Lou Andreas-Salomé

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Lou Andreas-Salomé (née Louise von Salomé) (February 12, 1861 – February 5, 1937) was a Russian-born intellectual, author of many books, psychoanalyst and spiritual companion of 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. Seeking an education beyond a typical woman's station of that time and place, 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, so she could acquire a university education. The journey was also intended to be 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 Rée's friend Friedrich Nietzsche to do the same. (Salomé wrote a controversial 1894 study, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werke, of Nietzsche's personality and philosophy^[1]. 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 moved to Berlin and lived together until a few years before her celibate marriage^[2] to linguistics scholar Carl Friedrich Andreas. Despite her opposition to marriage and open relationships with many other men, Salomé and Andreas remained married from 1887 until his death in 1930. The distress caused by Salomé's co-habitation with Andreas caused the morose Rée to fade from Salomé's life despite her assurances.

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

Her relationship with 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.^[2]

Salomé's literary and analytical studies became 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 days, "I have really done nothing but work all my life, work ... why?" And in her last hours, as if talking to herself, she is reported to have said, "If I let my thoughts roam I find no one. The best, after all, is death." [Peters, 'My Sister, My Spouse', p. 300] She wrote 15 novels and other non-fiction studies such as "Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten" (1892), a study of Ibsen's woman characters.^{[citation needed]}

Salomé is also mentioned in "Lou Salomé," A Sophe Lux song from their 2007 album "Waking the Mystics."

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Salomé, 2001
2. ^ ^{a b} Mark M. Anderson, "The Poet and the Muse", The Nation, July 3, 2006, p. 40-41.

[edit] References

Salomé, Lou:

• Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werke, 1894; Eng., Nietzsche, tr. and ed. Siegfried Mandel, Champagin IL: University of Illinois Press Univ. of Illinois Press, 2001
• "You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke", tr. Angela von der Lippe, Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2003
• "Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome: Letters", New York: Norton, 1985
• "The Freud Journal", Texas Bookman, 1996

• Peters, H. F., "My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salome", New York: Norton, 1962
• Binion, R., Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple, foreword by Walter Kaufmann, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968
• Vollmann, William T., Friedrich Nietzsche': The Constructive Nihilist, The New York Times, August 14, 2005.
• Le diable et sa grand-mère [1922], tr. and annotated by Pascale Hummel, 2005
• L'heure sans Dieu et autres histoires pour enfants [1922], tr. and annotated by Pascale Hummel, 2006
• Foerster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth, Friedrich Nietzsche et les femmes de son temps [1935], tr. and annotated by Pascale Hummel, Paris: Michel de Maule, 2007

[edit] External links

• Lou Andreas-Salomé (A comprehensive site in German)
• Entretien autour de Lou Andreas-Salomé (Interesting interview in French)