Dawn in Podil. The Jewish quarter of Kyiv from times past. March 21, 2024, sunrise and missiles over the Dnipro river — although it was impossible to see the sunrise from inside the bomb shelter. 
In a frame on my desk there is a scrap of paper that Václav Havel once left behind on a stage in Bratislava. Pravda a láska, he wrote. Truth and love, with some florid lines doodled around the letters. It was November 2009, the twentieth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, and the Central European Forum had organized a series of conversations at the Hviezdoslav Theatre in the Slovak capital. Havel likely said nothing new that day: he had long insisted that truth and love would prevail over lies and hatred. And there are moments when they have and moments when they do. Evil regimes are sometimes vanquished. In November 1989, on Wenceslas Square in Prague, crowds jingled their keys and called out “For whom the bell tolls!” The bell was tolling then for the communist regime. Borders were unsealed, censorship was lifted, files were opened. What had been kept in darkness was released into light. I was enchanted by this unclosing, by all the literary references, and by the dissidents once gathered around the extraordinary Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, who spoke of responsibility, conscience, and truth. Above all I was fascinated by the idea that truth was something whose ontological reality was as indubitable as the keys chiming in a chorus to a line by John Donne. In searching for where this truth that could be lived in came from, I began to read backwards, following the references: Havel to Patočka to Martin Heidegger to Edmund Husserl, the founder of a philosophical tradition called phenomenology. In communist Eastern Europe, dissidents had drawn upon this tradition in confronting Marxism-Hegelianism and its “iron laws of History.” In the decades following Stalin’s death, phenomenology, and still more so the Heideggerean existentialism that grew from it, became an antidote to the “Hegelian bite.” Patočka had been Husserl’s last great student. The Polish philosopher Krzysztof Michalski had in turn been Patočka’s. And Krzysztof read Husserl with me. I would not have stood a chance without him. I had anticipated that it would be Heidegger who would be impenetrable, but in fact it was Husserl where I encountered a wall. His writing was so much drier and more technical. Obsessed with the Cartesian “clarity and distinctiveness,” Husserl was unable, it seemed to me, to write a clear sentence. I struggled to bond with him. What was he like as a person? I asked Krzysztof. “He was not like you,” Krzysztof told me. “He had no emotional life.” Krzysztof insisted that Husserl lived purely for philosophy. Perhaps this is why, while the philosophical literature on the founder of phenomenology is very dense, the biographical literature is very thin. And this is what led me to the philosopher Lev Shestov. There is a single piece of great writing about Husserl, and it is a text in Russian by Lev Shestov — his most impassioned critic and his most earnest admirer, and at the end of his life one of his closest friends. Against Husserl’s profound commitment to reason, Shestov insisted on the limits of reason and the impossibility of epistemological certainty, on the need to search for truth not in light but in darkness. I came to Shestov through Husserl — which is to say, neither through Ukraine, nor through Russia, both subjects of my work, but rather, if this can be reduced to national categories at all, through Czech-via-German philosophy. I came to him in an oblique way, reading him as an interpreter of an elusive thinker whose ideas, seemingly impassable, were nonetheless foundational to a philosophy of responsibility that feels ever needed. “Verehrter Freund und Antipode!” Husserl addressed Shestov affectionately, and with a sense of humor otherwise rare in his writing. Who was this “esteemed friend and antipode”? He was born in 1866 in tsarist Kyiv to a Jewish family with a dominating father, and given the name Yehuda Leib Shvartsman. Was Shestov a Russian Jew or a Ukrainian Jew? Today the question suddenly matters. “Ukrainian Jew” feels like a neologism, a self-conscious identity that made its grand entrance during the Revolution of Dignity on the Maidan in 2013–2014. And right now, in the midst of this gruesome war, as Russians slaughter Ukrainians for no reason at all in a nihilist frenzy and Kyiv feels to me like the capital of the free world, I want Shestov to belong to Ukraine. And yet the embrace of anachronism feels disingenuous; it involves the projection of categories into the past that were not those of the time. Nor was Shestov a Soviet Jew: he was formed by the tsarist empire, he studied in Kyiv, Moscow, and Berlin; later he lived in Coppet, Geneva, and Paris. He was neither a monarchist nor a Bolshevik, neither a Russian nationalist nor a Jewish nationalist. He was a cosmopolitan who rebelled against his observant Jewish father, who adopted a Russian pseudonym as a young writer, yet who never in any way disavowed his origins. Shestov spoke French and German and read Nietzsche as intensely as he read Dostoevsky. Self-reflective in an ironic sort of way, he was fond of the Russian saying that what is healthy for Germans is fatal for Russians. Once, late in their lives, when the two philosophical antipodes were together, Shestov played with that expression. “What is healthy for a Jew is fatal for a German,” he said to Husserl. And Husserl had not understood what Jews had to do with their conversation: Husserl had converted to Protestantism as a young man. In his mind, he was not a Jew but a German. And Shestov, for Husserl, was not a Jew, but a Russian. After all, Shestov neither kept kosher nor attended synagogue. But Shestov did not accept this interpretation. For him, once a Jew, always a Jew. In February 2024,
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