Under the steady snow of Prague, a visionary was born.
Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875 to an upper-middle-class family, with his father working as a railway official and his mother an heiress to a modest fortune. Rilke’s relationship with his mother, Phia, was tumultuous; after losing her infant girl, she coped with the grief by dressing Rilke in feminine clothing and treating him as if he were a girl.
After dropping out of military school, he moved to Munich, where he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a Russian-born intellectual. He quickly fell in love with her, and it was through that relationship that Rilke met and began a training career with the renowned psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.
In the first decade of the 1900s, Rilke experimented with merging his scientific training with his natural poetic nature, nurturing a budding literary career that would become his legacy. He briefly served in World War I, with the experience deeply traumatizing him and almost destroying his poetic career completely. Although his portfolio of work contains only one novel, Rilke’s poetry is his most well-known, “Letters to a Young Poet.”
Comprising ten letters of correspondence between Rilke and then-soldier Franz Kappus, “Letters to a Young Poet” was not published until 1929, three years after Rilke’s death from leukemia. Throughout the letters, Rilke advises Kappus on the nature of poetry, life, death and art. The letters are a fascinating study in two poles of the artistic experience: Rilke, freshly established as a poetic force in Paris, and Kappus, ambitious yet insecure about his passion. The final letter was dated in 1908, and although it is assumed that Kappus went on to forge his own fame, he never achieved great success.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
(Rilke, “Letter Four”)
