SOURCE: "Shestov's Use of Nietzsche in His Interpretation of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky," in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. XVII, 1975, pp. 289-302.

Curtis is an American professor of Russian and author of works on Russian literature.

Lev Shestov wrote two books whose titles contain a reference to Nietzsche: The Good in the Teaching of Count Tolstoy and F. Nietzsche (1900) and Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy (1903). It often seems to the critic who wishes to do justice to these works, Shestov's second and third respectively, that such an undertaking merely shows why Nietzsche never believed in the adequacy of any single logical statement. The three were fashionable figures in the fin de siecle mood of the time; but the rigor and intellectual integrity of Shestov's thought transcends the age of impressionistic criticism in which he wrote. His interpretation of literary works as autobiographical documents links him...