Lev Shestov (Lev Isaakevich Shvartsmann, 1866–1938), like other philosophers of the pre-revolutionary Russian Silver Age and the post-revolutionary Russian emigration, has attracted an ever-increasing amount of critical attention, in Russia and beyond, since the end of the Soviet era. There now exists a substantial body of scholarship on him, including around twenty-five monographs in Russian, French, and English. Andrea Oppo's recent book represents a significant and distinguished contribution to this field.
Oppo's study is impressively comprehensive. Styled as an intellectual biography, it adopts a chronological approach. It is divided into two parts—“Shestov in Russia” and “Shestov in France,” to reflect the significance for Shestov's work and legacy of his exile from Russia in 1920, when he was already 54 years old, yet only halfway through his career as a published author. Four substantial chapters—two in each part—address loose phases in Shestov's intellectual development: the emergence of his “philosophy of tragedy” at the turn of the twentieth century; his work as a peculiar kind of literary critic and his evolving philosophical assessment of art (up to 1910); his philosophical engagement with key philosophers and theologians of the European intellectual tradition (1914–29, actually bridging the moment of emigration); and the mature works of the 1930s that most comprehensively reflect Shestov's later “religious turn.” Oppo claims to analyze each and every one of Shestov's works.
The intellectual biographical approach and comprehensiveness of coverage is in large part a strategy to “complicate” Shestov in several important ways. Oppo himself emphasizes two of these in his Introduction. First, he wishes to push back against Shestov's reputation as a “lonely thinker” (xiv) whom critics historically have found difficult to relate to contemporaneous philosophical and theological trends: by documenting his personal and intellectual connections to key actors of the Russian religious renaissance (among others Nikolai Berdiaev, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pavel Florenskii, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Gustav Shpet) and the interwar French and German intellectual milieu (including Martin Buber, Andre Gide, Edmund Husserl, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl), and—particularly in the very productive extended Conclusion—by analyzing the reception and legacy of his work. Here, Oppo argues, against Shestov's Russian contemporaries, that “[his] isolation is more apparent than real” (214). In Russia, Shestov's greatest contribution was to set the trend for harnessing Friedrich Nietzsche and Fedor Dostoevskii in the task of dismantling the type of systematic philosophy established by the late Vladimir Solov΄ev (d. 1900), whilst in exile he played a vital role in introducing the French both to Russian literature and, still more importantly, to Søren Kierkegaard and the Germanophone phenomenologists and existentialists Buber, Martin Heidegger, Husserl, and Max Scheler, thus “decisively contribut[ing] to creating an intellectual atmosphere that fostered the rise of French existentialism” (215–16).
Oppo states that his second objective is to challenge what he sees as a lazy characterization of Shestov's thought as either irrationalist or fideistic (xiv), but in fact his defense of Shestov is broader than this, and addresses another entrenched view established by his contemporary compatriots: that Shestov is “a person of a single idea” (Berdiaev, 210)—misologism (after Plato, 149), or the impossibility of arriving at truth through reason—which, moreover, is “unanswerable” (Frank, 208): impossible to dispute or engage with in dialogue. This critique incorporates censure of Shestov's uncritical and subjective approach to the philosophers that he writes about, the “Shestovization” of his subjects (xii). Oppo often concedes the justice of elements of this view, but invites the reader to get beyond it and appreciate the originality of Shestov's method and the nuance of his stance. A strategy of “reading between the lines” (Rostenne, 239) gives access to a thinker who sincerely “sought a world of intuitions that lay behind the authors themselves” and who thereby becomes a “credible witness” (241). In Oppo's reading, Shestov is neither a rationalist nor an irrationalist, but an “antirationalist” who accepts the validity of reason and the European philosophical tradition and acknowledges its power, but critiques it from within. He exposes its limits but, far from going beyond—to skepticism, mysticism, or myth—“remain[s] in the contradiction of a knowledge that seeks problems rather than solutions” (225). For Oppo, this is the meaning of Shestov's “philosophy of tragedy.”
Students of Shestov will appreciate the meticulousness of Oppo's research, which is reflected in an excellent bibliography that is in itself a reason to invest in this book.
