SOURCE: "Shestov's Challenge to Civilization," in The New York Times Book Review, October 3, 1920, p. 19.

In the following review of All Things Are Possible, De Casseres discusses the unique Russian character of Shestov's philosophy.

Leo Shestov, a Russian still living at the age of 50, belongs in the high line of iconoclasts. His book, AH Things Are Possible, just translated from the Russian by S. S. Koteliansky with a brilliantly written foreword by D. H. Lawrence, is a sheaf of 166 pensees on life, literature, European civilization, Russia, and, in fact, all things. His style is clear, uncollegiate and literary.

There is, nevertheless, a unity in the nihilism of Shestov, as there is in all his great predecessors. The unity of the skeptical thinkers is never in the brain. It is in the sensibility. Thought-siftings take on the fibre of the sieve, and our sensibility is a sieve of the external...