Rainer Maria Rilke was born on December 4, 1875 in Prague, but was considered an Austrian poet because he wrote mainly in German within the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in the family of a clerk from the railway administration. At the request of her ambitious mother she has been educated for many years as a girl, wearing women's clothes and hairstyles. After the separation of his parents, at the insistence of his father as a counterpart for five years he spent time in a military school where he felt physically and mentally crushed. Rilke attends the Trade Academy in Linz and then records philosophy, law and art history at the universities of Prague, Munich and Berlin. The rest of his life goes on a continuous journey through Italy, Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Among them, it is particularly important that he travel to Moscow, where he often meets Lev Tolstoy.
He is also known as the creator of the famous Duino Elegies and Sonnets for Orpheus, and also as one of the modern unprotected people of the unforgettable 20th century. Ricke's life seems to predict the cosmopolitan spirit of his work. Austria is the birthplace of his ancestors, Germany - in the language with which he most perfectly serves; Bohemia puts a geographical frame of his poetic youth, the Swiss castle of Mussot in his last days. As a matter of course, Rilke's spiritual lineage is cosmopolitan. It has innumerable branches, but not in the German world, as we would expect, especially in Russia, then in France and the Roman culture, in Scandinavia and the distant past of the eastern countries. The examples of his poetic Ricke discover in the Old-Renaissance iconography and the world of Tolstoy, in the medieval wisdom of Franz Aiszki and Charles Baudelaire's poetry, the art of the Danes Jens Peter Jacobsen and the Flemish man Maurice Materlinck, Roden, Cezan and Van Gogh. For his contemporaries, Rainer Maria Rilke is a legend for his successors - the embodiment and prototype of the Poet. His younger compatriot, Stefan Zweig, writes: None of our poets live as mysteriously as Rainer Maria Rilke. He had no home, no address to look for, no home or work. He was roaming the world and no one, even though he did not know where he would go in the next moment.
With his lifelong behavior, Rilke himself deliberately supports this overwhelming, almost astral image of the mysterious wanderer and loner. It also owes some of the extraordinary impact on its contemporaries. As for the stops of his poetic wanderings, they are known. The first one is sentimental neo-romantic lyrics, and Rilke is confidently going to her in the 1990s when she publishes her poems "Life and Songs," "Wreck of Dreams," "Before Christmas." They carry the special atmosphere of the Prague German literature, and their ambitious author - the footprint of a still-beating provincial writer. Rilke's path to the non-provincial territory of the great European literature begins a decade later. Outwardly, he was marked by two events: Rilke's meeting with writer Lou Andreas-Salome and his two trips to Russia in 1899 and 1900. These events give rise to the theme of the famous poems "Chasoslov" and "Book of Images". Their poetic styling reminds of the literary secession fashionable in the years of publication, and at the same time hints at the inimitable style of the late Rilke. In fact, the poetry books have been translated into many European languages, and although every translation always only imperceptibly reminds us of the perfection of the original, let's take a look at the famous poem "Autumn"
The leaves fall, fall as from far,
Like distant gardens withered in the heavens;
They fall with slow and lingering descent.
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
Thus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall
And lo! the other one:—it is the law.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.
Rilke's word often transforms the experience acquired by the poet so far with the art of other artists. Many of his poems owe his life, for example, to his painting arts. Sometimes they even build on the visual impression of a canvas or sculpture. Such are his "New Poems" published between 1907 and 1908. The New Poems collection marks a new stop in Ricke's poetic wanderings - his subject style, inspired mostly by the sculptural work of Auguste Born.
Rilke's personal contact with the famous French drinker dates back to 1902 when Ricke received an order to write a monograph for Roden and three years later became his private secretary. It is true that the friendship between them is not entirely cloudless. As their contemporaries argue, the sculptor's anger temperament and, on the other hand, the notorious French language of the poet-secretary very soon provoked no artistic strife, and the subsequent reconciliation was made safer only in written form.
Fortunately for the descendants, the life's bumps do not have a fatal impact on the poet, and in this period he creates some of his most famous poems. Among them are: "Panthera", "Carousel", "Gasella". As for the Born monograph, it was published in 1907 and is not only a prologue to Rilke's late poetic discoveries but also a model of exquisite prose. Here are a few lines from the beginning of this original book: Born was lonely before his glory. And when she came to him, it made him even more lonely. Because every glory is in fact just an embodiment of all the delusions that gathered around a new name. In the Born they are too many, and to be distracted, long and painful efforts are needed. But this is not necessary; they encompass the name, not the creativity, far exceeded the renown and boundaries of that name, and became a noble name as a nameless plain, or as the sea bears only the name of the map, the books, and the people, but in reality it is only wide, movement and depth .
Ricke's personal contact has almost always grown into creativity. This is also reminded of the discrete turns of heartbeats into creative impulses. The emergence of one of the last works of the poet, the Sonnets Cycle to Orpheus, is inspired, for example, by the Polish artist Balladin Klosovska, whose gift, a Renaissance engraving of the ancient singer, directs Rilke to the orphanic theme. The image of his Polish love is sealed with gratitude in his essay "The Will" which meets one of Rilke's central and most interesting interpretations of love. The image of the devoted beloved, which, in the words of the poet, is not a hindrance to his path, and a window to the larger universe embodies Rilke's belief in the feasibility of long-lasting and selfless love, love without possession, love-creativity.
It is true that in his life Rilke is not as dedicated as he advises his gentle friends; often abandons them and constantly complains about the harm they cause to his creative seclusion. But, in spite of his complaints, the women in Ricke's life still benefit him. Pianist Magda Hatinberg awakens his interest in music; artist Clara Westhof, with whom she marries him, first puts him to Teacher Cezanne and Roden. However, the gifts of the glamorous Lou Andreas-Salome are the most numerous. With its vast spirit, this extraordinary woman engages Rilke in the avant-garde intellectual culture of the epoch, and she is pushing him towards the great European art. Besides, one of the finest definitions of the poet belongs to it: It always seemed to me that his being came from ancient times, from a world in which he had lived - perhaps as a miner, perhaps as a warrior or knight , I do not know exactly. All I know is that his gaze encompasses centuries of life in his blood like pain, suffering and fear, but also happiness.
Rilke's connections and friendships can really fill a whole book. And it would probably be a diary of spiritual communication among the European intellectual elite before the Second World War. Rilke is familiar with personalities such as Andre Gide, philosopher Rudolf Kasner, writer Romain Roland and poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal; has a lasting and cordial friendship with the Belgian poet Emil Verharen, he knows and translates Paul Valery, and his Russian intellectual friends are a whole colony. In this mosaic of human and creative contact we also find figures with a special shine. Such is, for example, a meeting between Rilke, Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak, not in the reality but sealed in wonderful letters. To the Russian poet, Rilke dedicates his last "Duino Elegies" and Pasternak receives from his teacher of poetic mastery excited recognition of his first poems.
Without the rich history of encounters and touch with foreign spirituality, Rilke would not be what ultimately is - a universe open to the other, a cosmopolitan spirit whose homeland does not coincide with the geography of birth.
Source: Rilke's letters, his conversations with the russian poetess Tsvetaeva, the impressions of Stefan Zweig about him, and my reflection of Rilke's books that I read.