Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Chapter 18 - The Salomé Affair
from PART THREE - The Nomad
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- PART ONE Youth
- PART TWO The Reluctant Professor
- PART THREE The Nomad
- Chapter 15 The Wanderer and His Shadow
- Chapter 16 Dawn
- Chapter 17 The Gay Science
- Chapter 18 The Salomé Affair
- Chapter 19 Zarathustra
- Chapter 20 Nietzsche's Circle of Women
- Chapter 21 Beyond Good and Evil
- Chapter 22 Clearing the Decks
- Chapter 23 T he Genealogy of Morals
- Chapter 24 1888
- Chapter 25 Catastrophe
- Chapter 26 The Rise and Fall of The Will to Power
- Chapter 27 The End
- Chapter 28 Nietzsche's Madness
- Chronology
- Notes
- Bibliography of Secondary Literature
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Lou Salomé
On or about April 26, 1882, in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, Nietzsche kept an appointment with a young Russian who, beautiful and brilliant, was to be the cause of the most traumatic events of his life and a significant change in his intellectual outlook. The meeting had been arranged by Paul Rée, who sat in a nearby pew, pretending to read some notes but actually, for reasons that will become apparent, keeping a sharp eye on proceedings. Though the Messina poems suggest the intimation that its course might not be entirely smooth, they also suggest that Nietzsche was already in love with love, was ready to be rescued from his life of solitude. And so he greeted her with an echo of Romeo and Juliet almost certainly prepared beforehand: ‘what stars’, he asked, ‘have brought us here together?’ (In the just completed Gay Science he says farewell to Wagner with the thought that different ‘stellar orbits’ have drawn them apart: here he suggests the reverse.)
The recipient of this portentous introductory line was Lou Salomé (see Plate 24), at twenty-one eleven years younger than Rée and sixteen years younger than Nietzsche. Lou was the daughter of a Baltic German who, in the pro-German atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century St. Petersburg (both Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II had German wives and mothers), had risen to the rank of general in the Tsar's army.
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- Friedrich NietzscheA Philosophical Biography, pp. 339 - 356Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010