Friedrich Nietzsche wrote *Also sprach Zarathustra* between 1883 and 1885 in four parts; he printed the fourth part himself in forty copies. The book is not a treatise but a prophetic poetic narrative: it takes the founder of ancient Zoroastrianism as its hero and sends him to modern Europe to teach 'beyond good and evil'.

The central theme is 'God is dead' — but the declaration is not a triumph; it is a cold observation and a great danger. The two-thousand-year foundation of European Christian morality has weakened; no one truly believes it any more, but no one knows what should replace it. Nietzsche calls the void 'nihilism': values have lost their justifications, leaving only despair or indifference. The question is how to come out of this crisis.

Two concepts of exit are offered. The *Übermensch* (overman) is a figure who draws his morality not from outside but from himself, who affirms life and creates value — not a type but a longing. The *eternal recurrence* is a thought-experiment: if you had to live every moment of your life, in its smallest detail, again and again forever, would you live it? Being able to say yes to that question is, for Nietzsche, the test of an unconditional affirmation of life.

The strangeness of the book's style is deliberate: a parallel to scripture, animal figures (the eagle and the serpent), divisions, deliberate ambiguities. It tries not to be a philosophical system, not to close on a single reading. Until Nietzsche's mental collapse in Turin in January 1889 — after he saw a tram-horse being whipped — *Zarathustra* remained his central work. In the twentieth century, existentialism, post-structuralism, and even absurdist comedy walked in the path he opened.