When her memoirs were first published in 1951, fourteen years after her death, under the editorship of her literary executor, Ernst Pfeiffer, Lou Andreas-Salomé was a forgotten remnant of a lost age. Born Luise von Salomé in St Petersburg on 12 February 1861, just as Russia was emancipating its serfs and almost exactly five years after it had lost the Crimean War, this not particularly dutiful daughter of a Germanic Balt, highly placed in the service of the tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, was to let nothing and no one tie her down. The youngest of six children, and...

Another highly programmatic, highly stylized, and highly fragmented cultural icon, Simone de Beauvoir also left behind an autobiographical legacy, a comparative reading of which mutually illuminates both its own and Lou Andreas-Saloméʼs anticipatory stance.²

As befitted her haut bourgeois background, Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was given many names at her christening, but unlike little Luise von Salomé, her motherʼs name wasnʼt one of them.³ While both were, theoretically, of similarly minor nobility, the situation into which the young Mile Bertrand de Beauvoir was born on 8 January 1908 was neither as serene nor as secure as that...

Sreemati Maitreyi Devi was born in the coastal town of Chittagong in what was then known as East Bengal on 1 September 1914, just as retreating British troops were settling into their trenches in preparation for the First Battle of the Marne. European history was to have little effect on her, however. Although India sent more than a million troops in support of its colonial masters, the great majority were from the Punjab; Bengalʼs share was a mere 7,000. It was the European tradition of learning, not its history, that was to leave a more delible mark on Maitreyi.

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Anna Ernestovna Lacis was born on a country estate in Latvia on 19 October 1891, the same year as three of the individuals we will encounter in the third part of this study: Romola and Bronislava Nijinsky and Osip Mandelʼshtam. The circumstances into which Lacis was born, however, were considerably humbler; in fact, they were by far the humblest of any in this study. Her mother wove and dyed blankets, gardened, sang sad hymns, and suffered, while her father was off repairing the gentryʼs furs and saddles. The progressive socialist proclivities of the latter ensured that his only daughter received...

Nadezhda lakovlevna Khazina and Osip Emilovich Mandelʼshtam met on May Day 1919, in the Junk Shop, the artsy drinking establishment in civil-war-torn Kiev that the nineteen-year-old Nadezhda and her avant-garde painting companions habitually frequented. The poet, eight years her senior, was passing through town on his way to the Crimea, and the two, as Nadezhda Mandelʼshtam tells it, ‘at once took up with each other as though it were the most natural thing in the world’ (HA 28). And why not? They had much in common. Both came from pampered, Jewish bourgeois backgrounds. Osipʼs father had been so successful a...

In the history of the ballet, the figure of Vaslav Nijinsky makes the impression of the kind of blade of grass or wood chip that Nadezhda Mandelʼshtam would have had great empathy for - carried along by a turbulent stream but nonetheless engaged in a struggle to maintain internal freedom and in doing so perceptibly altering the ballet world. Generally regarded as one of the greatest male ballet dancers of all time, the tragic piquancy of Nijinskyʼs fall into madness subsequent to being dismissed from Diaghilevʼs Ballets Russes guaranteed his legendary status. It is not owing to his spectacular jumps...