Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~72,600 words · 345 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/selected-letters-of-friedrich-nietzsche
- MLANietzsche. "Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/selected-letters-of-friedrich-nietzsche.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/selected-letters-of-friedrich-nietzsche.
What it is about
Selected letters: to Wagner, to Rohde, to Overbeck, to his mother, and the last ones from Turin.
Context and history
There is no thesis to defend here, and that is why they matter: one sees the solitude, the headaches, the cheap hotels and the growing certainty of writing for a century that did not yet exist. The final letters, signed 'Dionysus' and 'The Crucified', are the collapse in real time. **Note:** a selection of letters is an editor's choice; to cite Nietzsche, use the books. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
consists in this, that here we have a writer of the most forbidding aspect, a prophet of almost superhuman inspiration, a hermit inhabiting a desert of icy glaciers, coming down, so to say, to the inhabited valley, to the familiar plain, where he assumes a human form and a human speech, where he exhibits a human heart and a human sympathy. He who still doubted that behind Nietzsche's violent denunciation of his age there was an ardent love of humanity and an eagerness to promote it to a nobler Destiny; he who still looked askance at a thinker whose ideas were thrown out hotly and abruptly like stones and lava out of an active volcano—all the skeptics, in short, about Nietzsche, as well as all his enemies, will be interested to see from these letters that there was another Nietzsche, a Nietzsche who was a good friend, a devoted son, an affectionate brother, and a generous enemy, such as the literary history of the world with its quarrels and jealousies has not had the good luck to encounter for a long time. The friends