thought. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2010. Salazar-Ferrer, Olivier. Benjamin Fondane. Paris: Oxus, 2004. _____. “Rachel Bespaloff and the Nostalgia for the Instant.” In Artists, Intellectuals, and World War II: The Pontigny Encounters at Mount Holyoke College, 1942–1944, edited by Christopher Benfey and Karen Remmler, 251–259. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. Scanlan, James, ed. Russian Philosophy. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1996. [1st ed. 1976.] (On Shestov see vol. 3, 221–247.) Scholem, Gerschom. Les grands courants de la mystique juive. Paris: Payot, 1977. Schwinn Smith, Marilyn. “Aleksei Remizov’s English-language Translators: New Material.” In A People Passing Rude: British Responses to Russian Culture, edited by Anthony Cross, 189–200. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2012. Shchedrina, Tatʹyana G., ed. Gustav Shpet: zhiznʹ v pisʹmakh. Epistolyarnoe nasledie. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2005. (Shestov’s letters to Shpet: 323–340.) _____, ed. Gustav Shpet i sovremennaya filosofiya gumanitarnogo znaniya. Moscow: Yazyki slavyanskikh kul′tur, 2006. _____, ed. Gustav Shpet: Filosof v kulʹture. Dokumenty i pisʹma. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2012. Sineokaya, Yuliya D., ed. Nitsshe: pro et contra. Saint Petersburg: RKhGA, 2000. _____. Tri obraza Nitsshe v russkoi kulʹture. Moscow: IF RAN, 2008. Smith, Oliver. “Prophecy.” In Vladimir Soloviev and the Spiritualization of Matter, 145–206. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2011. Stewart, Jon, ed. Kierkegaard and Existentialism. Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. Sutton, Jonathan. “The Problematic Status of the Russian Tradition in Religious Philosophy.” New Blackfriars 81, no. 958 (December 2000): 536–541. Tabachnikova, Olga. Russian Irrationalism from Pushkin to Brodsky: Seven Essays in Literature and Thought. London: Bloomsbury Academic Publishers, 2015. Teboul, Margaret. “La réception de Kierkegaard en France 1930–1960.” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 89, no. 2 (April–June 2005): 315–336. Vinokur, Val. “Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism.” In  Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context, edited by Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi, 37–64. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Voitskaya, Inna T. Fridrikh Nitsshe i Russkaya religioznaya filosofofiya. 2 vols. Minsk: Alkiona Pristsel’s, 1996. Vorozhikhina, Kseniya V. “Filosofskie iskaniya V. G. Malakhievoi-Mirovich.” Istoriya filosofii 21, no. 1 (2016): 53–62. Wahl, Jean. “‘Cheminements et carrefours’ par Rachel Bespaloff.” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 129, nos. 1/2 ( January–February 1940): 86–104.

Bibliography and Works Cited Wiebe, Donald. Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991. Zenkovsky, Vassily V. A History of Russian Philosophy. 2 vols. Trans. George Kline. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1967. [1st ed. 1953.] Zernov, Nikolai M. Russkoe religioznoe vozrozhdenie XX veka. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1974. [1st ed. 1963.]

319

Index of Names A

Abraham Adamovich, G.V., 78, 101n58, 102n60, 168n105, 214n14, 240 Adorno, T.W., 70n2, 186n22 Aesthetics, 39n77, 76-77, 81, 86n41, 89, 93-94, 224n34, 287 Chekhov’s, 85-90 Philosophical, 74, 77 Aikhenvalʹd, Yu.I., 11n23, 60, 70, 227 Akhutin, A.V., 71, 122n25, 126 Aleksandr II (Emperor), 6 Anaximander, 129-130, 148, 190-191, 232 Andreev, L.N., 41, 92, 212 Anselm of Canterbury, 198 Antiphilosophy, xvi, 56, 160, 220-225, 227n37 Apollo, 65, 93, 103 78n24, 81, 82n31, 85, 90n44, 94, 98, 121, 168, 208, 213, 217, 239n62, 269 Arakcheev, A.A., 116 Aristotle, 64-65, 101, 105, 124-125, 127n37, 129-131, 133, 138, 144, 150, 154-155, 159, 162, 180, 191-192, 198, 202-203, 246, 250, 252, 255, 275, 277, 278n12 Metaphysics, 202 Poetics, 64 Aryakovskii, A., 262n1 Asmus, V.F., 188n25 Astafʹev, P.E., 42 Athens Augustine of Hippo, x, 58, 75, 122-125, 127, 128n40, 133, 141n67, 142, 146, 173, 194, 230-231, 238

B

Bach, J.S., 16n37 Bakhtin, M.M. Bakst, L., 71n5 Balakhovskii, Daniil, 8, 109-110, 114 Balakhovskii, Georgii, 101 Balakhovskii, Sofiya, 8, 109, 190n28 Balʹmont, K.D., 41

Balzac, H. de, 213 Banner, Nicholas, 152n78 Baranova-Shestova, (Baranoff-Chestov) Natal’ya L., 3n2, 4n3, 6-7, 8n14, 9n18, 11-12, 14n30, 17, 60, 72n7, 73n12, 74, 78, 100, 108, 109n2, 110n4, 114n12,13, 115, 121, 127n39, 137n59, 141n67, 147148, 161, 172n2, 190n28, 243n1, 244245, 251n13, 255n24, 282, 289, 290n4, 294n14, 295n17, 298-299 Barth, Karl, 186, 263 Bataille, G., 45, 136n55, 215-216, 286 Batova, N.K., 237, 300 Baudelaire, C., 17n39, 59, 82n33, 281n2, 287-288 Baumgardner, Wilhelm, 252 Beaumont, M., 141n67, 174n5, 300 Beethoven, L. van, 131 Beginnings and Endings, xv, 37n75, 59n109, 72n7, 74, 90, 94, 97, 291 Belinskii (Belinsky), V.G., 21n44, 24, 27, 37, 49, 191, 236 Belyi, Andrei, 41, 56n107, 85, 90-91, 94, 108, 212 Benjamin, Walter, 70 Benois, Alexandre, xiii, 41, 42n84, 71n5 Berdyaev, Nikolai A., xii-xiv, 16, 20, 25n51, 41, 46, 47n99, 51-60, 67, 70, 71n6, 74, 75n17, 78, 85, 101-104, 108-109, 113, 115, 117, 133, 136-137, 141n67, 157, 166-168, 174n5, 181, 185, 186n22, 188, 189n26, 192-193, 197, 204-206, 207n1, 208-214, 216, 218-219, 221, 236, 239-240, 242, 262-279, 282 Meaning of Creation, The, 103 Russian Idea, The, 209, 277 Berezovskaya-Shestova, Anna. E., 9, 73, 190n28, 266 Berezovskaya-Shestova, Tat’yana, 10, 73, 136n55, 187n24, 290 Bergson, Henri, 43n87, 63n112, 137, 141n67, 173-174, 207, 215, 251n12, 260n30, 287

Index of Names Two Sources of Morality and Religion, The, 137n59, 174 Berlin, Isaiah, 217 Bespaloff, Rachel, 31, 216, 286-287, 300 Cheminements et carrefours, 31, 286n10 Bespochvennost’ (Groundlessness), 12n24, 51n102, 55-58, 62, 66, 77, 82n33, 89, 98, 160, 220, 230 Besschetnova, E.V., 163n96 Billings, Joshua, 64n115 Blanchot, Maurice, 206, 217 Blok, A., 85, 91 Boborykin, P.D., 41, 45n94 Bobrov, Evgenii.A., 213n13 Böhme, Jacob, 271 Boldareva, V.N., 46n97, 262n1 Bolshevism, 112-117 Bonetskaya, N.K., 51n101, 201n35 Bonnefoy, Yves, 136n58, 217, 300 Bos, Charles du, 135-136, 141n67, 156, 207, 263 Botkin, Vasilii P., 27 Bowman, Frank, 283n5 Brandes, Georg, xv, 4n3, 11-26, 36, 45n94, 185n22, 186n22 Bréhier, Émile, 147n72, 151n76, 153n80 Bronshtein, Evsei, 74 Brucker, Jakob, 153 Brutus, 21, 23-24, 145, 152n77 Bryusov, V.Ya., 41, 85 Buber, Martin, xii, 113n9, 171, 174-175, 178186, 189n26, 215, 282, 285n7 Bulgakov, Sergey N., 7n10, 10-11, 41, 45, 56n107, 74, 85, 87, 101-104, 110, 115, 117, 166-169, 173, 174n5, 175-177, 188, 204-206, 208n5, 211n10, 218, 230, 234235, 236n57, 262n2, 263-264, 267, 269, 278, 297, 300 Bunin, I.A., 85

C

Camus, Albert, xii, 31n64, 45, 137, 189n26, 215-217, 300 Carassou, Michel, 282, 283n5 Cassou, Jean, 33n69, 222n28 Cavell, Stanley, 70n2 Cézanne, P., 224n34 Chadaaev, P.Ya., 61 Chekhov, A. P., x, xv, 29n59, 59n109, 60-62, 72, 74, 76-77, 82, 84-91, 93, 98, 104-105, 164, 214, 240n63, 241, 291 “Boring story, A” (Skuchnaya istoriya), 88

“Ivanov,” 86, 88 Chelpanov, Georgii I., 74, 75n17 Chernyshevskii (Chernyshevsky), N.G., 21n44, 27, 219n21 Chertkov, Leonid, 186n22 Christensen, P.G., 136n58 Chubarov, I. M., 243n1 Chuiko, Vladimir V., 42 Chulkov, Georgii I., 56 Cioran, Emil M., 206, 217n18, 281n2, 282 Clement of Alexandria, 198 Clowes, Edith W., 26, 30n61, 40-41, 42n86, 46-47, 70n2, 218, 219n21, 223, 224n33, 300 Cohen, Hermann, 181 Copernicus, N., 250 Copleston, Frederick, 222n27 Corte, Marcel de, 151n76, 155n85

D

Damiani, Peter, 198-199, 201 Darwin, Charles, 43-44, 160, 267 David, Julia, 300 DeBlasio, A., 218 Del Noce, A., 197n32 Deleuze, G., 45, 68n121, 70n2, 206, 217, 228, 232, 236n56, 237-238, 241 Denis, Ernst, 135n53 Denn (Dennes), M., 168n104, 247n6 Derrida, Jacques, 70n2 Derznovenie (Audacity), 162, 267 Descartes, R., x, 130, 142-146, 192, 199, 201 Pensées, 142 Desjardins, P., 156-157, 181 Desmond, W., 23n47, 163n96, 300 Diels, Hermann, 129n42 Dillon, John, 154n84 Dimitrova, Nina I., 34 Diogenes, 131, 220 Dionysius, 65 Dobrolyubov, N. A., 15n34, 27 Don Quixote, 84 Dostoevskii (Dostoevsky, Dostoyevsky) F.M., x, xii-xvi, 3, 10, 13-15, 23-25, 29-30, 32, 34, 39, 46-56, 58-62, 66-69, 70n2, 72, 73n10, 75-76, 77n22, 78-84, 87, 97-100, 103105, 117-118, 120, 122-123, 125, 127n39, 131-132, 134-141, 152, 157, 164-166, 168-170, 172-173, 186n23, 187n24, 188, 190-196, 199, 205n42, 211-212, 214-217, 218n21, 224n34, 226n37, 234, 236-237, 240n63, 241, 243n1, 244, 247, 250, 252,

321

322

Index of Names 258n28, 263-265, 269, 271, 274, 276-277, 280-281, 283-284, 286n9, 291-292, 294 Brothers Karamazov, 48, 92n48, 258n28, 271 Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, 47n98, 140, 147, 173, 195 Karamazov, Alesha, 49, 52n104, 132, 152 Karamazov, Fedor, 168-169 Karamazov, Ivan, 38, 45, 49, 51, 52n104, 55, 140, 152, 212 Smerdyakov, 49 Crime and punishment Raskolʹnikov, 48, 51 Demons (Besy) Kirillov, 48-49, 140, 152 Stavrogin, 140 Diary of a Writer, 99, 164 Idiot, The, 234 Ippolit, 140, 234 Myshkin, 49, 52n104 Notes from the Underground, x, 47-49, 67-68, 122n28, 138-139, 157, 169 Doughty, Mark, 201n35 Drozdek, A., 201n35, 300 Duns Scotus, John, 275 Dupont, C.Y., 249n9, 250, 260-261 Durkheim, Émile, 159 Dyagilev, S.P., x, xiii, 41, 71-72, 78-79

E

Einstein, A., 169, 207, 250 Eitingon, Max, 158n90, 160-161, 165n98, 172n1, 175, 255n24 Ermichëv, A.A., 4n3, 12n26, 15n33-34, 82n31, 101n58, 114n12, 158n90, 163n94, 163n96, 205n41, 295n17, 300 Ermishin, O.T., 82n31 Ern, V.F., 102, 166, 167n102, 208n5, 220, 221n23 Erofeev, Viktor.V., 300 Esclapez, C., 136n58 Euclid (of Alexandria), 250 Euripides, 64, 139 Evdokimova, S., 86n39, 87 Evlampiev, I.I., 23, 162, 165, 166n99, 300

F

Fëdorov, N.F., 168-170, 293, 294n13 Fedotov, G.P., 300 Fichte, J.G., 145 Filosofov, D.V., 60

Finkenthal, M., 61, 62n111, 281n2, 285, 288n14, 300 Flake, O., 45 Florenskii, P.A., 34, 130n47, 166-167, 208n5, 218, 235, 236n57, 260 Pillar and Ground of Truth, The, 260 Florovskii (Florovsky) G., 208, 210n8, 214, 218 Fondaminskii I.I., 157 Fondane (Fundoianu), Benjamin, xii, xiv, xvi, 2n1, 3, 5, 6n8, 15n34, 17-18, 31n64, 33n69, 43, 44n91, 71-72, 75n16, 76, 79-81, 101, 110-112, 113n7-9, 121n23, 133, 135-137, 152n77, 154, 156-157, 159-161, 165, 169n107, 171-175, 178181, 183, 185, 188, 189n26, 192, 197, 216, 225, 227n38, 228, 231, 240, 242244, 251-252, 255n24, 256n26, 258n28, 260n30, 264, 266n8, 280-288, 300 False Treatise of Aesthetics, 76, 287, 288n13-14 Rencontres avec Léon Chestov, 137, 243n1, 281n2, 285, 300 Fotiade, R., 9n17, 11n22, 16n37, 25n51, 31n64, 73n12, 101n58, 216n17, 217n18, 243n1, 257, 262n1, 283n5, 286n10, 299300 Fox-Muraton, M., 216n17 Frank, D.H., 177n12 Frank, Semen L., 34-35, 41, 45, 56n107, 59, 85, 109, 115, 130n47, 131n47, 166, 208n2, 208n5, 223, 300 Frese Witt, M.A., 64n114, Freud, Sigmund, 160-161, 169, 287

G

Gascoyne, D., 217, 218n19, 281n2, 300 Gaultier, J. de, 17n39, 135-136, 141n67, 156, 207, 215, 221, 263, 281, 300 Gebgard, R., 11n23, Gersh, S., 153n79, Gershenzon, M.O., 7n10, 51-52, 53n105, 60, 70, 101-102, 109n2, 111, 126n36, 135n54, 141n66, 178n14, 227, 264, 293, 297 Gertsyk, Adelaida K., 101 Gertsyk, Evgeniya K., 6n9, 7n13, 9-10, 26, 51, 94n49, 95, 101-102, 120-121, 142n68, 220-221, 300 Gide, A., 134-137, 156-157, 207, 215, 263, 287 Gilbert, Louis, 174 Gillet, L., 263 Gilson, É., 196-200, 263, 293

Index of Names Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, The, 196-200, 293 Gippius, Z.N., 41, 91 Giuliani, M., 178n14 Goethe, J.H. von, 64, 105 Gogol’, N.V., 13, 49, 61, 97, 104, 164 Goldenweiser (Gol’denveizer), A.B., 88n43 Goncharov, Ivan A., 185n22 Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche, The Gor’kii (Gorky), M., 29, 30n59, 41, 115, 121n23 Gornostaev, A.K., 169 Grean, Stanley, 7n12, 206n44 Great Vigils, The Grenier, J., 189n26, 288 Griboedov, A.S., 61, 104 Griftsov, Boris A., 78, 85, 211, 213, 300 Grillaert, N., 40n80, Grot, Nikolai Ya., 30, 31n62, 42 Groys, Boris, 224, 226n37, 227n37, 229n42, 234n51, 300 Guchkova, Natalʹya, 225n36 Guyot, Henri, 151n76

H

Halévy, D., 141n67 Hansen, Peter Emmanuel, 185n22 Harnack, A. von, 164 Hartmann, Eduard von, 151n76, 155, 156n86 Hartmann, Nicolai, 260n30, 270 Hasidism, 182-184 Haskalah (The Jewish Enlightenment), 177, 184 Hegel, G.W.F., x, 27, 57, 61, 65, 74, 77, 84, 144-146, 150, 151n76, 154, 156, 158-159, 164-165, 168, 176n10, 180, 182, 186n23, 187, 189n26, 191-193, 199, 203-204, 226n37, 250, 276-278 Heidegger, M., 31n64, 39n77, 44-45, 63, 68, 70n2, 89, 129n42-43, 186n22, 187, 206207, 215-216, 224n34, 228n39, 231, 232n47, 233-234, 235n52, 236n57, 252, 253n16, 255-256, 259-260, 270, 284, 287-288 Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track), 232 “What is Metaphysics?,” 63, 231 Heine, Heinrich, 37, 58, 61, 75, 77n22, 89, 138, 162 Romanzero, 37 Heller, M., 110n3 Henry, M., 189n26, 206, 217

Hering, Jean, 67, 148, 207, 249-251, 256-258 Herzen, A.I., 21n44, 218n21 Hitler, A., 110, 111n5, 113, 118-119, 172, 181, 184, 285n7 Hölderlin, F., 44, 64-65, 231n46 Homer, 233 Horkheimer, Max, 181 Horowitz, Brian, 53n105, 201n35, 300 Hugh of Saint Victor, 198 Husserl, E., x, xiv, xvi, 25, 35n73, 63n112, 67, 111, 126n35, 129n43, 131-132, 138, 141, 144n70, 145, 148, 160, 167n104, 171, 173, 175, 186, 188, 206-207, 215, 226n37, 231, 234, 236n57, 239-240, 242261, 263, 282, 285 Hyde, J.K., 281n2

I

Iamblichus, 235n53 Ibsen, H., x, xii, xv, 39n78, 62, 72, 74-77, 91, 94-98, 185n22, 216, 241 Brand, 96 Catiline, 95 Emperor and Galilean, 96 Ghosts, 96 Hedda Gabler, 96 John Gabriel Borkman, 96 Little Eyolf, 96 Love’s Comedy, 96 Master Builder, The, 96 Pretenders, The, 96 Vikings and Helgeland, The, 95 Ernulf, 95-96 When We Dead Awaken, 96-97 Irena, 97 Rubek, 97 Ingarden, Roman, 215n16, 249n9, 252n14, 253n16 Ionaitis, O.B., 40n80 Ionesco, E., 217 Irrationalism, xvi, 2n1, 112, 220-225, 237 Russian, 223n30 Western, 66 Isaac, 141-142, 175, 273, 275 Isaiah, 162, 274, 277 Isupov, K.G., 101n58 Ivanov, Vyacheslav, xii-xiii, 32n65, 39n76, 40n79, 41-42, 53n105, 56n107, 85, 91-92, 100-106, 121, 122n27, 126n35, 147, 153, 207, 220, 240n63, 241, 264, 277 Furrows and Boundaries (Borozdy i mezhi), 103

323

324

Index of Names Ivanov-Razumnik, R.V., 14, 15n35, 16n35, 24, 27, 55-56, 60, 82n31, 92, 211-212, 214, 300 On the Meaning of Life (O smysle zhizni), 14n31, 211 Jacob, 141-142, 175, 275 James, William, 71, 72n6, 266 Jankélévitch, V., 217 Jaspers, Karl, 44-45, 158, 186n22, 216, 260, 270, 288, 294 Reason and Existenz, 44n92, 158n91 Jenkins, Fiona, 39n77 Jerusalem, xi, xvi, 32, 34, 68, 119, 127, 171172, 175, 177, 180, 192, 195, 197, 199201, 204, 208, 217, 238, 273, 275-277 Jesus Christ, 28, 36, 38, 45, 54, 71n6, 100, 119, 121, 122n27, 139, 147, 173, 174, 176, 195, 198, 236, 247, 250, 265, 267 Jewish philosophy, xiii, 177-178, 184 Jijina-Ogden, M., 161n92, Job, 127, 139, 150, 152n77, 180, 186n23, 187, 189n26, 191-194, 199, 250, 274-275, 292-293 John of the Cross, 131, 155n85, 173 John (St. John), 159, 230n44 Jospe, Raphael, 177n12 Judaism, xiv, 124, 172-173, 177-178, 180, 238, 240-241 Jutrin M., 32n64, 178, 281n2, 286n10

K

Kabbalistic-Hasidic mysticism, 178-179 Kalinnikov, L.A., 131n47 Kallas, Endel, 122n26 Kant, I., x, 20, 22, 25, 44n92, 52n104, 57, 61, 66-69, 76n18, 82n33, 84, 103-105, 130131, 138, 144-146, 158-159, 169n107, 180, 191-193, 200-201, 203, 226-227, 235n53, 255, 260, 266-267, 271, 277278, 284 Karamazov, A.F. see Dostoevskii, Brothers Karamazov Kartashov, Anton, 278 Kaufmann, Fritz, 252 Kaufmann, Walter, 64n115 Khokhlov, A.M., 201n35, 300 Kiefer, Otto, 147n72 Kierkegaard, S., x, xii, xiv, xvi, 3, 25, 31n64, 32, 39, 44, 47n99, 58, 64n113, 67, 98, 127, 138n60, 152n77, 160, 171-173, 174n5, 175, 176n10, 177, 182, 185-196, 198-201, 203-204, 206, 215-216, 224n34, 226n37,

228n39, 231n46, 232, 234, 235n52, 238, 241, 243n1, 252, 254-255, 258-260, 264n3, 270-277, 282-284 Concept of Anxiety, The, 187, 194 Either-Or, 255, 185n22 Fear and Trembling, 187 Practice in Christianity, 194 Seducer’s Diary, A, 185n22 Sickness unto Death, The, 194 Kievlyanin, 4n3 Kievskoe Slovo, 4n3-4, 290n4 Kleist, H. von, 64 Penthesilea, 64 Kluback, W., 281n2 Kohler, G.B., 136n58 Kornblatt, J.D., 174n7, 300 Kotlyarevskii, N.A., 45n94 Koyré, Alexandre, 249n9 Kozyrev, A.P., 167n104, 211n10 Kroner, Richard, 158-159, 293 From Kant to Hegel, 158-159 Self-Realization of Mind: Prolegomena to the Philosophy of Culture, The, 158-159 Krylov, I.A., 61 Kudishina, A.A., 237n60, 262n1, 300 Kudrova, I.V., 158n90 Kuprin, Aleksandr I., 41 Kurabtsev, V.L., 127n37, 201n35, 237n60, 300

L

Langton, D.R., 174n5, 300 Lashov, V.V., 73n10, 237n60, 300 Laurent, Alice, 114n10, 243n1, 262n1, 283n5 Laval, Pierre, 113n8 Lavrov, P.L., 15n34 Lawrence, D.H., 217, 218n19, 221, 291, 299300 Lazarev (Lazareff), Adolʹf M., 7, 74-75, 136, 189n26, 197, 216, 296, 300 Leaman, Oliver, 177n12 Lefevre, Frédéric, 115n14 Leibniz, G.W. von, 159, 198n34, 201 Lenin, V.I., 110 Leont’ev, K.N., 267 Lermontov, M.Yu., 13, 14n30, 49, 58, 61, 104, 131, 164 Hero of Our Time Pechorin, 14n30 Lessing, G.E., 64, 198 Levin, Yu.D., 21n44

Index of Names Levinas, Emmanual, 176, 184, 188n25, 190, 249n9, 299 Levitt, Marcus C., 13n27 Levtskii, Sergey A., 262n1 Levy, Z., 177n12 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 136, 156-160, 175, 181, 197, 207, 215, 293 Lewis, D.K., 233 Lichtenberger, Henri, 36 Likhachëv, D.S., x Listopadov, Sergei, 6 Listopadova, Anna, 6 Livak, L., 157n88 Lloyd George, D., 111 Lobachevskii, N.I., 250 Lopatin, Lev M., 42 Losev, Aleksei F., 223-224, 235 Losskii, N.O., 41, 70, 110, 158n90, 166, 208209, 214, 218, 221n26 Lovtskii, Fanya, 109-110, 135n52 Lovtskii, German L., 7n12, 9, 101, 109-110, 135n52, 190n28, 280, 300 Löwith, K., 44n91, 45, 186n22 Lucescu-Boutcher, A., 283n5 Lukács, G., 186n22 Lundberg, Evgenii G., 74, 114-115 Lungina (Loungina), D.A., 185n21, 186n22 Luther, Martin, xiii, xivn1, xvi, 16n37, 32, 38, 58, 98, 101, 120-126, 131, 141n67, 142143, 147, 173, 195, 199, 203, 208n3, 238, 241, 273-274, 277, 294

M

Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 177 Makolkin, A., 188n25 Malakhieva-Mirovich, Anastasiya G., 8-9 Malakhieva-Mirovich, Varvara G., 6n9, 7n13, 8, 9n17, 30, 71n6, 290n4, 300 Mallarmé, S., 224 Malraux, André, 136-137, 157, 207, 215, 221, 243, 263 Mandelberg, Lev, 172 Mann, Thomas, 88, 207 Marcel, Gabriel, 31n64, 136-137, 189n, 189n26, 258n28, 263, 286, 288 Mareev, S.N., 34n71 Marion, J.-L., 250 Maritain, Jacques, 137, 189n26, 215, 221, 263, 281n2 Mark Anthony, 24 Marsilio Ficino, 153n79 Martin, Bernard, ix, 184n20, 200, 201n35, 290, 292-294 Marx, K., 116, 169n107, 267

Marxism (Marxist), 5n4, 5n6, 103, 115, 116117, 212, 267, 286n9 Masing-Delic, Irene, viii, 170n108 Maslov, G.N., 101n58 McLachlan, J.M., 188n25, 190 Meister Eckhart, 173, 271 Mendelssohn, M., 178 Merezhkovskii, D.S., xiii, xv, 32n65, 39n77, 41-42, 45, 56n107, 59, 72, 76n19, 77-81, 85, 87, 91, 113n8, 117n16, 121, 157, 211, 214, 267-269, 278, 291, 195 Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevskii, 78, 291, 295 Mesnard, Pierre, 189n26 Metaphysics, 52, 57-58, 62, 68, 131, 153, 155, 159-160, 166, 168n106, 197-198, 200206, 213, 224n34, 226, 228n39, 231, 233, 235n53, 236, 239, 246 Aristotle’s, 129, 159, 202 Greek, 130, 139, 141, 208n3, Psychological, 54, 133, 211, 257n27 Western, 45, 63, 66, 68, 202, 232n47 Mikhailovskii, Nikolai K., 11n23, 12n23, 15n34, 26, 27n56, 28n56, 38, 42-44, 45n94, 47-49, 59, 70, 87, 91, 140, 212, 214, 227, 269 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 75 Miłosz, C., 300 Minkowski, H., 169 Minskii, Nikolai M., 45n94, 60, 91, 208 Mir iskusstva (World of Art, The), x, 41, 50, 71, 72n7, 78, 207 Mirskii (Svyatopolk-Mirsky), Dmitrii S., xi, xiii, 34, 92n48, 104, 111-113, 222 Mjør, K.J., 157, 210 Monseu, N., 251 Morality, xi, xiii, xv, 3-4, 10, 14-16, 18, 20-23, 24n50, 26-32, 35-39, 43-47, 51, 54, 63, 70, 72, 137n59, 138, 149, 152n77, 163, 169, 174, 178, 180, 188, 225n36, 226n36, 239, 248 Morozova, Tat’yana V., 5n5, 300 Moses, 192n29, 205n43 Motroshilova, N.V., 23n48, 30n61, 40n80, 300 Mounier, Emmanuel, 263 Moyn, Samuel, 188 Mozart, W.A., 131 Murry, John M., 217, 291 Mussolini, B., 172n3

N

Necessity, 14, 52, 65, 67-68, 86, 119, 128, 129n42, 132, 144, 146, 149, 152, 154156, 162, 179, 184, 188, 191, 194,

325

326

Index of Names 201-204, 220, 226, 228-229, 232n47, 233, 237, 241, 244n2, 245, 250, 252-253, 256, 260n30, 271-273, 275-276, 284-285 Of reason, 39n77, 63, 68, 229 Of knowledge (scientific evidence), 40, 150 Neher, A., 177n12 Neoplatonism, xiv, xvi, 127n37, 231, 235n53, 238 Neoplatonic, xiv, 58, 90, 133, 153, 179, 233, 238-239 Neshumova, Tat’yana, 9n17 Neto, J.M., 178n14, 201n35, 300 Newton, I., 250 Nietzsche, F., x-xii, xiv-xv, 2-3, 9-10, 12, 14n30, 15-18, 22-26, 28-32, 33n69, 34-56, 58-62, 64-69, 62n7, 72n7, 75, 77-78, 80-81, 87, 89-90, 103-104, 120-123, 125, 129n42, 132, 134, 135n55, 136n55, 138, 140, 146-147, 158n91, 160-161, 163, 165, 168-169, 173, 178, 182, 185n22, 186n22, 188, 189n26, 193-196, 199, 203, 205n42, 206, 211, 213-217, 225, 226n36-37, 228, 232-234, 238, 241, 243n1, 250, 252, 254, 260n30, 264, 271-274, 277, 280-281, 283-284, 286n9, 287, 290 Antichrist, 32, 36-37, 103, 122n27, 140n64 Beyond Good and Evil, 36, 43 Birth of Tragedy, The, 28, 35, 45n95, 65, 103, 281 Gay Science, The, 36, 39n77, 68 Human, All Too Human, 38, 44, 50 On the Genealogy of Morality, 43-44 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 37-38, 50 Will to Power (Wille zur Macht), 38, 44 Nitssheanstvo (Nietzscheanism), 41, 51, 81, 219 Nigg, W., 45 Nihilism, 2n1, 44, 139, 220, 221n25, 230n45 Nikolai I, 115-116 Nikolai II, 116 Numenius of Apamea, 154

O

Ocampo, Victoria, 281n2, 282 Oedipus, 65 Oppo, A., 15n34, 163n96, 235n53, 262n1

P

Papernyi, Vladimir M., 300 Parfenov, A., 21n44 Parmenides, 172, 200-202, 224n34, 294

Pascal, B., x, xiv, xvi, 3, 32, 58, 64n113, 127, 134, 135n55, 137, 140-144, 160, 162, 173, 187-188, 193, 196, 198-199, 201, 216, 225, 227, 234, 236n59, 238, 260n30, 264-265, 274, 277, 283-284, 286n9 Pensées, 142, 227 Pascal, Pierre, 265 Pasternak, Boris L., 60 Patterson, D., 188n25, 201n35 Pattison, G., 188n25 Paul (St. Paul), xiii, 32, 36, 71n6, 119, 122, 124n33, 125, 141n67, 162, 173n5, 174, 194-195, 198, 201, 265, 275, 277 Paulhan, Jean, 136, 156-157, 207, 215 Pelagius, 123-124 Peter (Apostle), 119, 124 Philo of Alexandria, 130, 146, 154, 164, 177, 193, 197-198 Philonenko, Alexis, 34n71, 42n87, 43n87, 44n91, 300 Philosophy of Tragedy, 2-68, 71, 98, 100, 238n62, 281 Piron, G., 5n5-6, 7n11, 8n16, 18n41, 21n44, 29n58, 34n71, 35, 57, 73n10, 78n24, 80n29, 81n30, 86, 101n58, 102, 280n1, 283n5, 294n14, 298n24, 299-300 Pisarev, D.I., 15n32, 27-28 Plato, x, 32, 57, 102, 122-125, 127-131, 133, 143-144, 149, 154, 162, 172n8, 191-192, 202, 220, 221n23, 230, 233, 238, 246, 252, 255n22, 275, 277, 283, 286n9 Phaedo, 230 Platonic, 152-156, 179, 235n53, 250 Plekhanov, G.V., 169n107 Plotinus, x, xii-xiv, xvi, 32, 57-58, 63, 67-68, 90n45, 98, 105, 119, 122-125, 127, 128n40, 131-133, 138-139, 140n64, 143144, 147-156, 158, 160, 163-164, 193, 195, 198-199, 201, 230, 234, 235n53, 237-239, 241, 246, 250, 252, 257, 283, 292, 296-297 Enneads, 147, 149-150, 152, 153n80, 154 Plutarch, 154 Pokornost’ (Submission), 23, 143, 155-162, 256, 292 Pons, Eric, 189n26 Porus, V.N., 163n96, 168n104, 243n1, 247n6 Potamo of Alexandria, 153 Preobrazhenskii, German M., 243n1 Preobrazhenskii, Vasilii P., 42 Price, J.G., 21n44 Proclus, 235

Index of Names Protagoras, 162 Pruzhinin, Boris I., 168n104, 247n6 Psychoanalysis, xiv, 160-162 Psychological metaphysics, 54, 133, 211, 257 Ptolemy, 250 Pushkin, A.S., 11-15, 21n44, 49, 82, 84, 92, 103-105, 131, 164, 240n63, 294-295 Putnam, Hilary, 237

R

Radishchev, A.N., 61 Radlov, E.L., 213n13 Rageot-Shestova, Tatiana L. (Tatʹyana), 136n55, 293 Rakhmaninov, (Rachmaninoff) S.V., 109n1 Ratner, M.B., 262n2 Reale, Giovanni, 230n44 Rehm, W., 44 Remizov, Aleksei M., 7n11, 11n22, 70n4, 76, 91, 297, 300 Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 157, 182, 196-197, 249n11 Ribot, A., 111 Rickert, Heinrich, 76n18 Riehl, Alois, 36 Rimbaud, A., 17n39, 281n2, 287 Rivière, Jacques, 134-136, 156-157, 207, 215, 263, 296 Rosenthal, B.G., 25n51, 26n55, 30n61, 40n7980, 41-42, 45n94 Rosenzweig, Franz, 181, 184 Rostenne, Paul, xii, 15n34, 239 Rotenstreich, N., 177n12 Rousseau, J.J., 75 Rozanov, Vasilii V., x, xii, 18n41, 41, 47, 56n107, 60, 70n3, 78-79, 85, 87, 166, 168-169, 208, 211, 213, 224-225, 267, 293 Rubin, Dominic, 174n5, 174n7, 262n1, 300 Russkie zapiski, 138, 173 Russkaya mysl’ (Russian Thought), 10, 72n7

S

Salazar-Ferrer, Oliver, 31n64, 32n64, 281n2, 286n10, 287, 299n25 Sartre, J-P., 137, 288 Sazeeva, I.B., 283n5 Scanlan, J., vii Scheler, Max, 207, 215-216, 236, 247, 251n12, 252, 253n16, 260, 270 Schelling, F., 64-65, 156, 164-165, 205n42 Philosophy of Art, 65

Schiffrin, Jacques, 31n64, 171n1 Schiller, F., 64, 103-105 Schlegel, Friedrich, 155 Schloezer (Shlëtser B.F.), B. de, xii, 8n14, 13, 15n34, 16n37, 31n63, 109n1, 111, 120, 134-136, 156-157, 168n105, 172n3, 175, 189n26, 197, 214-216, 239-240, 241n66, 265, 281n3, 282, 290-294, 296-297, 300 Schöck, H., 44 Scholem, Gershom, 178n14 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 50, 66-67, 104, 156 Schuhmann, Karl, 251n13, 253n16 Self-Evidences, 134-146, 150, 244-246, 251n12 Senderovich, Savely, 86n39, 300 Sernet, Claude, 282 Sev, Leopold, 163 Severnyi vestnik, 4n3, 15n33, 34n71, 91n47, 185n22 Sextus Empiricus, 225n36 Shakespeare, W., vii, x, xivn1, xv, 3-4, 10-27, 42n87, 47, 55, 57-58, 61, 69, 72, 82n33, 83-84, 130n47, 131, 145, 152n77, 162, 214, 291 Coriolanus, 21 Hamlet, 4n3, 15n33, 16, 18-21, 25, 84, 216 Julius Caesar, 12, 21, 23-24, 72, 291 King Lear, 21, 152n77 Macbeth, 21-23, 83 Duncan, 22 Shakhovskoi, Dmitrii, 9n17 Shankara, A., 172n4 Shaw, Devin Z., 65n117 Shchedrina, Tatʹyana G., 7n10, 8n14, 11, 28n56, 34n71, 35, 38, 43, 51, 53, 60, 74n14, 90, 111n5, 136n56, 166n100101, 167n102, 162n104, 168n104, 173, 174n5, 175n9, 176n10, 188, 192, 208n2, 212, 215n1, 225-226, 230n45, 234n49, 240n64, 241n66, 247, 287n11, 299-300 Shein, Louis, 206n44 Shestov, Lev Apotheosis of Groundlessness, The, xv, 12n24, 13n28, 24, 53-54, 59-62, 74, 76n18, 78n24, 81, 82n31, 85, 90n44, 94, 98, 121, 168, 208, 213, 217, 239n62, 269, 291 Athens and Jerusalem, xi, xvi, 32, 127, 171, 180, 187n23, 188n26, 189n26, 192, 197, 200-201, 204, 208, 217, 253n18, 276, 293

327

328

Index of Names Beginnings and Endings, xv, 37n75, 59n109, 72n7, 74, 90, 94, 97, 291 Dostoevskii and Nietzsche. The Philosophy of Tragedy, xv, 24, 32, 46-51, 53, 62, 281, 290 Good in the Teaching of Tolstoi and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, xi, xv, 23, 26, 29n59, 31, 32n65, 34-35, 38n76, 43, 121n23, 290 Great Vigils, The, xv, 67n120, 71n6, 72n7, 74, 90n46, 95, 291 In Job’s Balance: Peregrinations Through the Souls, xi, xvi, 120n22, 127, 138-139, 141n66, 144, 148, 155, 162, 197, 201, 249n11, 283, 292, 294n14 Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, xi, xvi, 82n31, 127, 138n60, 156, 171, 176n11, 187n23, 188, 189n26, 190, 217, 273, 276, 283, 293 Potestas Clavium (The Power of Keys), xvi, 114n13, 115, 119n20, 120n22, 122n25, 126, 128n40, 129n42-43, 138, 141, 160, 201, 244n2, 283-284, 292 Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, xv, 11, 13n29, 14-23, 25-26, 290 Speculation and Revelation, xvi, 12n26, 25n53, 140n63, 158n91, 163n96, 168n105, 169, 187, 253n18, 254n21, 270n11, 277, 293, 296n20 Shirmanov, Ya.I., 201n35, 300 Shpet, G.G., 75n17, 101, 141, 167-168, 213n13, 225226, 245, 247-248, 256-258, 260, 297, 300 Shteinberg, Aaron, 11n22, 161, 300 Shvartsman, Elizaveta I., 172 Shvartsman, Fanya I., 9, 86, 89, 101, 108, 160161, see also Lovtskii, Fanya Shvartsman, Isaak M., Shestov’s father, 5-7, 9n18, 11n22, 73, 74, 101, 120, 173, 179n15 Shvartsman, Sofiya I., 109, see also Balakhovskii, Sofiya Silesius, Angelus, 271 Sineokaya, Y.D., 30n61, 36n74, 40n80

Skepticism, 14n30, 17, 29, 50, 53, 55, 86, 102, 117, 166, 208, 212-213, 219-222, 225226, 229n42, 237, 264-265, 270 Skryabin, A.N., 16n37, 41, 109n1-2 Socrates, x, 34, 65, 84, 93-94, 104, 124-125, 127-131, 144, 148, 174n5, 180, 191-192, 200-203, 230, 246, 252, 275, 277 Sokolov, B.G., 188n25 Sola Fide, 101, 115, 120n22, 126, 128n40, 144, 146, 294 Solger, Karl W.F., 65 Sologub, F.K., x, xv, 14n31, 39n78, 62, 72, 74-75, 76n18, 77, 85, 90-94, 98, 212, 291 Petty Demon, The (Melkii bes), 91-92 Peredonov, 92 Solov’ëv (Solovyov), V.S., xii, 4, 15n33, 26, 29, 30n61, 40n79, 41n82, 42, 46, 70n3, 99-100, 162-166, 168, 170, 185n22, 208n5, 218, 235, 236n57, 238, 241, 258n27-28, 278, 293, 295 Sophocles, 64 Sovremennye zapiski, 134, 141n66, 163, 204n41, 265 Spielrein, Sabina N., 160 Spinoza, Baruch, x, xiii, xvi, 134, 135n55, 143147, 156, 164-165, 178, 180-181, 183, 191-193, 197, 200-201, 203, 226n37, 267, 274, 277, 292 Stalin, I.V., 111n5, 113, 118, 172n3 Stein, Edith, 249n9 Stepanov, Andrei, 85n39, 86 Stewart, Jon, 189n26 Stravinskii, I.F., 16n37 Struve, Nikita, 112n6, 114n10, 243n1, 262n1, 283n5, 299 Struve, P.B., 117, 278 Struve, Wolfgang, 44 Surya, Michel, 286n9 Sviridovskaya, Nina D., 136n58 Szepieniec, K., 243n1 Szondi, Peter, 64-65

T

Tabachnikova, Olga, 73n10, 85n37, 85n39, 136, 157, 158n90, 161n92, 174n7, 223n30, 297, 300 Taine, Hippolyte A.,, 17-20, 260 Taput’, A.V., 131n47, 300 Tarski, Alfred, 233

Index of Names Tauler, Johannes, 271 Teboul, M., 189n26 Teresa of Ávila, 131, 173 Tertullian, 122, 133, 143, 173, 198, 199, 226n37 Tetzel, Johann, 124 “Third Sailing,” 226-239 Thomas Aquinas, x, 58, 123, 125, 130, 188, 198, 238, 275 Tillich, P., 45 Timiotaton (That which matters most), 131, 139, 147, 151, 237, 246, 257, 261 Tolstoi (Tolstoy), L.N., x-xii, xv-xvi, 4n3, 9-10, 12, 14n30, 21-24 26-37, 43, 44n91, 47, 49-50, 54, 58-61, 68-69, 70n2, 71-72, 73n10-11, 75, 78-79, 81-83, 88, 99-100, 104-105, 120-123, 125, 131-132, 136n55, 141, 161, 163, 170, 172, 185n22, 211, 214-215, 234, 240-241, 252, 264n3, 283, 286n9, 290-292, 295 Confession, 33, 234 Death of Ivan Il’ich, The, 37, 88, 122 Father Sergius, 122 Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow, 27-28 War and Peace, 27-28, 83, 104 What is Art?, 28 “Tragic thought,” 2, 15, 40, 64, 142, 161, 217, 219, 235, 244, 249, 289n10 Trubetskoi, E.N., 45n94, 85 Trubetskoi, Sergei N., 235 Tsvetaeva, Marina I., 158 Turgenev, I.S., x, xv, 21n44, 33n67, 60-61, 72, 76n18-19, 78, 81-85, 87, 97, 104 Enough (Dovol’no), 83 Dog, The (Sobaka), 83 Old Woman, The (Starukha), 83n34 Senilia, 97 Visions (Prizraki), 83 Tyutchev, F.I., 58 Tzadiq (The Righteous One), 179-180, 184, 193

U

Übermensch, 31-32, 38-39, 140n64 Unamuno, M. de, 275 Underground, 13n28, 32n67, 47-50, 53, 55-56, 63, 76, 89-90, 100, 118, 132,

138-139, 157, 164, 169, 193, 202, 204, 219n21, 237 Man, 46, 48-49, 52, 54, 59, 122n28, 138, 140, 147, 195, 228-229, 234, 236n56, 237 Philosophy of the, xi, 47, 50 Psychology of the, 53, 212 Upanishads, 172, 173n4

V

Valevicius, A., 73n10, 243n1 Vengerova, Z.A., 11n23, 12n23 Vengrov, Natan, 115 Verbitskaya, Anastasiya A., 41 Verlaine, Paul, 80n28 Vizgin, Viktor P., 136n56, 262n1, 287n11 Vodovozov, Vasilii V., 262n2 Voitskaya, I.T., 40n80 Voltaire, 142 Vorozhikhina, K.V., viii, 4n3-4, 9n17, 15n33, 16n38, 161n92, 167n104, 211n10, 216n17, 283n5, 286n9, 287, 288n13, 290n4, 295, 299-300

W

Wagner, R., 42, 50, 103 Wahl, Jean, 31n64, 188, 189n26, 198, 215, 221 Études Kierkegaardiennes, 188, 189n26 Welte, B., 45 Wernham, James, 262n1 Wiebe, Donald, 206n44 Winckelmann, J.J., 64 Windelband, Wilhelm, 76n18 Wittgenstein, L., 229

Y

Yakovenko, Boris V., 213n13 Yehuda Ha-Levi, 177

Z

Zaitsev, Boris K., 278 Zakydalsky, T.D., 201n35 Zeller, Eduard, 133, 150, 151n76, 154 Zen’kovskii (Zenkovsky), V.V., 166, 210-211, 214, 230, 235 Zernov, Nikolai M., 71 Zhiznʹ i iskusstvo, 4n3-4, 14n30, 15n33, 162, 290n4

329