Так говорил Заратустра: Философский роман Фридриха Ницше

Philosophical novel by Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen), also translated as Thus Spake Zarathustra, is a work of philosophical fiction written by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; it was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. The protagonist is nominally the historical Zoroaster. Much of the book consists of discourses by Zarathustra on a wide variety of subjects, most of which end with the refrain, "Thus spoke Zarathustra". The character of Zarathustra first appeared in Nietzsche's earlier book The Gay Science (at §342, which closely resembles §1 of "Zarathustra's Prologue" in Thus Spoke Zarathustra). The style of Nietzsche's Zarathustra has facilitated varied and often incompatible ideas about what Nietzsche's Zarathustra says. The "[e]xplanations and claims" given by the character of Zarathustra in this work "are almost always analogical and figurative". Though there is no consensus about what Zarathustra means when he speaks, there is some consensus about that which he speaks. Thus Spoke Zarathustra deals with ideas about the Übermensch, the death of God, the will to power, and eternal recurrence.

Nietzsche was born into, and largely remained within, the Bildungsbürgertum, a sort of highly cultivated middle class. By the time he was a teenager, he had been writing music and poetry. His aunt Rosalie gave him a biography of Alexander von Humboldt for his 15th birthday, and reading this inspired a love of learning "for its own sake". The schools he attended, the books he read, and his general milieu fostered and inculcated his interests in Bildung, or self development, a concept at least tangential to many in Zarathustra, and he worked extremely hard. He became an outstanding philologist almost accidentally, and he renounced his ideas about being an artist. As a philologist he became particularly sensitive to the transmissions and modifications of ideas, which also bears relevance into Zarathustra. Nietzsche's growing distaste toward philology, however, was yoked with his growing taste toward philosophy. As a student, this yoke was his work with Diogenes Laertius. Even with that work he strongly opposed received opinion. With subsequent and properly philosophical work he continued to oppose received opinion. His books leading up to Zarathustra have been described as nihilistic destruction. A few weeks after meeting this idea, he paraphrased in a notebook something written by Friedrich von Hellwald about Zarathustra. This paraphrase was developed into the beginning of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He said in a letter that the entire first part "was conceived in the course of strenuous hiking: absolute certainty, as if every sentence were being called out to me". Thus, "[a]s Nietzsche admits himself, by choosing the name of Zarathustra as the prophet of his philosophy in a poetical idiom, he wanted to pay homage to the original Aryan prophet as a prominent founding figure of the spiritual moral phase in human history, and reverse his teachings at the same time, according to his fundamental critical views on morality. The original Zoroastrian world view interpreted being on the basis of the universality of the moral values and saw the whole world as an arena of the struggle between two fundamental moral elements, Good and Evil, depicted in two antagonistic divine figures [Ahura Mazda and Ahriman]. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in contrast, puts forward his ontological immoralism and tries to prove and reestablish the primordial innocence of beings by destroying philosophically all moralistic interpretations and evaluations of being". Nonetheless Thus Spoke Zarathustra "has contributed most to the public perception of Nietzsche as philosophernamely, as the teacher of the 'doctrines' of the will to power, the overman and the eternal return".

Nietzsche's thinking was significantly influenced by the thinking of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer emphasised will, and particularly will to live. Nietzsche emphasised Wille zur Macht, or will to power. Nietzsche was not a systematic philosopher and left much of what he wrote open to interpretation. Receptive fascists are said to have misinterpreted the will to power, having overlooked Nietzsche's distinction between Kraft ("force" or "strength") and Macht ("power" or "might"). Scholars have often had recourse to Nietzsche's notebooks, where will to power is described in ways such as "willing to become stronger [Stärker werden wollen], willing growth".

It is allegedly "well known that as a term, Nietzsche’s Übermensch derives from Lucian of Samosata's hyperanthropos". This hyperanthropos, or "overman," appears in Lucian's Menippean satire Κατάπλους ἢ Τύραννος, usually translated Downward Journey or The Tyrant. This hyperanthropos is "imagined to be superior to others of 'lesser' station in this worldly life and the same tyrant after his (comically unwilling) transport into the underworld". Interpretations of the eternal recurrence have mostly revolved around cosmological and attitudinal and normative principles. As a cosmological principle, it has been supposed to mean that time is circular, that all things recur eternally. Though Nietzsche "probably learned Sanskrit while at Leipzig from 1865 to 1868", and "was probably one of the best read and most solidly grounded in Buddhism for his time among Europeans", Nietzsche was writing when Eastern thought was only beginning to be acknowledged in the West, and Eastern thought was easily misconstrued. Nietzsche's interpretations of Buddhism were coloured by his study of Schopenhauer, and it is "clear that Nietzsche, as well as Schopenhauer, entertained inaccurate views of Buddhism". An egregious example has been the idea of śūnyatā as "nothingness" rather than "emptiness". "Perhaps the most serious misreading we find in Nietzsche's account of Buddhism was his inability to recognize that the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness was an initiatory stage leading to a reawakening". Nietzsche dismissed Schopenhauer and Christianity and Buddhism as pessimistic and nihilistic, but, according to Benjamin A. Elman, "[w]hen understood on its own terms, Buddhism cannot be dismissed as pessimistic or nihilistic". Moreover, answers which Nietzsche assembled to the questions he was asking, not only generally but also in Zarathustra, put him "very close to some basic doctrines found in Buddhism". An example is when Zarathustra says that "the soul is only a word for something about the body". Thus Spoke Zarathustra, The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Volume VI, 1899, C. G. Naumann, Leipzig.]] The nature of the text is musical and operatic. Nietzsche would often appropriate masks and models to develop himself and his thoughts and ideas, and to find voices and names through which to communicate. While writing Zarathustra, Nietzsche was particularly influenced by "the language of Luther and the poetic form of the Bible". The critic Harold Bloom criticized Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Western Canon (1994), calling the book "a gorgeous disaster" and "unreadable". Other commentators have suggested that Nietzsche's style is intentionally ironic for much of the book.

The first English translation of Zarathustra was published in 1896 by Alexander Tille.

The Common translation remained widely accepted until more critical translations, titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra, were published by Walter Kaufmann in 1954, and R. J. Hollingdale in 1961. Clancy Martin states the German text from which Hollingdale and Kaufmann worked was untrue to Nietzsche's own work in some ways. Martin criticizes Kaufmann for changing punctuation, altering literal and philosophical meanings, and dampening some of Nietzsche's more controversial metaphors. Kaufmann's version, which has become the most widely available, features a translator's note suggesting that Nietzsche's text would have benefited from an editor; Martin suggests that Kaufmann "took it upon himself to become [Nietzsche's] editor".

In 2006, Cambridge University Press published a translation by Adrian Del Caro, edited by Robert Pippin.

Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Alexander Tille. New York: Macmillan. 1896. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common. Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis. 1909. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House. 1954. Reprints: In The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking Press. 1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1976
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 1961. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Graham Parkes. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics. 2005. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Clancy Martin. Barnes & Noble Books. 2005. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro and edited by Robert Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Michael Hulse. New York Review Books. 2022.

Also sprach Zarathustra, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (study edition of the standard German Nietzsche edition). Also sprach Zarathustra (bilingual ed.) (in German and Russian), with 20 oil paintings by Lena Hades. Moscow: Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences. 2004. .

Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra': Before Sunrise (essay collection), edited by James Luchte. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 2008. Higgins, Kathleen. [1987]. 2010. Nietzsche's Zarathustra (rev. ed.). Philadelphia: Temple University Press. OSHO. 1987. "Zarathustra: A God That Can Dance". Pune, India: OSHO Commune International. OSHO. 1987. "Zarathustra: The Laughing Prophet". Pune, India: OSHO Commune International. Lampert, Laurence. 1989. Nietzsche's Teaching: An Interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rosen, Stanley. 1995. The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press. 2004. Seung, T. K. 2005. Nietzsche's Epic of the Soul: Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.