Rainer Maria Rilke Biography

Rainer Maria Rilke poet René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (German pronunciation: [ˈʁaɪnɐ maˈʁiːa ˈʁɪlkə]), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, ended up being a Bohemian-Austrian poet. He is considered one of the main poets in the German language. Their haunting photos focus on the trouble of communion utilizing the ineffable in a day and age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: motifs that will position him as a transitional figure involving the old-fashioned together with modernist poets. He wrote both in verse and a very lyrical prose. Among English-language visitors, their best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a new Poet plus the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He additionally penned over 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of preference, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

Life

1875–1896

He had been produced René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, money of Bohemia (then element of Austria-Hungary, today the Czech Republic). His youth and youth in Prague are not specially pleased. Their dad, Josef Rilke (1838–1906), became a railway authoritative after an unsuccessful army career. His mommy, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851–1931), originated in a well-to-do Prague household, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, just who lived-in a property regarding Herrengasse (Panská) 8, in which René in addition invested many of his early many years. The connection between Phia and her only child was colored by the woman mourning for a prior youngster, a daughter, that has died after only a week of life. During Rilke's very early many years Phia acted as though she desired to recover the lost woman through the kid by dressing him in girl's clothing. The moms and dads' marriage fell apart in 1884. His moms and dads pressured the poetically and artistically gifted childhood into entering a military academy, that he went to from 1886 until 1891, as he left due to disease. From 1892 to 1895 he had been tutored for the institution entry exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he learned literary works, art record, and philosophy in Prague and Munich.

1897–1902

In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke found and fell in love with the widely traveled, intellectual woman of letters Lou Andreas-Salomé. Rilke changed his first name from "René" to "Rainer" at Lou's urging because she thought that name much more masculine, powerful, and Germanic. His relationship with this particular wedded woman, with who he undertook two substantial trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their split, Lou stayed Rilke's primary confidante before end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared the woman familiarity with psychoanalysis with Rilke.

In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey enduring several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he journeyed with Lou along with her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to Moscow where he came across the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, followed just by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he came across your family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Later, "Rilke labeled as two places their home: Bohemia and Russia".

In autumn 1900, Rilke remained at performers' colony at Worpswede. (later on, their portrait will be painted because of the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker, whom he surely got to know at Worpswede.) It had been here which he surely got to understand the sculptor Clara Westhoff, who he married listed here springtime. Their particular girl Ruth (1901–1972) was born in December 1901. During summer of 1902, Rilke left residence and traveled to Paris to publish a monograph from the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Before long their wife left their child together parents and joined up with Rilke here. The connection between Rilke and Clara Westhoff carried on throughout his life; a mutually agreed-upon work at breakup had been bureaucratically hindered by Rilke's "official" status as a Catholic, though he was the very opposite of observant.