In Ukraine with Lev Shestov

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Dawn in Podil, Kyiv’s former Jewish quarter. March 21, 2024, dawn and missiles on the Dnipro River – although it was impossible to see the dawn from inside the bomb shelter.

In a frame on my desk is a piece of paper that Václav Havel once left on a stage in Bratislava. Pravda a láska, he wrote. Truth and love, with a few squiggles drawn around the letters. It was November 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and the Central European Forum had organized a series of conversations at the Hviezdoslav Theater in the Slovak capital. Havel probably said nothing new that day: he had long insisted that truth and love would prevail over lies and hatred. And there are times when that was the case and times when it still is. Evil regimes are sometimes defeated. In November 1989, in Wenceslas Square in Prague, the crowd jingled their keys and shouted: “For whom the bell tolls?”

The bell was ringing for the communist regime. Borders were opened, censorship was lifted, archives were opened. What had been kept in the dark was brought to light. I was enchanted by this openness, by all the literary references and by the dissidents who had once gathered around the extraordinary Czech philosopher Jan Patocčka, who spoke of responsibility, conscience, and truth. But most of all I was fascinated by the idea that truth was an ontological reality as indubitable as the jingling of keys in a chorus to a line by John Donne. In an attempt to understand where this lived truth came from, I began reading backwards, following the references: from Havel to Patocka, from Patocka to Martin Heidegger, and finally to Edmund Husserl, the founder of a philosophical tradition called phenomenology . In communist Eastern Europe, dissidents had drawn on this tradition to oppose Marxism-Hegelianism and its “iron laws of history.” In the decades following Stalin's death, phenomenology, and even more so the Heideggerian existentialism that grew out of it, became an antidote to the “Hegelian bite.”

Patocka was Husserl’s last great student. The Polish philosopher Krzysztof Michalski was also a student of Patocka. And Krzysztof read Husserl with me. Without him I would not have stood a chance. I expected Heidegger to be impenetrable, but in fact it was with Husserl that I hit a wall. His writing was much more dry and technical. Obsessed with Cartesian “clarity and distinctness,” Husserl seemed incapable, to me, of writing a clear sentence . I struggled to connect with him. What kind of person was he? I asked Krzysztof. “He was not like you,” he replied. “He had no emotional life.” Krzysztof insisted that Husserl lived purely for philosophy. Perhaps this is why, while the philosophical literature on the founder of phenomenology is vast, the biographical literature is almost nonexistent.

That is how I came to the philosopher Lev Shestov . There is only one great work on Husserl, and that is a text in Russian by Lev Shestov – his most passionate critic and his most sincere admirer, and, at the end of his life, one of his closest friends. Against Husserl’s deep commitment to reason, Shestov insisted on the limits of reason and the impossibility of epistemological certainty, on the necessity of seeking truth not in the light but in the darkness. I came to Shestov through Husserl – which means, neither through Ukraine nor through Russia, both of which are at the heart of my work, but rather, if one wants to reduce the question to national categories, through Czech-German philosophy.

I came to him indirectly, reading Shestov as an interpreter of an elusive thinker whose ideas, seemingly inaccessible, were nevertheless fundamental to a philosophy of responsibility that today seems more necessary than ever.

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Verehrter Freund und Antipode!, Husserl addressed Shestov affectionately, and with a sense of humor otherwise rare in his writings. But who was this “esteemed friend and antipode”? He was born in 1866 in tsarist Kyiv, into a Jewish family with an authoritarian father, and given the name Yehuda Leib Shvartsman. Was Shestov a Russian Jew or a Ukrainian Jew? Today the question suddenly becomes important. “Ukrainian Jew” sounds like a neologism, a self-conscious identity that came onto the scene during the Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan in 2013-2014. And right now, in the midst of this horrible war, while the Russians massacre Ukrainians senselessly in a nihilistic frenzy, and Kyiv appears to me as the capital of the free world, I want Shestov to belong to Ukraine . Yet embracing an anachronism seems hypocritical to me; it would mean projecting into the past categories that did not exist at the time. Nor was Shestov a Soviet Jew: he was shaped by the Tsarist empire, educated in Kyiv, Moscow and Berlin; later he lived in Coppet, Geneva and Paris. He was neither a monarchist nor a Bolshevik, neither a Russian nationalist nor a Jewish nationalist. He was a cosmopolitan who rebelled against his observant Jewish father, who as a young writer adopted a Russian pseudonym, but who never in any way denied his origins.

Shestov spoke French and German and read Nietzsche as intensely as he did Dostoevsky. Self-reflexive in an ironic way, he liked to repeat the Russian saying that “what is healthy for Germans is fatal for Russians.” Once, late in life, when the two antipodal philosophers were together, Shestov played with the expression. “What is healthy for a Jew is fatal for a German,” he told Husserl. But Husserl did not understand what the Jews had to do with their conversation: as a young man he had converted to Protestantism and in his mind was not a Jew, but a German. And Shestov, for Husserl, was not a Jew, but a Russian. After all, Shestov did not follow kosher dietary rules or attend synagogue. But Shestov did not accept this interpretation. For him, once a Jew, always a Jew.

In February 2024, almost a century after that exchange between Shestov and Husserl and two years after the start of the largest invasion war in Europe since World War II, I was invited to speak at the Kyiv School of Economics together with the Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko. “What should our speech be about?” Volodymyr asked me. “I want to talk about Shestov.”

“It's too Russian,” Volodymyr replied to me.

I disagreed, though I did not protest. I understood—as much as an outsider can understand—the desire, even the necessity, at that moment when the Russian army was burying Ukrainian children under rubble, to draw an absolute distinction between what was Ukrainian and what was Russian, a sharp boundary parallel to an ontological distinction between good and evil. So Volodymyr and I chose a broader topic, including Shestov as well as other thinkers, inspired by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers’s concept of Grenzsituationen, a “borderline situation,” in which one is shaken out of everyday life and pushed to the very edges of human existence.

In Kyiv, when our conversation began—between Volodymyr, his wife Tetyana Ogarkova, a brilliant literary scholar, and me—I realized that I had misunderstood what Volodymyr meant by “too Russian.” He did not mean it in a political, ethnic, or linguistic sense. By “too Russian” he meant Shestov’s belonging to the anti-Cartesian Russian irrationalist tradition, at a time when what was needed was the balanced foundation of French rationalism . After all, hadn’t it precisely this Russian irrationalism that led to the absolution of madness?

The classic summary of Russian anti-rationalism was articulated by the nineteenth-century Russian poet Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev, in a stanza translated by Tyutchev's contemporary scholar, John Dewey:

Who could ever understand Russia with his mind? For her no yardstick has been created: He has a soul of a special kind,

Perceptible only with faith.

Dewey’s version is rather lyrical. A literal translation of Tyutchev’s most famous lines would be: “Russia cannot be understood with the mind/ In Russia one can only believe.” Volodymyr Rafeyenko, the Ukrainian novelist from Donetsk, in the eastern mining region of Donbas, once told me that the poem “has become the universal formulation of Russian self-consciousness. Russians believe that they cannot and should not be judged by laws and standards common to all men. And in this sense, everything is permitted.”

In December 2019, Stanislav was freed in a prisoner exchange. In 2023, he volunteered to serve in the Ukrainian army and went to the front. I sometimes sent him messages about Shestov – it seemed to me that their sensibilities were very similar. Stanislav responded to one of my messages by referring to one of Solzhenitsyn’s main characters, an engineer in the gulag, who tells a Cheka agent: “You have power over a man only as long as he has something to lose. But when everything is taken from him, you have no power over him. He is free again .”

“In Russia,” Stanislav told me, “they have turned this maxim into a national treasure: the people have nothing, and in this they see their strength and their ‘specialness’ compared to the West.” He sent me this reflection on the “ontology of Russia” while firing a burst of machine gun fire in the trenches.

I was in Poland on June 24, 2024, when I received that Signal message from Stanislav at 1:05 p.m., Central European Time. Thirty-five minutes later, his next message came: “They just surrounded us.”

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Another younger Ukrainian writer, also from Donbas, Stanislav Aseyev, studied philosophy in Donetsk. When he arrived at the university, his professor told the students: “The art of thinking, that is what we intend to teach you. And whenever you ask, ‘What good is all this to me?’, remember that philosophy is everything, and everything else is compromise.” The teenage Stanislav soon found himself faced with the central question of modern philosophy: in the absence of a deity to ensure the correspondence between perception and being, how can we know that the world really exists and is not just a projection of our consciousness? How can we ever step outside our minds to verify reality independent of our perceptions? Kant’s compromise assured us that although the world was real, we had no direct access to things in themselves. Kantian idealism came to Stanislav as an apocalyptic revelation: “The table, the walls, the flowers, the vase, even I myself – all this is simply an image of my consciousness.”

And all the others? All those people? After all, most of them have no idea about this! They calmly continue to ride the tram, pay for the ticket, do the shopping, buy dinner – and do not even suspect that all this is nothing but a grandiose set of sensations, which does not extend even a millimeter beyond the boundaries of their mind!

In 2017, Aseyev, then 27, was captured by pro-Russian separatists; he was held captive for 962 days, most of them in the prisons of Izolatsiia, the most notorious Russian prison camp in occupied Ukraine. During this time, he was constantly tied to a table with duct tape and subjected to torture with electric shocks. In an essay he wrote there, published in his memoirs, The Torture Camp on Paradise Street, he rebelled against epistemological optimism: “No science in its entire history can boast of a failure as profound as the one that finally engulfed philosophy: two and a half millennia of Western thought have still not solved any of the problems that philosophy set out to address.”

Was – is – Shestov too Russian?

Shestov had positioned himself, most famously, against Husserl, who was not a French philosopher, but belonged to the rationalist tradition. Husserl very consciously saw himself as the continuator of the Cartesian project of achieving certain knowledge. He was determined, as Descartes had been, to achieve “clarity and distinctness.” This phrase—Klarheit und Deutlichkeit—Husserl repeated again and again. If Descartes, Kant, and others had failed before him, Husserl believed that this meant that a deepening of reason was needed, not a retreat from it.

The inevitable juxtaposition here is with Freud , who shared with Husserl a strikingly similar biography: both were assimilated Habsburg Jews, originally from Moravia, born in the 1850s; both came to Vienna and studied with the philosopher of psychology Franz Brentano.

They were two of the greatest rebels against the materialist and objectivist tendencies that dominated the nineteenth century. And both elaborated philosophies that reconstructed the world on the basis of a radical subjectivity, centered on the “I.” However, these philosophies were also antithetical: one, Husserl’s, saw the most essential subjectivity as radical transparency; the other, Freud’s, as radical concealment. Shestov shared with Freud a love of Shakespeare. In December 1896, the then thirty-year-old Shestov wrote from Berlin to his friend Varvara Malafeeva Malakhievaia-Mirovich in Kyiv, telling her that she should not be so insecure about her knowledge of Kant, because she would find something far more essential in the early modern English playwright. “All knowledge, all literature is in Shakespeare,” Shestov wrote her, “all life is in him.” At the time, Shestov was immersed in an intense reading of Nietzsche – the thinker who, according to Freud, “had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or will ever live.” Shestov’s sister, Fania Lovtskaia, was a Freudian who became a prominent psychoanalyst in Palestine, then Israel, and later Switzerland. It was obvious to her that her older brother’s obsession with Nietzsche was a symptom of egocentrism. Her brother wrote only about neurotics, she pointed out to a friend—Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard. It was all self-analysis in disguise.

On stage with Tetyana and Volodymyr in Kyiv, I defended Shestov against the displeasure his sister had expressed a century earlier. I am writing a book on phenomenology, and of the many generations of characters in this book, from Husserl to Havel, Shestov is the most generous, the most menschlich, the most human. I have read his correspondence with Husserl, with Varvara Malafeeva, with Martin Buber, and with his fellow Kyiv philosopher Gustav Shpet. His letters were always modest and warm, always concerned about his friends, always grateful to other thinkers for stimulating his ideas. He was, of all of them, the most sensitive to other people's feelings. When Fania Lovtskaia spoke to their aunt about her brother's narcissism, her aunt told her that Lev's main problem was his rejection of Kant. For Fania this was absurd: “If a person displays boundless narcissism and egocentrism and at the same time is extremely insecure and feels surrounded by enemies, then no Kant will be able to help him.”

A nontrivial question remains: Was Shestov's rejection of Kantian reason a glorification of irrationalism in the archetypically Russian spirit of Tyutchev? Or was it rather an expression of epistemological modesty, of a very different kind from Kant's? “We find nothing in our minds and in our experience that could give us a basis for somehow limiting the proizvol of nature,” Shestov wrote in 1905 in The Apotheosis of Precariousness, using a Russian term for arbitrariness with shades of tyranny, stubbornness, caprice.

If reality were different from what it is now, it would not seem less natural to us. In other words: it may be that in human judgments about phenomena there are both necessary and accidental elements, and yet despite all efforts, we have not yet found and evidently never will find a way to separate the one from the other. Moreover, we do not know which of these elements are more essential and more important. Hence the conclusion: philosophy should abandon attempts to discover veritates aeternae . Its task is to teach man to live in uncertainty – man who fears uncertainty more than anything else and hides from it behind various dogmas.

Shestov's opposition was between certainty and uncertainty, between binding rules and capricious contingency. (The Apotheosis of Precarity was translated into English in 1929 as All Things Are Possible, with a preface by D. H. Lawrence.) But the fact that Shestov believed that everything was possible did not mean that he believed that everything was permitted.

After February 24, 2022

After February 24, 2022, when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine and he and his wife came under Russian occupation, Volodymyr Rafeyenko decided he would never write in Russian again. For a writer, giving up his native language is like amputating an arm. And he was not alone in this self-amputation. Other top Russian-speaking Ukrainian writers—including Stanislav Aseyev—renounced Russian in favor of Ukrainian. It is a linguistic amputation implicitly in solidarity with the bodily amputations to which so many Ukrainians have been subjected.

Haunting this conversation from beyond the grave, or from the depths of the Seine where he committed suicide in 1970, is Paul Celan, whose native Czernowitz is now the Ukrainian city of Chernivtsi. It is impossible not to think of Celan and try to comprehend anew the devastating intimacy of Muttersprache/Mördersprache. What does it mean to write poetry in the language of your mother’s murderer? Can language ever transcend atrocity? Can it ever be purified, conceived anew? Celan was among Shestov’s readers, though I don’t know in what language Celan read him: Russian? German? French? Like Shestov, Celan knew all these languages. In a 1960 speech known as The Meridian, which he gave after receiving the Buchner Prize, Celan addressed Shestov about obscurity. The speech became one of the most famous statements on the nature of poetry of his time. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is common today to reproach poetry for its ‘obscurity,’” he said.

At this point, allow me to quote – perhaps abruptly, but hasn’t something suddenly opened up here? – allow me to quote a sentence from Pascal, a sentence I read some time ago in Lev Shestov: Ne nous reprochez pas le manque de clarté puisque nous en faisons profession!, Do not reproach us for the lack of clarity, since we make it a profession!

Pascal's sentiment closely mirrored Shestov's sensibility. It was the antithesis of Husserl's, who once wrote in his diary that he could not bear to live without certainty. For Husserl, truth was tied to Klarheit and Sicherheit, clarity and certainty. For Shestov, however, truth, clarity and certainty did not form a harmonious whole at all.

About half a century before Celan’s speech, Shestov, having never met Husserl in person, was fascinated by the German philosopher’s determination to achieve Sicherheit, or security. When Shestov’s younger friend Gustav Shpet traveled to Göttingen to study with Husserl in 1912, Shestov was delighted for him. At the time, Shestov was living in Switzerland with his wife, Dr. Anna Eleazarovna Berezovskaia, and their two teenage daughters, Tatiana and Nataliia, whose existence he had long kept secret from his parents, believing that his father would never accept a non-Jewish daughter-in-law . He was eager to hear Shpet’s impressions. What did Husserl think, Shestov asked Shpet in July 1914, of Dostoevsky’s expressed anxieties? Many interpreted Shestov's philosophy as skepticism and pessimism, Shpet wrote to his new wife, Nataliia Guchkova, in a letter, “And meanwhile I know of no one who seeks the truth more ardently, or who desires to find it more than he does.”

In August 1914, the Europe that Husserl, Shestov, and Shpet had known came to an end. Shestov returned to Kyiv, then in September traveled to Moscow, where his wife and daughters joined him and where they joined Shpet and Nataliia Guchkova, who was expecting a baby. Sergei Listopadov, Shestov's 22-year-old son born out of wedlock, was already serving in the tsarist army. Early that fall, Sergei was wounded in battle, and Shestov traveled to Kyiv to see him. Shestov wanted his son to take more time to recover from his concussions, but Sergei soon returned to the front. The next few summer weeks passed without news, and Shestov feared that his son had been taken prisoner. Sergei's last letter conveyed disquiet: the fighting was fierce; his commander had been wounded; he was now the only officer in his company. Shestov wrote to his sister Fania and her husband Hermann Lowitzky in Switzerland: Sergei, he told them, had their address; if he contacted them, could they send him a telegram in Moscow? One word would be enough to say they had heard from him, and perhaps a second to say whether – whether – he was well...

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Then Sergei reappeared and took leave from the front during the winter of 1916-1917 in Moscow, where Shestov and Shpet gathered for long evenings of discussions with their friends. Shestov loved these debates; the more dogmatic his interlocutor, the more Shestov was kind to him, taking his time to answer. Varvara Malafeeva believed that Shestov was finally almost happy, surrounded by friends and conversations. Sergei had not grown up with his father, but now Shestov welcomed him into his family and introduced him to his younger half-sisters. Shestov included him in the debates, and, from time to time, a friend noticed that he looked at him with adoration.

In Moscow, Shestov even lost his personal, if indirect, connection with the founder of phenomenology. Political conditions made any correspondence between Shpet and Husserl impossible: they belonged to warring empires. Yet Shestov continued to be absorbed by Husserl from a distance. Husserl’s phenomenological method, intended to achieve “pure vision,” was based on a concept Husserl called Evidenz. Literally “evidence,” Evidenz for Husserl meant the quality of “adequate self-giving,” a clear mental vision of something that actually existed as what was seen. It was the means by which Husserl pursued a horizon of absolute truth, which—surprisingly for Shestov—had been to humanity since the beginning of time what the Promised Land was to the Jews. “Husserl does not want compromise,” Shestov wrote in wartime Moscow, “all or nothing. Either Evidenz is the final destination to which the human spirit aspires in the search for truth, and is reachable by human means, or a reign of chaos and madness must reign on earth.” Shestov praised Husserl’s awareness of the gravity of the issue. It was “finally time,” he agreed, “to put all the cards on the table and to raise the questions as radically as Husserl did.”

But the Promised Land that Husserl saw on the horizon seemed to Shestov a mirage. Its existence depended on the “autocracy of reason,” from which history must necessarily be excluded . For Husserl, historicism was skepticism. Truth had to be absolute, valid always and everywhere; what was true had to be true an sich, in itself, not historically contingent. Shestov translated Husserl’s Evidenz into ochevidnost’, a Russian word that literally means “visible to the eye.” It was a much better translation than the original: this word, absent in German, was exactly what Husserl wanted to express. But weren’t there moments, Shestov wondered, when the “visible to the eye” reached the limit of its possibilities? Reason could extend only so far; and Shestov suspected that truth was something that lay beyond the limits of reason.

Husserl, according to Shestov, did not address the space beyond these limits; he remained in the intermediate zones of life, those that reason could reach, and mistakenly extrapolated that this reachability also applied to the border zones. But this was not the case .

We must have the courage to say firmly: the intermediate zones of human and universal life do not resemble either the equator or the poles. The constant error of rationalism is its certainty in the unlimited power of reason. Reason has done so much, therefore reason can do everything. But “so much” does not mean “everything”; “so much” is separated from “everything” toto coelo; “so much” and “everything” are absolutely incommensurable. They belong to two distinct and irreducible categories.

In October 2023, Stanislav Aseyev, while serving in the army, described the contrast between the intermediate zones and the poles, realms between which there was contiguity without commensurability. “A tram noisily rushing along the tracks carrying a dozen people on their morning errands,” he wrote, while, at the same time, someone’s head was being crushed between a wall and a hammer. What were we doing when this was happening? Perhaps we were shopping, putting eggs and ketchup in carts, at the very moment when, in a patch of Donbas forest, a Ukrainian soldier’s head was being sawed off alive, the video “leaked” to Telegram along with the screams.

Shestov titled his polemic with Husserl Memento Mori. He published it in Russian in 1917, a decade before Heidegger wrote Being and Time and before his central concept of Sein-zum-Tode—“being-toward-death”—became a dominant philosophical motif. Much else happened that year. Shestov was in Moscow during the February Revolution; the following month he went to Kyiv. “Perhaps, God willing,” he wrote to his mother from Kyiv, “Russia will be more sensible than other countries and will pass over to a new system without too many upheavals.”

News came of Shestov's son's death at the front; and it seemed to Varvara Malafeeva that, from that moment on, Shestov had never seemed happy again. In April 1917 Lenin arrived in Petrograd, where he “found power on the road and picked it up.” Life in Moscow was becoming increasingly difficult. In February 1918 the Red Army took Kyiv. The following month the Germans drove the Bolsheviks out of Shestov's hometown; in April they installed Pavlo Skoropadsky as hetman of a German-controlled Ukrainian state. In July 1918 Shestov and his family left Moscow for Kyiv, where they were welcomed by his sister and her husband, the Balakhovsky family, who lived near St. Andrew's Church. The house was not far from the bank of the Dnipro River; from the window there was a wonderful view. When the Balakhovsky family fled to Paris, other friends and refugees moved into the house with the Shestovs, including Varvara Malafeeva. The eldest Shestov daughter, Tatiana, began attending university; she was attracted to Plato.

In November 1918, the Hetmanate fell and the Germans began to abandon the city. This is the story Mikhail Bulgakov tells in The White Guard, an epic novel published in 1925 and set in Kyiv during a single day in December 1918. Today, in Ukraine, Bulgakov is an object of resentment: a collaborator of a Russian imperialist literature that is repeating itself in the dungeons of Buchcha, Kherson, and Donetsk, on the tortured bodies of Ukrainians like Stanislav Aseyev. The judgment is not without foundation. Yet we do not read literature because it is innocent. There is no erasure in history: history is not only the history of the good. Husserl's phenomenological method involved Einklammern, putting “in brackets” everything that was empirical and the questions about its existence independent of consciousness, setting them aside . In history, however, one cannot “put in brackets”, one cannot assume that the life of a writer can be set aside as a “genealogical error” irrelevant to his work.

In any case, The White Guard remains in my mind for entirely different reasons: it is a novel that illuminates how temporality itself expands at the poles. Vasilia, the building administrator who makes a brief appearance, says: “When I think about all these things that are happening, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that our lives are extremely insecure.” This euphemism is very much in the spirit of Shestov. In Bulgakov’s novel, insecurity is total not only because of physical violence, but also because of existential violence: temporality is revealed to be painfully fickle. It slows almost to a stop and speeds up as if beyond the laws of physics. Time is torn apart in moments of extreme tension. In that single day in Kyiv the world changes radically, as if decades had passed. The Ukrainian government freed Stanislav Aseyev from imprisonment in an exchange of prisoners in 2019, but for many months it continued to be afraid. He came to find "no imminent misunderstood signs" but he was about to experience the inconstanding time: between fresh cheese and iron bars passed only an hour. , he only passed an hour "...

In December 1918, the forces of the Ukrainian nationalist leader Symon Petliura took Kyiv and established the Popular Ukrainian Republic. Greek and another on the fundamental problems of philosophy, from Plato to Descartes.

On June 14, 1919, Shestov wrote to his mother: "From us everything is Blagopoluhno" . Ity and the absence of problems at that time and in that place? perhaps it only means that, until then, Shestov's family had been spared from physical brutality.

While August ended and September, the white anti -Brescent white army took Kyiv. Evil Jewish appearance; they dressed like Russian girls.

He almost apologized, almost skilled. , they felt the screams of "beating the Jews! Russian saved!" And profound friendship; he could not believe that he was leaving it.

He took three weeks to reach Yalta, a brutal journey via land in frozen freight wagons to Rostov and then by sea from Rostov to Yalta.

The family traveled from Yalta to Sebastopoli, then from Sebastopoli to Constantinople on a French steamship, then from Constantinople to Genoa on an American ship.

After the last months of that winter 1919-1920 in Switzerland trying to explain what found inexplicable.

Nobody understood. How someone could have happened? Crushes Shestov.

The Russians had never loved the word "citizen", he explained. They were neither good materialists nor good Hegelians; they were idealists who did not believe in knowledge or in reason, but rather in "brute physical strength".

Even today, a century later, that moment in which the First World War poured into the Bolshevik revolution, which in turn turned into a series of civil wars, is difficult to assimilate for historians.

"In the atmosphere of mutual brutality and civil war, the latest sparks of faith were extinguished in the possibility of creating, even if only in spectral form, a truth on the earth", wrote Shestov. How could someone understand what was happening?

A century later, Stanislav Aseyev wrote about his native Donbas in the revolutionary year 2013-2014. Private time of a future and accustomed to humiliating conditions.

Now, ten years after the start of the war in Donbas and more than two years after the Russian invasion on a large scale of Ukraine, I find myself rereading the wise of Shestov more and times. the absence of truth; indifference to time as a symptom of renunciation of a freedom never owned by Ini had now been overcome, and that what was happening in his homeland was now beyond the scope of reason.

And what about the truth that is beyond the limits of reason? Shestov turned to Dostoevskij, opposing him with Kant and implicitly to Husserl, philosophers who had anelated to the eternal, not contingent, timeless. He inherited the power and the rights of the gods and demons driven out of the world. " His act of resistance was denying the law, the general principle that was always worth, to understand the singular truth.

Dostoevskij rebelled at the universal, to what applies to everyone, in favor of the individual. Ostoevskij. Which does not require guarantees or defense, he was his only and true object of study ".

In 1928, over a decade after the original publication of Memento Mori, Shestov and Husserl met in person for the first time. Conference on Tolstoy, Husserl was extremely happy. Next. "They are like two lovers," Malvine said, "inseparable".

It was in that visit to Husserl's house that Shestov met Heidegger . Nineteenth century.

And so, while the Stalinist terror overwhelmed the place that had been his home, Shestov studied the work of Copenhagen's Christian existentialist. Ethics, what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, represented the universal for him, who for Shestov was connected to a necessity that could only be oppressive. During his atrocious suffering, the three friends of Job - Elifaz the fear, Bildad the Suhita and Zofar the naamatita - sat down on his side and insisted on the fact that men and gods should accept their destiny. Naked this question. there God appeared as proiizvol, arbitrary and capricious.

For Kierkegaard - like Shestov understood by reading - The greatness of Job was not to accepted that "the Lord has given and the Lord has removed", but in despairing because "his pain is heavier than the sands of the sea". Ov explained that "Job returns to the crying and the curse, Luge et detestari, rejected by speculative philosophy, their primordial right: the right to present themselves as judges when investigating the truth and falsehood". Like Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard supported the individual against the universal.

If Hegel could have admitted even for a moment that such a thing was possible; that the truth was not in him, but in the ignorant Job;

Kierkegaard's question, how Shestov summarized it, was this: "Which side is the truth on the side of 'all' and the 'cowardice of all', or on the side of those who dared to look at madness and death in the eyes?" ;

Edmund Husserl died in April 1938, a year before turning eighty years old. It was "a profound inner affinity between Husserl's teaching on the one hand and that of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard on the other. Shestov understood that Husserl's life was his own and true Kierkegaardian Aut-Aut: "He placed us in front of an unprecedented choice with an unprecedented force: either we are all crazy, O 'Socrates has been poisoned' is an eternal truth, binding for all conscious beings" .

For Shestov, the absolute dominion of reason was cruelty.

“I had to rebel against the evident truth.

This splendid funeral praise was the last writing of Shestov. Among people we know nothing about. "

Stanislav Aseyev completed his autobiographical novel in August 2014, asking in the final chapter the indulgence of readers while "he groped towards the bottom," writing these lines under the fire of artillery while the pro-Russian separatists attempted to overturn the Ukrainian state. We don't know anything. "

When, in March 1939, the Czechoslovak President Edvard Ben faced the large -scale invasion of his country by Nazi Germany, he decided to go into exile; his country did not fight. I was to fight.

In September 2022 a visitor had a question for Zelensky during a meeting in Kyiv. "It's all in Shakespeare," said Zelensky .

This was what Shetov also believed in his first book was dedicated to the English playwright. Publication of that book, Shestov chose to stay at the house of one of his sisters, in Bibikovskii Benar 62, an address that I passed while I was driving with Volodymyr Yermolenko towards the Kyiv School of Economics last March.

Twenty years later, Volodymyr, Tetyana and I went up on the stage to talk about the Grenzsitationen, the "limit situations" that tear us down to everyday life. Epistemological access gate, the poles described by Shestov, where the ground escaped us under the feet and the philosophical questions proved to be with a disturbing acuity.

"Men respond only to the horrors that happen around them," wrote Shestov in 1905, "except in times in which the wild and heartbreaking inconsistency of our condition suddenly reveals himself to our eyes, and we are forced to know what we are. Shestov knew that this border area was the center, the Schwerpunkt, the focal point from which we had to look for the truth. They will protect from the accused of the whim, who saturates existence " . No meaning. It's just ugliness and misery. "

Shestov completed Athens and Jerusalem in 1937, during the great terror.

For Hegel, ethics required the sacrifice of the individual to the whole. Like Ivan Karamazov, Job refused to accept a transcendent justification for suffering.

In my years of reading of Shestov, especially as an interlocutor of Husserl and character of a central European story about the search for epistemological certainty and absolute truth, I had not fully absorbed what he meant with the irreducibility of the singular. Rnov showed us in 20 Days in Mariupol, a documentary shot between February and March 2022 during the Russian siege of the Ukraine port city. "Who will give us back our children?", A young woman shouted. It was the most raw desperation I have ever seen on film.

There are moments of suffering so absolute that they cannot in any way be compared, they cannot be "outdated" and "reconciled" in the terms of Hegel. OMINIO A LOPIOLE, exploded by a Russian missile. Terrible spasm, born from the feeling of the tragic nature of individual human existence, delivered to the prohibio of the case and death. To this Proizvol Shestov has opposed his own counterproizvol.

What was the counterproiizvol of Shestov, his resistance to the cosmic whim and cruelty? Userliana - It was not irrationalism in a nihilistic sense.

When, years ago, I started reading Shestov to better understand Husserl, I would never have imagined the anti -aircraft refuge of Podil and how much I would have heard close to Shestov there. Ale from the anti -aircraft refuge to the hotel.

That morning the Cremlin had launched thirty -one cruise missiles and balm on Kyiv. abandoned cats he adopted made him company in the trenches. "I count on those cats to watch over you," I wrote to him.

"But they don't know anything about Shestov," he replied.

Marci Shore, professor of Yale and author of several essays, studies and teaches the intellectual history of Central and Eastern Europe. This essay was originally published in the magazine Liberties.

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