Lou Andreas-Salome
Encyclopedia : L : LO : LOU : 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 [link], psychoanalyst [link] 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, Lou 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 Lou persuaded 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 Lou that he planned to divorce his wife and marry her, Lou and her mother fled to Zurich, Switzerland so she could acquire a university education. The journey was also meant to prove beneficial for Lou's physical health; she was already coughing up blood by this time.
Lou's mother took her to Rome, Italy when she was 21. At a literary salon in the city, Lou became acquainted with Paul Rée, an author and compulsive gambler with whom she proposed living in an academic commune. After two months, Lou persuaded him to accept her as a partner. On May 13, 1882, Lou had also persuaded Friedrich Nietzsche, a friend of Rée's, to do the same. (Lou wrote a controversial study, "Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werke" (1894), of Nietzsche's personality and philosophy (Salomé, 2001).)
The three traveled with Lou's mother through Italy and considered where they would set up their "Winterplan" commune. Arriving in Leipzig, Germany in October, Lou and Rée separated from Nietzsche after a falling-out between Nietzsche and Lou, in which Lou (with characteristic narcissism) insisted that Nietzsche was desperately in love with her. Lou and Rée set up housekeeping in Berlin and remained together until a few years before her marriage to linguistics scholar Carl Friedrich Andreas. Despite her opposition to marriage and open collaboration (and affairs) with many other men, Lou 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 Lou's life despite her assurances.
Lou 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 Looking Back, and her 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. She 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 [link].
References
- Salomé, Lou (2001). "Nietzsche". Translated and edited by Siegfried Mandel. Champaign, Ill.: [Univ. of Illinois Press].
- Andreas-Salomé, Lou (2003). "You Alone Are Real to Me: Remembering Rainer Maria Rilke". Translated by Angela von der Lippe. Rochester, N.Y.: [BOA Editions]
- 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.
External links
- [Lou Andreas-Salomé] (A comprehensive site in German)
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.