He writes to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis: ‘Every fibre in me, every tissue, cracked.’

1923 The Duineser Elegien and Sonette an Orpheus are published. He spends December in a sanatorium at Valmont.

1924 Rilke stays twice in the sanatorium.

1925 He lives in Paris from January to August, returning to Switzerland in September.

1926 Much of the year is spent in the sanatorium once again. Rilke dies of leukaemia on 29 December.

1927 He is buried on Sunday 2 January in Raron in the Valais, above the valley of the Rhône.

1931 Death of Rilke's mother, Sophie.

1954 Death of his wife, Clara.

Introduction

In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, two German-speaking writers who would both cast long shadows over the world's literature in the twentieth century were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the Bohemian capital of Prague. One was the great master of disquiet Franz Kafka (born in 1883), whose novels and stories taught us all to rethink how we know our own selves. The other, Kafka's senior by eight years, was the poet of whom Paul Valéry wrote that ‘of all the people in the world, he possessed the greatest tenderness and spirit’, the poet who has taught us to see afresh the things we live among and to discover through them as much as it is possible to know of an absolute value in life: Rainer Maria Rilke.

It was Rilke who gave to the twentieth century its clearest understanding of the pure poet, the poet whose raison d'être is simply to express the nature of the world in words of lambent, tranquil beauty. Everyone who takes an interest in modern poetry is familiar with the story of the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies), begun before the First World War at the Castle of Duino on the northern Adriatic and completed a full decade later in early 1922, at Muzot in Switzerland, in an extraordinary outpouring that saw Rilke writing the remaining elegies and all fifty-five of the Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) within a very few weeks, as if ‘taking dictation within’ (as he put it). The story is the stuff of myth, and has fuelled an image of the poet as an inspired, Orphic singer, even a medium for utterance from some imagined ‘beyond’; and it was of course Rilke himself, notwithstanding the level-headed remarks on writing that we find him making elsewhere (for example, in his letters of advice to a younger poet), who created the myth in the letters and telegrams that he fired off in February 1922, writing of the ‘storm of spirit and heart’ that had broken over him. However we may choose to respond to the myth, though, Rilke's unique poetic tone and style, and his breathtaking fertility and facility, have long commanded awed respect, and fellow-poets from Marina Tsvetaeva to W. H. Auden have recognized and responded to his genius; even those others, from Bertolt Brecht to Ian Hamilton, who have seen him as a toadying freeloader whose narcissism failed to respond to the socio-political agendas at the heart of modern times, have found it necessary to engage with the example and presence of Rilke. There is no ignoring him.

Born in 1875, Rilke spent his first twenty years in Prague or in Austria, undergoing an education (first in a Roman Catholic school, then at military schools) that reflected the concerns of his parents. Beginning in 1896, he began to travel, and from that time returned only rarely to Austria-Hungary. First he ventured into Germany (where he was nominally a student) and Italy; in 1899 and 1900 he made two extended visits to Russia with his then lover, the remarkable writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé; and after his marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff and a period of quiet in northern Germany, he led a life of continual movement from one temporary home to another, chiefly in Italy, France, Germany and Scandinavia (he also visited North Africa and Spain in the years immediately before the First World War). In fact he might plausibly be described as the first truly ‘European’ poet, in the sense that so many different national heritages, histories and literatures, so many places, customs and languages, occupied those parts of his nature that in other writers are occupied by a single nation. Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) exemplifies this on almost every page: Rilke's understanding of art, of history, of life, does not inhabit a national pigeonhole.

Rilke never had much money of his own, and frequently lived as the guest of aristocratic admirers and well-to-do patrons – to the end of his life, he was fortunate in attracting the generosity of those who understood and valued his gift and took pleasure in being associated with it. His mother Sophie, known to the family as Phia, was from an upper-middle-class background, high enough on the social scale to have hopes of access to aristocratic circles, and quite likely it is to her that we can trace not only his devotion to poetry (she read it to him from infancy) but also his apparent sense that the more refined sensibility of the nobility was his natural element. What we like to call the real world, however, refused to leave him undisturbed in that cosy belief. In late November 1915, shortly before his fortieth birthday, he was called up for military service, and in January 1916 began three weeks of basic training in the army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an agonizing period for Rilke, which ended with his transfer to the Imperial War Archives in Vienna, where he worked until his discharge from the armed forces that June. With the exception of this distant brush with the terrible reality of his age, Rilke could fairly be said to have led a charmed life, and in the post-war world he presently found himself in a position to return permanently to that life, in the modest and secluded Swiss château of Muzot, where he was installed by Werner Reinhart, a wealthy businessman and patron. There, remote from the horrors of the world, Rilke spent his final years, until his death from leukaemia in December 1926.

Throughout his adult years, Rilke was supremely conscious of his calling as a poet. His decisions concerning the conduct of his life were always made with a thought to what circumstances would be most conducive to his writing. He was not yet nineteen when he published his first collection, Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs). His earliest work shared in the excessive sweetness that could mar any of the arts in the fin-de-siècle period, but with Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images, 1902) and Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours, 1905) he had already found an individual voice, one in which intuitions of a divine immanence in the things of this world could be expressed with intoxicating rhythmic poignancy. By the time those two books had been published, however, Rilke's poetry had already taken the new direction that led to the first great achievement of his writing life, the two volumes of the Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907 and 1908). From the autumn of 1902, partly under the influence of Auguste Rodin, Rilke had developed a closer scrutiny of things, hoping to penetrate to an inner quiddity, to express or reveal their inmost being, and the poems he wrote out of this endeavour, close to two hundred in all, remain one of the great milestones of twentieth-century poetry in any language. In the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, already touched on, Rilke in due course created another.

Poetry was the stuff of life to him, and it is astonishing to think of him writing a novel at all, even an anti-novel such as The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – so astonishing, in fact, that it may be aptest to think of the work as a long prose poem. But let us now turn to the roots of the Notebooks, which lie in his move to Paris in 1902, his experience of the city, and his adoption of a new approach to his work.

When Rilke arrived in Paris in late August 1902, he was a man of twenty-six with a wife and an eight-month-old daughter, both of whom remained behind in northern Germany. Two years before, he had accepted the invitation of the painter Heinrich Vogeler to repeat an earlier visit to Worpswede, a village near Bremen where the elder man was at the centre of an artists' colony of substantial and growing repute. Rilke delighted in the peaceful countryside, with its meadows and birches and old farmsteads, and at Vogeler's residence, the Barkenhoff, he warmed to a community of like-minded spirits that included the painters Fritz Mackensen, Fritz Overbeck, Hans am Ende and Otto Modersohn; Paula Becker, shortly to become Modersohn's second wife, whose name as an artist would in due course stand higher than that of all the others; and Paula's friend and ‘sister spirit’, the sculptor Clara Westhoff. In the autumn of 1900, Rilke seemed equally attracted to Paula and Clara, but after he learned in November of Paula's understanding with Modersohn he settled his interest on her fellow-artist.