I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet In the spring of 1899, a 24 year old Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Russia for the first time in the company of his friends Lou and Friedrich Andreas. Rilke had had a troubled upbringing which he described in a letter as “one single terrible damnation, out of which I was cast up merely as out of a sea that is stirred to its depths with destructive intent.” After avoiding parental pressures to attend military school, he studied philosophy, art history, and literature in Prague and Munich, but never obtained a degree. In the interim he had managed to publish some reviews of art, literature, and culture, along with some plays, poems, and short stories. But when he went on that trip to Russia, something happened that influenced him profoundly as an artist for the rest of his life. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was able to meet the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Perhaps it was his encounter with the rites of the Russian Orthodox church. Whatever happened, Rilke encountered Russia as what he called a “spiritual fatherland,” and it sparked his true evolution as a poet.
God in the Dark: Rilke's Prayers of a Young Poet
God in the Dark: Rilke's Prayers of a Young…
God in the Dark: Rilke's Prayers of a Young Poet
I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves. –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet In the spring of 1899, a 24 year old Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Russia for the first time in the company of his friends Lou and Friedrich Andreas. Rilke had had a troubled upbringing which he described in a letter as “one single terrible damnation, out of which I was cast up merely as out of a sea that is stirred to its depths with destructive intent.” After avoiding parental pressures to attend military school, he studied philosophy, art history, and literature in Prague and Munich, but never obtained a degree. In the interim he had managed to publish some reviews of art, literature, and culture, along with some plays, poems, and short stories. But when he went on that trip to Russia, something happened that influenced him profoundly as an artist for the rest of his life. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was able to meet the famous Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Perhaps it was his encounter with the rites of the Russian Orthodox church. Whatever happened, Rilke encountered Russia as what he called a “spiritual fatherland,” and it sparked his true evolution as a poet.