SOURCE: "Lou Andreas-Salomé," in The Hibbert Journal, Vol. 58, January, 1960, pp. 149-56.

[In the following essay, Hobman offers an overview of Andreas-Salomé's life.]

Lou Andreas-Salomé wanted love—the love of man and the love of God—and she took what she wanted. Throughout her whole being and throughout her whole life she was filled with an awareness of God. This RussoGerman woman writer, famous on the Continent but scarcely known in England, divided her autobiography [Lebensrückblick: Grundrißeioiger Lebenser innerungen, 1951] into separate parts, not in chronological order but according to her experiences; one of the last sections, about Sigmund Freud, is an account of her close friendship with him. She was his disciple, and her intuitive understanding of men and women was further enlarged by his discoveries concerning the psyche, but although she learned much from him, she never learned to explain away religious faith as an illusion. The title of the first and most important chapter in the story of her life is Experience of God.

She recalls that as a very small and naughty child, if she was occasionally whipped by her adoring parents, she complained of this treatment to God who invariably agreed heartily with her resentment; indeed it made him so angry that, for the sake of the father and mother whom she dearly loved, she then persuaded him to ignore the whole affair. In a postscript to this book the editor, Ernst Pfeiffer relates that as an old woman shortly before her death in 1937 she said: "No matter what happens to me, I never lose the certainty that in the background there are arms open to receive me."

Her mysticism was bound up with a strongly erotic temperament and a passionate zest for life. She would not accept any form of orthodoxy and already in adolescence gave up the Protestant creed in which she had been brought up. "He who loves God does not need a Church," was a Russian saying which she quoted with approval. She felt that this explained a peculiarity of Russianized Christianity, which gave devotion less to the clerical hierarchy than to individual pilgrims, "in whose footsteps anyone could walk, so that this reverence included something of which each man in secret felt himself capable. Conversely, it could happen to any man to find himself in the position of one condemned—a criminal." This attitude accounted for a lack of discrimination in values, a kind of fatalism, since all things for good or evil lay ultimately in the hands of God.

Lou Andreas-Salomé believed that, in spite of all their superstition, the Russian masses provided a basis of profound primitive strength for the educated classes as well, and that in this passionate inner life the tensions of sexual love were somehow lessened, so that love was accepted with greater natural simplicity in Russia than in more civilized nations. She analyses the Slav attitude as though it were also her own, as no doubt to some extent it was. Although she was of mixed, partly German origin, and spent the greater part of her adult life in Germany, she seems to embody a point of view which belongs to Eastern rather than to Western Europe, where goodness and morality are not necessarily equated. Educated Russian women of the nineteenth century might have been puzzled by the idea of subordinating personal emotion to a generalized code. Famous English-women, on the other hand, were usually moral, not in the accepted sense only, but in their efforts at improving their social surroundings. Their faith in public opinion, and therefore in Parliament, to redress social evils was the result of living in a country with democratic institutions, however imperfect. In Russia any faith in reform was almost inevitably bound up with the desire for revolution, and Lou Andreas-Salomé was neither a political rebel, nor indeed was she politically minded at all. In her life and work she was first and foremost an artist, and her concern was with the individual and not with society. The edifice of religion seemed to her a dreary ruin, cumbering ground which was urgently needed for a more rational development, yet she was no rationalist. She was a primitive impulsive creature, avid for life, awed by its mystery. As a child she comforted herself by talking to God as a friend, and in old age she still depended upon his love.

She sought the reflection of her own feelings in the hearts of her friends. Many years after she had refused Nietzsche's offer of marriage, she published a long book about him, an analysis of his nature through his works, and she was convinced that religious genius permeated all that he had written. According to her, his entire development sprang from his own loss of faith, from his "emotion over the loss of God." He was a split individual who had "achieved health through disease, genuine adoration through illusion, genuine affirmation and enhancement of the self through self-wounding." In the same way, in the poet Rilke, it was the mystic to whom she responded out of the depth of her own nature. She gave him an understanding which bound them together during a passionate friendship of nearly thirty years. He left the manuscript of his Book of Hours in her keeping until in 1905 his publisher persuaded him to let it be brought out. After she had sent it back to him, he wrote to her of his longing for her presence, and said that the old prayers were re-echoing within him, "vibrating inwardly down to the very foundations, and echoing outwardly far beyond myself. Echoing to you …"

Louisa (Ljola) von Salomé, later always known as Lou, was born in St. Petersburg on February 6th, 1861. Her father, General von Salomé, was of Huguenot descent, whose ancestors had emigrated from Avignon, and after the French Revolution had wandered across Germany to the Baltic Provinces, where he was born. He had been brought to St. Petersburg as a little boy and had there received a military education. He was given a patent of hereditary Russian nobility after he had taken part in putting down the Polish insurrection of 1830. His wife was of mixed Danish and German origin, and at home the family spoke German or sometimes French. This was by no means unusual in the cosmopolitan society of the Russian capital, where foreign languages were much in fashion. The fact that they were Protestant made the General's wife feel herself an emigrant in a Greek-Orthodox land, and she passed on something of this feeling to her children. Her husband, on the other hand, felt deep love for the narod, the common people, which found an echo in Lou.

As the sixth child and only girl, she was cherished by her family, so that in after life she said that her instinct led her to seek a brother in every man whom she met. To judge by an early picture she was a beautiful little girl, with boyishly short curly hair, a high forehead, full sensuous lips, and eyes which seemed to be asking a question of the world.

In spite of all the affection by which she was surrounded she seems to have been a curiously lonely child, and something of a rebel against authority from her earliest years. Like all imaginative children she was much given to making up stories, and in bed at night, with two dolls beside her pillow, she told these stories to God, beginning with an invariable formula: "As thou knowest." Sometimes she told them to her family, but was to discover with a shock that not every audience was favourably impressed. One day, on her return from a walk with a little cousin, she related a dramatic adventure which was supposed to have befallen them both on the way, when to her consternation she saw the other child staring at her, not in admiration, and heard her exclaim: "But you're telling lies!" Her father once brought home for her from a Court ball a fine large cracker, which was said to contain a dress. Lou at once pictured to herself a golden robe, and when it was explained that the gown could only be made of tissue-paper, with perhaps a little tinsel trimming, she refused to pull the cracker at all. As long as it remained intact she could keep her illusion, and that mattered more to the child than reality.

She was devoted to her parents, especially to her father, who liked to fondle her, but their caresses always ceased as soon as her mother—Muschka—came into the room. Sometimes in the summer the latter, who enjoyed seabathing, took her for a drive to the coast. On one such occasion, when she was still very young, she watched her mother in the water through a little window in the bathing-hut, and suddenly cried out eagerly: "Oh, dear Muschka, do drown!"

Laughing, her mother called back: "Why, child, then I should die."

Lou's response to this was a shout of "Nitschevol" (No matter.)

She was once bitten by a favourite dog who, to her great grief, had to be destroyed, because hydrophobia was rampant in the town. Told that a mad dog usually attacked his beloved master before anybody else, she was in anguish lest—having gone mad herself—she might bite him whom she loved above all else on earth. It was only in later life that she realized the full implication of this fear of injuring her father; in childhood she seemed to herself to love both parents equally.

One winter's day, when she was eight years old, walking down the frozen stone steps in front of the house she slipped and fell. An adjutant of the Czar who happened to be passing at the moment rushed to her aid, but himself fell down, and there they both sat on the ice, opposite one another, the handsome young officer laughing, and the little girl gazing at him in silent ecstasy: she was for the first time in love.

Her father died when she was eighteen, and soon afterwards she took the unusual step of leaving the Church officially. He had originally obtained permission from the Czar to found a German Reformed Church in St. Petersburg, yet in spite of this she felt inwardly certain that, unlike her mother, he would have approved the honesty of her action, no matter how much her lack of faith might have grieved him. Her adolescence was unduly tormented and prolonged, until an event occurred which ended her youthful loneliness and changed the future course of her life.

Somebody persuaded her to hear a sermon by a Dutchman, chaplain to the Dutch Embassy and the most famous Protestant preacher in St. Petersburg. He was a man of liberal and unorthodox views, and she immediately recognized in him a kindred spirit, who saw the world as she saw it, and to whom she was linked by invisible bonds. She felt this so strongly that she wrote and asked for an interview; her request was granted and she appears to have been received literally with open arms. Soon she was visiting him regularly, and was being instructed by him in religious history and philosophy. She worked hard under his severe tuition, perhaps too hard, for on one occasion, either because she was over-tired or else because she was emotionally overwrought, he took her on his knee and she lost consciousness in his arms. He was a widower with two children, one of them near her own age, but that did not prevent the adoration which filled her whole being. On the contrary, the very fact that he was so much older and wiser than herself, pastor and teacher, only inflamed her heart the more, as though the profound capacity for love, which had once been devoted to God, was now blended with love for a God-like human being.

The girl was living in a romantic fairy-tale, but the man's affection for her was realistic and practical, and he intended to make her his second wife. He understood the childlike nature of her feelings, and in order not to startle her he did not reveal his intentions at first, no doubt hoping that in time the master-pupil relationship would be transmuted into the more perfect one which he desired. He did not guess that, in an attempt to raise a young girl's dream to the plane of reality, the whole thing would be completely shattered. Lou had adored him as though he were a God, but at the moment when he asked her to marry him the cloak of divinity fell from his shoulders, and he became almost a stranger. The magic cracker was opened, revealing tinsel instead of the golden robe of glory which she had imagined. Much later she made the whole affair the theme of a novel, Ruth, in which she recorded this episode in her own life.

The middle-aged man must have suffered a disillusion as great as her own, but he loved her well enough to continue to help her. He persuaded her to study at the University of Zurich, and prepared her for her entrance. She studied there during the winter of 1881-82, and then, on account of her ill-health, her mother came and took her away to Rome. Here, through mutual acquaintances, she met Friedrich Nietzsche, who already had an international reputation. A friend was with him, a young graduate of philosophy, a half-Jew called Paul Rée, and soon the three were inseparable, referring to themselves as the Trinity. Such triangular relationships are proverbially untenable: Nietzsche fell in love with the brilliant girl, but Lou preferred Paul Rée.

She tried to make Nietzsche understand that marriage was against her principles, and sent Rée to him as the bearer of her refusal of his offer. In spite of this he seems to have considered himself engaged to her, and after she had left Rome he strove in his letters to put her against his former friend. She went to Bayreuth on a short visit to hear Wagner's operas, and there met Nietzsche's sister, Elizabeth, who was insanely jealous of her and made a scandal out of Lou's friendship with a Russian artist who was there at the same time. There were quarrels and recriminations, not improved by the fact that she declared her intention of setting up house together with Rée, as a pair of friends. Madame von Salomé sent for one of her sons to try and dissuade his sister from such a compromising step, but she had made up her mind, and it was not until many years later that she came to understand how deeply she had made her mother suffer by her unconventional behaviour.

Lou and Paul Rée settled in Berlin and remained together for several years, travelling a good deal, and everywhere meeting famous writers and artists. She began to write herself, novels and short stories (her first book was called The Struggle for God), and Rée finally decided to take up the study of medicine. For the sake of his work they thought it best to live apart for a time, although she had actually suggested sharing his studies; such a step was unnecessary, he declared, for two people who would never part. While she was living alone in a pension she met a man who came to teach German to some Turkish officers living there. Karl Friedrich Andreas, later Professor of Oriental Languages, was a reserved and melancholy man with an admixture of Malayan and Armenian blood. She does not give any account of his wooing, but merely states that she became engaged to him in May 1887. She insisted that it was to make no difference to her relationship with Paul Rée, and at first both he and Andreas agreed. However, the former soon realized that the situation was impossible, and one evening he came to say goodbye and stayed until it was almost dawn. After he had gone, Lou found a little photograph of her as a child, which he had left behind, wrapped in a piece of paper on which he had written: "Be merciful. Do not try to find me."

Paul Rée subsequently settled in the Engadine as a doctor and devoted himself to the poverty-stricken population. He was killed in a mountain accident.

A month after she became engaged, in June 1887, Lou von Salomé was married to Karl Friedrich Andreas.

They lived at first in Berlin and later in Gottingen, where Professor Andreas taught at the University. They had a literary and artistic circle, and entertained their friends with tea and cake or sandwiches and a glass of wine. Their tastes were simple and they shared a great love of nature and of animals. Lou visited her mother in Russia at intervals, and wrote books and essays and reviews, and in later life, after she had taken up psycho-analysis, she accepted patients for treatment. On the whole, both she and Andreas seem to have found contentment in their marriage, which lasted for many years, although towards the end they became inwardly estranged. Her account of her husband, written after his death, is full of affection.

In 1897, when Lou was thirty-six, a young man of twentytwo was introduced to her at the theatre, whose name was Rainer Maria Rilke. An essay of hers, "Jesus the Jew," had recently appeared in a literary review, and after their meeting he wrote to thank her for having written it. He sent her a poem, and bought roses which, however, he was too shy to present to her, although he wrote that for her all the roses in the world were blossoming. It was the beginning of a relationship and a correspondence which lasted until the end of his life. The letters of this excessively neurotic poet, full of lush outpouring and sentimental yearning, read strangely to English eyes. Lou was his burning bush, he was her slave or her king, but actually he seems in some ways to have been more like her son. He hated his mother, who during his early childhood had dressed him like a little girl and treated him as one. At the age of ten he had been plunged from this hothouse environment into the icy atmosphere of an Austrian military academy, and the gross bullying to which he had there been subjected had caused him inner torment for the rest of his life.

Lou gave him what he most needed—understanding of his morbid and his mystic moods, and a sense of protection and stability, and he came to depend on her more than he ever depended on any of the many other women of whom he was enamoured. E. M. Butler says in her biography, Rainer Maria Rilke, that he and Lou were lovers, and that she became pregnant by him; if so, the child must have been stillborn, for she does not refer to it in her own book. Professor Andreas accepted the relationship between his wife and the poet, whatever it may have been. Rilke stayed with them in Berlin, wandering barefoot with Lou in the pinewoods round the town, helping her to chop wood, to cook and wash up. They studied Russian together, and at one time they translated The Seagull into German. In 1899 they all three went on a journey to Russia, and the following year the two friends went again, this time without the Professor. They spent several weeks in Moscow, then travelled about the country and ended up in St Petersburg. They visited Tolstoy, but do not appear to have been very warmly welcomed by the sage or his wife.

In 1901 Rilke married the sculptress Klara Westhoff, a pupil of Rodin, but he never took any responsibility, either as husband or later as father of their child. In due course they were separated, and on that occasion Lou took Klara's part, recognizing the cause in the poet's intense egoism. She believed in Rilke's redemptive mission, and thought that God was the object of his art: "in the fulfilment of the task 'God' his humanity and his poetic faculty met: the human being in living and immediate receptivity, the poet in action, to create that which he had received."

At the outbreak of the 1914 War he at first shared the general exaltation, but the frenzy did not last, and Lou thought that he had already "anticipated the suffering of the war by the agonies he had undergone in the realization of what we human beings are" (E. M. Butler). She was not a Pacifist herself, although she felt a general sense of guilt which all must share for the War. Her friendship with Rilke lasted through all the subsequent vicissitudes of his life, and when he lay dying in Switzerland in 1926, by his own wish accounts of his illness were sent to her alone.

Rilke's neurosis was the chief cause of Lou's intense interest in psychology. She attended a psycho-analytic Congress in Weimar in the autumn of 1911, and asked Freud to teach her his technique. He was amused by her request, for at that time there was not yet any institution for disseminating his principles; nevertheless she persisted, and six months later arrived in Vienna, to work under him, and also to learn from his former colleague, who had broken away from him, Alfred Adler. She very soon gave up attending the latter's lectures, and concentrated entirely on the teachings of Freud. Lou began as his disciple—she ended as his friend. She, who had been a mother-figure to Rilke, found in Freud a father-figure to herself, and in this reversal of réles she was given a hitherto unknown sense of peace. She rejoiced in his scientific dedication, and the stark honesty of his rationalism, and she loved the man. The last time she was with him, in 1928, when he had already become the victim of a terrible disease, she began to weep bitterly at his sufferings. "Freud did not reply," she wrote, "I only felt his arm around me."

She sent him an essay for his seventy-fifth birthday in the form of an open letter, called "My Thanks to Freud." In reply he wrote that hers was the true synthesis of an artist, in which she had transformed the body dissected by the analyst's knife once more into a living organism, and he asked her to have the letter published as a pamphlet under the title, "My Thanks to Psycho-Analysis." She always cherished this letter from him, and had it read aloud to her a few days before her death.

Here in outline is a brief sketch of a remarkable woman. She was a modern intellectual, but she was also gifted with the artist's sensibility to a realm outside the perception of the intellect. As a child she had refused to open a cracker lest its contents should prove a disillusion; as a woman she had no such apprehensions—fearlessly she explored life, and discovered that it held a golden robe.