Early life (1875–1896) He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in
Prague, capital of
Kingdom of Bohemia (then ruled by
Austria-Hungary, now capital of the Czech Republic). His father, Josef Rilke (1838–1906), found employment as a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851–1931), was from a well-to-do family in Prague, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived at Herrengasse (Panská) 8, where René spent many of his early years. His childhood was not always a happy one, and the relationship between Phia and her only son was colored by her mourning for an earlier infant daughter who died within one week. During Rilke's early years, Phia acted as if she sought to recover the lost daughter by treating Rilke as if he were a girl. According to Rilke, he had to wear "fine clothes" and "was a plaything [for his mother], like a big doll". His parents' marriage ended in 1884. His parents enrolled the poetically and artistically talented youth in a military academy in
Sankt Pölten, Lower Austria. He attended classes from 1886 until 1891, but left due to illness. He then moved to
Linz, and entered a trade school. During this time he lived with Hans Drouot (publisher and owner of the printing and publishing company Jos. Feichtingers Erben) at Graben 19 on the 3rd floor. Expelled in May 1892, the 16-year-old returned to Prague, where, for three years, he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. He took classes in literature, art history, and philosophy in
Prague, until 1896 when he left school and moved to Munich.
Munich and Saint Petersburg Rilke met and fell in love with the widely travelled and intellectual woman of letters
Lou Andreas-Salomé in 1897 in Munich. He changed his first name from "René" to "Rainer" at Salomé's urging because she thought that name to be more masculine, forceful and Germanic. His relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. Even after their separation, Salomé continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a
psychoanalyst with
Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke. In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey of several weeks to Italy. The following year he travelled with Lou and her husband,
Friedrich Carl Andreas, to Moscow where he met the novelist
Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of
Boris Pasternak and
Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Author Anna A. Tavis cites the cultures of Bohemia and Russia as the key influences on Rilke's poetry and consciousness. In 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at
Worpswede. (Later, his portrait would be painted by the proto-expressionist
Paula Modersohn-Becker, whom he got to know at Worpswede.) It was here that he got to know the sculptor
Clara Westhoff, whom he married the following year. Their daughter Ruth (1901–1972) was born in December 1901.
Paris (1902–1910) (1876–1907), an early expressionist painter, became acquainted with Rilke in Worpswede and Paris, and painted his portrait in 1906. In the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and travelled to Paris to write a
monograph on the sculptor
Auguste Rodin. Before long his wife left their daughter with her parents and joined Rilke there. The relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life; a mutually-agreed-upon effort towards a divorce was bureaucratically hindered by the fact that Rilke was a Catholic, albeit a non-practising one. At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called upon in the first part of his only novel,
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved with the sculpture of Rodin and then the work of
Paul Cézanne. For a time, he acted as Rodin's secretary, also lecturing and writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation and, under this influence, Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature. The result was the
New Poems, famous for the "
thing-poems" expressing Rilke's rejuvenated artistic vision. During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence. The most important works of the Paris period were
Neue Gedichte (
New Poems) (1907),
Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (
Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910. During the later part of this decade, Rilke spent extended periods in
Ronda, the famous bullfighting centre in southern Spain, where he kept a permanent room at the Hotel Reina Victoria from December 1912 to February 1913.
Duino and the First World War (1911–1919) near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the
Duino Elegies in 1912, recounting that he heard the famous first line as a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs and that he wrote it quickly in his notebook. Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle
Duino, near
Trieste, home of
Princess Marie of
Thurn und Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the
Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade because of a long-lasting creativity crisis. Rilke had developed an admiration for
El Greco as early as 1908, so he visited
Toledo during the winter of 1912/13 to see his paintings. It has been suggested that El Greco's manner of depicting angels influenced the conception of the angel in the
Duino Elegies. The outbreak of
World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter
Lou Albert-Lasard. Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916 and had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf – he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He returned to Munich, interrupted by a stay at manor in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.
Switzerland and Muzot (1919–1926) On 11 June 1919, Rilke travelled from Munich to Switzerland. He met Polish-German painter
Baladine Klossowska, with whom he was in a relationship to his death in 1926. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zurich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up his work on the
Duino Elegies once again. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio,
Locarno and Berg am Irchel. It was only in mid-1921 that he was able to find a permanent residence in the Château de Muzot in the commune of
Veyras, close to
Sierre in Valais. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the
Duino Elegies in several weeks in February 1922. Before and after this period, Rilke rapidly wrote both parts of the poem cycle
Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Together, these two have often been taken as constituting the high points of Rilke's work. In May 1922, Rilke's patron
Werner Reinhart bought and renovated Muzot so that Rilke could live there rent-free. During this time, Reinhart introduced Rilke to his protégée, the Australian violinist
Alma Moodie. Rilke was so impressed with her playing that he wrote in a letter: "What a sound, what richness, what determination. That and the
Sonnets to Orpheus, those were two strings of the same voice. And she plays mostly
Bach! Muzot has received its musical christening..." From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly struggled with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a
sanatorium in
Territet near
Montreux on
Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923–1926 (including
Gong and
Mausoleum), as well as his abundant lyrical work in French. His book of French poems
Vergers was published in 1926. In 1924, began writing poems to Rilke, who wrote back with approximately 50 poems of his own and called her verse a
Herzlandschaft (landscape of the heart). This was the only time Rilke had a productive poetic collaboration throughout all his work. Mitterer visited Rilke in November 1925. In 1950 her
Correspondence in Verse with Rilke was published and received much praise.
Admiring Russian Revolution, far left and Mussolini's fascism Rilke supported the
Russian Revolution in 1917 as well as the
Bavarian Soviet Republic in 1919. He became friends with
Ernst Toller and mourned the deaths of
Rosa Luxemburg,
Kurt Eisner, and
Karl Liebknecht. He confided that of the five or six newspapers he read daily, those on the
far left came closest to his own opinions. He developed a reputation for supporting left-wing causes and thus, out of fear for his own safety, became more reticent about politics after the Bavarian Republic was crushed by the right-wing
Freikorps.
Death and burial , Switzerland Shortly before his death, Rilke's illness was diagnosed as
leukemia. He suffered ulcerous sores in his mouth, pain troubled his stomach and intestines, and he struggled with increasingly low spirits. Rilke chose as his own epitaph this poem: Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern. Rose, o pure contradiction, desire to be no one's sleep beneath so many lids. A myth developed surrounding his death and roses. It was said: "To honour a visitor, the Egyptian beauty , Rilke gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well", and so he died. ==Writings==