In the anglophone world, Shestov became known even before he was forced into exile by the Bolshevik revolution in 1921, thanks to several translations published in London, Dublin, and Boston, which were prefaced by high-profile personalities of the time such as D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry (a close friend of D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield’s husband). Three collections of articles came out in quick succession: Anton Tchekhov and Other Essays (published by Mansel & Co., in 1916), Penultimate Words and Other Essays (published by W. Luce, also in 1916), and All Things Are Possible (the first translation of the volume originally entitled The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, published by Martin Secker in 1920, with an introduction by D. H. Lawrence). Shestov’s work had a powerful influence on the British poet David Gascoyne, who was briefly associated with the Surrealist movement in Paris in the 1930s before becoming Fondane’s close friend and disciple. Gascoyne later published a long essay on Shestov (in the magazine Horizon in 1946) and an account of his encounter with Fondane (and, indirectly, with Shestov’s philosophy), which first came out in French in 1987, and was then collected in a volume of Existential Writings (published by Amate Press, Oxford, in 2001). Nevertheless, half a century passed between the first English translations of Shestov’s essays in 1916 and the more recent editions of his works starting with Chekhov and Other Essays prefaced by Sidney Monas in 1966 (for the University of Michigan Press), and Athens and Jerusalem, which Bernard Martin edited and published with Ohio University Press the same year. From that moment on the list of available titles by Shestov from Ohio University Press grew steadily, reaching a peak in the late 1960s and mid-1970s, but suddenly coming to a halt in 1982—the year that Speculation and Revelation was published. Four decades after the last publication of a book by Shestov in English translation, most of his major works (such as Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, In Job’s Balances, Potestas Clavium) have long been out of print.
The new edition makes once again available Shestov’s masterpiece of religious existential philosophy, which is frequently referenced in Continental philosophy, religion, and interfaith studies. The recent renewal of interest in his work has been sparked by comparative studies in phenomenology, existentialism, and the philosophy of religion that have brought out Shestov’s influence on the evolution of twentieth-century luminaries such as Albert Camus, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Emile Cioran, Leszek Kolakowski, Michel Henry, and Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze and Guattari brought to light Shestov’s preeminent role in the postmodern attempt at breaking with the tradition of speculative thought and overcoming the limits of the scientific account of being, in order to establish a new type of thinking, most aptly defined as “the thought from the outside” or the “nomad thought”:
Noology, which is distinct from ideology, is precisely the study of images of thought, and their historicity. . . . But noology is confronted by counterthoughts, which are violent in their acts and discontinuous in their appearance, and whose existence is mobile in history. These are the acts of a “private thinker,” as opposed to the public professor: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, or even Shestov. Wherever they dwell, it is the steppe or the desert. . . . “Private thinker,” however, is not a satisfactory expression, because it exaggerates interiority, when it is a question of outside thought. . . . There is another reason why “private thinker” is not a good expression. Although it is true that this counterthought attests to an absolute solitude, it is an extremely populous solitude, like the desert itself, a solitude already intertwined with a people to come, one that invokes and awaits that people, existing only through it, though it is not yet here.54
Shestov’s solitary journey far from the beaten tracks of speculative discourse, across the wastelands of reason, presents the reader not so much with the riddle of a voice crying out in the desert, but with the call addressed to nomad thinkers and explorers who have, at different times, and in discontinuous yet persistent manner, set out in search of the impossible figure of an “eternal return” without repetition, outside of time.
Prefatory Note
Bernard Martin
The present translation includes the entire text of Athens and Jerusalem except for some of Shestov’s quotations in the original languages from Greek, Latin, French and German authors. All of these quotations have here been rendered into English. In some cases, where this was deemed necessary for a full appreciation both of Shestov’s substance and style, the original languages have also been retained.
I am grateful to Shestov’s daughters, Madame Tatiana Rageot and Madame Natalie Baranov of Paris, who supplied me with much valuable biographical information about their father and read large parts of my translation. The translation was read in its entirety by Professor Stanley Green of Ohio University and in part by Professor George Kline of Bryn Mawr College, to both of whom I would express my appreciation. Responsibility for any errors in the translation is entirely my own. I am grateful, also, to Professor Paul R. Murphy of Ohio University for transliterating a large number of Greek quotations in the text, to Miss Jane Ann Caldwell for preparing the index and to Mr. Mark McCloskey and the late Mr. Cecil Hemley of the Ohio University Press for their unfailing kindness and courtesy.
INTRODUCTION
The Life and Thought of Lev Shestov
Bernard Martin
I
Lev Shestov (1866–1938) belongs to the small company of truly great religious philosophers of our time and his work deserves the closest attention of all who are seriously concerned with the problems of religious thought.
Unfortunately, Shestov’s stature has not hitherto been generally recognized nor has his work been widely studied. Even in Europe—where his genius was acknowledged by such figures as Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov in Russia, Jules de Gaultier, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Albert Camus in France, and D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry in England—he did not enjoy any great popularity in his lifetime and now, a quarter of a century after his death, his writings are little read. In America his name is practically unknown to the general public, and even many professional philosophers and theologians are unacquainted with his work.
It is regrettable that this is so, and yet the fact itself is hardly surprising. Shestov established no school and had no real disciples1 to carry on his work. He did not believe that he had created any clearly defined, positive body of philosophic or religious thought that could simply be handed on to students, to be expounded and taught. Whatever insights or wisdom his own life-long spiritual striving had brought him could not be transmitted by intellectual processes to others; their appropriation of his existentially acquired “truths” could come about only through the same kind of intensive personal struggle and search on their part. But perhaps an even more important reason for the relative obscurity into which Shestov has fallen is the fact that he is stubbornly and unrelentingly anti-modern. The gods of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century man—science, technology, the idea of inevitable historical progress, autonomous ethics and, most of all, rationalist systems of philosophy—were for him idols, devoid of ultimate meaning but terrible in their potentiality for destruction.
It is Shestov’s revolt against scientism and philosophic rationalism, a revolt carried on with immense polemical passion and extraordinary dialectical skill, that has drawn attention to his work but at the same time repelled most readers. Some, to be sure, have found that what Shestov has to say is extremely important and worth listening to. His diatribes against the untested assumptions of rationalist metaphysics and positivist science, as well as his superb and penetrating analyses of the singular, the inexplicable and the extraordinary in the human psyche, made a profound impression on at least