In its exploration of this traumatic state, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is very much a novel of its time – of the Age of the Masses.

But if the oppressive experience of the city, and his determination to take his fear and make something lasting of it, were the trigger for Rilke's writing, there was more than mere autobiography, and more too than mere ‘autotherapy’ (Donald Prater's apt word), in his conception of his main character.

Rilke had developed an informed and steadily deepening interest in Scandinavia generally, and Denmark in particular. The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard was important to him, and the Danish novelists Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847–1885) and Herman Bang (1857–1912) meant a great deal in his personal canon; Rilke's idea of dying ‘one's own death’ was perhaps sparked by a passage in Jacobsen's Fru Marie Grubbe (1876), while Malte's mother, with her fear of needles, has been found to owe a debt to the mother in Herman Bang's novel The White House (1898), which Rilke had reviewed in 1902. In the Swedish writer Ellen Key (1849–1926), Rilke found an advocate of his own work who was able to organize invitations to Denmark and Sweden, with the result that from 1904 onwards he had increasing opportunity to steep himself in the spirit of northern Europe. His Danish narrator, complete with his family ramifications and his recounting of the death of King Christian IV, emerged from a real engagement with the literature and history of Scandinavia: in that sense, Rilke's protagonist is a response to the world outside rather than the world within. Though the Notebooks is a work with autobiographical dimensions, its gaze is consistently on other people, other things, other experiences.

Moreover, in long conversations in 1925 with his French translator, Maurice Betz, Rilke left no doubt of his abiding interest in a Norwegian writer of no especial fame, Sigbjørn Obstfelder (1866–1900), whose Diary of a Priest he had read in 1901 and whose posthumous works in German translation he had reviewed enthusiastically in November 1904, when his own work on the Notebooks was begun but not yet far advanced. The journal form of both books may have confirmed Rilke in his instinct to assemble a collage rather than a conventional narrative (though a vogue for writing the ‘papers’ of fictional characters was observable around the turn of the nineteenth century in other writers Rilke was probably reading, from Hamsun and André Gide to Ricarda Huch and Robert Walser); in addition, Obstfelder had died young, and in Paris, and had ‘probably not expressed the full greatness of his noble, troubled soul in his work’, as Rilke put it to Betz, and this evidently appealed to Rilke's sense of the adverse terms on which his own protagonist existed with the world. In the air of crisis that is fundamental to Malte's presence throughout the Notebooks, and furthermore his illness, his consciousness of being the last of his line (his phrase ‘the breaking of the helmet’, after the perforation of his father's heart, pages 101–3, recalls an ancient custom when a great family became extinct), and his self-consciously exquisite taste and rarefied reading, Rilke's Dane of course shares traits with fictional heroes of the fin-de-siècle decadence, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans's des Esseintes (Against Nature, 1884). Here too we are in the presence of a literary craft carefully deliberated and wrought, and Malte's passing remarks on a Charles Baudelaire or Gustave Flaubert only serve to remind us that Rilke was steadily thinking through the fundamentals of his vocation.

Perhaps it would be unnecessary to stress that The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a fiction that goes beyond the autobiographical, were it not that Rilke himself, in comments that allowed Malte the near-autonomous existence of an alter ego, gave frequent reminders that self and fiction are intricately interwoven. Maurice Betz reported him as saying:

The unity I needed was no longer that of a poem but that of a personality which, in all its infinite diversity, had to come to life, from start to finish. The rhythm that forced itself upon me was chopped and broken, and I was drawn in many an unforeseen direction. One moment it was childhood memories, the next Paris, then the atmosphere of Denmark, then images that seemed to have no connection with my own self. At times I well nigh merged into Malte, at others I lost him from sight: if I made a journey, he seemed out of my range, but once I returned to Paris I found him again, more present than ever. Many pages I wrote without knowing what would come of them. Some were letters, others notes, fragments of a diary, prose poems. Despite the density of this prose, which was quite new to me, I was forever groping about or heading off on a seemingly never-ending march into the dark. But in the end it turned out that he really was there, my companion of so many nights, my friend and confidant. He had accompanied me to Venice, he had wandered the streets of Paris as I had, he had stood with me in the shadow of Les Alyscamps, together we had met the shepherd at Les Baux. In Copenhagen I saw him on the Langelinie, we met in the yew avenues of Fredensborg, he recalled the heavily sweet scent of phlox in summer, his childhood was mine, he was my self and was someone else.

What ending can there be to such a book? The question is not only a technical one, though there is a sense in which this compilation of everyday observations, historical reports, ghost stories, childhood recollections and so on need not obviously come to a conclusion. The question is also teleological. To end the existence of so intimate an alter ego would be like ending one's own existence. Goethe had solved this problem, in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by overlapping his own experience and that of an acquaintance who had committed suicide: this gave him the ending he needed, an ending which might conventionally be thought inevitable. Rilke's Malte has been in a state of crisis since the beginning of the Notebooks, and, while it is true that the second part exposes him less to the everyday horrors of the detested city, it is striking that the stories he now sees a meaning in retelling – the death of Charles the Bold, the sermons and recantation of Pope John XXII – draw their power to fascinate from grim physical facts of mortality and equally grim metaphysical dispute over life beyond the mortal. In the first part, the hard dying of Chamberlain Brigge was offset by a relaxed approach to familiar spirits of the dead, and by a steady, quasi-musical movement towards celebration of the senses and of love in the Dame à la licorne tapestries; in the second part, the triumph of love is balanced against the triumph of death, and it is by no means clear which will emerge as the more persuasive, more enduring triumph.

Rilke discarded two versions of an ending that described Leo Tolstoy, whom he had visited in Russia together with Lou Andreas-Salomé. These endings confront Tolstoy's fear of death, which had powerfully affected Rilke, as this extract from the second of his drafts demonstrates:

What if he were to have been right, in all his fear of death, because he would now end his life as one who was interrupted at the very beginning? In that house there was not one room where he had not been afraid of dying. […] And with an unparalleled horror he realized that what was within him was scarcely begun; that, if he were to die now, he would not be capable of living in the afterlife; that they would be ashamed, over there, of his rudimentary soul, and would hide it away in eternity like a premature baby.

To discard writing of this order was surely a wise decision, not only because within itself it is ungenerous in tone, in a way that very little else is ever ungenerous in Rilke, but also because it offers no sense of an ending to the complex of experiences which we have been offered in the name of Malte. In the event, Rilke had it both ways, choosing both love and death. His apparent instinct that the triumph of love should be the greater, an instinct that places him on the side of life and accords well with many passages throughout the Notebooks, was difficult to bring to narrative fruition (since this most plotless of anti-novels conspicuously lacks any significant object of Malte's love – other, that is, than Malte himself). But in ending with his interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son, with ‘that unprecedented gesture that no one had ever seen before, that gesture of supplication with which he threw himself at their feet, imploring them not to show love’ (Rodin's sculpture shows the prodigal on his knees), Rilke contrived to give a new dimension to the self-abnegation he had admired in (women) lovers throughout his text. To set ourselves aside from the love of those who suppose themselves closest to us (so the contention seems to run) is to place ourselves in a position of readiness for a higher love, and by extension a position of acquiescence in death.

This stance, which relinquishes love as it is conventionally known in the home and in the family (and so implicitly vindicates Rilke in the conduct of a life devoted to his art), prompted Ellen Key to write in her review of the Notebooks, in October 1910, that ‘a spiritual condition such as Brigge's bears within it suffering so great that it occasions suffering in others’. The American writer William Gass wrote more bluntly in 1984: ‘The Notebooks' last words make a dismal sound.’ It may be so.