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critic philosopher psychologist theologian author
Lou Andreas-Salome was born Luiza Gustavovna Salome on February 12, 1861 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She was the daughter of Gustav Ludwig Salome,a Russian general, and Louise (Wilm) Salome. She was the youngest of six children, their household was wealthy and well-cultured.
Lou and her siblings spoke Russian, German, and French, and she attended her brothers classes.
Seeking an education when she was 17, Salomé persuaded the Dutch preacher Hendrik Gillot, 25 years her senior, to teach her theology, philosophy, world religions, and French and German literature. She studied theology at the University of Zurich.
Her mother took her to Rome, where Andreas-Salome met the philosophers Paul Ree and Friedrich Nietzsche. The three became inseparable, and planned for a time to live together in a sort of commune-cum-think tank. Andreas-Salome became deeply involved with Nietsche, who wanted both to marry and teach her. She was to be his greatest disciple. Andreas-Salome, with characteristic independence, refused both offers, but her relationship with Nietzsche was productive in other ways. He wrote Thus Spake Zarathustra (1892) while inspired by Andreas-Salome, and she, in turn, wrote a fictional account of their affair in her first novel (under the pseudonym Henri Lou), 1885’s Im Kampf urn Gott (“A Struggle for God”).
In 1887, Andreas-Salome married Friedrich Carl Andreas. Resch wrote that she did so “for unknown reasons.” Whatever the reason, the marriage was not a particularly successful one, though she remained married to Andreas until she died. Andreas-Salome left him by 1898. Supposedly, their marriage was never consummated. Andreas-Salome, who had become a notable theater critic and biographer during their brief co-habitation, set out on the intellectual and romantic peregrinations that made up the rest of her life.
While involved with Friedrich Pineles, she wrote several short stories detaillng her sexual exploits, such as “’Internal Men' Ward,” “One Night,” and “Group of Girls.” She also began to Publish feminist-philosophical articles, such as “Homo Sapiens as Woman” (1899). In this article, she idealistically imagines that women's true selves can emerge utside of professional or romantic situations.
By this time she had emerged, herself, in a variety of ways: not only was she experienced in the ways of love, but she had also published a biography of her old friend Nietzsche, a novel (Ruth, 1895), and a host of articles.
It was at this point, in 1897, that Andreas-Salome met Rainer Maria Rilke, then only twenty-two. Rilke pursued her with a poetic fervor that completely overwhelmed her, and she eventually bent herself to the task becoming his helpmate. She nurtured and taught the young poet, but also supported him through his terrible depressions.
Along with other works, during this period Andreas-Salome published a collection of her stories, Fenitschka und Eine Ausschweifung: Zwei Erzählungen (1898), an account of her ill-starred friendship with the playwright Frank Wedekind, and Ma: Ein Portrait (1901), a novel about a widow who refuses any role but that of motherhood, claiming that women's “one cultural act” and one identity is enmeshed with childbirth. It was a time that proved remarkably productive for Andreas-Salome, though little of her writing from this period is still read.
Following her rejection of Rilke, Andreas-Salome also rejected the life of an artist. She returned to Pineles and began to write philosophical articles about the nature of the self. Her fascination with selfhood brought her, in 1911, to the Weimar Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, where she met Sigmund Freud. He allowed her to attend his lectures, and within six months Andreas-Salome had become expert in the new science. She began to practice as a psychoanalyst, as well as publish some of her ideas in articles on the psychology of the artist. In these she outlines how different “temperaments” guide artists to different genres - lyric, drama, or epic. Occasionally, too, Andreas-Salome would revisit her own creative impulses. She published dramas and poetry, expressing in these forms what she experienced in her study of psychotherapy.
Andreas-Salome also continued to write about the powerful personalities with whom she congressed. In 1928 she published a biography of her lover and “brother,” Rainer Maria Rilke, and in 1931 she published a collection of reminiscences, letters, and diaries relating to her last great teacher. Mein Dank an Freud: Offener Brief an Prof Sigmund Freud zu seinem 75 Geburtstag (“My Thanks to Freud: An Open Letter to Professor Sigmund Freund on His 75th Birthday”). This last volume, written as a letter to Freud, discusses the culmination of her consideration of eroticism, hysteria, and obsession.
Andreas-Salome died on February 2, 1937. In 1958 her journal recording her studies with Freud and his pupils during the years 1912 to 1913 was published as The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salome.
Lou Andreas-Salome is best remembered for her intensely cerebral accounts of her own erotic and romantic adventures. She wrote in a wide variety of genres, including biography, novels, poetry, and psychoanalytic studies, and through them influenced the writing careers of such notable thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria-Rilke, Paul Ree, and the Viennese physician Friedrich Pineles.
Andreas-Salome’s theories of the psychology of women have remained influential, as have her records of the major intellectual developments of her day. Most importantly, however, she was influential simply by living the life that she wished, by being the independent, brilliant, thrilling woman she wanted to be.
Born into a strictly Protestant family, Lou Andreas-Salome grew to resent the Reformed church and Hermann Dalton, the Orthodox Protestant pastor, causing her to refuse being confirmed, while also leading her to be interested in philosophical, literary, and other religious topics.
Quotations:
“Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.”
“The main thing is that life-faith is essentially and vitally present, by means of which we survive.”
“Should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?”
“If you have no more happiness to give: Give me your pain.”
“The main thing is that life-faith is essentially and vitally present, by means of which we survive.”
She was, by all accounts, not only a stunningly beautiful woman, but a bewitchingly intelligent interlocutor, so that until the end of her life, men and women of all stripes were prone to fall madly in love with her.
Hendrik Gillot became smitten with Salome that he planned to divorce his wife and marry her. Salomé refused, for she was not interested in marriage and sexual relations; she was downright disappointed and shocked by this development, but remained friends with Gillot.
In 1882 the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche fell in love with her, but she rejected his proposal of marriage. In 1887 she married the Orientalist Friedrich C. Andreas, a professor at the University of Göttingen.
In 1895 Andreas-Salome began an affair with Friedrich Pineles, a younger physician from Vienna.
In 1897 she met the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was 14 years younger than she and who also fell in love with her. She called herself his wife, and his sister, it was a love affair that lasted four years, but which marked Rilke for the rest of his life.
