The Poet and the Muse

The legend preceded her: the Russian-German beauty, not yet 21, who so infatuated Friedrich Nietzsche that he proposed marriage to her before bitterly denouncing her and admonishing his followers to "not forget the whip" in their relations with women. Louise von Salomé was born in 1861 in St. Petersburg into a German-Baltic family and, like her contemporary Alma Mahler, made a career of subjugating talented men with her sexuality, intelligence and steely independence. Her conquests included her pastor in Russia (he 42, she 17), Nietzsche and Nietzsche's philosopher friend Paul Rée (with whom she lived in Berlin on the condition they not have sex), the gifted linguist and Armenian-German aristocrat Friedrich Carl Andreas (whom she married on the same condition) and, in platonically collegial fashion, Freud.

But Rilke was her biggest coup. She met the unknown German-speaking poet from Prague in 1897 when he was 21 and she, fifteen years his senior, already a well-known essayist and cultural personality. He began showering her with effusive love letters and precious verse that she initially ignored before finally "succumbing" and then quickly dominating him. They became lovers and constant companions for the next few years in a typically countercultural, proto-hippie, turn-of-the-century way, walking barefoot through the woods, eating fruit paps with yogurt, studying religion as an artistic experience and art as a form of religion. Tolstoy, whom they traveled to Russia to meet, was their patron saint.

Though Salomé was a formidable intellectual, novelist and practicing psychoanalyst, her most lasting contribution to European culture may well be her role as poetic midwife to the greatest German lyric poet since Hölderlin. It was she who recognized the makings of genius in the bundle of neuroses, preciosity and über-feeling that made up the young "René Rilke," helping him through various personal crises to accept the "Other" in his psyche without which he never would have forged the Modernist style of the New Poems, his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge or his poetic masterpiece, the Duino Elegies. Soon after their first encounter she starts calling him by the "fine, German name" Rainer; teaches him to read Tolstoy and Pushkin in the original Russian; opens for him the doors to wealthy patrons, aristocrats and artists; and after their affair is over, continues to advise him about his love relationships, his diet, his choice of doctors, his writing. Denied as a lover, he grovels for a meeting, a word of advice, any sign of the woman he still sees as "the single bridge to [his] future." She responds by turning herself into the recipient of his increasingly disturbing depressions and hallucinatory states. "Write about how you feel and what's tormenting you," she counsels him in 1903, a full decade before studying psychoanalysis, "write it out of your system." She more than anyone is the person he wrote for, his first and only great love, his ideal reader. The printed dedication to his verse collection The Book of Hours (1905) reads simply "laid in the hands of Lou for all time."

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.