[Below, Strong gives a mixed appraisal of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche.]

Tolstoy's solution (too harshly condemned, I think by Shestov) was to equate God with "the good" and to preach fraternal love. Dostoevsky's radically egotistical Underground Man, as embodied in Raskolnikov, for example, had to be saved by Orthodox Christianity. And Nietzsche, for whose courage Shestov expresses the greatest admiration, eventually succumbed to the doctrines of amor fati and the Ubermensch. Within our space limitations here, Shestov's own philosophy must briefly be summarized as anti-idealistic and anti-rationalistic. In a sense, it was at least tangential to religious existentialism. Late in life, moreover, Shestov wrote a book on Kierkegaard, and an English translation has recently appeared.

Bernard Martin's introduction is competent, though overly long (thirty pages) because of many needless quotations from the texts which follow. One puzzling omission is Shestov's real family name (Schwarzman). A knowledge of this thinker's Jewish background would provide another dimension to Shestov's passionate moral fervor and to his own solution: belief in a predominantly Old Testament God for whom "one must sacrifice everything."