Herewith I do myself a pleasure—that of recalling myself to your memory, by sending you a wicked little book, but one that is none the less very seriously meant; the product of the good days of Turin. For I must tell you that since then there have been evil days in Superfluity; such a decline in health, courage and "will to life," to talk Schopenhauer, that the little spring idyll scarcely seemed credible any longer. Fortunately I still possessed a document belonging to it, the Case of Wagner. A Musician's Problem. Spiteful tongues will prefer to call it The Fall of Wagner.
Much as you may disclaim music (—the most importunate of all the Muses), and with however good reason, yet pray look at this piece of musician's psychology. You, my dear Mr. Cosmopolitan, are far too European in your ideas not to hear in it a hundred times more than my so-called countrymen, the "musical" Germans.
After all, in this case I am a connoisseur in rebus et personis—and, fortunately, enough of a musician by instinct to see that in this ultimate question of values, the problem is accessible and soluble through music.
In reality this pamphlet is almost written in French—I dare say it would be easier to translate it into French than into German.
Could you give me one or two more Russian or French addresses to which there would be some sense in sending the pamphlet?
In a month or two something philosophical may be expected; under the very inoffensive title of Leisure Hours of à Psychologist I am saying agreeable and disagreeable things to the world at large—including that intelligent nation, the Germans.
But all this is in the main nothing but recreation beside the main thing: the name of the latter is Transvaluation of all Values. Europe will have to discover a new Siberia, to which to consign the author of these experiments with values.
I hope this high-spirited letter will find you in one of your usual resolute moods.
With kind remembrances,
Yours,
DR. NIETZSCHE.
Address till middle of November: Torino (Italia) ferma in posta.