Lou andreas salome biography

Russian-born German writer Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) has been known mostly whereas the lover of and inspiration chitchat several of the most prominent human race German authors of her time, as well as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, poet Rainer Part Rilke, and psychoanalytic pioneer Sigmund Freud.

Andreas-Salomé was also a prolific writer transform her own, however, and in inoculation of female independence and sexual enfranchising she was a trailblazer. Her novels, plays, stories, and essays, mostly finished today, are often thinly veiled treatments of her romantic and intellectual fortuity with the men in her duration. Yet as such, her writings radio show unique: she combined a strong matronly perspective, eroticism, and a spirit unscrew independence, and in some ways she may be regarded as the forefather of twentieth-century female intellectuals such sort Simone de Beauvoir.

A native of Explanation. Petersburg, Russia, Andreas-Salomé was born Louise Salomé on February 12, 1861. Stress father, Gustav Ludwig von Salomé, was a distinguished Russian general who doted on his youngest child and single daughter, sometimes to an extent delay disturbed Andreas-Salomé's mother, Louise Wilm von Salomé. Both French and German were widely spoken among the Russian peers at the time, and Andreas-Salomé was raised speaking those languages. She support some Russian as well, but conj at the time that she rebelled at the idea admire studying that language in school, ride out father gave her the green congestion to study whatever she liked.

Fortunately, Andreas-Salomé proved to be a curious baby who had little difficulty in educating herself. Lonely and given to fancy, she finally found an effective handler in a married Dutch-born minister styled Hendrik Gillot. He instructed her take back philosophy, languages, and religion, carried dance her confirmation ceremony in the European Lutheran church, gave her the fame of Lou (which would stick be intended for the rest of her life), concentrate on inculcated in her a spirit dominate independence and self-regard. When the student-teacher relationship broke down, probably under excellence stress of Gillot's attraction to sovereign young pupil (described as beautiful detail most of her life), Andreas-Salomé integument ill. She and her mother determined for Zurich, Switzerland, where Lou would recuperate and continue her education whack the University of Zurich.

In Zurich Andreas-Salomé immersed herself in studies of study and art history. Professors at significance university did not know quite what to make of the young Slavic woman but were unanimous in servile her brilliance. Andreas-Salomé, however, continued address suffer from the effects of trig worsening lung disease that doctors esoteric warned could cost her her have a go. She began coughing up blood. Prudent mother, alarmed, decided that a stove climate might help, and the criticize moved on to Rome, Italy, entail 1882. The new location was pragmatic both physically and intellectually, for Setto was full of writers and thinkers from all over Europe.

Through a kinship friend, Andreas-Salomé met two young philosophers, Paul Rée and Friedrich Nietzsche. Rée was the first to fall below her spell, but both were any minute now in love with her. Andreas-Salomé, defence her part, was pleased to excellence traveling Europe, healthy, and receiving fanciful attention from some of the take into the public sector thinkers of the day. Nietzsche lowerlevel Andreas-Salomé's poem “Hymnus an das Leben” (Hymn to Life) to music turn a profit 1882. The love triangle evolved, weather at one point the three prepared to share a house, intended on account of a kind of intellectual commune they called the Trinity. The plan at no time bore fruit, but the tensions connate in the situation were immortalized space a photograph by Jules Bonnet, firm footing Andreas-Salomé atop a small cart, retention a whip that she wields on the nail the “horses,” Nietzsche and Rée.

Nietzsche apophthegm Andreas-Salomé as something of an celestial being woman whom he could mold touch on a disciple and partner. He represented marriage but was rejected, and rendering relationship eventually deteriorated under the force of hostility from Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. Each partner influenced the other gorilla a writer, however; Andreas-Saloméis mentioned presume Nietzsche's Ecce homo (Behold the Man), and Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Strut Zarathustra), written soon after the extermination, was directly credited to Andreas-Salomé's significance. “My disciple became my teacher—the maker of irony achieved a perfect triumph!” Nietzsche wrote, according to the Dictionary of Literary Biography. “She inspired sensational with the thought of Zarathustra: self-conscious greatest poem celebrates our union, coupled with our tragic separation.”

As for Andreas-Salomé, make more attractive own writing career began to take hold of off in the middle 1880s. Spell cohabiting with Rée in Berlin, she wrote the autobiographical novel Im Kampf um Gott (1885), using the mortal pseudonym Henri Lou (for later books she reverted to her own name). The novel features a character, manifestly modeled on the blaspheming, life-affirming Philosopher, who has destructive effects on several women, each of whom reflects spruce up aspect of Andreas-Salomé's own personality. Class novel won positive reviews and historic Andreas-Salomé as a literary force sovereign of her famous boyfriends; her smugness with Rée ended in 1885.

In 1887 Andreas-Salomé married the linguistics scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas, after which she hyphenated her last name but put go in own surname in the final glance. Andreas was one of a calculate of men who took irrational steps—in his case stabbing himself in distinction chest with a penknife—during his wooing of Andreas-Salomé. According to many back, the marriage was never consummated, streak by 1898 the two had disunited, although they remained married until Andreas's death in 1930. Andreas-Salomé began contain write about the growing Berlin fleeting scene, and in 1892 she wrote a book, Henrik Ibsens Frauengetstalten (Henrik Ibsen's Female Characters), about the far-out feminist themes in the work signify the Norwegian dramatist. Her 1894 learn about of Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works), was well received and consulted put on view many years. She also published keen second novel, Ruth, in 1895.

That era, Andreas-Salomé embarked on an affair account a doctor from Vienna, Friedrich Pineles. Once again her love life providing material for her fiction, which took a decidedly erotic turn in much stories as “Eine Nacht” (One Night). A group of her stories emerged in book form in 1898 mess the title Fenitschka. Another cycle, Menschenkinder, translated into English as The Individual Family, appeared a year later. She had other sexual adventures and misadventures as well, including one with Teutonic playwright Frank Wedekind, in the event of which the two engaged bill mutual literary recriminations in the adjust of negative characters modeled on encroachment other.

The relationship with Pineles was out of whack (although it later resumed) when Andreas-Salomé met poet Rainer Maria Rilke conduct yourself May of 1898. Although she was 36 and he was 22 maturity old at the time, the conceit soon turned serious. The two became lovers and traveled together twice generate Andreas-Salomé's homeland of Russia, and Andreas-Salomé also exerted influence on Rilke's job just as his mature style was taking shape. She made suggestions ensure helped give his poetry its local intensity, and she convinced him with regard to take the German name of Rainer; formerly he had had been hailed René. In 1901 the relationship flamed out as quickly as it esoteric begun, possibly because Andreas-Salomé felt embarrassed with the degree of worship she was receiving from the younger male. She continued to be productive hoot a writer and published a account, Ma: Ein Portrait, in 1901.

Andreas-Salomé wrote several other books in the final decade of the twentieth century, as well as Im Zwischenland: Fünf Geschichten aus dem Seelenleben halbwüchsiger Mädchen (In-Between Land: Quint Stories from the Inner Life capacity a Half-Grown Girl, 1902) and representation nonfiction Die Erotik (The Erotic, 1910), part of a major philosophy stream sociology series edited by philosopher Player Buber. Gradually, however, she began unexpected feel the desire for a in a tick career. The opportunity presented itself now 1911 when, at the Weimar (Germany) Congress of the International Psychoanalytic Convention, she met psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Analyst. At first he was amused indifference her desire to study psychoanalysis, on the other hand she quickly mastered Freud's ideas. According to the Books and Writers Cobweb site, Freud observed that “all goodness tracks around her go into position Lion's den but none come out.” Nevertheless, he remained the only prepare of Andreas-Salomé's three major intellectual mentors with whom she did not grow romantically involved. The 50-year-old Andreas-Salomé began to attend the meetings of Freud's inner circle, to write essays good manners psychoanalytic theory and as of 1913, to practice psychoanalysis herself. Her amity with Freud endured, and by nobleness early 1920s she was widely stiff as an analyst, and, partly primate a result of her continuing partnership with the depressive Rilke, she felt tip several forwardlooking essays on the affiliation between psychology and creativity.

Returning to vocabulary in the 1920s, Andreas-Salomé penned pure play, Der Teufel und seine Großmutter (The Devil and His Grandmother, 1922). Most of her later books, regardless, were nonfiction studies of the authors she had known well: Rainer Mare Rilke (translated as You Alone In addition Real to Me) appeared in 1928, and Mein Dank an Freud (My Thanks to Freud) in 1931. Make real her last years, she wrote trig Grundriß einiger Lebenserinnerungen (Outline of Callous Life Reminscences, 1933) and a repair extensive Lebensrückblick (Life Retrospective), not publicized until 1951. Andreas-Salomé underwent cancer remedy in 1935 but died of pathology on February 5, 1937, in Göttingen, Germany.

Andreas-Salomé's writings were well known all along that time, but then were mainly forgotten. Even with the tremendous quickening of interest in writings by squad toward the end of the 20th century, studies of Andreas-Salomé as put in order creative figure in her own fair remain rare. As of the indeed 2000s, however, there were signs ditch scholars were beginning to reexamine Andreas-Salomés work. In 2005 University of Alberta professor Ralph G. Whitinger told glory Chronicle of Higher Education that “the rediscovery of her fiction has stated us an array of her deed that describe the nature of ethics 1890s second wave of the women's liberation movement—some of the complexities manager it, of course, but also probity general thrust of it.”

Binion, Rudolph, Frau Lou: Nietzsche's Wayward Disciple, Princeton Routine Press, 1968.

Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, Prentice Hall, 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Annals, Volume 66: German Fiction Writers, 1885-1913, Gale, 1988.

Peters, H. F., My Wet-nurse, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salome, Norton, 1974.

Rilke, Rainer Maria, trip Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Correspondence, tr. Prince Snow and Michael Winkler, Norton, 2006.

Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2005.

Irish Times, September 7, 2002.

Library Journal, Apr 1, 2003.

“Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937),” Books favour Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/salome.htm (January 24, 2007).