the revolution, there broke out in Kiev one of the first pogroms, which we felt in all of its tragedy. In those years I had, along with Berdyaev, to struggle with the local representatives of positivism and atheism in defense of a religious outlook. Shestov was in sympathy with us, though he did not himself participate in the discussions. From Kiev our group moved north, and our ties with Shestov were continued and consolidated in Moscow. In the midst of new literary, philosophic and religious movements, Shestov remained his old self, with the same paradoxical philosophy, and invariably loved by all . . .8
After finishing his studies at the university, Shestov entered his father’s textile firm. Though bored by business affairs, he managed to acquire enough skill in merchandising and accounting to stave off the bankruptcy then threatened by his father’s overextension of the firm’s credit. At the same time he maintained his literary interests and began to write for the avant-garde press of Kiev. He published several articles, including an essay on the work of Soloviev and one entitled “Georg Brandes and Hamlet,”9 which was to serve as the basis for his first book.
Having put the family business on a firm footing, Shestov turned its management over to his brothers-in-law and younger brothers, and in 1895 went to Rome. There in 1896 he married a young medical student, Anna Eleazarovna Berezovsky. Two daughters were born of the marriage, Tatiana in 1897 and Natalie in 1900. In 1898 Shestov and his wife moved to Switzerland where Anna finished her studies under the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Berne. At this time Shestov considered pursuing a career as a singer but, according to his brother-in-law, Lowtzky, a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov and Gabriel Fauré who became an eminent musicologist, Shestov’s teacher ruined his splendid singing voice. This did not, however, destroy his interest in music. Music and poetry (though he was not satisfied with his own attempts at writing verse) continued to be his major interests. The French poets—Musset, Baudelaire and Verlaine—were great favorites of Shestov’s at this period, but he soon abandoned poetry and music for what Plato called “the highest music”—philosophy.
In 1898 Shestov returned to Russia for a brief stay in St. Petersburg. Here he became part of a circle of talented young writers and artists, including Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Vasily Rozanov, Nikolai Berdyaev, David Levin and Sergei Diaghilev, the great creator of the modern Russian ballet. Diaghilev welcomed Shestov as a contributor to the noted journal Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art) which he was then editing.
Shestov had brought back with him two completed book manuscripts. The first, Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes, was published in 1898. In it he attacked the positivism and skeptical rationalism of the famous Danish critic and essayist in the name of a vague moral idealism. The second, Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, which appeared in 1900, was characterized by a very different outlook. Shestov’s first reading of Nietzsche had been a shattering intellectual and emotional experience. He was greatly moved by the paradoxical ideas of the solitary German thinker and prophet. In his volume comparing him with the Russian writer, Shestov contrasted Nietzsche’s supposedly cruel, unpitying and amoral philosophy with the pretentious moralistic preaching of Tolstoy. The book’s closing lines express the central idea that came to dominate all of Shestov’s later thought and writing: “Good—we now know it from the experience of Nietzsche—is not God. ‘Woe to those who live and know no love better than pity.’ Nietzsche has shown us the way. We must seek that which is above pity, above Good. We must seek God.”
Shestov’s profound interest in Nietzsche inspired a third book comparing the German philosopher with Dostoevsky. This volume, entitled Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, was published in St. Petersburg in 1903 and enhanced the author’s growing reputation as a creative and original thinker. The systematic presentation of ideas, however, was growing burdensome to Shestov. In his next volume, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, published in St. Petersburg in 1905, he turned to the aphoristic style which remained one of his favorite literary forms throughout the remainder of his life. This was a book containing over 160 brief essays, some no more than a paragraph in length, dealing with philosophy, science and literature. Shestov here revealed himself as a keen satirist and polemicist, a master of the ironic style and of the indirect mode of discourse that characterizes much of Kierkegaard’s writing. Though at this time Shestov had not even heard of Kierkegaard or of what a few years later came to be called Existenz-philosophie, it is interesting to note that The Apotheosis of Groundlessness already adumbrates a number of the chief characteristics of existentialist thought. It contains not only a vigorous attack on the speculative metaphysics of the neo-Kantian and Hegelian idealist variety that dominated European academic philosophy at the time but also a radical challenge to the pretensions of scientific positivism and its basic assumptions, namely, the principle of unalterable regularity in the sequence of natural phenomena and the idea of causal necessity that is supposed to govern them. Shestov further denied the value of autonomous ethics and passionately insisted on the need for subjectivity and inwardness in the search for truth. In this book he also displayed a profound appreciation of those unique insights in the work of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Ibsen which later critics were to regard as distinctively “existential.”
The Apotheosis of Groundlessness was not warmly received either by the general public or by the author’s friends in the literary circles of St. Petersburg and Moscow. Though the classic simplicity of Shestov’s language and his stylistic brilliance evoked widespread admiration, the Russian public by and large saw in the book mere libertinism and sarcasm. Even the critics emphasized its apparently nihilistic message and strongly decried its anti-rationalism; only a very few—among them Shestov’s friend, Berdyaev understood the significance of what he was saying and recognized the promise implicit in the book. However, in all fairness it must be admitted that The Apotheosis of Groundlessness is largely a negative work. Shestov was merely beginning his struggle against the ideas dominating European thought which he felt had to be overcome in order to provide room for what was later to be the chief burden of his positive message—the reality of the living God of the Bible and the possibility of the restoration of human freedom through religious faith.
The Apotheosis of Groundlessness was translated into English by S. S. Koteliansky and published in London and New York in 1920 under the title All Things Are Possible. In his foreword to this edition, D. H. Lawrence said of Shestov:
“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.
Dress this up in a little comely language, and we have a real new ideal that will last us for a new, long epoch. The human soul itself is the source and well-head of creative activity . . . No ideal on earth is anything more than an obstruction, in the end, to the creative issue of the spontaneous soul. Away with all ideals. Let each individual act spontaneously from the forever-incalculable prompting of the creative well-head within him. There is no universal law. Each being is, at his purest, a law unto himself, single, unique, a Godhead, a fountain from the unknown.
This is the ideal which Shestov refuses positively to state, because he is afraid it may prove in the end a trap to catch his own free spirit. So it may. But it is none the less a real, living ideal for the moment, the very salvation. When it becomes ancient, and like the old lion who lay in his cave and whined, devours all its servants, then it can be dispatched. Meanwhile it is a really liberating word.10
Lawrence declared that what Shestov had rendered explicit in The Apotheosis of Groundlessness was just what had been implied in the work of the great Russian novelists, namely, a rejection of and rebellion against “the virus of European culture and ethic” that had worked in the Russian soul “like a disease.” Shestov, he suggested, in “tweaking the nose of European idealism,” was expressing the last prenatal struggle of the real Russia about to be born and presently engaged in “kicking away from the old womb of Europe.”11
In
