When her story becomes cultural history: The autobiographical writings of Zarathustra's sisters

This study reads the autobiographical writings of six women who share the experience of being in and writing about a relationship with a man significant to the tradition of Western letters. Unlike the life-writing of other "significant others," these authors represent their autonomy in an ambiguous manner, playing upon, and thus encouraging focus on, the cultural implications of self-representation. Situating itself at the intersection of scholarship on Nietzsche, autobiography and modernity, the study explores the means by which these women expressed the relationality inherent both in their subjectivity and in the autobiographical genre, and establishes them as precursors of the autobiographically-oriented academic postmodern.;The study consists of three parts. After an introduction which plots the generic and socio-historical scholarly coordinates of the study, the first part draws attention to the ways in which Lou Andreas-Salome and Simone de Beauvoir mobilized their autobiographical writing to counter societal mythologies and entrench their positions as sovereign figures of literary and cultural import. What emerges in the second part on Maitreyi Devi and Asja Lacis are eerily similar images of the ghosts of attachments past on both the parts of the women in question and the men with whom they were fleetingly involved, Walter Benjamin and Mircea Eliade. The autobiographical writings of these two women are shown to function as anti-mythologies, which counter other accounts of their intense, brief encounters with young scholars whose work was destined for substantial academic capital. The focus of the third part is on the mythologizing means by which Nadezhda Mandel'shtam and Romola Nijinsky established both their husbands' heroic artistic accomplishments and their own role in heroically writing those accomplishments. A conclusion then tackles the question of precursing postmodernity and argues that the approach of avant-garde artists to the life-art relation serves as a link between, and provides a reading strategy for, both these texts and the autobiographical element increasingly prevalent within the Anglo-American academy.