Lev Shestov belongs in the stream of the religious existentialists and was deeply interested in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche (see also Vol. 2) and Soren Kierkegaard; he knew and was close to Nikolai Berdyaev and in touch with Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (see also Vol. 5), and Martin Buber. In his own strong voice, however, deeply reliant not on the God of the conventional churches but on the Old Testament as he interpreted it, he denounced conventional metaphysics and the domination of a rigidly structured worldview in which we are governed by necessity. He believed that we have fettered ourselves with crutches and limits and made ourselves puny; we must seek a new God---with God "all things are possible." His most important early "existential" work, an attack on traditional metaphysics, was The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905, entitled in English translation All Things Are Possible), to which D. H. Lawrence (see Vol. 1) provided the introduction. The novelist wrote:""Everything is possible,' this is his really central cry. It is not nihilism. It is only a shaking free of the human psyche from old bonds. The positive central idea is that the human psyche, or soul, really believes in it-self. . . . No ideal on earth is anything more than an obstruction, in the end, to the creative issue of the spontaneous soul." In a brilliant introduction to Athens and Jerusalem (1938), Bernard Martin says, "Shestov suggests . . . that modern man can perhaps reach the God of the Bible only by first passing through the experience of his own nothingness, and by coming to feel, as Nietzsche did, that God is not. . . . "Sometimes [says Shestov] this is the sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence . . . [and] awakens. . . . Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?"'