Lev Shestov 1866 – 1938

Lev Isaakovich Shestov was a Russian Jewish religious-existentialist philosopher who emigrated after the Bolshevik revolution and spent the rest of his life in Paris. Through readings of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and the Hebrew Bible, he attacked the rationalist tradition from Plato to his own day, arguing that necessity is a tyrant and that the truths of faith are inaccessible to reason but liberate the person to whom they are given. His major works include Athens and Jerusalem, Potestas Clavium, and In Job's Balances. He shaped a generation of French existentialism.

Lev Isaakovich Shestov — born Yehuda Leib Shvartsman — was born in 1866 in Kiev, the son of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer. He studied law at Moscow and Kiev but never practiced, devoting himself instead to literary and philosophical writing and managing the family business after his father's death. His early books on Tolstoy, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky in the 1890s and 1900s gave him a place in the Russian Silver Age literary and religious-philosophical scene.

After the Revolution he emigrated through Switzerland to Paris in 1921, where for the next two decades he taught at the Sorbonne and the Russian Religious-Philosophical Academy and wrote his major works. They include Potestas Clavium (Power of the Keys, 1923), In Job's Balances (1929), Athens and Jerusalem (1938), and the posthumous Speculation and Revelation. His friendships with Husserl, Buber, Bataille, and Levinas drew him into the heart of interwar European philosophy.

Shestov set faith and reason, Jerusalem and Athens, against each other with a sharpness no contemporary rivalled. Against the necessary truths of speculation he upheld the biblical God for whom all things are possible; against the consolations of philosophical theodicy he defended the shouting of Job. His writings exerted lasting influence on Camus, Berdyaev, and the existentialist tradition. He died at Paris in November 1938.