Anton Tchekhov, and Other Essays
Essays on Tragic Consciousness, Metaphysical Rebellion, and the Crisis of Rational ConsolationBy Lev Shestov
Length5h 29m
About this audiobook
In *Anton Tchekhov, and Other Essays*, Lev Shestov reads literature as a site of philosophical crisis rather than as an ornament to established ideas. His central essay on Chekhov attends to the writer's restrained irony, medical realism, and compassionate depiction of lives constrained by habit, social convention, and the apparent meaninglessness of existence. The accompanying essays extend this inquiry to the spiritual and intellectual tensions of Russian literature, challenging the confidence that reason, progress, or historical necessity can explain human suffering. Shestov's style is aphoristic, polemical, and intensely interpretive: less conventional literary criticism than a dramatic encounter with authors whose works expose the limits of rational consolation. The book belongs to the late-Russian tradition of religious-philosophical criticism while anticipating modern existentialism. Shestov, born Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann in Kiev in 1866, developed his philosophy amid the upheavals of Russian intellectual and political life. A Jewish Russian thinker who later lived in European exile, he was deeply concerned with the conflict between abstract systems and the irreducible singularity of lived experience. His readings of Chekhov and other writers reflect a lifelong resistance to positivism, determinism, and the belief that suffering can be justified by universal laws. Literature offered him a form of knowledge unavailable to systematic philosophy. This volume will reward readers interested in Chekhov, Russian literary culture, existential thought, and the philosophical possibilities of criticism. It is especially valuable for those prepared to encounter literature not as settled interpretation, but as a provocation to rethink freedom, despair, faith, and the boundaries of reason.
Audiobook details
GenrePhilosophy
Length5 hrs 29 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateNov 24, 2023
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1A Brief History of Modern Philosophy (Annotated)
26The Force of Argument
2INTRODUCTION
27VI
3I
28Swan Songs
4II
29VII
5III
30What is Philosophy?
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6IV
31IX
7V
32What is Truth?
8VI
33X
9VII
34More of Truth
10VIII
35XI
11THE GIFT OF PROPHECY
36I and Thou
12(For the twenty-fifth anniversary of F. M. Dostoevsky's death.)
37THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE
13I
38The Theory of Knowledge as Apologetics
14II
39Truth and Utility
15III
40Philosophers and Teachers
16PENULTIMATE WORDS
41Truth as a Social Substance
17I
42Doctrines and Deductions
18De omnibus dubitandum
43Truths, Proven and Unproven
19II
44The Limits of Reality
20Self-renunciation and Megalomania
45The Given and the Possible
21III
46Experiment and Proof
22Eternal Truths
47The Seventh Day of Creation
23IV
48What does the History of Philosophy teach us?
24Earth and Heaven
49Science and Metaphysics
25V
50A Tacit Assumption
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