René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, in Jundžiska Street, and his father, Josef Rilke, was born in the small town of Švabic in the Czech Republic. Mother Sophia, known as Fia Rilke, gave birth to him when he was seven months old and baptized him in the Jinji church. Today, the street extends from there with one branch to Vaclavska, the other to Karlov trg.

The poet's birthplace is not completely preserved, but a plaque with his name hangs five hundred meters away, where his parents moved, on the corner of Husova Street and Bartolomejski Square. There, even today, it demonstrates its full power as an inn At the good soldier Švejk, where Jaroslav Hašek began his dark novel dedicated to beer, mockery and human stupidity. Bartholomew's Church is built in the neighborhood, where the reformer of Christianity, Jan Hus, served and came up with the radical idea of ​​social reorganization of the church at the end of the fourteenth century.

There is a different emphasis on water - he says in one of his sonnets, and that verse, in fact, speaks of the otherness of the poet's appearance as a whole. And he is different, himself, a poet in the mirror of Prague ("baptized by the Vltava", as the Czechs say), where he was born and studied at the Charles University.

Rilke is different, first of all, in two fields of knowledge - in language, and in the blood of his heart. He ignored the technological revolution of his time, to remain alone among words, in speech. From the German-speaking Prague Rilke (German-Praguer Rilke), as his younger contemporary and fellow citizen, the Jewish-German writer Johannes Urzidil, spoke, "an isolated island of German speech in Prague, untouched by dialectal influences from the provinces" (J. Urzidil: There Goes Kafka, Detroit, 1968, 20).

Rilke's heart is different compared to European poets. He was fascinated by the individual conscience, but he was not burdened by morality, but surrendered his spirit to the discipline of speech and pure poetry like Dante. Countess Marie von Thurn und Taxis says that he often turned to her with a request to recite Dante's verses dedicated to the son of Frederick II:

Biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto... (She was blue, beautiful and with fine features...)

In the minor speech, it is as powerful as the world to which it belongs, which is the Judeo-Christian speaking island of Prague, urban in a sea of ​​settled German, "untouched by the provincial affects of language."

It is a privilege to observe, and listen to, Rilke in Prague.

Prague circle

Formally, he did not belong to the "closer Prague circle", like Jewish writers of the German language. Among the others, Franz Kafka, Oskar Baum, Felix Weltsch and Max Brod entered the circle, from which the adjective narrow comes, because one entered only after someone left (the Czech-German writer Ludwig Winder was admitted after Kafka's death in 1924).

Rilke could not belong to this circle in the formal member sense (he is a decade older than the mentioned four founders of the circle), but history classifies him in the wider Prague aura alongside the legends of the Prague German language: Gustav Meyrink, Franz Werfel, Ernst Weiss, Milena Jesenska, Paul Leppin and others.

He restores the Prague poetic genius of the German language, "untouched by provincial affects", with writers who articulated the power of the minor worlds of language in one field of the large (major) worlds of monarchy, nation, culture, history.

"I have a kind of instinct," he writes to Countess Von Thurn, "so I should guard against being productive, because the spirit enters and exits me so sharply that I feel as if it is tearing me to pieces" (Marie Thurn Taxisová: Rainer Maria Rilke in my memories, Prague 1997, 41.)

The minor worlds trace their roots to the old Prague scholars, Jews, mystics and philosophers from the Jewish-German language who felt most Czech. "When I hear that some Germanophile attacks Yiddish," says JL Borges, "I think that Yiddish is just a dialect of German, barely stained with the language of the Holy Spirit."

Rilke in Prague is not a pumpkin without roots. Here are some of the great names of the Judeo-Germanic speech that precede him:

Reinmar von Zweter (1200-1248), court poet of the Czech kings, dedicated to the task of fostering a high culture of German rhapsodes at the court of Pžemislović (Minnesäng). Ulrich von Etzenbach (1250-1300), a contemporary of Dante, a native of Prague, the first great German poet, author of the Alexandrian epic of 28.000 verses in honor of Otakar II Pžemislović.

Judah Lev ben Bezalel (1512-1609), famous Prague rabbi, creator of the mythical Golem. Gelasius Dobner (1719-1790), founder of modern Czech critical historiography. Josef Dobrovský (1753-1829), champion of the Czech national revival.

Forerunner of the Gothic novel Christian Heinrich Spiess (1755-1799); he is also considered the originator of the sensational European novel with a four-volume work Biographies of madmen (Biographien der Wahnsinnigen).

Karl Egon Erbert (1801-1882), a Biedermeier poet and Bömisch-patriot, who also felt Czech and whose motifs were composed by the German composer of Jewish origin, Felix Mendelssohn. (I mention Borges again: "My Judaism is without words, like a Mendelssohn sonata").

Among them is the Czech-German writer Karl Borromäus Herlossohn (Prague 1804 - Leipzig 1849), author of adventure prose Montenegrins (Der Montenegriner-Häuptling, German ed. 1828, Czech translation 1899).

They are not there by chance, just as young Rilke is not by chance in Prague.

German speech

Rilke is the progenitor of the modern Prague-German literary word that celebrated Prague and the German speech of this mythical city as a whole. During his lifetime, he was admired only by writers, and later by all readers. He had just jumped out of his boyish pants, from the mythical ecstasy of the city when he received it genius locci. "The heritage from the coat of arms of the ancestors, which Prague handed down to its poets, was a mythical ecstasy," says Czech-American Germanist and Czech dissident Peter Demetz (René, The Prague Years of Rainer Maria Rilke, see Aula, Prague, 1998, 63).

The poet is preparing for big journeys physically and philologically. Wolfgang Leppman, the author of one of his better biographies, reveals that the young Rilke studied Italian in Florence, studied history in Berlin, and on his way to Russia, with the help of Lou Andreas-Salomé, he already read a little in the original Tolstoy and Turgenev. (W. Leppmann, Rilke, Bern and Munich 1981, Engl. translation New York 1984, 84.)

The young poet spread the infectious smell of travel, the smell of life through travel, even in his Book of Pictures, in uncompromising kinetics with the aim of cataloging the desert that must be crossed (quotes from Rilke's poetry translated by Branimir Živojinović: Lirika, Prosveta, Belgrade, 1968):

No matter who you are: step into the evening from your room, where you know every corner; no matter who you are: the last one along the road is your house, and behind it: infinity.

As a young poet he met Tolstoy, in Russia (1897), but during his visit to Jasna Polyana he hardly spoke a word to him, only listening to an old fool disputing the claim of the poet Lu Salomé that the future of humanity rests in the synthesis of the Western intellect and the "Russian soul ".

Lou Salomé, by the way, is a special chapter: she created Rilke, and she started her idea by changing his French René to the very German name Reiner. To say that such a woman is a lover is an understatement.

But let's get back to serious things: not at all, said the old writer, putting his chin to the other side with his fist. A Russian man needs enlightenment, madam, and not to deepen his backwardness by mystically dealing with his own "soul".

Nevertheless, the "long night" and the Easter "Christ is risen!" were engraved in Rilke's heart and memory for the rest of his life, while "He is risen indeed!" is heard from thousands of voices (Donald A. Prater, Ringing Glass, Oxford University Press, 1986, 74).

Europe, the aspiration to Europeanness, pulled the young Rilke out of Prague's mythical pants, observes Peter Demetz, himself, after all, an "external emigrant", as the Czechs call their writers who were forced to leave the country but never let go of the country from their hearts. Ladislav Nezdařil compares the momentum of the emigration of Rilke's biographer in 1948 with the poet's case, half a century earlier, and comes to the conclusion that one simply has to escape from some cities at some point in life and under some nasty circumstances. "After February 1948, Prague seemed to him as hopeless, narrow-minded and joyless as the Prague of the young Rilke," Nezdařil says of Demetz. "The two places where he could express his gift (Academy of Sciences and Charles University) were inaccessible for ideological and political reasons."

Connections and discretions

Acquaintances, discretion and letters, written in the darkness of senses and original ideas marked life and poetry:

I love the half-darkness of my being/ Which gives my senses depth.

The titles suggest acquaintances and relationships, the hand that writes and the response she expects. Language and reception - these are Rilke's minor worlds, which he exalted (not value-based, but comparative minority: narrowing the world to the essence of its being). The following works were created from Prague's inspiration: 1) Sonnets to Orpheus (Sonnet an Orpheus); 2) Records

The Malta of Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge); 3) On the love and death of the cornet by Christoph Rilke (The Way of Love and Death by the Cornet Christoph Rilke, which, by the way, was translated into Czech by my professor of German literature, Ludvík Kundera: Píseň o lásce a smrti by cornet Kryštof Rilko, Praha, Naše vojsko 1958); 4) Letters to a young poet (Briefe an einen jungen Dichter) and others.

The spirit of Prague in him is adorned by the beauty of letters and epistolary, which is not a mere quantitative set of subjectivities, impressions and judgments, but a living breath. Rilke corresponded for a long time with André Gide, Stefan Zveig and Boris Pasternak. Alan Sheridan, in his monumental biography André Gide, finely connects the writer's memories with Rilke, Countess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, in whose villa near Trieste they were written Devin elegies and contemporaries, the poet Appolinaire and the American writer and Japanese scholar Lafcadio Hearne (Ibid., Cambridge, 1999, 271).

What is a letter, the minor aura of a letter - what is it in relation to the big (major) aura of life and the even wider, major, aura of the text? What does a personal letter mean to old writers, speech, type of speech and voice, what does a personal letter convey in the style of the old epistolary masters? After all, so many writers and readers agree that Rilke was perhaps most accomplished in love and poetic epistles.

"The fact that the letter did not lose its cultural reputation, and that even at the end of the nineteenth century writers defended their letter from the new technical media, which were looked down upon for their superficiality, can be justified at first sight by the growing respect for truth and authenticity," says Reiner Stach in his extensive biography Kafka, year of decision in which he talks about the Prague Circle (Reiner Stach, Kafka, Die Jahren der Entscheidungen, S. Fischer, Frankfurt, 2002, 181).

After all, didn't the Prague Circle become famous precisely through epistolary connections - Kafka wrote letters to Max Brod and Oskar Baum, every God's day, and all three lived in the neighborhood not even a kilometer away. He wrote to Milena Jesenska maniacally, crazy from both, from love and from letters, but it can be seen from the tone that he only considers the poetic text as an invitation to the discovery of madness and nothing else.

Prague: it is a letter, a text, a book, and even today, when I set foot in that city, I experience it as thirty-seven years ago when I put down roots there, and it seemed to me that it was not built of bricks, but covered with letters, put in an envelope and sent to the address of some God. "The letter was then in an emphatic sense an expression; it has become a mediator that attests to subjectivity. The threatened disappearance of the culture of the private letter reflects the decline of expressive abilities and, ultimately, the decline of subjectivity itself - a position that Adorno takes very decisively. This thesis in no way explains why such phenomena as Kafka, Thomas Mann, Rilke and Hermann Hesse devoted a considerable part of their lives to endless correspondence, even in the sign of often illusory expectations." (R. Stach: Kafka, Die Jahren...trans. GČ).