_Postscript._--Leon Shestov is fifty years old. He was born at Kiev, and studied at the university there. His first book was written in 1898. As a writer of small production, he has made his way to recognition slowly: but now he occupies a sure position as one of the most delicate and individual of modern Russian critics. The essays contained in this volume are taken from the fourth and fifth works in the following list:-- 1898. _Shakespeare and his Critic, Brandes._ 1900. _Good in the teaching of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching._ 1903. _Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy._ 1905. _The Apotheosis of Groundlessness: An Essay on Dogmatism._ 1908. _Beginnings and Ends._ 1912. _Great Vigils._ ANTON TCHEKHOV (CREATION FROM THE VOID) Résigne-toi, mon cœur, dors ton sommeil de brute. (CHARLES BAUDELAIRE.) I Tchekhov is dead; therefore we may now speak freely of him. For to speak of an artist means to disentangle and reveal the 'tendency' hidden in his works, an operation not always permissible when the subject is still living. Certainly he had a reason for hiding himself, and of course the reason was serious and important. I believe many felt it, and that it was partly on this account that we have as yet had no proper appreciation of Tchekhov. Hitherto in analysing his works the critics have confined themselves to common-place and _cliché_. Of course they knew they were wrong; but anything is better than to extort the truth from a living person. Mihailovsky alone attempted to approach closer to the source of Tchekhov's creation, and as everybody knows, turned away from it with aversion and even with disgust. Here, by the way, the deceased critic might have convinced himself once again of the extravagance of the so-called theory of 'art for art's sake.' Every artist has his definite task, his life's work, to which he devotes all his forces. A tendency is absurd when it endeavours to take the place of talent, and to cover impotence and lack of content, or when it is borrowed from the stock of ideas which happen to be in demand at the moment. 'I defend ideals, therefore every one must give me his sympathies.' Such pretences we often see made in literature, and the notorious controversy concerning 'art for art's sake' was evidently maintained upon the double meaning given to the word 'tendency' by its opponents. Some wished to believe that a writer can be saved by the nobility of his tendency; others feared that a tendency would bind them to the performance of alien tasks. Much ado about nothing: ready-made ideas will never endow mediocrity with talent; on the contrary, an original writer will at all costs set himself his own task. And Tchekhov had his _own_ business, though there were critics who said that he was the servant of art for its own sake, and even compared him to a bird, carelessly flying. To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Tchekhov was the poet of hopelessness.