Vom Gottesdienst zum „Lebensdienst“. Gottesvorstellungen zwischen Frömmigkeit und Lebensreform in Lou Andreas-Salomés religionstheoretischen Schriften und ihrer Erzählung Ródinka. Russische Erinnerung
Representations of God between piety and reform of life in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s religious theoretical texts and her short story Ródinka. Russische Erinnerung

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with selected religious theoretical, autobiographic, and literary texts by Lou Andreas-Salomé and proposes that their ideological content, as well as the author’s biography, were shaped by the tension between the concepts of piety viewed nowadays as archaic, and the early modernist life-reform movement (Lebensreformbewegung). Lou Andreas-Salomé‘s religious theoretical essays, but also her letters and autobiographic notes are taken into consideration to trace the origin of the author’s image of God and her autonomously and free-willingly constructed form of life. The paper presents the shift from the ‘old’ prominence of God and the new metaphysical prominence of ‘Life’, characteristic both for the literature and for the ideology of Lebensreformbewegung. Subsequently, the paper focuses on Andreas-Salomé‘s short story Ródinka. Russsische Erinnerung (1923), viewed as a literary embodiment of her theoretical reflections, in which the ideas of piety and life reform clash. It is also shown to what extent these thematic motifs are narratologically founded by the author.

• Details
• Contents