Anton Tchekhov, and Other Essays — Background and Themes

The Anguish of the Swan Song

Shestov draws a striking contrast between the conscious ideals of Turgenev and Ibsen and the darker motives that emerge in their final works. He notes that Turgenev's essay Hamlet and Don Quixote concludes with 'Everything passes, good deeds remain,' yet in his Prose Poems an utterly different motive is heard: 'one infinite, inextinguishable anguish for a life wasted in vain.' Shestov deliberately uses the word senilia rather than 'swan songs,' invoking Plato's claim that swans sing better at death, rejoicing in the god they serve. For Ibsen and Turgenev, their last songs were better than all that had gone before, containing 'a bottomless depth awful to the eye.' The source of this anguish, Shestov argues, is not regret for lost youth or health, but for having sacrificed the person for the artist—Ibsen's Professor Rubek renounces his art because he gave up Irene, and Turgenev cannot away with memories of 'the Russian girl' he described but never touched.

The Illusion of Divine Appointment

Shestov examines how writers like Gogol and Ibsen eventually lost the belief that God had chosen them for a particular task. He observes that Gogol burnt his best work before death, and Ibsen, in his last drama, renounced his literary activity despite the fame, respect, and riches it brought. Shestov quotes Ibsen's confession that he had to sacrifice the man for the artist, calling this 'the greatest vulgarity' if said by a common mortal, but on the lips of the author of Brand and Emperor and Galilean, it acquires 'an unexpected and mysterious meaning.' The pattern Shestov identifies is that 'with years all illusions vanish,' including the illusion that God chooses certain men for particular purposes. He invokes the human law: 'Forswear not the prison nor the beggar's wallet!'—a warning against denying one's essential humanity for the sake of a role.

The Intimate Connection Between Philosophy and Life

Shestov's introduction establishes his core argument: Russian thought is chiefly manifested in the great novelists, who attacked fearlessly the fundamental problem of philosophy—whether life is worth living. He praises them for emphasizing 'the intimate connection between philosophy and life,' a relation professional philosophers often neglect. The essay on Chekhov, titled 'Creation from the Void,' suggests that Shestov sees Chekhov's work as emerging from a nihilistic starting point, while 'The Gift of Prophecy' addresses Dostoevsky's ability to foresee human depths. Shestov's own method is to treat literary works as philosophical statements, drawing on the writers' final productions to reveal tensions between their conscious beliefs and the darker truths that surface at the end. The collection thus offers not a systematic philosophy but a series of meditations on the cost of artistic creation and the inevitability of confronting life's ultimate questions.

Readers approaching Shestov's essays should attend to his method of juxtaposing a writer's earlier ideals with their later, more anguished expressions. He does not offer biographical summaries but rather philosophical readings that treat the works as evidence of a struggle between conscious belief and unconscious truth. The translations by Koteliansky and Murry preserve Shestov's dense, allusive style, which rewards careful attention to his recurring motifs—the swan song, the sacrifice of the man for the artist, and the illusion of divine appointment.

That rainy afternoon, Shestov’s essay on Chekhov kept circling the same quiet ache—how the light of conscious ideals often falls on a life already half-spent. I put the book down, stared at the wet window, and somehow reached for the Eryxias — Reading Companion instead. It felt less like searching, more like the rain had simply washed one thought into another.