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 the years preceding the First World War Shestov made 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