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Maria Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic)
on December 4, 1875, the
child of an unhappy marriage. 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 Jewish family,
the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a palace on the Herrengasse
(Panská) 8, where René also spent much of his early years. However,
despite his mother's Jewish background, Rilke was raised as a Roman Catholic. |
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writer and poet born in Prague, Bohemia |
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Rilke's childhood and youth was also sorrowful. The relationship between Phia and her only son was encumbered by her prolonged mourning for the daughter who had been born before Rene but lived for only one week. 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..The parents' marriage fell apart in 1884 when he was only nine years old. Expected to become an army officer, his parents forced him to spend five years (1886-1891) in the military academies of St. Pölten and Mährisch-Weisskirchen. 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 at the Charles University in Prague, during which time he decided to pursue a literary career. He had already published his first volume of poetry in 1894, at his own expense, a collection of indifferent love poems called Leben und Lieder, (Life and Songs), written in the conventional style of the Heine tradition. At the turn of 1895-96, Rilke published his second collection, Larenopfer (Sacrifice to the Lares). revealing a sentimental attachment to his native Prague. A third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned) followed in 1896. That same year, Rilke decided to leave the university for Munich, Germany.
In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937), a widely traveled a Russian-born intellectual, author of many books, psychoanalyst and companion to many male and some female artists and authors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was married and their intense relationship lasting until 1900. At her urging, he changed his first name from "René" to the more masculine Rainer.In 1898, Rilke made a trip to Italy that lasted several weeks. In 1899, he traveled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to Moscow where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. This trip proved to be a milestone in Rilke's life, and marked the true beginning of his early serious work. |
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Between May and August 1900, Rilke made a second journey to Russia, this time accompanied only by Lou. They went to Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he met the family of Leonid Pasternak, the father of the then 9-year old Boris Pasternak, and also met Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Tolstoy's influence can be seen in Das Buch vom lieben Gott und anderes (Stories of God). The relationship betwen Rilke and Salome's ended in 1900, but they remained friends. In fact, Lou continued to be his most important confidante to the end of his life. When she later studied under Sigmund Freud from 1912 to 1913, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke. In the autumn of 1900 Rilke went to the artists' colony at Worpswede, where his portrait was painted by the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker. It was here that he became friends with - and for a time the secretary of - Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rilke got to know a pupil of Rodin, 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 inclined towards living like his parents in a middle-class milieu that he called "petit bourgeois", so left for Paris the following summer, but still maintained a relationship with Clara for the rest of his life. Rilke would continue to travel throughout his lifetime; to Italy, Spain and Egypt among many other places, but Paris would serve as the geographic center of his life, where he first began to develop a new style of lyrical poetry that was influenced by the visual arts. At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, while 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 Cézanne. 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 led to Rilke's Dinggedichten ("thing-poems"), a famous example of which is "Der Panther" ("The Panther").Rilke enjoyed his greatest poety activity during his twelve-year stay in Paris. His first great work, Das Stunden Buch (The Book of Hours), appeared in 1906, followed in 1907 by Neue Gedichte (New Poems), one of the most important works of this period, and his only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge), the first part of which drew on his difficult times in Paris which he started in 1904 and completed in January 1910. His other important works of the Paris period were Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), and the two "Requiem" poems (1909). |
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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 depression and a long-lasting writer's block. The outbreak of World War I caught Rilke by surprise during a stay in Leipzig, Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war years in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Loulou Albert-Lasard (1885-1969) who had connections with the Belgian avant-garde magazine "Het Overzicht", which was directed by Michel Seuphor and Jozef Peeters. He also dedicated some poems to her. Rilke was called into military service 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 June 9, 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.
On June 11, 1919, traveled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zürich, but the greater reason was his desire to escape the post-war chaos and to resume work on the Duino Elegiesies. 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, close to Sierre in Valais. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart purchased the building so that Rilke could live there rent-free. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies within several weeks in February 1922 while staying at the chateau. He also wrote an addition, the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), which was a memorial for the young daughter of a friend. In the philosophical poems Rilke meditated on time and eternity, life and death, art versus ordinary things. The tone was melancholic. Rilke believed in the coexistence of the material and spiritual realms, but human being were for him only spectators of life, grasping its beauties momentarily only to lose them again. The Angel of absolute reality from his early elegies is too perfect and far from the reality of earth, but with the power of creativity an artist can try to build a bridge between two worlds, although the task is almost too great for a man. The work influenced deeply such poets as W.H. Auden, who had Rilkean angels appear in the collection In Times of War (1939), Sidney Keyes, Stephen Spender, Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin and John Ashbery. - See also: Kobo Abe - "I can think of few little books so densely packed with the matter of poetic observation, few books where every line counts so heavily. Moreover, the nature of the poetry in it is so unwaveringly accurate in its vision and so coolly, surgically presented to the reader that one hesitates to use the world at all..." (Lawrence Durrell on Malte Laurids Brigge, in German Life and Letters, 1963) Before and after, he wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus. Both are among the high points of Rilke's work. From 1923 onward, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that required 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 Gongng and Mausoleum</), as well as a comprehensive lyrical work in French. Rilke's illness was diagnosed as leukemia only shortly before his death. The poet died on December 29, 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was laid to rest on January 2, 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:
At the time of his death his work was intensely admired by many leading European artists, but was almost unknown to the general reading public. His reputation has grown steadily since his death, and he has come to be universally regarded as a master of verse. Known as the greatest German poet since Goethe, Rilke has been attributed with transforming the German language into a poetic language with his dense, lyrical style, and his startling images that portray the complexities of modern life and their effects on the sensitive human being. He became famous with such works as Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (The Sonnets to Orpheus), which are concerned with "the identity of terror and bliss" and "the oneness of life and death." Published poetry:
Prose:
Sources:
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This page compliments of Marisa Ciceran Created:
Saturday, August 11, 2007, Last Updated:
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
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