Anton Tchekhov, and Other Essays

“Great privations and great illusions so change the nature of man that things which seemed before impossible, become possible, and the unattainable, attainable.””

— Lev Shestov

“Tolstoi, and also Socrates and Plato, and the Jewish prophets, who in this respect and in many others were very like the teachers of wisdom, probably had to concentrate their powers wholly upon one gigantic inward task, the condition of its successful performance being the illusion that the whole world, the whole universe, works in concert and unison with them. In Tolstoi's case I have elsewhere shown that he finds himself at present on the brink of Solipsism in his conception of the world. Tolstoi and the whole world are to him synonymous. Without such a temporary delusion of his whole being”

— Lev Shestov