Excerpt From The Book Of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet widely recognized as one of German language's greatest 20th century poets. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence and though he is most known for his contributions to German literature, over 400 of his poems, were originally written in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Through his writings, he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers and makes his works much sought after in the current age of existential angst.
Rilke was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, capital of Bohemia (then part of Austria-Hungary, now part of Czechia). He was the only son of a not-too-happy marriage. His father, Josef, a civil servant, was a man frustrated in his career; his mother, Sophie was the daughter of an upper-middle-class merchant and imperial Councillor, who felt that she had married beneath her. The relationship between Sophie and her only son was coloured by her mourning for an earlier child, a daughter who had died only one week old. During Rilke's early years, Sophia acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl through the boy by treating him as if he were a girl. In 1884, his parents' marriage failed and his mother soon after moved to Vienna. Rilke’s parents pressured the poetically and artistically talented youth into entering a military academy in Lower Austria, which he attended from 1886 until 1891. Rilke later left the military academy and entered a German preparatory school. By then, Rilke had already published a volume of poetry (1894), and he had no doubt that he would pursue a literary career. Matriculating at Prague’s Charles University in 1895, he enrolled in courses in German literature and art history and, to appease his family, read one semester of law. But he could not become really involved in his studies, and so in 1896 he left school and went to Munich, a city whose artistic and cosmopolitan atmosphere held a strong appeal.
In May 1897 Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salomé, who shortly became his mistress. Lou was from St. Petersburg. In her youth she had been wooed by, and refused, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche; 10 years before her meeting with Rilke she had married a German professor. Rilke’s affair with Lou was a turning point in his life. More than mistress, she was surrogate mother and the person who introduced Russia to him. He changed his first name from "René" to "Rainer" at Lou's urging, because she thought that name to be more masculine, forceful and Germanic. Even after their affair ended, Lou remained his close friend and confidante.
Russia was a milestone in Rilke’s life. It was the first and most incisive of a series of “elective homelands”. He and Lou visited Russia first in the spring of 1899 and then in the summer of 1900. There he found an external reality that he saw as the ideal symbol of his feelings, his inner reality. Soon after his second trip to Russia, Rilke joined the artists’ colony of Worpswede, near Bremen, where he hoped to settle down among congenial artists experimenting with developing a new life-style. In 1901, he married Clara Westhoff, a young sculptor from Bremen who had studied with Auguste Rodin. The couple set up housekeeping in a farm cottage in nearby Westerwede. That same year, Clara gave birth to a daughter, and soon afterward the two decided on a friendly separation so as to be free to pursue their separate careers.
In 1902, Rilke was commissioned by a German publisher to write a book about Rodin and went to Paris, where the sculptor lived. For the next 12 years Paris was the geographic center of Rilke’s life. He frequently left the city for visits to other cities and countries, beginning in the spring of 1903, when, to recover from what seemed to him the indifferent life of Paris, he went to Viareggio, Italy. He also worked in Rome, in Sweden, and repeatedly in Capri; he traveled to the south of France, Spain, Tunisia, and Egypt and frequently visited friends in Germany and Austria.
When World War I broke out, Rilke was obliged to leave France and during the war he lived in Munich. In 1919, he went to Switzerland where he spent the last years of his life. It was here that he wrote his last two works, the Duino Elegies (1923) and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). He died of leukemia on December 29, 1926. 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 his mesmerizing lyrical verse and prose has come to enthrall an ever widening clan of admirers.
#bookofhours #rainermariarilke #philosophy #poetry #soulful
Music credits: Moonlight by Scott Buckley

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