SOURCE: "Lev Shestov After Ten Years Silence," in Horizon, London, Vol. 20, No. 118, October 1949, pp. 213-29.

Gascoyne is an English poet, translator, critic, memoirist, dramatist, novelist, short story writer, and editor. In the following essay, he explicates basic tenets of Shestov's thought, comparing and contrasting his unique form of existentialism with that of Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Sartre.

As far as it is possible to judge, there exists at present among the intelligent reading public in England only a dim and confused conception of the significance of Existential Philosophy and its situation in relation to the rest of contemporary thought. It is unlikely however that the confusion that reigns here in people's minds with regard to this philosophic movement is anything like the dense and inextricable confusion regarding it that must by this time have become general in France. Intellectual discursivity, having sensed the menace to itself that a proper...