The article is concerned with the origin problem of the pen name adopted by the Russian philosopher Leib Schwartzman (Lev Shestov). The author questions the explanation of Shestov’s pseudonym in the 1920s–1930s as provided by the philosopher himself and quoted by A. Steinberg in his memoirs. As the pen name Lev Shestov first appeared as early as in 1897–1898, it must have stemmed from a fascination with the works of I. Turgenev, the subject of L. Shestov’s book written at the time. Shestov was certainly well acquainted with Turgenev’s novel Smoke [Dym] (1867), which has a female protagonist named Tatiana Shestova. No coincidence then that Tatiana was the name that L. Shestov chose for his daughter born in 1897. The article also considers other hypotheses which complement rather than contradict each other. The pseudonym Lev Shestov, therefore, is examined as an intertextual microtext denoted by an allusion and characterized by a wide range of symbolic meanings.