Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), with his observation and understanding of small worlds among large worlds, and Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) with his observation of minority (minority in things and events), it came to him in the Prague aura as some kind of mental shopping. Informative shopping, trade. It's a typical Prague character - because it's Prague, very Prague, to find out and trade at the same time. Business and knowledge at the same time.
Prague is a three-leaf clover, a city of Eastern and Western Christian culture, filled with the deepest Jewish experience since its foundation like no other in the world in this trinity and proportion, perhaps not even New York with its influential urban Judaism in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The business of knowledge does not lose its price here. For Jews, business is not separated from knowledge and culture.
Freud's and Husserl's conquest of the minor worlds of psychoanalysis and phenomenology - both somehow belonging to Prague, although born in the interior - is so close to Prague cosmopolitanism that I must not call it Prague because there is no local cosmopolitanism. It is Prague only by color, taste, smell, by local-minor property (genius loci).
Threshold, that's discourse therapy. Psychotherapy through the textual genres of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
I call it that most honestly, when it has to be called something, but basically it is a geological layer in the history of ideas. He was given attributes of worldliness, among others, by Jewish writers: Paul Kornfeld (1889-1942), Friedrich Torberg (1908-1979), Franz Kafka ("the secret king of German prose", as Hermann Hesse called him), Paul Lepin (1878-1945), Leo Peruz (1882-1957), Alfred Meisner (1821-1885). Sigmund Freud, although he is not from Prague (he was born in Pšibram, about a hundred kilometers in the east of the Czech Republic), is a witness that psychoanalysis has something Prague in it. There is Jakob Julius David (1859-1906) and so many other Czech Jewish writers - cosmopolitans. Jiří Mordechal Langer (1894-1943), Kafka's teacher of Hebrew and Hasidic history. Max Brod (1884-1968), writer who preserved Kafka's manuscripts even though he vowed to the author to burn them. Finally, one Husserl, born in Prostejov, in the east of the Czech Republic, but closely connected with the Prague literary and philosophical circle.
Rilke occupies a familiar place among them - could anyone, without the palette of cosmopolitanism in his heart, write these lines (Requiem for Count Wolf von Kalckreuth):
Let me start telling you
corpse; willing, passionate corpse -
Can someone, whose cosmopolitan vocation does not know the depth of international experience in the heart of Europe, say this?
Minority - that's genius loci. The tactic of King David with a slingshot against Goliath - figuring out how to be great, even though you are minor.
Rilke's forerunners
Minor worlds are these in depth, in that Rilkeian sense in which the poet, hallucinatingly controlling language, in fact gives us (and himself) life to enjoy, lends us (and himself) the property of language to govern life, can afford us (and himself) the linguistic property of life entrusted through language. Cosmopolitanism has been brought up in connection with Prague countless times, because of those intersections and ethnicity (tri-ethnicity: Czech-Jewish-German). For me, this city is a cosmopolitan convincing, justified water, more than others I have met in the Americas and in Asia.
It's enough that I don't stray from the bend that the Vltava makes when it turns under the Letna plateau, then takes its course to the left, around the old Jewish cemetery, where Judah Loew ben Bezalel (1526-1609), the creator of the Golem, with hundreds of writers rests - a cemetery full of water, earth and language, a multilingual cemetery. Nowhere in the world have I seen such a cemetery of writers and theologians: Justus Frey (1799-1878), David Kuh (1818-1879), Moritz Hartmann (1821-1872), Rudolf Glasser (1801-1868) and so many others.
Among them is Isaac Solomon Kapper (1821-1879), who writes in Czech and German, but also in Serbian. In his epic Knez Lazar, this Jewish writer compared the sufferings of the Slavic peoples in the terror and pogroms of the Turks with the Jewish sufferings in the diaspora. In his popular magazine Slavische Melodien, he blamed the Yugoslavs, including us Montenegrins, by drawing attention to the fight against the occupiers at a critical moment (1853). This collector of folk treasures, under the pseudonym Siegfried Kapper, proved to be a loyal follower of Vuk.
One contemporary writer honors the Jewish cemetery with nothing less than the title of his novel (Umberto Eco: Il cimitero di Praga, 2010). Then the Vltava turns left, under the banks of Podoli, and further through Huhle. People born in Prague are said to be "baptized in the Vltava", even for Jews who are not baptized.
Many of these in the cemetery, between the Staron Synagogue and Charles University, are Rilke's forerunners.
There is no greater power than language. No, really.
But even such power can remain threatened, since for the discovery of language - the language in which events take place (it is the homeland of events), in which life provides proof of existence - a guarantee is necessary. He demands disclosure. Language, as German poets know best, is the guarantor of human existence.
In the case of a poet, sensitive to language to the point of psychotic consequences, discovery takes place through diminution and reduction to a sufficiently percussive particle. The escape to the safety of the minor world resulted in the development of that boy, who was no longer the Frankish René, but Rainer, "nice, more German" as Lou Anreas-Salomé would say.
On April 27, 04, Mr. Andreas-Salomé, his wife Lou Salomé and the young Rilke to Moscow, where they first greeted the young artist Leonid Pasternak, an impressionist painter and the father of nine-year-old Boris Pasternak at the time.
Leonid, making illustrations for Tolstoy's Resurrection, arranged for Rilke to visit Count Tolstoy the following day - say the biographers of both - during which, on the young poet, the count's "kindness and humanity" would make a strong impression. He watched his host with open eyes as he fled, says Lowe in his diary, of a Persian sect. When the Austrian delegation finally arrived in Petersburg, Pushkin's centenary was celebrated there.
Petersburg had a different effect on the young poet than Moscow, "more international and non-Russian" ("minor" Russia). He visited the Hermitage, presented a certain Countess Voroninja with a collection of Two Prague Tales (a fresh German edition, since the Czech edition saw the light of day two years later), which he intended to present to Tolstoy. He met the naturalist painter Ilja Rjepin and some "real Russians, who tell people what others would believe".
Christmas 1899 Rilke spent time in Prague, where he published a short translation of two Russian poets. In 1900, Poem on the Love and Death of Ensign Kristof Rilke was published, youthful by the age of the author, but also by the death of the young man whom he laments without consolation. Thirty-five years later, under this influence, the Spanish poet FG Lorca will recreate the same image in the poem Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías).
In the same year, in the same May, he also traveled to Moscow with Lou and again met with Tolstoy, first in Moscow and then in Jasnaya Polyana. The young poet writes that they could not have come at a worse time. The old gentleman was angry because of the quarrel with his countess, there was a banging of the door, a woman's cry, Tolstoy's consolations, so in the end he suggested to the guests a walk around the estate to avoid lunch. He spoke harshly - concludes the young guest - despite the wind that carried the old man's words like straw, and swayed his beard back and forth.
Vienna School
In this work, I am most interested in Rilke from Prague, but also from Vienna, and I often return to my youth in Prague. Two books were published in Prague that open up the nature of the poet, the deep-linguistic, double, dark-being, reminiscent of a mature Rilke's couplet:
I love the half-darkness of my being
which gives my senses depth.
Both books act as a bronze double-leaf with the letterhead of Prague mysticism. The first, The Modern Prague Mystic Rainer Maria Rilke by Richard Messer (edited by one René Wellek) opens Rilke still in his lifetime in the light of a mystical poet. The second is entitled Rilke, Witness of Spiritual Life. The author is the famous French writer, playwright, Christian existentialist and philosopher in a technically dimensioned world, Gabriel Marcel. The label philosopher in a technically dimensioned world, what else is a philosopher who contaminates the major (big) world from a subjective, minor angle? The Czech translation came out recently, in 2013. on the fortieth anniversary of Marcel (1889-1973).
Alchemists Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka worked on mysticism in golden Prague - the occult Kafka on the eve of death. Both, Messer and Marcel, know the habits of the age and enter the era as familiarly as ants in an anthill.
"Rilke is a cry of pain at a certain moment of European cultural tragedy, he receives his entire poetic fart, his pathos from the mental mood of the time to which he belongs" (Richard Messer, Moderní pražský mystik Reiner Maria Rilke, Prague, 1923, 59-61).
Old Europe: cultural tragedy rests in a glut that others can neither understand nor reach, in the inability to be comparatively minor since it has reached standards that others have tarnished in aesthetics, poetics, ethics. Rilke in 1902. published the collection Buch der Bilder, current to the core, which does not announce, but states the mental mood of the era that would give birth to Dr. Freud, the poet's fellow citizen in Vienna, although both had moved to the capital of the empire from the Czech Republic.
Critic Hans Brethge, a connoisseur of German lyric poetry, says that the realist spirit of the age drew its best representatives straight to the spiritual center. The time in which psychoanalysis was born was not just any time, but the time of political truth. In order for a psychoanalytic theory to be born, there must already be an experience of illness. Speech and text therapy only treats the already observed disease. The truth.
Experience is a disease, so says the age, it inaugurates the disease through discourse, just as it cures it - through discourse.
What is Freud, the young Freud in old Vienna, a newcomer from the Czech Prostejov, is seeing mentally weakened patients through discourse and rhetoric? The speech of sight and the most painful wounds of the heart. Freud and Rilke heal with discourse.
(And with what else did my father treat me - me who writes these lines - in my childhood, if it was rhetoric about Lord Crnojević, on whose estate we built our first udzerica, a potleushica, five hundred years ago and we stand there to this day despite lightning and thunder? What else drove away the disease, while I lay dying, or a paternal discourse about a king with side legs, with strong sideburns and a belly bag, the largest m of all the kings in the world, who unsheaths his saber to cut the executioner's neck on the battlefield with a perfectly competent name: Wolf Dô?)
Who is Freud if not the great father who is ashamed of Judaism, and passes, like so many famous Jews (Joseph Flavius, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky), among self-deniers into Jew-haters?
What is Rilke if not treatment - I exclude the mentally ill, although I do not exclude them - with slow-flowing and rhyming discourse? He ended the fourth Devinska with verses tinged with Prague mysticism:
It's easy to see through killers.
But death, all death...
Today, novelists see the crisis of time in the crisis of European thought, like the Czech-American writer Rio Preisner (1925-2007), who calls Rilke a mythmaker in the age of the decline of myths. "One of the true signs of the crisis of European opinion between the two wars was the cult of the poet RM Rilke, which cannot be labeled uncritically, since the essence was the change of the poet into the founder of a new religion, into a teacher of humanity, into a harbinger of new and reviving myths," says Preisner.
"It is enough to remember the hallucinatory cult of one Klopstock in the eighteenth century (as opposed to the disappearing voice of Goethe, the magical influence of Lenan on the so-called Biedermeier (the strengthening of the middle class and thus the opening of a more mass sensibility for art in the first half of the 19th century, cf. GČ), on pseudo-mysticism, on the influential esotericism of Mallarmé, on the fascination with Kafka. (...) The influence of Rilke's work on Heidegger's philosophy is indisputable" (Rio Preisner: Zápis ky Malta by Laurids Brigge, Mladá fronta, Prague, 1994, 196).
Bonus video:
