Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke.jpg
Born 4 December 1875(1875-12-04)
Prague, Bohemia
Died 29 December 1926 (aged 51)
Switzerland
Occupation poet, novelist
Nationality Austrian
Writing period 1894 - 1925

Rainer Maria Rilke (also Rainer Maria von Rilke) (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

Contents

[hide]

Life

1875-1896

He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic). His childhood and youth in Prague were sorrowful. His father, Josef Rilke (1838-1906), became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851-1931), came from a well-to-do Prague family, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a palace on the Herrengasse (Panská) 8, where René also spent much of his early years. Despite his mother's Jewish background, Rilke was raised Roman Catholic .

The relationship between Phia and her only son was encumbered by her prolonged mourning for her elder daughter who was lost after only a week of life. In fact, during Rilke's early years Phia acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl through the boy by dressing him in girl's clothing when he was young, and making him act like a girl, etc..[1] The parents' marriage fell apart in 1884.

His parents pressured the poetically and artistically gifted youth into entering a military academy, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left due to illness. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich.

1897-1902

In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled intellectual and lady of letters Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). (Rilke changed his first name from "René" to the more masculine Rainer at Lou's urging.) His intense relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke.

In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he traveled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to Moscow where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Later, "Rilke called two places his home: Bohemia and Russia".[2]

In autumn 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where his portrait was painted by the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker (illus. above). It was here that he got to know the sculptress Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married the following spring. Their daughter Ruth (1901-1972) was born in December 1901. However, Rilke was not one for a middle-class family life; in the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Still, the relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.

1902-1910

At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called on in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time, his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and then with the work of Paul CĂ©zanne. For a time he acted as Rodin's amanuensis, eventually writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, which effected the transformation of Rilke's poetic style that is manifested most pertinently in the Neue Gedichte, and the preoccupation contained therein with poetically recreating the 'Kunstdingen' that he learned to see with his rejuvenated artistic vision. The poems of the Neue Gedichte and Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil can be said to be Kunstdingen in themselves. During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence.

The most important works of the Paris period were Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.

1910-1919

Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade due to a long-lasting creativity crisis.

The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard.

Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916, and he had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf, and he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He spent the subsequent time once again in Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.

1919-1926

On 11 June 1919, Rilke traveled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in ZĂĽrich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up once again his work on the Duino Elegies. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno, and Berg am Irchel. Only in the summer of 1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Chateau de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close to Sierre in Valais. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies within several weeks in February 1922. In May 1922, after considerable renovation, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart bought Muzot so that Rilke could live there rent-free.[3] Before and after, he wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Rilke afterwards called it "the great giving." Both works together constitute the high points of Rilke's work.

During this time, Reinhart introduced Rilke to his protégé, the Australian violinist Alma Moodie.[4] Rilke was so impressed with her playing that he wrote in a letter: What a sound, what richness, what determination. That and the "Sonnets to Orpheus", those were two strings of the same voice. And she plays mostly Bach! Muzot has received its musical christening....[5][6] [7]

From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923-1926 (including Gong and Mausoleum), as well as a comprehensive lyrical work in French.

Only shortly before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukemia. The poet died on 29 December 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was laid to rest on 2 January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp. Rilke had believed that his death would be from blood poisoning as the result of having been pricked by a rose thorn. He chose his own epitaph as:

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.

Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy
of being No-one's sleep, under so
many lids.

Rilke's literary style

Rilke's work was highly influenced by his education and knowledge of classic authors. Ancient gods Apollo, Hermes and hero Orpheus can be found often as motifs in his poems and are depicted in new ways and original interpretations (e. g. story of Eurydice, apathetic and dazed by death, not even recognising her lover Orpheus, who descended to hell for her, in the poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes). Other characteristic figures in Rilke's poems are angels, roses and a character of a poet and his creative work.

Rilke often worked with metaphors, metonymy and contradictions (e. g. as in his epitaph, rose is represented as a symbol of sleep - rose petals remind of closed eye lids, and of awakened senses - colour, scent and fragility of a rose).

Rilke's 1898 poem, "Visions of Christ" depicted Mary Magdalene as the mother to Jesus' child.[8][9]

Quoting Susan Haskins:

It was Rilke's explicit belief that Christ was not divine, was entirely human, and deified only on Calvary, expressed in an unpublished poem of 1893, and referred to in other poems of the same period, which allowed him to portray Christ's love for Mary Magdalene, though remarkable, as entirely human.[10]

Rilke's influence

Literature

Television

Film

Music

Art

Religion

Selection of works

Complete works

Volumes of poetry

Prose

Letters

Collected letters

Other volumes of letters

Translations

Selections

Duino Elegies

Sonnets to Orpheus

Other works

Books on Rilke

Biographies

Studies

References

  1. ↑ WashingtonPost.com: Life of a Poet : Rainer Maria Rilke at www.washingtonpost.com
  2. ↑ Anna A. Tavis. Rilke's Russia: A Cultural Encounter. Northwestern University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8101-1466-6. Page 1.
  3. ↑ http://books.google.com.au/books?id=MRmu9Xy9aqkC&pg=PA505&lpg=PA505&dq=werner+reinhart&source=web&ots=1KBVEA3-uJ&sig=Zh_jXxi8Vvu3OGJDc4PS-oRBgyA&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result#PPA505,M1
  4. ↑ R,M,Rilke: Music as Metaphor
  5. ↑ Photo and description
  6. ↑ R. M. Rilke – Music as metaphor
  7. ↑ Rainer Maria Rilke: a brief biographical overview
  8. ↑ Liza Knapp, "Tsvetaeva's Marine Mary Magdalene" (The Slavic and East European Journal, Volume 43, Number 4; Winter, 1999).
  9. ↑ Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (Riverhead Trade; 1995).
  10. ↑ Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene - Myth and Metaphor, page 361 (HarperCollins; 1993 ISBN 0 00 215535 4).
  11. ↑ The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Robert Hunter at www.hunterarchive.com
  12. ↑ The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Robert Hunter at www.hunterarchive.com

External links

Persondata
NAME Rilke, Rainer Maria
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Austrian poet and novelist
DATE OF BIRTH 4 December 1875
PLACE OF BIRTH Prague, Bohemia
DATE OF DEATH 29 December 1926
PLACE OF DEATH Switzerland