Wandering Among the Muses, Part III—Lou

by

Nicki Leone

In the spring of 1937 Frida Kahlo and her husband Diego Rivera went to meet a ship. On the ship was a man and his wife, forced into exile by a regime that no longer viewed them as friends, and indeed had begun to consider them as enemies to its future. The man was Leon Trotsky—one of the three architects of the Russian Revolution. The founder and former head of the Red Army stepped off the ship onto a dry, sandy shore in a brave new world he had never foreseen. And there to greet him was the Dove. The Aztec Goddess. The force of nature that was Frida Kahlo. History does not say whether he found the exchange satisfying—the leadership of the military might of a new country for a brief but passionate affair in a new land. Certainly Trotsky’s wife, Natalia Sedova, did not. Trotsky kept nothing from his service in the nascent Soviet Union’s first Central Committee except a nervous habit of paranoia that would ultimately be justified. He had nothing from his time with Frida except one small portrait she painted with herself in a pink dress. It is one of the few self-portraits from that era that does not include a monkey. She called it “Between the Curtains.”

To Americans, who associate Communism with red scares, spy novels and fanatic right-wing politicians, Leon Trotsky’s name rings only the faintest of bells. He is perhaps best known as the pig Snowball in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. It is less commonly known that Trotsky was the inspiration for one of the characters in Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, making his influence on great literature rather more successful and enduring than his influence on his own country’s politics. He triumphs over Stalin in this sphere, at least.

The Trotsky character in Doctor Zhivago is Pavel Pavlovich Antipov (“Pashenka”), the son of a railway worker, childhood friend and later husband of Yuri Zhivago’s beloved, Lara. Lara and her husband move to the country after marrying to teach the poor, but Pashenka becomes dissatisfied and joins the army on the eve of World War I. After the October Revolution, he reappears as “Strelnikov” (“The Shooter”) a hated and feared commissar in the new regime. Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago in 1957, and the Soviet Union refused to allow its publication. It was published in Italy in 1958, and translated into Russian by the American CIA, who used the book as anti-communist propaganda. Pasternak also was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958, so never let it be said that the Nobels don’t have their political side.  

But before the October Revolution, which sent so many writers and intellectuals (although not Pasternak) fleeing their country, before World War I exhaled the last gasping breath of the czar’s regime, Pasternak was the son of a Jewish painter at the Moscow School of Painting. His mother was a pianist and their home was a place of literary and artistic congress, a gathering place for the great writers and intelligentsia. On a summer day in 1900, when Pasternak was only ten years old, one such couple arrived for a visit. The man was short, dark, nervous and wore a large cape with a rather affected air. The woman was tall, composed, beautiful, and intimidating. They were Rainer Maria Rilke and his mistress, Lou Andreas-Salomé.

The heirs to history can only speculate about things like fate. Pasternak’s meeting with Rilke was the beginning of a friendship that would last until Rilke’s death over twenty-five years later. In the summer of 1926, while Pasternak was in Moscow struggling to be a poet under the Bolshevik regime, he wrote to Rilke, who was then struggling to be a poet in Berlin (and suffering from leukemia).  He wrote ostensibly to say “Happy Birthday,” but the letter is a veiled plea. Revolution had “. . . caught all of us up . . . cut off from Europe and the world of culture in the nightmarish conditions of our Russian life.” Pasternak tells Rilke that his poetry has become “cherished” by them. This letter set off a series of correspondence between the dying Rilke, the persecuted Pasternak, and the exiled Maria Tsvetayeva, then living in France. The exchange, collected in a volume with the unassuming title of Letters: Summer 1926, portrays a brief but intense discussion of the role of poetry and the poet in an era torn asunder by war and revolution. “It is the poet who matters” writes Tsvetayeva to both Rilke and Pasternak “not the martyr.” Rilke took this philosophy and wrote The Duino Elelgies. Pasternak took it and wrote Doctor Zhivago.

It might be argued that Pasternak would not have become Pasternak if he had never met Rilke. But Rilke would not have come to Russia if it weren’t for that tall, mysterious and intimidating woman at his side—Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Men fell in love with Lou. It had been happening all her life. As a young girl in Russia in the late 19th century (her father was a general in the army), she convinced her tutor to teach her French and German philosophers and literature that her father had banned her from reading. The tutor, who was twenty-five years older than her, begged the seventeen-year-old to marry him, despite the fact he was already married and had two children. Lou was not impressed and soon after convinced her mother to take her south, ostensibly for her health. Lou Salomé eventually ended up in Rome, where her apartment became a salon of sorts for many of the exiled and drifting intellectuals of the era. She continued her studies, met and fell in love with the philosopher Paul Reé, met and fell in love with Reé’s own tutor, an intense young man named Friedrich Nietzsche, and became mistress to them both. Each proposed to her. She said no. In fact, she suggested instead that the three of them live together in a kind of “marriage a trois.” In the only in-depth biography that has ever been written about her, My Sister, My Spouse by H.F. Peters, she relates her dream: “[I] dreamt that we were sharing a large apartment. There is a study and a library in the center, filled with books and flowers, and bedrooms on either side. We all lived and worked together in perfect harmony, and it made no difference at all that I was a woman, and you were men.”  Paul Reé was somewhat astounded by the proposal, but allowed himself to become convinced. Madame von Salomé, Lou’s mother, was appalled.

Lou Andreas-Salomé is sometimes accused of being one of those femme fatales who uses her sexuality to devour men. Nietzsche had moments where he felt this, but even he, as self-centered and despairing as he was, knew it not to be true. Salomé had no desire to be any man’s muse. She did not want to appear in their paintings or their poetry. She did not want to be known only for warming the beds of artists and writers. She was an accomplished writer herself, and more concerned with the pursuit of art than the pursuit of love. (“I was glad,” she once told a friend about Nietzsche, “when he said that he hated all creative work unless it was excellent.”)

The mariage a trois as Reé and Nietzsche called it, eventually fell apart. As odd as it sounds, the two men were ultimately too conservative for Lou. They neither one ever abandoned their hopes that she would marry one of them, and hence grew bitter when they were forced to conclude she would never do so. They might have been consoled, however, to know that they had been fortunate. When Lou Salomé finally agreed to marry one of her ardent suitors, it was only with the stipulation that there would be no sex. Her marriage to Carl Friedrich Andreas was completely celibate. Peters’ biography tells us that he was unhappy about this.

Lou met Rilke at a party in the spring of 1897, but although he was a rising young poet (he was twenty-two at the time), she didn’t really notice him. It wasn’t until he wrote her a letter—a rather intense and overboard letter—on an article of hers he had read that she began to sit up and take notice of this young, effeminate man.  The article was called “Jesus the Jew” and Rilke claimed to find “a devout fellow-feeling walked ahead of me along this solemn path—and then at last it was like a great rejoicing in me to find expressed in such supremely clear words, with the tremendous force of a religious conviction, what my [Visions of Christ] present in dreamlike epics.”  

Flattery, it is said, will get you everywhere. That latter started a correspondence between the two that would blossom into a deep friendship, a deeper love and a few passionate weekends. The passions flared and subsided, but the friendship remained, and grew so deep that, in Rilke’s last few days as he lay dying from leukemia, he refused to see either his wife or his mistress, but he would read Lou’s letters.

Rilke has been called the first “modern” poet. In an age of war, revolution and upheaval, he wrote poetry of the internal life, not outer events. Diego Rivera painted canvases of worker industry. Tina Modotti took photographs of protest marches. Boris Pasternak wrote books about oppressed intellectuals. Rilke wrote

But to have been
once, even though only once:
this having been earthly seems lasting, beyond repeal.

All that we
can achieve here, is to recognize ourselves completely
in what can be seen on earth
Duino Elegies (#9)

Modotti and Kahlo worried about reconciling their art and their life. Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé did not draw the distinction. It was the art that was real.

Early in their relationship, Rilke proposed publishing a book of love poems written to Lou. She squashed that idea, and told him to get a grip. She wrote to him about his poetry, his moods, his many despairing moments and manic periods. She identified in him a creature she called “the other one” whose destructiveness was both the energy and the enemy of his art. (Freud would latter tell her she had identified the subconscious). She also told Rilke to change his name.  It was Rene, which she thought sounded girly. Lou started calling him “Rainer.” In a very real sense, the Rilke who visited the Pasternaks in 1900 was creation of Lou Andreas-Salomé.   

There is a lovely collection of the letters between Rilke and Salomé, (Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé: The Correspondence) that, unlike most collections of letters between friends is remarkable for its lack of the little mundane details of life. The weather is rarely mentioned, and only then to some purpose (“Today it is raining,” writes Rilke in a farewell sentence, “No doubt also on Kufstein and Pushkin.”). The reader who is curious about the progression of either writer’s outer life will find very little to satisfy him here. But as a record of their inner lives, it is remarkably complex and captivating:

Rilke to Salomé on August 10, 1903:
Somehow I too must find a way of making things; not plastic, written things, but realities that arise from the craft itself. Somehow I too must discover the smallest constituent element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of expressing everything . . .

Salomé to Rilke, August 10, 1903:
[The artist] works day and night on that space within him, so that nothing would pace around in it any longer like a phantom, restless and demanding . . . Perhaps when he succeeds in that he will then create just the one hand of which you speak in your words about Rodin, but “all around it will be pure splendor”; for only then will it be the hand, the hand that exists as if it were all there is.

When Rilke published The Duino Elegies in 1923, he inscribed a copy with the words “For Lou, who has owned it with me from the first, this now in its ultimate form. Rainer.”

It is too much to say that Sonnets to Orpheus, The Duino Elegies, Doctor Zhivago, and even Thus Spake  Zarathustra (written by Neitzche in a fit of despair when he realized Lou would not come back to him) may never have existed without her, one can’t help feel grateful that she was there—to inspire when inspiration was called for, to criticize when inspiration turned to folly, and to love, when love was so desperately needed.


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program "Let's Read" on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it