SOURCE: "Shestov's Second Dimension: In Job's Balances," in Slavic and East-European Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2, Summer, 1978, pp. 141-53.

In the following essay, Patterson examines Shestov's use of biblical imagery and discusses his interpretations of the fiction of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche in his In Job's Balances.

In his introduction to Lev Šestov's Umozrenie i otkrovenie Nikolaj Berdjaev tells us that gestov was a man for whom philosophy was a matter of life and death, for whom human tragedy, terror, and suffering form the starting point of philosophy in such a way that "the conflict of biblical revelation and Greek Philosophy became the fundamental theme of his thought." Although Albert Camus believed that gestov "had only begun to move into that desert where all certainties are turned to stone," in Le mythe de Sisyphe he describes gestov by saying:

In the course of striving with admirable monotony Shestov struggled incessantly...