All Things Are Possible: A Brief Biography of Lev Shestov

All Things Are Possible: A Brief Biography of Lev Shestov

In 1936, two years before his death, the Jewish‑Russian philosopher Lev Shestov was invited by the Histadrut to deliver a series of lectures in Eretz Israel. He was warmly received by audiences in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem — the city that, in his late thought, came to symbolise the liberation of the individual from the tyranny of rational necessity. And yet, despite the intensity of that reception, Shestov and his writings have since slipped into obscurity. This is his story.

All Things Are Possible: A Brief Biography of Lev Shestov

Nearly every life can be summed up in a few words: man was shown heaven – and thrown into the mud — Lev Shestov

Lev Shestov (born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann) was a Jewish‑Russian polemicist, philosopher, theologian, literary critic, and existential thinker. Born on January 31, 1866, in Kiev — then part of the Russian Empire — he grew up immersed in both Jewish and Russian literary traditions. His early intellectual formation unfolded alongside his studies at Moscow University and his work in his father’s textile business. Eventually, seeking distance from the constraints of the Empire and space for his developing philosophical voice, he left Russia for a period and travelled to Rome.

In 1896 he married Anna Eleazarovna Berezovsky, a Russian medical student. Around this period he encountered the philosophy of Nietzsche, a discovery that proved transformative for his developing worldview. Within a remarkably short span he completed two substantial manuscripts: Shakespeare and His Critic Brandes and Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, early works that already reveal the polemical intensity and philosophical restlessness that would define his later thought.

Shestov’s engagement with Nietzsche soon yielded a third major work, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy, published in St Petersburg in 1903. This study deepened his preoccupation with the limits of reason and the revelatory force of suffering. His next book, The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905), pushed these concerns further: a sardonic assault on academic philosophy and scientific positivism, written in a sharply aphoristic mode.

The Apotheosis of Groundlessness was translated into English and published in 1920 under the title All Things Are Possible. In his foreword to the edition, D. H. Lawrence captured what he took to be the book’s animating impulse. “‘Everything is possible’ — this is his really central cry,” Lawrence wrote. “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.” Lawrence’s remarks helped introduce Shestov to an English‑speaking audience as a thinker of radical possibility, one who sought to liberate thought from the constraints of rationalism and necessity.

Indeed, the book advances the claim that, since no overarching theory can resolve the enigmas of existence, everything remains open to doubt. “We know nothing of the ultimate realities of our existence, nor shall we ever know anything,” Shestov writes in the ninth aphorism — a line that sums up his revolt against rationalist assurance. The implication is stark and clear: the world does not cohere into a rational order, and philosophers deceive themselves when they imagine that reason can uncover such order.

In the years leading up to the First World War, Shestov and his family moved frequently between Russia, Switzerland, and Germany, living a largely itinerant intellectual life. In 1915 tragedy struck: his illegitimate son, Sergei Listopadov, was killed in action while serving in the Russian military. After the Bolshevik takeover of Russia, Shestov and his family relocated to Paris, where he would spend the next decade. Although initially almost unknown within French literary circles, he quickly attracted attention. His 1921 article commemorating the centenary of Dostoevsky’s birth electrified the Parisian literary scene, announcing him as an unsettling new voice in the city’s intellectual landscape.

During the 1920s he continued his literary endeavours, including a complete edition of his works in French. He taught and he lectured, and he was invited to speak in Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Netherlands. In 1929, Shestov acquainted himself with the work of Kierkegaard, whom Shestov immediately recognised as a kindred spirit.

Shestov formed a close friendship with Martin Buber in the late 1920s, a relationship that continued well into the following decade. In a 1934 conversation with Buber, Shestov articulated one of his most striking theological claims: that sin entered the world when humanity abandoned the nourishment of the tree of life and instead sought sustenance from the tree of knowledge. For Shestov, this shift marked the fatal substitution of living, immediate freedom for the dead certainties of rational understanding.

Shestov pressed the point even further in his exchange with Buber. “The very moment man ate from the forbidden fruit, he gained knowledge and lost his freedom,” he insisted. “Man does not need to know. To ask, to beg questions, to require proofs, answers, means that one is not free. To know means to know necessity.” In Shestov’s formulation, the Fall is not a moral lapse but a metaphysical catastrophe: the moment when living freedom was exchanged for the constraining logic of necessity, and the human spirit became ensnared in the demand for knowledge rather than nourished by life.

To stave off despair and to break the grip of nature’s law of irreversible necessity — the law that declares certain things fixed, unchangeable, and impossible — we must hold fast to the conviction that everything is possible. Yet such a stance cannot be grounded in reason; it demands faith, a faith that the world can be otherwise, that reality is not exhausted by what necessity proclaims.

Commenting on the boldness of Shestov’s philosophy of faith, Bernard Martin, a professor of Jewish studies, offers a succinct formulation:

Faith, for Shestov, is audacity, the daring refusal to accept necessary laws [...] it is the demand for the absolute, original freedom which man is supposed to have had before the fall, when he still found the distinction between truth and falsehood, as well as between good and evil, unnecessary and irrelevant.

Martin’s reading captures the extremity of Shestov’s position: faith as a revolt against necessity, a reclamation of primordial freedom, and a refusal to submit to the inherited categories through which reason seeks to bind human possibility.

Shestov’s move beyond good and evil is inseparable from his notion of God’s groundlessness — the divine freedom that precedes, exceeds, and overturns every fixed moral or rational category. For Shestov, God is not bound by sanctions, reasons, or necessities; He is the one in whom everything is possible. God requires no justification, no support, no firm ground. He is groundless. He is the personal God of the Bible, in whom there is neither subordination nor limit — and therefore, once again, all things are possible.

This groundlessness is what Shestov, in In Job’s Balances, calls “the basic, most enviable, and to us most incomprehensible privilege of the Divine.” It names the abyssal freedom by which God shatters the sovereignty of reason and dissolves the supposed immutability of moral law. Consequently, our moral struggle will bring us to emancipation not only from moral valuations, but also from logic, reason, and limited knowledge. “I know that this ideal of freedom in relation to truth and the good cannot be realised on earth,” Shestov writes, “but it is granted to man to have prescience of ultimate freedom.”

He then deepens the thought with one of his most striking images:

Before the face of eternal God, all our foundations break together, and all ground crumbles under us, even as objects - this we know - lose their weight in endless space, and - this we shall probably learn one day - will lose their impermeability in endless time.

In 1936, Shestov was invited by the Histadrut — the Jewish trade‑union federation — to deliver a series of lectures in the Land of Israel. His appearances in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa drew enthusiastic audiences, and he was celebrated as a major Jewish thinker. For Shestov, the visit carried a deep personal significance: it fulfilled a lifelong dream, bound up with the memory of his grandfather, who was buried on the Mount of Olives.

The following year, Shestov completed the manuscript of his final masterpiece, Athens and Jerusalem, in which he rejects the impersonal metaphysics of the European philosophical tradition — Plato, Kant, Hegel — in favour of the personal, biblical God. As he insists, “to find God one must tear oneself away from the seductions of reason, with all its physical and moral constraints.” One must, instead, turn to “another source of truth”: the living God who is not bound by necessity, who speaks in revelation rather than in concepts, and whose freedom shatters the certainties that philosophy has long mistaken for truth:

In Scripture this source bears the enigmatic name ‘faith’, which is that dimension of thought where truth abandons itself fearlessly and joyously to the entire disposition of the Creator.

On 14 November 1938, Shestov was taken to the Boileau Clinic in Paris, where he died six days later. He was laid to rest in Boulogne‑Billancourt.

That Shestov remains relatively unknown today is due in part to the fact that he left behind no school and no disciples to carry his work forward. The sole exception was Benjamin Fondane, the young Jewish poet who became his most devoted interlocutor and who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944. Fondane had kept detailed notes of his conversations with Shestov, and these were discovered among his papers after his death.

Shestov’s work did, however, exert an influence, even if that influence was largely confined to his own lifetime. The writings of Georges Bataille, Jean‑Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus all bear traces of his uncompromising assault on rational necessity. And Hillel Zeitlin went so far as to declare: “If someone asked me who was the true successor of Friedrich Nietzsche, I would answer without hesitation: L. Shestov.”

Given Shestov’s lifelong fascination with Nietzsche, he would surely have regarded this as praise of the highest order.

Bibliography

Primary

Shestov, L. (1920) All Things Are Possible. Translated by S.S. Koteliansky. London: Martin Secker.

Shestov, L. (1932) [1929] In Job’s Balances. Translated by Camilla Coventry and C.A. Macartney. Edited by Bernard Martin (1975). Ohio: Ohio University Press.

Shestov, L. (1966) [1938] Athens and Jerusalem. Translated by Bernard Martin. Ohio: Ohio University Press. 

Secondary

Finkenthal, M. (2010) Lev Shestov: Existential Philosopher and Religious Thinker. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.