February 5, 1937

A dreadful translation is included below to align Lou Andreas-Salome (February 12, 1861 to February 5, 1937) within her times. The translation is of part of a poem written by Rilke to the subject of today's post.

I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; ....

Before Rilke there was Nietzsche. Although she later wrote about her friend, (1894)  her letters to him do not survive and his pain at the ending of their relations in 1882 is without a clear context. We include a translation of his analysis of her, found in Biddy Martin's  Woman and Modernity: The (life)styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé (1991) . Martin prefaces our quote this way. Nietzsche's 

"drafts and letters [to her] manifest a fury so primitive as to suggest that much more was shattered for him than friendship or intellectual exchange." Here is an excerpt of Nietzsche's words:

I have never fooled myself about a person and in you there is that drive toward a holy self-seeking that involves the impusle toward obedience to what is highest. You have apparently confused it, through some kind of curse, with its opposite, the self-seeking and the pleasure in exploitation of a cat that wants nothing other than life.

And she studied with Freud later, becoming one of the first female psychoanalysts. She wrote about all of these men. Lou Andreas-Salome was born in St. Petersburg and died in Gottingen; she was a comet in the sky of modernity.