his home alternately in Russia and in Switzerland or Germany. From 1908 to 1909 he and his family lived in the German university town of Freiburg and from 1910 to 1914 in the Swiss town of Coppet on Lake Geneva. These were for Shestov years of continued literary and philosophical study and writing. In 1908 his book, Beginnings and Endings, containing two perceptive essays on Chekhov and Dostoevsky as well as a number of striking aphorisms, was published in St. Petersburg. Three years later, in 1911, another book, Great Vigils, appeared.
Beginnings and Endings was translated into English and published in 1916 in London under the title Anton Chekhov and Other Essays and in Boston under the title Penultimate Words. In his introduction to the English version John Middleton Murry, writing under the deeply felt impact of the war in which Europe was then embroiled, insisted on the need for men to “learn honesty again: not the laborious and meagre honesty of those who weigh advantage in the ledger of their minds, but the honesty that cries aloud in instant and passionate anger against the lie and the half-truth, and by an instinct knows the authentic thrill of contact with the living human soul.”12 Murry suggested that the work of Shestov could well teach such honesty. He noted the deep passion, the courage, the authenticity, the rebellion against tyranny and dogmatism and the refusal to be deceived that motivated both Shestov’s personal reflections and his criticism of other men’s ideas. Shestov, he declared,
is aware of himself as a soul seeking an answer to its own question; and he is aware of other souls on the same quest. As in his own case he knows that he has in him something truer than names and divisions and authorities, which will live in spite of them, so towards others he remembers that all that they wrote or thought or said is precious and permanent in so far as it is the manifestation of the undivided soul seeking an answer to its question.13
In 1914 Shestov felt the need to return to his homeland and again immerse himself in the life of the Russian people. He went with his wife and children to Moscow, where they lived through the stormy years of the war. Anna Eleazarovna, who had passed her state medical examinations in Moscow in 1905, worked in a hospital and their daughters attended secondary school. The war brought him one great personal sorrow when, in 1915, his handsome and gifted illegitimate son, Sergei Listopadov, was killed in action. Shestov traveled to the front to trace him but his mission was unsuccessful.
During the war years Shestov remained largely indifferent to political controversies. He continued his writing, working on a book which was to be called Potestas Clavium and which was dominated by the religious interest in the direction of which his thought had been increasingly turning. He also maintained contact with a group of philosophers and writers including Chelpanov, Gershenson, Bulgakov, Lurie, Berdyaev and Ivanov.
The democratic revolution of February 1917 left Shestov unaffected, but when the Bolsheviks seized power in October, life in Moscow became precarious. Shestov and his family fled to Kiev, which was not yet under Communist rule and there, in January 1919, he finished Potestas Clavium. By this time Kiev, too, had acceded to the Soviets, and the authorities refused permission to publish the book unless the author added an introduction—be it only half a page—defending Marxist doctrine. Shestov stubbornly refused and the volume never appeared in Russia. Despite the disfavor in which he stood with the authorities, Shestov was permitted to teach and in the winter of 1918–19 gave a course of lectures on Greek philosophy at the People’s University of Kiev. During this period he also received an honorary doctorate from the University of Simferopol. A growing discontent with the Bolshevik regime, however, finally led him to the decision to leave Russia. In the fall of 1919 he and his family began a long and difficult overland journey with stops at Rostov, Yalta and Sevastopol, where they boarded a French steamer with visas obtained by an older sister who lived in Paris. After visiting the home of the Lowtzkys in Geneva, they arrived in Paris in 1920, where a large colony of Russian émigrés had settled and where the Shestovs were to live for the next ten years. During this period Shestov resumed his quarrelsome but enduring friendship with Berdyaev, who was later to call him “one of the most remarkable and one of the best men it was my fortune to meet in my whole life.”14
When Shestov first came to Paris he was virtually unknown in French literary and philosophical circles. But in 1921 he wrote a brilliant article commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. When it appeared in La nouvelle revue française, a number of distinguished French philosophers and men of letters became aware of Shestov’s existence and recognized the originality and profundity of his thought. This article, “La lutte contre les évidences,” was combined in 1923 with one on the late work of Tolstoy called “Le jugement dernier” under the title “Les révélations de la mort” and published in book form in Paris early that year. A few months later a remarkable essay commemorating the three hundredth anniversary of Pascal’s birth appeared in Paris as a small book entitled “La nuit de Gethsémani.”15 On the strength of these essays Shestov was invited to contribute to the Revue philosophique by its well-known editor, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who for many years published his articles and papers.
The middle 1920’s brought Shestov increasing fame not only in France but throughout Europe. In addition to continuing his research and writing, which had for some years now been concentrated on the Bible and on an intensive study (he called it a “pilgrimage through souls”) of the work of such great religious thinkers as Plotinus, St. Augustine, Spinoza, Luther and Pascal, Shestov taught at the Institut des Etudes Slaves and served as a lecturer in the extension division of the Sorbonne. He also joined the Academy of Religious Philosophy which had been founded by Berdyaev in Berlin in 1922 with the help of the American YMCA and transferred to Paris in 1925. The YMCA Press, of which Berdyaev was the director, published several of his books, and a number of his essays appeared in the Russian-language periodical Put, also sponsored by the YMCA. With the financial support of his friend, Max Eitingon, Shestov undertook in 1926 the preparation of a complete edition of his works in French. Though sales were small, his works were thereby made available to interested readers everywhere on the Continent. The German Nietzsche-Gesellschaft, recognizing his stature, elected him its honorary president, along with Thomas Mann, Heinrich Hilferding, Heinrich Wolfshagen and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and in 1926 published a splendid German translation of his Potestas Clavium. Under the auspices of the Nietzsche-Gesellschaft Shestov was also invited to lecture in Berlin, Halle, and Freiburg. Invitations from other countries as well came to him, and he addressed philosophical meetings in Prague, Cracow, and Amsterdam. In Amsterdam Shestov met Edmund Husserl, with whom he maintained a close friendship for some years. Though they differed radically in their philosophical orientation and sharply attacked each other’s point of view, they had a profound respect for each other. It was at Husserl’s home in Freiburg that Shestov, when he came to the German university town to lecture in 1929, met Martin Heidegger. When Heidegger left the house after a long philosophical discussion, Husserl urged Shestov to acquaint himself with the work of Kierkegaard, hitherto entirely unknown to him, and indicated that some of Heidegger’s fundamental ideas had been inspired by the Nineteenth-Century Danish thinker.
Shestov plunged into a study of Kierkegaard and immediately recognized that he had found a deeply kindred spirit. His own thought, influenced by his reading of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Pascal, Luther and, above all, the Bible, had for a long time been moving in the very directions in which, as he now discovered, Kierkegaard had preceded him. The rejection of Hegelian idealism as mere word-play of no ultimate significance to the living individual; the insistence that man’s salvation lies in subjective, rationally ungrounded faith rather than in objective, verifiable knowledge; the awareness that the root of sin is in man’s obsession with acquiring knowledge through the exercise of reason and through empirical procedures; the conviction that science and speculative philosophy have not, despite their inordinate pretensions, liberated man but served rather to destroy the freedom with which God had originally endowed him; the unshakable belief that for God—the God of the Bible, not of the philosophers—“all things are possible” and that indeed it is just this boundless possibility that constitutes the operational meaning of the reality of the living God of Scripture—all this that Shestov found in
