RILKE’S CORRESPONDENCE with Lou Andreas-Salomé is the record of his most intense and enduring friendship. The letters they exchanged over some twenty-five years, half his lifetime, chart his tormented maturation as a poet under the guidance of a shrewdly observing confidante who had been his lover before she became his counselor in all matters of his aggrieved soul. It is to her that he addressed his most trenchantly self-revealing “confessions,” some of them plaintive with no small admixture of self-pity, many of them unrelenting in their exploration of his psyche’s innermost complexities and their search for whatever resources his frail constitution and precarious hold on sanity might provide. And Lou responded with an unusually clear-eyed intelligence and compassion. Without the support of her analytical skills and her honest objectivity Rilke might well have succumbed to the confusions and self-destructive anxieties he traced back to the psychological devastations he had carried inside himself since childhood. Instead, her insights into his personality, without ever evading unpleasant truths or deflecting them into professional jargon, elicited from him a style of writing in which, as he presents his experiences to her for understanding, the eloquence of epistolary conversation becomes difficult to distinguish from the art of narrative prose.
Louise von Salomé was born in St. Petersburg on February 12, 1861, the youngest of six children and the only daughter of a German-Baltic family with Huguenot ancestors. Her father, Gustav von Salomé (1804–1879), was a general in the czar’s service. Her family felt Russian even though its social contacts did not extend much beyond the immigrant community. They lived in apartments across from the Winter Palace reserved for high-ranking generals and kept a country house near Peterhof, the imperial summer residence. She was brought up in the reformed Protestant Church but left it at the age of seventeen in protest against its restrictive rules. Her search for a God who could fulfill her personal needs led her toward Hendrik Gillot, the charismatic pastor of the Dutch Legation and a tutor of the czar’s children. Without her parents’ knowledge he became her private instructor and spiritual-intellectual guide, a kind of Father-God persona with whom she read Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Kierkegaard, and books on comparative theology. Her daydreams and fantasies, in other words, while never fully dispelled, were being attenuated by enthusiastic yet disciplined studies of systematic philosophy—until Gillot, age forty-two and a husband with two children, proposed marriage to her. She let him confirm her at his hometown of Santpoort but then quickly departed for Zürich to study theology and art history until the recurrence of pulmonary bleeding forced her to abandon her scholarly pursuits. When her condition did not improve during a cure in Scheveningen (on the North Sea near The Hague), her mother, early in 1882, took her south, eventually to Rome.
There she joined a circle of young intellectuals, avid readers of Schopenhauer and passionate Wagnerians, who gathered at the house of the expatriate writer Malwida von Meysenbug. Through her she met Paul Rée, a philosophical historian of morals whose ideas failed, however, to gain academic approval, which meant the end of his quest for the stability of a university position. He was twelve years her senior, and during that spring introduced her to his former teacher Friedrich Nietzsche, then thirty-seven years old and still virtually unknown as a thinker. Both men were quickly captivated by her and each eventually proposed marriage—which she declined. Rée soon moved into an apartment in Berlin with her and remained a close friend (and unrequited lover) for over three years, her partner in philosophical studies with a small group of like-minded young thinkers and her companion during frequent travels. Nietzsche was for over half a year her rigorous teacher and briefly even thought that she might become his intellectual heir. But by the end of 1882, in no small measure duped by the jealous intrigues of his sister Elisabeth, he felt betrayed by his independent-minded and at times incautious disciple and denounced her with bitter intensity.
In 1886 Lou became engaged to Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930), a man with an extraordinary background. Andreas was born in Batavia (now Jakarta), the son of a German-Malay mother and an Armenian father, a Prince Bagratuni from Isfahan in Persia. At the age of six he attended a private school in Hamburg and in 1860 enrolled in a Gymnasium in Geneva in preparation for studies of classical and oriental philology at various German universities. In 1868 he obtained a Ph.D. and went to Denmark to study Persian manuscripts in the Copenhagen Library and to learn Scandinavian languages and literatures. Following his military service in the Franco-Prussian War, he studied in Kiel. In July 1875 he was to join a scientific expedition to Persia as an expert in Sassanide inscriptions. But he arrived half a year late, having contracted cholera in Bombay. He stayed in Persia for six years as a language teacher and, for a time, as the supervisor of the country’s postal system. In January 1882 he returned to Germany in the company of a Prince Ihtisam-ed-daule, physically exhausted and destitute. It took him the rest of the year to recover. In 1885 he met Lou, who was living in the boarding house where he gave private lessons in Turkish and Persian to Prussian diplomats, officers, and businessmen.1
Andreas was a dark-bearded and passionately forceful man, fifteen years older than Lou. He was determined to overcome her resistance to marriage, and in the end accepted her condition that they abstain forever from having sex together. His courtship must have been tumultuous. Even on the day before they were to announce their betrothal he plunged a knife into his chest during an argument with her, barely missing an artery but collapsing unconscious. They were married a year later in June 1887, in a civil ceremony in Berlin-Tempelhof followed by a wedding in the church where she had been confirmed, the Reverend Hendrik Gillot officiating. The couple returned to live in Berlin, where Andreas had been appointed a professor of Persian (and later a professor of Turkish) at the newly established Institute of Oriental Languages, a position he had to relinquish two years later when colleagues questioned his academic credentials. After his dismissal he returned to working as a private language teacher. Lou, for her part, began to establish a career as a writer. The first years of their marriage were never free of tensions, in part because she felt guilty of having betrayed Paul Rée, in part because she and Andreas sought to hide their basic incompatibility behind the illusion that they were joined in a bond of high ideals. It was not long before their life together turned into a connubial father-daughter relationship rather than a mature companionship.
This arrangement appears to have remained placid enough until 1892, when Lou met Georg Ledebour (1850–1947), the editor of a socialist newspaper, Berliner Volkszeitung, and a highly-principled politician. Their love was mutual and serious. But Andreas forced her to renounce it some two years later after he had resolutely refused her requests for a divorce. Her immediate response was to immerse herself in long trips, to Petersburg, Paris, Switzerland, and Vienna, and to cultivate her friends among the emerging cultural elite. She gave the impression of a happily independent woman who lived a life of her own choosing. But it took her years to overcome her deep estrangement from her husband, a circumstance—as with so many other personal woes—she never mentioned in any of her letters. Later in life they settled for a polite co-existence, and Andreas acquired the dignified composure of a reclusive scholar.2
René Maria Rilke first met Lou Andreas-Salomé on May 12, 1897, at the Munich apartment of a mutual acquaintance, the novelist Jakob Wassermann. Rilke was twenty-one years old, a student of art history, prolific though nearly unknown as a poet but busily expanding the purview of his contacts. Lou was thirty-six and an established author.3 Soon after her arrival at the end of April to meet an old friend, Frieda von Bülow, he began to send her, anonymously, handwritten copies of his poems, along with effusive letters, which she shrugged off as an annoyance. He persisted, and soon she was enamored of him. They became lovers during a stay of three months (until September 8, 1897) in the farming village of Wolfratshausen in the foothills of the Alps. (It was during this period that “René” became “Rainer,” adopting the “plain fine, German name” by which Lou chose to call him.) For three and a half years, and with only three extended interruptions, they spent almost every day in one another’s company, at times under strained circumstances and more than once precariously close to an irreconcilable break. But to help them through such periods of stress there was the discipline of shared studies, most doggedly of Russian literature and culture, the routine of daily chores and the enjoyment of nature, and, not least, their need for complementary emotional support.
It is easy to dismiss the prolix weave of exalted adorations in Rilke’s earliest letters to Lou as so much ludicrous flattery. Their recipient, at any rate, distanced herself from them as soberly as she vetoed his plan to publish the nearly one hundred poems he had written for her and to call the volume Dir zur Feier (To celebrate you). She may well have done so with an intuitive awareness of what they foretold of Rilke: a still juvenile propensity for expressing erotic emotions in sacral language, and for imagining new experiences with an excess of grandiosely “inspired” subjectivity. Such foibles Rilke would learn to outgrow before long. But these early poems also suggest the outline of a poet-imago and a psychic disposition which he was to describe incessantly and respecify with ever new details throughout his life.
This self-image entails three aspects: (1) the presence of an exemplary artist (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Jens Peter Jacobsen, Rodin, Cézanne, Valéry, and others), existing in the imagination and implicit in all his epistolary monologues as a powerful, often overwhelming challenge; (2) his inner Enemy-Doppelgänger—what he and Lou called the “Other” in him—that is, the unknown, stubbornly defiant side of his personality, including his frequent physical ailments and his susceptibility to psychosomatic illnesses; and (3) an “understander,” preeminently, but not exclusively, Lou, as the embodiment of a superior mode of being, who will explain to him the anxieties and phobias that block his creativity, and whose empathic affirmations encourage him in his struggle to break through to new aesthetic beginnings. It was therefore inevitable that he should keep returning to her, even after their seemingly final break toward the end of February 1901.
The immediate cause of this separation was Lou’s angered reproval of Rilke’s decision to marry Clara Westhoff, whom he had met in September 1900 during his stay at the artists’ colony of Worpswede, near Bremen. But her remonstrations had a number of precedents, most notably her less-than-satisfactory reception of the diary he had written for her in April–May 1896 in Tuscany,4 and her frustration with the extreme mood swings he suffered on their long journey through Russia and the Ukraine in the spring and summer of 1900. Her own diary of this trip, to be sure, gives an exuberant account of their many profound experiences and revelations and only once points to her “not always good mood.”5 But her autobiography speaks of recurrent outbursts of “anxiety, almost states of terror” on Rilke’s part, of irrational behavior escalating into panic attacks and of “an explosive dissolution into feelings which tumbled over into a monstrous immensity—as if he felt a compulsion to let them overwhelm him.”6 She attributes these problems to his inability to reconcile “the conflict between hymnic experience and its expression in creative form,” calling it, in a paraphrase of his own words, a kind of pseudo-productivity “that has been led astray by fear, like some desperate substitute for the command”7 to give tangible, tensile shape to diffusely subjective impulses. This discrepancy between grand emotional transports and completely inadequate aesthetic means to structure them into poems made Rilke the spiritual pilgrim feel like a blaspheming outcast. In her words: he was far short of that “immanent harmony” and spacious resplendence with which “the great soul” makes productive use of “everything that falls into it.”8 And she, her nerves badly frayed by his morbidly monopolizing fixation on her, craved “quiet,—more being by myself, the way it was until four years ago.”9
Hence Lou’s abdication of her role as mother-protector in the reckoning of her “Last Appeal” (February 26, 1901), a letter that Francine Prose calls a “document remarkable for the imperious, heartless self-absorption disguised (from Lou herself, one senses) as compassion and concern.”10 And Lou’s advice that Rilke should abandon any expectation of “normal” happiness—as a husband with perhaps a supportive wife, among fellow artists, in the company of congenial friends—and only follow the “dark God” of his art can indeed be read as a retaliatory (and devastating) assault on an apprehensive bridegroom’s state of mind. But her assessments of his character and of his prospects are also, in large measure, accurate. And that could have well meant the end of their correspondence. Rilke, though, did not read her letter as his final castigation. After his monograph on Rodin had reassured him that in some new and deepest sense he could write, he probed in the summer of 1903 for an opening to revive the relationship, and when she acceded, reluctantly, to epistolary contacts, he responded with an outpouring of finely honed prose—as if now at last he had gained the confidence to express in artful letters his encounters with facets of a harsh reality that his Diaries had evaded.
Rilke’s life during the first decade of the new century, though never as unabatedly precarious as many of his letters suggest, continued to lack a sense of steadiness and assurance. His ambition as an artist, however, had found a clear purpose and direction: to accomplish the breakthrough to an absolutely modern aesthetic. He began to write a new type of short lyric, which he sometimes called a “Kunst-Ding”: a poem in which the obtrusive interferences of an authorial self and all subjective, accidental occasions have been replaced by an inwardly tensile, self-contained sculptural presence, delimited by strong contours but filled with an utmost of interacting visual and visible reality.
This fundamentally new way of creating art Rilke found exemplified in Rodin, and, with the fervor of a proselytizing convert, he sought to articulate it in ever expanding aesthetic reflections. His nearly immaculate Rodin, of course, is an “art-figure” in whom Rilke adored, again in consonance with cultural trends prevalent not only in Germany, a liberating Messiah of Art.11 In view of this it is surprising that none of his lyrics collected as New Poems (1907–1908) figure even tangentially in his correspondence with Lou. They are, after all, the evidence, most copiously written in August 1907 and during the following summer, that vindicated his sustained commitment to all that Rodin’s ethos of “rien que travailler” demanded.
It is true that Lou’s understanding of art remained conventional even as she may have recognized in Rilke the emergence of a supremely modern artist; and it is more than likely that she was put off by the gestures of haughty self-sufficiency in the New Poems, by their sometimes “hard” indifference to cruel impulses that generate aesthetically pleasing effects. Her attention, therefore, whenever it was being solicited, focused on Rilke the highly problematical individual. And so she did not become truly important to him again as a correspondent until the end of the decade.
The time after Rilke’s departure had been difficult for Lou as well. Her recovery from an anguished exhaustion and its lingering psychological causes was slow, even though, in October 1903, she had bought a spacious house in the country outside of Göttingen that was to be her permanent home for the rest of her life, and even though she had found, in the Viennese neurologist Dr. Friedrich Pineles, a devoted lover and a companion with whom she took frequent and often extended trips. But the state of her health remained worrisome. By early 1905 she was diagnosed as suffering from a heart condition that would continue to afflict her.
The crisis that caused Rilke to write Lou with renewed urgency was brought on by the poet’s acute disorientation after the completion in 1910 of his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He had hoped that he could rid himself of his destructive “Other” and unravel a spiritually suffocating web of traumatic memories by creating a fictional character through whom he might, so to speak, observe himself in the refraction of mirror images of his psyche. But instead of the expected therapeutic catharsis, he encountered feelings of blockage, emptiness, and irrevocable self-damage, and when after two years they persisted he turned again to Lou. “Can you understand,” he wrote to her from Duino on December 28, 1911,
that in the wake of this book I have been left behind like a survivor, stranded high and dry in my inmost being, doing nothing, never to be occupied again? The nearer I approached its end, the more strongly I felt it would mark an indescribable division, a high watershed, as I always told myself; but now it turns out that all the water has run off toward the old side and I am walking down into an arid world that stretches on unchanging.
Lou wrote back, and over the next three months they entered into an intense exchange (ten letters from him, eight or nine letters and a telegram from her, everything on her side now tragically lost), with Rilke this time forcing the question that in their earlier days had been the one Lou put to him: “What to do?”
One option was an extended psychoanalysis, and when on January 20 Rilke presented this to Lou as something for which he had already laid the groundwork, despite his distrust of its exploratory technique and his fears of its efficacy (“something like a disinfected soul results from it, a non-thing, a freakish form of life corrected in red ink like a page in a schoolboy’s notebook”), she responded swiftly on January 22 by urging against this course of action. The exchange marked a key moment for both of them,12 and especially for Rilke. Immediately upon writing Lou he received the “task” of the Elegies in a moment of epiphany on the cliffs of Duino, and by the time her January 22 reply reached him the whole of the First Elegy had already been written. He could thus receive her advice as corroboration not just of his own first impulse but of their profound rapport: “Kind heart, you speak to me while you write, I am so at home in the reading of your letters . . . ; my own feeling, that initial, ever anew strongest feeling to which you lend credence, has so prepared me for what you say that I find myself already persuaded” (January 24, 1912). And she does in some strange sense “come back” to him through her counsel. With Rilke once more on the verge of trying “normal” life, Lou repeats the gesture of her “Last Appeal,” yet in the process its black magic is undone. It would be during the following two or three years before the outbreak of the First World War, as the Elegies began to dominate Rilke’s poetic quest, that he could accept Lou’s insights into the psychology of his creative compulsions with the most consistently grateful consent. And this would be in no small part because her solicitude toward him and his importance for her seemed closer, more clearly genuine. Their exchanges, despite her at times almost impenetrable style, show a remarkable degree of interanimation: her insights are reflected in his images, and his metaphors follow the guidance of her observations, so that he feels relieved to exclaim: “You know and understand” (June 26, 1914).
Lou’s counsel against psychoanalysis was all the more remarkable considering her commitment to it. As early as 1910 she had taken up the systematic study of Freudian psychoanalysis—some say specifically for Rilke’s sake.13 After attending the Weimar Conference in the autumn of 1911, she wrote in April to Freud himself, asking permission to attend his 1912 Vienna lectures and even to participate in his private Wednesday evening sessions. Both requests were granted, and between October 1912 and April 1913 she became a student of Freud and a member of his inner circle, interacting with Adler, Jung, Tausk, Ferenczi, Eitingon, Abraham, and above all Freud himself, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. (Over two decades they exchanged some 200 letters.) She also became a theorist in her own right, publishing on narcissism and infantile sexuality. When she returned to Göttingen she set up a lay practice in her home (Freud, among others, sent her patients), and after 1914 her work as an analyst would be her chief passion.
Rilke and his closest confidante spent much time together during her frequent stays in Munich between 1914 and 1919, without, however, meeting again in person thereafter. Their correspondence, for this reason, takes on a new intensity only during and soon after the final completion of the Duino Elegies on February 11, 1922. At that moment, as if in some Rilkean dream of reparation, Lou becomes almost deliriously his reader, while he assumes in her reflections a significance for her comparable to that which Rodin once held for him. The feelings of rapproachment and full arrival in these letters (especially in Lou’s) make the infrequency of their epistolary contact after 1924 all the more lamentable. Their one crucial exchange of 1925 is especially disconcerting, not least because it leaves a number of questions, specifically about Rilke’s and Lou’s awareness of his fatal illness, and about his confusion over its symptoms and her perhaps over-analytical responses, in the realm of pure speculation. It also causes the whole correspondence to end on a note of failed understanding, as two intimately caring people seem to miss each other in differently impenetrable languages.
On November 30, 1926, Rilke returned to the Clinique Valmont sur Territet, near Montreux, which he had first entered three years earlier, hoping for an accurate diagnosis of his lingering illness. Since he was no longer capable of writing more than a few letters, he had his devoted friend Nanny Wunderly-Volkart send out well over a hundred printed cards informing his friends of his grave condition. On December 13 she also forwarded his last letter to Lou, together with her own message on his behalf: “You know everything about him, from the beginning until this day. You are aware of his unlimited belief in you—he said: Lou must know everything—perhaps she knows a consolation . . .” His physician also wrote her, informing her of his diagnosis that Rilke had entered the final, excruciatingly painful stage of leukemia, and advising her, as was customary at that time, against disclosing the full diagnostic report to his patient, who was “anticipating a long, long time of suffering.”14
Lou wrote Rilke five days in a row, and he reportedly read three of her letters.15 He did not, however, allow any visitors to see him, not even his wife Clara, who had traveled to Muzot, nor his lover Baladine Klossowski, who was nearby and desperate to be with him. The only exception was Nanny Wunderly, who tended to all his medical needs and read to him in French, sometimes for up to six hours into the evening. At Christmas he declined to have her send further messages.
Rilke died on December 29, 1926, at Valmont. Friends received the news of his death by telegraph. They buried him four days later in the little mountain cemetery of Raron, near Sierre. He had designated his daughter, Ruth, as the heir to his literary estate, and she and her husband, the lawyer Dr. Carl Sieber (1897–1945), agreed to establish a family-owned archive. On the evening before the funeral, Rilke’s publisher, Anton Kippenberg, took possession of the poet’s notebooks and all other written material at Château Muzot. Rilke had kept all his correspondence in meticulous order, sorted into bundles by sender and year. He had also authorized their publication.
Lou Andreas-Salomé survived Rilke by a little over ten years. She had lived through a mastectomy in 1935 but was nearly blind from diabetes and close to destitute. She died in her house at the Hainberg, in Göttingen, on February 5, 1937.
THE CORRESPONDENCE between Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé was first edited in 1952 by the executor of her literary estate, Ernst Pfeiffer (1893–1986), who also supervised a second, expanded printing (1975) which adds one new letter from Lou, that of February 16, 1914. This edition served as the text for the present translation, which contains all 199 pieces of their extant correspondence—134 from Rilke, 65 from Lou—unabbreviated.
Lacunae exist for all years, beginning with the time from 1897 through the end of February 1901 when Lou, in breaking with Rilke, proposed that they burn each other’s letters (he complied; she kept a good many of his). For the years after June 1903 it can be ascertained from internal evidence that at least thirteen communications from Rilke and over thirty-five from Lou have been lost. It is possible that Kippenberg withheld a number of these letters, or that Lou herself destroyed some of them after receiving them back through Frau Wunderly.
We have followed Pfeiffer in utilizing excerpts from Rilke’s Diaries and Lou’s journals and other autobiographical writings to help bridge informational lacunae and supplement the emotional context of certain exchanges. This has proved chiefly useful for the early years of the correspondence, since so much material from that period is missing, and since Lou and Rilke, still together, assume each other’s knowledge of the lived experience out of which they are writing. Once the correspondents separate, and the letters themselves take on the task of filling in, we have resorted less frequently to non-epistolary material. We would like to thank Dorothee Pfeiffer (Göttingen) for allowing us to adapt her father’s annotations to the needs of English-speaking readers. Our thanks also to Ulrich von Bülow, of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach (which has acquired Rilke’s letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé), who was kind enough to verify that what in a few instances appear to be questionable transcriptions are indeed accurate renderings. Last but not least, we would like to thank Jill Bialosky, our editor, for her infinite patience with this project.
NOTES
1. These and further details of Andreas’s early life can be found in H. F. Peters, My Sister, My Spouse: A Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 168–179.
2. His tenured appointment in the newly created department of Oriental Languages at the University of Göttingen in the fall of 1903 allowed him to teach small seminars in his private library during late evening hours. He was highly respected among fellow Iranists but hapless in his academic career.
On the questionable paternity of their housekeeper’s child, Maria, born in 1904, see the note to p. 157. Lou had no doubt that Andreas was the father and forbade him to enter her area of their three-story house.
3. Lou had published, in 1892, an interpretive monograph on the female characters in the dramas of Ibsen, then the most widely discussed playwright in Europe, followed by a study of Nietzsche’s personality as revealed in his works (1894) and three books of (largely autobiographical) fiction, including the short novel Ruth (1895), of which Rilke was particularly fond. In addition to a number of poems, she had written essays and reviews on philosophical and literary subjects.
4. See Diaries of a Young Poet, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 1–78.
5. “Russland mit Rainer,” edited by Stéphane Michaud in cooperation with Dorothee Pfeiffer, Marbach: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2000, p. 90. It should be noted, however, that Lou tore out all the pages that mention Rilke when she reread this journal in preparation for her autobiography, Lebensrückblick (published 1951; translated by Breon Mitchell as Looking Back: Memoirs [New York: Paragon House, 1991]). He appears in just one marginal notation (p. 73), as “R.”
6. See Looking Back, p. 89, which tones down her perfervid descriptions considerably.
7. “Russland,” p. 131.
8. Ibid.
9. According to an entry in Lou’s diary: see below, p. 38.
10. “Lou Andreas-Salomé,” in The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), pp. 137–186.
11. How extensive Rilke’s preoccupation with Rodin was becomes apparent from a compilation of all his literary descriptions of the “grand et chère maître,” including the more than one hundred often long and effusive letters he wrote to him (in French). See Rainer Maria Rilke/Auguste Rodin: Der Briefwechsel und andere Dokumente zu Rilkes Begegnung mit Rodin, edited by Rätus Luck (Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Insel, 2001). This documentation is no less revealing for all the pragmatic issues that Rilke was careful to overlook, among them the fact that Rodin by then no longer worked with a chisel but administered a workshop of some fifty employees who turned out copies of his sculptures.
12. Lou would later describe the decision as one of the most difficult of her life. Rudolph Binion (Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple [Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1968]) remarks with characteristic shrewdness and cynicism that Lou actually had no objection to Rilke being analyzed as long as she was the one doing the analyzing, and that she advised no in 1911 because she didn’t want the psychoanalyst in question (Gebsattel, whom she knew well) “messing around in her past” (p. 450). There are undoubtedly part-truths here, but interpreting dreams together on the train is obviously different from undertaking an extended analysis, and the issues underlying Lou’s decision not only genuinely concerned her but (in her mind) bound her and Rilke together as a couple: “That key point of ours: why and by what means analysis is disastrous for all creative production” (September 12, 1914).
13. This also is partly true, as confirmed by one of Lou’s own remarks. But psychoanalytic thinking also attracted her in and of itself. For a succinct summary of Lou’s affinities with psychoanalysis, see Angela Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work (Mt. Kisco, New York: Moyer Bell Limited, 1984), pp. 144–147.
14. The two direct quotes from Frau Wunderly’s letter of December 13, 1926, and the physician’s summary are included in Ernst Pfeiffer’s note (Rainer Maria Rilke/Lou Andreas-Salomé: Briefwechsel [Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig: Insel, 1975], p. 622) on RMR’s last letter to LAS. For details see J[ean] R[obert] von Salis, Rainer Maria Rilkes Schweizer Jahre: Ein Beitrag zur Biographie von Rilkes Spätzeit. Third, newly revised edition (Frauenfeld [Switzerland]: Huber, 1952), p. 229.
15. None of these letters from Lou survive, and we cannot be absolutely sure she wrote them. For further details of this last exchange, see the final notes to the present translation.