“Zarathustra” is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims. My brother had the figure of Zarathustra in his mind from his very earliest youth: he once told me that even as a child he had dreamt of him. At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his dreams by different names; “but in the end,” he declares in a note on the subject, “I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.”
criticism · How Zarathustra came to be
Zarathustra as Nietzsche's most personal work
Partisan source: the author shaped Nietzsche's posthumous reputation and is not a reliable interpreter.
Förster-Nietzsche says that Zarathustra is her brother's most personal work, the history of his friendships, raptures and disappointments, and that the figure had haunted his dreams since childhood before he identified it with the Persian prophet, citing his note on the Persian idea of a prophet's thousand-year 'Hazar'.