You alone are real to me

You Alone Are Real presents for the first time in English Lou Andreas-Salomé's memoir of the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke's lifelong friend, travelling companion and muse, Salomé vividly recalls their meetings and travels, the dam-bursts of creativity in which Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies, and their long correspondence in which she kept Rilke from utter despair.

Written in 1927, a year after Rilke's death, You Alone Are Real to Me is the work of a fascinatingly multi-faceted woman, a popular European novelist, a friend to Nietzsche and Freud, a noted writer on psychoanalysis: above all, a woman capable of understanding the aspirations and spirit of her 'Old Rainer'.