Introduction

Rereading Rilke by Adam Zagajewski
We read Rilke for his poetry, for his prose, for his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and for hundreds if not thousands of the letters he left, but there seems to be another important motive too: in our eyes his life pre­sents itself as a .awless example of a modern artist’s existence, an example purer perhaps than any other, perfect in its relentless pursuit of beauty.
In the German literary tradition it is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe who enjoyed for a very long time the status not only of an immense poet, play­wright, and novelist but also of a sublime role model, an ideal human being, highly successful yet knowing the price of resignation, standing in the middle of a bourgeois society that had just rediscovered the value of intellectual ac­complishment; Goethe, who happily accepted the position of someone who represented more than just his own singular destiny, graciously allowing oth­ers?through the numerous windows of his letters, diaries, and conversa­tions?to have a look at him in his different hours and moods; Goethe, the scion of a patrician Frankfurt family, who as a young man became a minister at the Weimar court and a scientist entertaining each night in his lovely house on Frauenplan visitors from every imaginable country, explaining to them se­crets of geology, biology, and literature?someone Napoleon would wish to meet and, as we know, did meet. Goethe, who renewed the German imagina­tion even as he remained skeptical of the newborn nationalism of his compa­triots during the Napoleonic Wars; Goethe, who was proud of his long life and didn’t stop short of mocking others for dying too early; Goethe, a poet and thinker whose spiritual territory was so vast that it encompassed many el­ements of the Enlightenment but also involved vital ingredients of the Ro­mantic era; and .nally, Goethe, who knew well the silence of the writer’s study but who also witnessed in 1792the misery of premodern warfare in the mud, hunger, and hopelessness of an unsuccessful military campaign?not as a soldier but as an observer sharing the misery of others.
And then, next to this giant, Rainer Maria Rilke?a dif.dent, homeless poet born on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire, an artist who had to in­vent his own pedigree, who claimed an aristocratic lineage?the claim seems rather doubtful?an introvert, a lover of solitude, someone who, especially in his later years, didn’t care much for publishing and remained until the end of his short life famous only among a rather small group of connoisseurs. Never a minister like Goethe, never a senator like Yeats, never an ambassador like Saint-John Perse. Yes, he enjoyed the company of aristocrats, but not at any court; he’d only see them as private persons, gladly when they were set against the background of their natural environment, their castles and palaces: they were for him colorful relics of a more or less imaginary me­dieval Europe. The fact that Duino Castle?its name is forever linked to Rilke’s poetry?which belonged to the Thurn und Taxis family, was de­stroyed in World War I (though later rebuilt) is symptomatic: the aristocrats Rilke knew were the shadows of once powerful magnates. None of the in.u­ential politicians of his time would have thought of meeting him. Clemenceau and Rilke? Lloyd George and Rilke? Lenin and Rilke? No, impossible, ridicu­lous: a joke. Paul Valéry? Yes, that makes sense; the two poets met and their meeting left a trace, a well-known photograph (but also and foremost Rilke’s translations of Valéry’s poetry).
What is so attractive for us in Rilke’s symbolic status has almost nothing to do with the external circumstances of the period. Unlike Goethe, Rilke was not a robust representative of his epoch; he seemed to be, rather, an elegant question mark on the margin of history. Within the spectrum of literary mod­ernism he stood among the antimoderns (in the sense of being hostile to many characteristics of the newly born industrial civilization), though he didn’t care to develop his ideas in any coherent way. He was a poet, not a philosophical journalist, after all. He was like the Chopin of Gottfried Benn’s marvelous poem: ?when Delacroix propounded theories / he grew restless, for his part he could not / explain the Nocturnes.”
It is his inner discipline, the discipline of his life, the sacri.ces he made, that appeal to us. We cherish a certain intriguing narrowness of his external existence, which we can see and contemplate like an arrow ferociously speed­ing to its ultimate target: Rilke ’s poetic work. We believe we can see his rich inner life through the veil of his writings. If anything, Rilke was the epoch’s secret voice, we think, the epoch’s whisper, as opposed to its of.cial expres­sion. This, we think sometimes, is how his time should have been: not the absurd, terrifying killing .elds of Verdun but the tranquillity of the poet’s meditation in the midst of a great city or an Alpine meadow. His life spent in travels, his life as a search for the .nal illumination, fascinates us, but also his willingness to learn from Rodin and Cézanne and, later, to teach a young poet what poetry is about. We like to imagine lonely Rilke in Toledo or in Ronda in Spain, or think of him in Rome or in Cairo?and we always remember that from each of these travels he would bring with him a few pebbles we later .nd in the splendid mosaic of the Duino Elegies.
A lonely person he was, and yet not a stranger to social life. An incredibly proli.c letter writer, he once told Merline?the nickname of Baladine Klos­sowska, the mother of Balthus?that he had to write 115 letters to make up for a backlog in his correspondence! These letters are extremely interesting, mostly written with the brio of the major artist he was, and should be seen as an important part of his oeuvre (as, for example, in the case of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters).
The most mesmerizing part of this biography is Rilke’s iron-willed wait­ing for the Duino Elegies to arrive, to visit his poetic mind. This is perhaps a unique case in the history of literature: a major poet who expected a certain poem for a long time?not any ?great poem” but a particular one?appre­hending its very nature, just not receiving it yet. We, the latecomers, know that the .rst four of the ten elegies were written between 1912 and 1914 and that he had to wait eight years for the rest of them. In this perspective, World War I can be regarded as just a very unpleasant nuisance that kept the poems from coming?which, by the way, is how Rilke himself often felt about the Great War. He didn’t just wait?later, after the war was over and new possi­bilities opened up for him, he would, with some help from his friends, more or less actively look for a house, a tower, a quiet place on the planet in which to receive the Angel’s message. For this he eventually chose Switzerland, one of the very few European countries not dis.gured by the scars of trenches. The Duino Elegies, as we know, did eventually arrive and gave a glorious meaning to his entire pilgrimage, to his waiting, to his procrastinating, to his moving from one villa to another, to his patience. They gave Rilke’s life the shape of a...