Disciple of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, although captivated by the great authors of the Russian novel Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the Russian thinker of Jewish origin Lev Shestov - known until now in Spain and France, his adopted country, like Léon Chestov - leaned towards the short fragment and the aphorism to rehearse a difficult present in which moral, social and political utopias have lost credibility. In the work that we publish, unpublished in Spanish, he makes curious observations loaded with irony, in which he does not spare criticism of positivism and the "good intentions" of secularized reason, heir to the Enlightenment.

In addition to being a combative philosopher, Shestov cultivated literary criticism, for which he was both admired and reviled. Among his admirers are thinkers of the stature of Edmund Husserl and Martin Buber. He also devoted insightful studies to the works of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Descartes, and Spinoza, to whom he perused his entire life.

His thought is a polyhedron: anti-rationalist, anarchist, and at the same time religious in the Pascalian sense of the term, although steeped in the work of Nietzsche until Kierkegaard replaced the German thinker.

Shestov fought nothing more and nothing less than the same history of Western philosophy, which he said was nothing more than a long battle between reason and faith, between secularism and religion, between Athens and Jerusalem.