The greatest modern lyricist in world poetry was born on December 4, 1875. in a house called Kod bijelo lav, in Jindžiska street, old Prague, as a seven-month-old premature baby "running to come out into the world". He was baptized on December 9 in the church of St. Jindzhiha under the name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke.
In the seventeenth century, the poet's ancestors cultivated the land around the cities of Usti nad Labom and Teplice, near the German border, according to Czech sources. He dedicated many days to find a trace of his noble origin, through his wide and spacious family, scattered in the countries where he lived: Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy, Switzerland.
Information is available that the Rilkes lived once upon a time in South-Austrian Carinthia, around Klagenfurt, and were some knights named von Rülko, or Rylko. However, the poet was not lucky enough to find a trace of them in his life, otherwise spent in castles - other people's, where he wrote his best verses, such as Devin's Elegies in the castle of the same name, on the sea cliff, near Trieste.
He grew up in Prague, where the German-speaking citizens are a minority, from 7% upwards, which is why the Germans were called a double ghetto in the linguistic and ethnic sense. The backdrop of Rilke's young years, says Donald A. Prater, an English historian of literature from Cambridge, were the Germans, Czechs and Jews who moved and created, traded and lived in that apartheid, and he lived his childhood and early youth "in the narrow streets of Prague. .. in the twilight of which my lonely boyhood yearned like a pale flower for the sun", as he later said in a letter to his friend from his youth, Jenny Oltersdorf.
Rilke talks about his childhood in the tone of his sonnets. "My parents' marriage was clearly withering when I was born. My mother was a very nervous, slim, black woman who was looking for something vague in life. In preschool, she dressed me as a girl (one of the Czech biographers says that she did it in pain because of her prematurely lost daughter, cf. GČ). She was proud when someone addressed her as Miss. She wanted to appear youthful, suffering and unhappy. And she seemed really unhappy. I think we were all unhappy" - this letter is quoted by Paul Leppin, a member of the Prague Circle of Jewish-German writers. He digested these things well because he grew up, like Rilke himself, among the scenes of Germanism, Czechism and the new Jewish cosmopolitanism awakened in Prague.
Today there are two pubs associated with the poet: a cozy bar with his name that promises a lot when you approach, where excellent French cognac is served in a warm glass, in Hradčani, near the castle of the Czech kings, and the bohemian pub Slavija, opposite the National Theater on the bank of the Vltava he spent his lessons, his lesson. So many Prague poets have paid tribute to Slavija, Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert, lyricist Vladimir Holan, students of art faculties.
The story of the detachment is also known to Yugoslavs, who also left many of their time here with a comforting drink: Lordan Zafranović, Goran Paskaljević, Emir Kusturica, Goran Marković, Vuk Dapčević, Želimir Guardiol, Gojko Čelebić, Benjamin Filipović, so many others. The easiest way to get used to a city where beautiful women are everyday is at the bar of Slavija. I don't know which country Rilke addressed directly in Deveta Devinska, but which one it is, it must have drawn him as strongly as the Czech land in early spring:
Earth, isn't that what you want: to live in us?
Prague years
At the end of the nineteenth century, Prague was a city of literature, matinee literary, fashion and social atmosphere, literary evenings were held often and everywhere, and the poet was a well-known guest in German artistic circles, says Prater, and the same is confirmed by Czech criticism.
Thanks to his student acquaintances, he came into contact with Czech literature. Richard Messer, a contemporary of the poets, talks about the Czech folk lyric that accompanied Rilke through his childhood and Prague years (he spent the first twenty years of his life there, 1875 - 1895), and became a conscious ingredient of his inner life. There is truth and logic here, even in the conclusion that he "was thus prepared for the great event of his life, for the spiritual engagement with Slavs realized in Moscow" (see Richard Messer: Moderní pražský mystik Reiner Maria Rilke, Prague, 1923, 4-5).
In May 1897 someone introduced the poet, in the house of Jakob Wasermann, apparently the host himself, to the "famous writer" Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), about whom much will be written later as a lover, a relative, which according to Lou's own confirmation she was, as well as a lifelong friend (before that she resolutely refused the marriage offered to her by Friedrich Neitzsche, "despite a strong intellectual attraction").
Here, one gets the first impression of Madame Salomé's influence on a vulnerable young man who spontaneously embraces the Russian world. Her being, as well as the reading, penetrated the young heart more strongly than one can imagine, says Wolfgang Leppmann, claiming that it was she who turned the young poet towards Tolstoy, who stands in the middle between the Slavophile Dostoyevsky and the Westerner Turgenev. (Tolstoy had long been Lou's favorite writer, partly because of his intermediate stance between the Slavocentric Dostoevski and the Westernized Turgenev. See in detail in Leppmann, Rilke: A Life, Bern & Munich 1981, Engl. translated by N. York 1984, 84).
And then it was the turn of the Russian folk epic, says Messer, and we see, no matter how surprised we are today, that at the time of the creation of the Prague Circle, emotions towards Russia were strong and respectable - "then Tolstoy and his first Christianity, the monks on Mount Athos, Dostoevsky, Gogol..."
With Lu Salomé, the young poet will travel to Russia and meet Russian poets, Pasternak, and others, since books of poems and short prose are already underway. Lou named him Reiner, instead of the French René, which he had received at baptism. “Reiner is a plain, fine German name,” she said. That summer his verse becomes a clear letter:
Deprive me of my sight, I will look at your image, stop my ears, I will listen to you, I will be dumb, but I will call you through a cry, without legs I will still find a way to you.
They were two, says Lu, inseparable parts of one whole, "like relatives - but still relatives from ancient times, before incest became a sin".
In these lines, I see the gentle darkness of Rilke's poetry, the darkness that speaks to me suddenly, and I love poets who speak to me suddenly, when they want (and not when I want). Lu Salomé soon left him. After the death of her great creation, she published a book of memories in which she talks about the poet through the eyes of his language and perception (Lou Andreas-Salomé: Reiner Maria Rilke, Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1928).
Muteness in language
German literature in Prague, to which Rilke belongs, if not as the greatest representative (because there is, of course, Dr. Franz Kafka), but as one of the first great ones, has its beginning and rise as well as its end. Today it is already a historical relic (although it does not lose its luster), but we will not feel the beginning even at the end of the eighteenth century.
Peter Demetz (1922), Czech and American Jewish writer, perhaps the most famous of the many authors of that interest, professor of German literature at Yale, winner of the Goethe Medal, gives his opinion on this. He claims that at the end of the eighteenth century, which was the time of the beginnings of modern German literature in the Czech Republic, this literature was still not perceived as German.
"The German-speaking subjects of the Czech kingdom did not consider themselves Germans, just as their contemporaries in hundreds of imperial states did not consider themselves Germans. German writers in the Czech Republic of that time were regularly inspired by Slavic themes, which were common to all the inhabitants of the kingdom - there were no distinct national structures yet - and for the writers of the German language themselves, their works were simply patriotic, he says. Demetz.
Then he moves to the field of the revolutionary European year (1848), to the main stream of discussion, which is the people's struggle for language. By the way, then Vuk Karadžić took part in the historical congress of philologists in Prague, albeit with variable luck, which was led by Czech educators and romantics. (Last summer I was traveling in nice company from Prague to Leipzig and I got into car trouble, and I cursed at the top of my lungs; "Look at him, he drives a Mitsubishi jeep and he's not dark," said a person who was dear to me reproachfully, "and the lame wolf trudged this way without complaining!”).
I am interested, however, in Rilke's case, the struggle for language as a meeting of small and large worlds, organic and cultural, ethnic and aesthetic, in a word: minor (small) and major (large). He was born in a minor world, Czech, but from a mother from a large, Frankish spectrum who infused him with language and love together - as only a mother can.
His parents were married under the name Josef Rilke and Sophia Enzo, called Phia (Czech period texts say that she exhibited fashion hypochondria and dressed only in black). She was the daughter of a Prague merchant whose ancestors moved to the banks of the Vltava from Frankish Alsace, and this will encourage the poet in his life and in his correspondence, including poetry, to express extraordinary affection for France and the French - the great world. After all, the names of those whom Rilke translated into German read: Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, André Gide - quite enough to form a major world.
In the monograph published by the English on Gide, which, in my opinion, is not far behind the best French one, by Alan Sheridan, a French student (who first introduced England to the work of Michel Foucault), it was noted that Rilke was politically conservative. If it's any consolation, Sheridan continues, “most of the great modern writers were politically conservative, if not extreme and radical - like Valéry, Proust (even at an early stage, Gide himself); Joyce and Faulkner; Eliot and Pound; Rilke and, before real politics took him under their wing, Thomas Mann" (see André Gide: A Life in the Present, Cambridge, 1999, p. 493).
"Also, the generation that wrote the first verses under the influence of Young Germany (the literary movement of young German liberal authors between 1830 and 1848 who fight for freedom of speech, the emancipation of women and against religious dogmatism - the most prominent representative of Heinrich Heine, prim. GČ) grew up in the black and white colors of her Czech homeland. The inspirations of these authors are topics that can be labeled as Czech only later, from the distance of time. The historical turning point was the year 1848: ethnic conflicts broke out, German writers from the Czech Republic had to make up their minds quickly, almost overnight. (...) From April 1848 to Munich (pact of Germany, Italy, France and Great Britain on the surrender of the border territories of Czechoslovakia to Germany, signed on September 29, 1938 in Munich, prim. GČ), German literature in the Czech Republic was divided into two parts, into two traditions, each writer had to choose: either individual freedom, or popular discipline; either the truth or the national agenda.” (Petr Demetz: René, Pražská léta Rainer Maria Rilka, Aula, Prague, 1998).
We think so, if we think of him as someone who, during his developmental stages, paid respect to his elders (I'll use a nice Spanish term: los majores), ancestors in the literary sense of the word. Prague's German tradition from his young days came to Rilke naturally, spontaneously, like resin to the sweet bark of a tree. His own view los majores he expressed with unbearable tenderness towards death in the Fourth Devinska (Die vierte Duineser Elegie):
You, my father, who, since he died, in my hope, often, in my midst, tremble, and indifference such as the dead know, the whole realms of indifference reject the work of my tiny destiny, - am I not right? Majushna - it means minor. Minor fate - minor fate of an individual. Majorna - the great destiny of the language.
Minor worlds
The battle for the language is very wide, especially in the scale of the Slavic languages, and each of them familiarly knows this space from a defensive historical and even theoretical angle, except, perhaps, Russian, which does not feel the need to fight the battle for size (majority). But in my essay on German writers from Prague, attention is paid to this struggle from the angle of minor worlds.
That's what I'm interested in, the minor worlds. That's where I burn.
Ergo, it is a situation when small worlds, whether organic or inorganic (atoms), whether ideological or aesthetic, once separated from the big ones, broken along the line of matter, along the vein-knock in the geological direction, blown up in space, therefore, fight for their hereditary traits.
Particles of her, in that terrible struggle for survival, thanks to internal strength, autonomy, in the given case the cultural system, accumulate strength for survival in an autochthonous form and - survive, search. They live on, despite the challenges, acting with the qualitative properties of the major worlds they once belonged to. Through life we feel our heritage, even though we are small (minor) that beats in our chest, fills our heart, arms us with the experience of life and death.
Rilke's debtor, Ezra Pound, puts it this way:
What you really love, no one will steal from you / what you really love is your real inheritance!
Bonus video:
