Lou Andreas-Salomé

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Lou Andreas-Salome
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Lou Andreas-Salome

Lou Andreas-Salomé (née Louise von Salomé) (February 12, 1861 – February 5, 1937) was a Russian-born intellectual, author of many books[1], psychoanalyst [1] and companion to many male and some female artists and authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Born in St. Petersburg to a Russian-Jewish army general and his wife, Salomé was their only daughter; she had five brothers. She sought an education beyond a typical woman's station of that time and place, so when she was seventeen Salomé persuaded the Dutch preacher Hendrik Gillot, twenty-five years her senior, to teach her theology, philosophy, world religions, and French and German literature. When Gillot became so smitten with Salomé that he planned to divorce his wife and marry her, Salomé and her mother fled to Zurich, Switzerland so she could acquire a university education. The journey was also meant to prove beneficial for Salomé's physical health; she was already coughing up blood by this time.

Salomé's mother took her to Rome, Italy when she was 21. At a literary salon in the city, Salomé became acquainted with Paul Rée, an author and compulsive gambler with whom she proposed living in an academic commune. After two months, Salomé persuaded him to accept her as a partner. On May 13, 1882, Salomé had also persuaded Friedrich Nietzsche, a friend of Rée's, to do the same. (Salomé wrote a controversial 1894 study, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werke, of Nietzsche's personality and philosophy[2].)

The three traveled with Salomé's mother through Italy and considered where they would set up their "Winterplan" commune. Arriving in Leipzig, Germany in October, Salomé and Rée separated from Nietzsche after a falling-out between Nietzsche and Salomé, in which Salomé believed that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her.

Salomé and Rée set up housekeeping in Berlin and remained together until a few years before her celibate marriage[3] to linguistics scholar Carl Friedrich Andreas. Despite her opposition to marriage and open collaboration (and affairs) with many other men, Salomé and Carl remained married from 1887 until his death in 1930. They also set up housekeeping in Berlin, a situation which drove the morose Rée out of Salomé's life despite her assurances.

Salomé was a prolific writer, and wrote several little-known novels, plays, and essays; she also was a creative feminist. Throughout her married life, she engaged in affairs and correspondence with German journalist Georg Lebedour, German poet Rainer Maria Rilke on whom she wrote an analytical memoir (Andreas-Salomé, 2003), Viktor Tausk and Viennese psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, among many others. Accounts of many of these are given in her volume Lebensrückblick.

Her relationship with and influence upon Rilke was particularly close. Salomé was fifteen years his senior. They met when he was 21. They were lovers for several years and correspondents until Rilke's death; it was she who began calling him Rainer rather than René; she taught him Russian, to read Tolstoy (whom he would later meet) and Pushkin. She introduced him to patrons and to many other people in the arts, and remained his advisor, confidante, and muse throughout his adult life.[3]

Salomé's literary and analytical studies took on such a vogue in Göttingen, the German town in which she lived her last years, that the Gestapo waited until shortly after her death by uremia in 1937 to burn her library. Salomé is said to have remarked in her last hours of life that when she allowed her thoughts to roam, she found no one but herself.

She wrote 15 novels and other non-fiction studies such as "Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten" (1892), a study of Ibsen's woman characters [1].

Contents

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937)
  2. ^ Salomé, 2001
  3. ^ a b Mark M. Anderson, "The Poet and the Muse", The Nation, July 3, 2006, p. 40-41.

[edit] Works

  • "Die Erotik" (1911) - a study of sexual love

[edit] References

  • Peters, H. F. (1962). "My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salome". New York: W. W. Norton.
  • Vollmann, William T. (2005). Friedrich Nietzsche': The Constructive Nihilist. The New York Times, August 14, 2005.
  • Le diable et sa grand-mère (1922), traduction, annotation et postface de Pascale Hummel (2005)
  • L'heure sans Dieu et autres histoires pour enfants (1922), traduction, annotation et postface de Pascale Hummel (2006)
  • Binion, R. Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple. With a foreword by Walter Kaufmann. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. (1968)
  • Giroud, Francoise. (2002). "Histoire d'une femme libre" Paris: Fayard.
  • Elisabeth Foerster-Niezsche, Friedrich Nietzsche et les femmes de son temps (1935) . Traduction, annotation et postface de Pascale Hummel, Paris, Michel de Maule, 2007.

[edit] External links

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