The wanderer and his aim (the L. Shestov’s hermeneutics)

Abstract

The L. Shestov’s philosophy, in its method and style, is a kind of hermeneutics, - that is an interpretation of the another’s textes. The thinker named his approach “the wandering through souls”; his aim was the revelation (by means of the text) of the author’s spiritual catastrophe, - in Shestov’s opinion, certainty fact of the writer’s life. The Shestov’s hermeneutics is the comparative one; the philosopher compares often the Russian writer’s views (Tolstoy’s, Dostoevsky’s, Chehov’s) with the Nitzsche’s phenomenon. To 1900 Shestov used the hermeneutic’s method for grounding his philosophy of life; from his book “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche” (1902) the thinker develops the philosophy of tragedy (the philosophy of death). The great writers passed their own experience to some heroes of their works: that is the source of the mature Shestov’s hermeneutics.