Thus Spoke Zarathustra
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~96,400 words · 458 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/thus-spake-zarathustra-a-book-for-all-and-none
- MLANietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/thus-spake-zarathustra-a-book-for-all-and-none.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None [Thus Spoke Zarathustra]. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/thus-spake-zarathustra-a-book-for-all-and-none.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
A prophet comes down from his mountain to announce that God is dead and that man is a rope stretched toward something greater: Nietzsche's strangest book, half gospel, half poem, all dynamite.
Context and history
Written in bursts between 1883 and 1885, in four parts, much of it during summers at Sils-Maria in the Swiss Alps. Nietzsche had just broken with Wagner and come through the Lou Salomé episode, and he wrote almost without readers: only forty private copies of the fourth part were printed, because no publisher wanted it. A deliberate parody of biblical style, it carries his most famous and most misunderstood ideas — the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence. Its posthumous fame was immense and often toxic: no book of his has been so quoted or so distorted.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
“Zarathustra” is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows.…