ABSTRACT
Lev Shestov is the nom de plume of Leib Isaakovich Schwartzmann, a highly idiosyncratic writer on philosophy, literature and religion who was born in Kiev in 1866 and died in Paris in 1938.1 The son of a wealthy Jewish businessman, he worked for a period in the family business, whilst pursuing his literary and other interests in an amateur capacity. The first fruits of these were the books Shakespeare and his Critic Brandes (1898) and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche: The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching (1900).2 In the following period he became acquainted with members of the so-called Russian religious renaissance, including Nicholas Berdyaev (1874-1948), with whom he continued to have close relations until his death. However, the tendencies of Shestov’s own thought were rather different from the majority of representatives of the Russian religious renaissance. He never converted to Orthodoxy, and was largely non-observant with regard to his own Judaism.3 In the period before the Russian Revolution he published further works on, for example, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (182181), and Berdyaev himself, as well as general reflections on philosophy and life, often in an aphoristic form reminiscent of some works of Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900). Following the Revolution, Shestov made his way to Paris in 1919, where he remained until his death.
