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 his reading of Kierkegaard had already been for some time his own passionately held convictions. To be sure, there was much here that did not please him—Kierkegaard, he felt, did not go far enough and at crucial moments had “lost his nerve”—but, on the whole, he found him deeply congenial.
The fruit of Shestov’s study of the founder of modern religious existentialism was one of his finest works, Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy: Vox Clamantis in Deserto, published in France in 1936 by a committee of eminent French and Russian émigré men of letters organized to honor the author on the occasion of his seventieth birthday.
That year also saw the fulfillment of one of Shestov’s long-cherished dreams. At the invitation of the Cultural Department of the Histadrut, he traveled to Palestine, where his grandfather lay buried on the Mount of Olives, to deliver a series of lectures. His appearances in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa evoked an enthusiastic response from audiences who recognized the aged Shestov as one of the great Jewish philosophers of the century.
Shestov’s home in Boulogne-sur-Seine, where he moved in 1930, was the meeting place of a considerable number of distinguished representatives of the French as well as the Russian émigré literary and philosophical worlds, but he had few intimate friends or genuine disciples with the exception of Benjamin Fondane, a talented young Rumanian Jewish poet and essayist with whom he became acquainted a few years after settling in Paris. Fondane was to be Shestov’s most appreciative pupil and closest confidant during the last years of his life. The notes he kept of his meetings with the philosopher and his correspondence with him provide valuable insights into Shestov’s intellectual interests and motivations. They were found among Fondane’s papers after his death at the hands of the Nazis in the gas chambers of Birkenau in 1944.16
Shestov’s last years were shadowed by the approach of war, but he continued his work until the very end. He had finished the manuscript of his major work, Athens and Jerusalem, in the spring of 1937 at Boulogne-sur-Seine and had personally supervised the preparation of French and German translations of the Russian text. The German language edition was barely published in Graz and distributed to libraries throughout Europe before Hitler annexed Austria.
The summer of 1938 was spent in Châtel-Guyon which had been Shestov’s much loved vacation home for a number of years, but he went there a tired and sick man and returned to Paris in the fall already mortally ill. Despite his illness and fatigue, however, Shestov persisted in the last weeks of his life in working on an article on Husserl who had just died and, when he was too tired to write, whiled away the hours by reading Indian philosophy. On November 14 he was taken to the Boileau Clinic in Paris and there, six days later, died peacefully. At his bedside was an open Bible and the Deussen translation of the Vedas open at the chapter “Brahma als Freude” where he had underlined the following passage: Nicht trübe Askese kennzeichnet den Brahmanwisser, sondern das freudig hoffnungsvolle Bewusstsein der Einheit mit Gott [It is not somber asceticism that marks a sage but a confident and joyous awareness of unity with God]. He was buried in the mausoleum of the new cemetery at Boulogne-Billancourt, where his mother and brother lay, on November 22, 1938.