Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy

Introduction

Shestov published “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy” in St Petersburg in 1903, as a sequel to his book on the good in Tolstoy and Nietzsche (1900). He reads Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground” as the moment at which its author broke with his earlier humanitarian idealism, and compares it with Nietzsche’s turn against the morality of compassion. Both, he argues, discovered in their own suffering a region where the consolations of ethics, reason and progress no longer hold; the “philosophy of tragedy” begins where the “philosophy of everyday life” ends. The book made Shestov known in Russia and set the theme of his later work. It is read today as an early document of existential thought and as an influential, if one-sided, interpretation of both authors.

Connections

Builds on

• Notes from Underground1864 · Fyodor Dostoevsky

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• 1938Athens and Jerusalem