Salome, Lou
NAME: (Andreas-) Salome, Lou.
ACHIEVEMENTS: Intellectual and woman of letters.
NICKNAME/ALIAS: None.
DATE/PLACE OF BIRTH: 12th February 1861, St Petersburg, Russia.
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: 5th February 1937, Gottingen, Germany. Aged 76.
DISCIPLINE: Writer/Psychoanalyst.
FIELD: Literature/Psychology.
LANGUAGE: German.
PARENTS: Gustav von Salome and Louise Wilm.
SIBLINGS: Three brothers, Alexander, Robert, Eugene.
SPOUSE: Friedrich Andreas.
CHILDREN: None.
EDUCATION: English school in St Petersburg, Petre Gymnasium.
MAJOR WORK: "Friedrich Nietzsche in His Works" (1894), "Rainer Maria Rilke" (1928), "My Gratitude to Freud" (1931).
LIFE AND TIMES: Salome's early years were spent in the privileged world of the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary Russia. In September 1880, accompanied by her mother, she entered Zurich University to study religion, philosophy and history of art.
Her professors considered her to be a brilliant student, but, in 1882, she became unwell, so her mother took her to Italy, where they settled in Rome. There she became friendly with Malwida von Maysenburg, a German feminist and writer, whose villa was a meeting place for artists, politicians and writers.
Through Maysenburg, Salome met Paul Ree, a young German philosopher, who fell in love with her. Although Salome didn't share his feelings, they set up a platonic study group in a shared household with his friend, <fallen for by> Nietzsche*. Nietzsche, aged thirty-eight, also fell in love with Salome, but she rejected him too.
In July 1882, they went to Bayreuth for the first performance of <didn’t like music of> Wagner's* "Parsifal", which she didn't enjoy. She was beginning to feel uneasy in Nietzsche's company, probably feeling that his attachment to her was too strong. Salome left Neitzsche and joined Ree in Berlin, where they lived together as friends. Nietzsche, realising that the plan for him to join them had fallen through, retreated into solitude and despair.
Salome and Ree lived in Berlin for five years, where they were both financially independent. They studied, wrote, travelled and threw themselves into the intellectual life of the city. In 1884, Salome wrote "A Struggle for God", about the effect on man of losing faith in God and which reflected her own feeling of agnosticism.
In 1887, she met Friedrich Andreas, an Orientalist, who was fifteen years older than her. Unlike the men she had met so far, Andreas would not accept rejection and after he attempted suicide with a knife in front of her, she agreed to marry him.
Salome refused to consummate the marriage and always treated Andreas as a father figure, continuing her life as before. In the early years of her marriage she felt trapped and found solace in reading the works of <wrote about> Ibsen*, following which she wrote a book about the female characters in his plays, published in 1892.
Writing more seriously, she set out to earn enough money from articles and books to pay for periods of travel. Travelling extensively, to Paris, Vienna, St Petersburg, Stockholm, Salzburg and Munich, she gained a reputation as a femme fatale and literary figure. She was accepted into Europe's intellectual avant garde and men continued to fall in love with her despite being consistently rejected.
Becoming part of an artistic circle which included <knew> Strindberg * and, as a member of a group of writers, the "Freie Volksbuhne", she promoted the staging of plays which had not received a public license. The group also published a magazine advocating free theatre, socialism in politics and naturalism in the arts.
In 1890-1892, she wrote articles in defence of Ibsen in "Freie Volksbuhne" and often visited Paris, becoming a part of the circle who supported the Free Theatre there. In 1894, she wrote a book about Nietzsche.
While in Vienna in 1895, she met Friedrich Pineles, a doctor seven years her junior. He became her lover and was regarded as her "unofficial husband" but she refused to divorce Andreas, choosing to stay with Pineles only when she was in Vienna and when they travelled together.
In 1897, she visited Munich where, at the age of thirty-six, she began an affair with <had affair with> Rilke*, an unknown Austrian poet. He was only twenty-two years old and was studying at university. The affair lasted for three years and, for Rilke, this was the most significant event in his life. For Salome, it was the first relationship where an intellectual and emotional soul mate was also someone for whom she felt physical attraction.
When she returned to Berlin, Rilke followed her and they travelled together, studying the art of the Italian renaissance and visiting Russia, where they met <met> Tolstoy*. On a further trip to Russia in 1900, they travelled with Leonid Pasternak, his wife and their son, Boris. On this trip, Salome decided to end the affair with Rilke and finally broke with him in 1901.
In 1902, her book of short stories with a strongly psychological theme, "The Twilight Zone", was published. The next year, Andreas became Professor of West Asiatic Languages at Gottingen University and they moved to Gottingen with their housekeeper, with whom he eventually had two children.
Salome continued to maintain her reputation as a femme fatale and as a woman of letters and her interests turned increasingly towards psychology. In 1910, she wrote “Eroticism”, a book suggested by Martin Buber, an editor of sociological studies.
On her fiftieth birthday, she was asked to write a brief autobiographical sketch. This appeared in the "Literary Echo" in 0ctober 1911. In the same year she met Paul Bjerre, a Swiss psychotherapist, who became her lover. He later said of Salome that she was evil in the Nietzschean sense.
She accompanied Bjerre to the Third Psychoanalytical Congress in Weimar in September 1911, where <attended lectures by> Freud* was attending. Salome was immediately intrigued by Freud, who allowed her to attend his lectures and his evening seminars. Uniquely, she also gained permission to go to the lectures of Alfred Adler, one of Freud's disciples, who had now turned away from Freud's theories.
Salome took a series of young lovers, the most important them being Dr Victor Tausk, sixteen years her junior. She returned to Gottingen and began to practise as an analyst as well as continuing to write. In 1914, encouraged by Freud, she agreed to act as a teaching analyst to doctors at Konisberg, who were training as analysts themselves.
In 1928, she published "Rainer Maria Rilke", again using her psychological knowledge of the man in relation to his work and in 1931, she wrote "My Gratitude to Freud", a book which he praised as a genuine synthesis of his theories.
In her last years she continued to analyse and to write, staying in Gottingen where she
died, at the age of seventy six, in 1937.
ASSESSMENT: Salome is remembered because of her friendships with leading intellects of her time.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: None.
ONELINER: Lou Salome, 20th-century woman of letters
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Peters, H F, My Sister, My Spouse, A biography of Lou Andreas-Salome, Victor Gollancz Ltd., London 1963.
Binion, Rudolph, Frau Lou, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1968.