But it is appealing to think that his story of the prodigal was the closest Rilke could approach to a way forward out of the maze of irreconcilables he had written into being. I like to imagine that when Rilke arrived in Leipzig in January 1910, with the manuscript in his luggage and a growing sense of having at last completed an immense and difficult labour that had weighed upon him cruelly for years, and was welcomed into the warm hospitality of his publisher Anton Kippenberg and his charming wife Katharina, and given for a fortnight the services of a typist in a quiet room in a turret of the Kippenberg home, he chose to accept that the Notebooks could quite simply end with that sentence: ‘But He was not yet willing.’ With no need for anything more. For a fiction, like a poem, is never finished, only abandoned. And ‘not yet’ leaves a window open for hope: it does not mean ‘never’.

Michael Hulse

University of Warwick

June 2008

Notes to the Introduction

The jubilant letters Rilke wrote in February 1922 following completion of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus to (among others) Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, Gertrud Ouckama Knoop (mother of the deceased Wera, to whose memory the Sonnets were dedicated), Anton Kippenberg (Rilke's publisher) and Lou Andreas-Salomé, are to be found in Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1950), pp. 740–55. His letter of 9 February 1922 to Kippenberg, in which he wrote of the ‘storm of spirit and heart’, is on p. 741. His sense of ‘taking dictation within’ was expressed in a letter (now held in the German Literature Center, Pittsburgh) of 7 February 1922 to Professor Jean Strohl, a Zurich friend; Rilke's phrase, ‘une dictée intérieure’, is quoted in Donald Prater's A Ringing Glass (see Further Reading), p. 347.

His very long letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 18 July 1903, from which several passages describing his recoil from city life in Paris and his sense of a need to ‘make things out of fear’ are quoted here, is in Rainer Maria Rilke/Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Zurich: Max Niehans Verlag, 1952), pp. 53–65.

His remarks to his French translator, Maurice Betz, were reported in Betz's Rilke in Paris (Zurich, 1958) and are quoted here from Hartmut Engelhardt's Materialien (see Further Reading), pp. 157–72. Two unused drafts of the opening of the novel, and two discarded versions of the Tolstoy ending, are included in Engelhardt's Materialien, pp. 55–73. The passage quoted in the Introduction is to be found on p. 72.

Donald Prater uses the word ‘autotherapy’ in A Ringing Glass, p. 173. Ellen Key's remarks on Malte were collected in her Seelen und Werke (Berlin, 1911) and are here quoted from Engelhardt's Materialien, p. 151. William Gass's remark on the closing words of the novel is in his introduction to Stephen Mitchell's translation (New York: Random House, 1983), p. xxiv.

Further Reading

The most lucid and judicious critical biography in English remains Donald Prater's magnificent A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). Another clear and informative biographical study is Ralph Freedman's Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1996).

An invaluable explication, section by section, of the entire novel is offered by George C. Schoolfield in his succinct article ‘Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’, in Erika A. Metzger and Michael M. Metzger (eds.), A Companion to the Works of Rainer Maria Rilke (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2001), pp. 154–87.

Other articles in English that can be recommended include: Barbara Carvill, ‘Homage á Cézanne: The blind news vendor in Rilke's novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’, and Joan E. Holmes, ‘Rodin's Prodigal Son and Rilke's Malte’, both in Frank Baron (ed.), Rilke and the Visual Arts (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1982), pp. 61–72 and 19–26; Idris Parry, ‘Malte's Hand’, German Life and Letters, NS 11 (1957), pp. 1–12; and Walter H. Sokel, ‘The Devolution of the Self in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge’, in Frank Baron, Ernest S.