„Der unbekannte Rilke”
Rilke, der Mann
Rainer Maria Rilke was born, two months prematurely, on the 4th of December,
1875, in Prague, in a century caracterised mostly by wars and revolutions. Considering that
the date of his birth fell on a Saturday, the day when is celebrated Holy Mary, his mother saw
this as a good sign and she included the name of “Queen of Heaven” in her son’s Christian
name. Therefore Rilke was baptized René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria.
Even since his early years, Rilke showed great interest in poetry and painting but
as W. L. Graff said in “ Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet”1 : «Little
Ren was impelled by an inner urge to write verses and his ambition in this respect was high.
The date of his earliest poems is not known but it is placed considerable before 1885. »
In 1884, Rilke’s parents divorced when he was nine and the boy continued to stay
with his mother until he left for the Mahrisch- Weisskerchen Military School at St. Polten, in
1886. The strict discipline and the physical effort that he had to cope with for four years made
Rilke consider this period the most dreadful of his entire life and later on he called the
academy a “Dostoevskian House of Dead”. This experience also had influenced his writing as
it is shown in poems like “The Grave”, “Resignation”, “The Churchyard”, “The Orphan”,
“All Saint’s Day”.
Because Rilke’s father was firmly against him being a poet and saw that his son was
not made for a military career, he decided to send him to a business school in Linz. However,
Rilke left Linz after one year and later, sponsored by his uncle Jaroslav, went for a classical
education at the University of Prague, between 1892 and 1895. During this time he wrote the
collection of verses “Life and Songs”.
After university, Rilke was filled with confidence and wanted to prove to his parents
that he could live as a poet. He started to travel and visit the places that he had been reading
about and since then he rarely stayed in the same place for more than two years.
Although he used his travels as a source of inspiration, Rilke remained a poet of the
solitude. «Rilke once spoke about his need for space around his feelings and a large portion
of his life might be considered a flight from intimacy to seek refuge in the impersonal
coldness of space.»2
He traveled to Germany, Italy, Russia, France, Scandinavia, North Africa and
Switzerland.
Italy was the first distant country that he visited and also the place where his “real
works” began. But after he travelled to different parts of Europe, Rilke felt like Italy did not
suit him anymore. The Italian influence can be found in “The Book of Hours”.
Later, Lou Andreas-Salomé inspired him to travel to Russia, “…that soundless
journey” as Rilke refers to, where the poet learnt about Russian history, language and
literature. As H. W. Belmore said in “Rilke’s Craftsmanship”3, «it was there that he had felt,
like a revelation, the great breath and width of life, a real life that freed him from the
1
Princeton, 1956, p.15
2
Bernard Murchland, “A Poet for Now”, Commonweal, December 15, 1961, p.321
3
Oxford, England, 1954, p.181
1
sentimentally overstressed artificiality of the artistic surrounding in Germany ». The Russian
influences can also be found in “The Book of Hours”, especially the selections entitled
“Monkish Life” and “The Pilgrimage”.
Another place that had an important influence on Rilke’s work was Paris. There, the
poet identified himself with people from the city that was occupied by disease, poverty and
death and also, the thought of death started to preoccupy him increasingly more. In this
period he published “The Book of Pictures”, “Stories of God”, “The Tale of Love and Death
of Cornet Christoph Rilke”, “Books of Hours”, “New Poems” and “The Notebooks of Malte
Laurids Brigge”.
Among the people that influenced the artist Rainer Maria Rilke, the most important
are Lou Andreas-Salomé, Clara Westhoff, August Rodin and Magda von Hattingberg.
Speaking about Rilke’s philosophy, there are four significant themes that are
outlined: Life, God, Love and Death.
He thought that life was a paradox and that «the terribleness and bliss of life are as a
single face that merely looks this way or that depending on his distance from it or his
mood»4. Also, he was concentrated on the present moment, which he perceived as full of
suffering and thus, his thesis became “the despair is the creative basis of hope”5.
Rilke’s view on God was firstly influenced by his mother orthodoxy, but later on he
saw God more like a Creation of the men than a Creator. He stated that when the pious
man says “God is”, and the sorrowful man says “God was”, the artist smiles and says “God
will be”.
Rilke saw the act of love as fear and this explained his non-committal nature. He also
linked it to the death because he saw both as extinctions of human life into infinite. The
artist thought that only the young lovers that died together had experienced the blissful part of
life.
Speaking about death, Rilke called it “the invisible side of life” and he tried to return
it to its owner, to life, through art. He also believed that death doesn’t necessarily imply
physical death, but «Death is when someone lives and does not know it. Death is when
someone cannot make up his mind to die- much is death, you cannot bury it.»6 This
philosophy can be seen in “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge” where the poet tries to
restore the death to the mystery form.
4
Walter Kaufmann, “From Shakespeare to Existentialism: Studies in Poetry, Religion and Philosophy” (Boston,
1959), p.207
5
Bernard Murchland “Rilke’s Dual Affirmation of Life and Death”, “Commonweal”, March 13, 1959, p.627
6
W. L. Graff “Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet” (Princeton, 1956), p.227
