Poetry for Students

Volume 19 39

Gedichte(Crowned with Dreams, 1897), contain-

ing some turgid but striking erotic poems, and he

was already a busy contributor to popular journals.

Some of Rilke’s Munich acquaintanceships

were plainly meant to further his career—for ex-

ample, that with the dramatist Max Halbe. (Rilke’s

naturalistic drama Im Frühfrost: Ein Stück Däm-

merung. Drei Vorgänge[1897; translated as Early

FrostinNine Plays, 1979] was produced in Prague

in July 1897 with the young Max Reinhardt in the

role of the weak father.) Others were more impor-

tant: the novelist Jakob Wassermann introduced

him to the Danish author whose works became his

vade mecum, Jens Peter Jacobsen. Another young

friend, Nathan Sulzberger from New York, pro-

vided him with a second major object of cultural

devotion: in March 1897, at Sulzberger’s invita-

tion, he visited Venice for the first time. He spent

an April vacation on Lake Constance with “the mad

countess,” Franziska zu Reventlow, who was preg-

nant with another man’s child; and in May 1897 he

met Lou Andreas-Salomé, fifteen years his senior,

the author and former friend of Nietzsche, and the

wife (in name only, it would seem) of the Iranian

scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas. The summer Lou

and Rilke spent at Wolfratshausen in the Bavarian

Alps wrought remarkable changes in him: he al-

tered his name from René to Rainer, his handwrit-

ing became firmer and clearer, and he gathered his

passionate love poetry to Lou into the manuscript

collection “Dir zur Feier” (In Celebration of You),

which, at her request, he did not publish. (The ti-

tle, transmuted into Mir zur Feier: Gedichte[In

Celebration of Me], was used for a book of verse

in 1899.) Some of these poems, estimated to have

been about one hundred in number, were subsumed

into published collections; others survived only in

manuscript; others were destroyed. How long Lou

and Rainer remained lovers is not known, but Rilke

followed her and her husband to Berlin in the au-

tumn of 1897.

The Prussian capital remained Rilke’s home

until the new century. His stay there was inter-

rupted by trips that were to be of major importance

for his poetic development: a springtime journey

to Italy in 1898 (his verse play Die weiße Fürstin

[published in Mir zur Feier: Gedichte; translated

asThe White Princess in Nine Plays, 1979] grew

out of a stay at Viareggio); an excursion to Russia

from April to June 1899 in the company of the An-

dreases; and a second and much more carefully

prepared Russian trip from May to August 1900,

again with Lou but without her husband. Rilke—

who had learned Russian easily and quickly on the

basis of his school training in Czech—visited the

peasant poet Spiridon Drozhzhin and had an un-

comfortable interview with Leo Tolstoy at his es-

tate, Yasnaya Polyana. The Russian experience

under the tutelage of Lou, a native of Saint Pe-

tersburg, provided him with new poetic material:

following a fad of the time, he professed a mystic

love for the great land in the east; he read its lit-

erature carefully and used Russian themes in the

poems in Das Buch der BilderandDas Stunden-

Buch enthaltend die drei Bücher: Vom mönchis-

chen Leben: Von der Pilgerschaft: Von der Armuth

und vom Tode, in his tales, and in Die Aufzeich-

nungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. During a late-

summer stay with the artist Heinrich Vogeler in the

artists’ colony at Worpswede, near Bremen, after

his return from Russia, he wore a Russian peas-

ant’s blouse and a large Greek cross. In Worp-

swede, thus attired, he met the painter and

sculptress Paula Becker and the sculptress Clara

Westhoff. Rejected by Paula, he turned his affec-

tion to her statuesque friend. On 28 April 1901

Rilke and Clara were married.

The affair with Lou had been broken off, but

their years together had been enormously produc-

tive for Rilke. Some of the poems in Advent(1898)

are from the Wolfratshausen summer; Rilke came

to regard Mir zur Feier: Gedichteas the first of his

“admissible” books; his career as a dramatist had

been encouraged by the publication of Ohne

Gegenwart: Drama in zwei Akten(1898; translated

Childhood

Long the prey of

cultists and often obscure

exegetes and regarded as

the bearer of a ‘message’ or

‘messages,’ he has more

recently been seen as a

brilliant verse tactician

whose visions may be more

original in their manner of

perception than in their

philosophical core.”

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