RAINER MARIA RILKE: LIFE AND WORK      

---

Rainer Maria Rilke, born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague on 4 December 1875, is one of the greatest of all lyrical poets.[1] Rainer Maria Rilke is part of that group of modern European poets and writers which includes Apollinaire, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, Marina Tsvetajeva, Proust, Mallarmé, Yeats, Thomas Mann, Paul Claudel, Laforgue, Stefen George, and friends such as André Gide, Lou Andreas-Salomé and Paul Valéry. Rilke mixed, in Munich in the Great War years, with people like the astronomer Erwein von Aretin, Paul Klee, the poet Hans Carossa, the art historian Wilhelm Hausenstein and the dancer Clotilde von Derp. Rainer Maria Rilke's world is that of mittel Europe, German-speaking Czechoslovakia, Austria and Germany, and cities of the late 19th century and early 20th century: Vienna, Prague, Munich, Berlin, Paris. Although he moved towards the culture of French writers such as Valéry and Gide towards the end of his life, the world Rilke comes out of is the Germanic one of Kafka, Egon Schiele, Wittgenstein, Paul Celan, Karl Kraus, Robert Musil and Trakl. Although he disliked being categorized as a German artist, Rilke is clearly from the Germanic tradition: in philosophy, the transcendent ethics and dialectics of Kant and Hegel, the pessimism and mysticism of Schopenhauer, the tragic Hellenism of Nietzsche, the lyrical effusion of Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Heine and Novalis. The fervent Hellenism of Hölderlin and the magic idealism of Novalis seem particularly aligned with Rilke's poetic sensibilities, even if he were not directly influenced by them (he certainly was by Hölderlin). Rilke's life appeared to be one of restlessness and rootlessness: he spent the life, it seems, of the archetypal romantic, introspective, bourgeois European outsider. The outsider figure crops up in the works of Huysmans, Sartre, Gide, Hamsun, Dostoievsky, D.H. Lawrence, Mann, Hesse, Forster and others. Rilke's life fascinates critics, and it's easy to see why: his life embodies a certain kind of highly cultured, post-imperial European heritage. There are the extraordinary number of friendships with (often older) women, such as Princess Marie von Thurm und Taxis, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Nanny Wunderly (Rilke called her 'Nîke'), Elizabeth Dorothee Klossowska ('Merline'), Magda von Hattingberg ('Benvenuta'), Eva Cassirer, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Hertha Koenig, Sidonie Nádherny von Borutin ('Sidie'), Regina Ullmann, Adelmina Romanelli ('Mimi'), Marianne Weininger ('Mieze'), Agapia Valmarana ('Pia'), Mathilde Vollmoeller, Theodora von der Müness ('Dory'); the list goes on. There are the key meetings with European artists (Rodin, Stefen George, Gide, Valéry); the etherealized romances; the ever-changing philosophy; the endless letters; his mysterious, inward-looking personality; and the way in which his art and his life seem to be intimately intertwined. All these aspects of Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, make him such a intriguing object for biographical or critical investigation. Also, not forgetting, his incredible poetry.
    Rainer Maria Rilke is one of those artists who is eulogized as a saint, a martyr, a mystic, a prophet of his age. Like writers such as Goethe, Shakespeare and Cervantes, Rilke is thought to have something profound to say about life. However, Rilke did not not resolve the many conflicts in his life, just as Dante or Gide didn't: Rilke remained in a state of ontological flux and ambivalence to the end of his life. He was an acutely sensitive individual - particularly to people and places. He was seldom satisfied with any particular place, though, and often yearned for some other place. Even though he holed up in some of Europe's finest locations, he would pine for somewhere else. In this he recalls the archetypal traveller, who must always have a departure date in mind. No permanency for Rilke, but a residence in a place which must always have the hope at the end of it of moving on somewhere else.
    Rilke was exquisitely sensitive to aesthetics - to flowers, for example (he wrote many poems about roses), to furnishings (he loved to have a standing desk at which to work), to food and architecture. Elizabeth Sewell wrote that Rilke 'was from the beginning a hypersensitive being and apparently without the robust stamina a poet needs'.[2] However, Rilke's life reveals that he was at times ruthlessly determined to follow his poetic calling. Seemingly wan and weak from the outside (he was discharged from active military service on health grounds), he was also ambitious and self-determined. Many of Rilke's relationships were idealized, non-sexual interweavings, often occurring over long distances, by letter. He maintained a number of relationships with what were really muses. The litany of Rilkean muses include Merline, Magda, Andreas-Salomé, Sidie, Clara, Loulou, Nîke and the Princess Marie. There were heroines, too, for Rilke, such as the Virgin Mary, Eurydice, Mary Magdalene and Alcestis. Few major poets have had so many women friends, so many potential muses - and so many of them reciprocated with advice, help, money, places to stay. They listened to him reading poetry (weeping at the right moments), they begged to stay with him, begged him to stay with them, gave him money and love. Rilke was one of the most feminized of poets, but he also was deeply ambivalent in his attitudes towards women. He feared and desired them, alternately yearning for intimacy, then retreating to a safe distance.
Rilke said he had searched for some kind of ecstatic connection with women but had failed to find it. He told Lou on 21 October, 1913 that it seemed as if he were always 'standing at the telescope, ascribing to every approaching woman a bliss which was certainly never to be found with any one of them: my own bliss, the bliss I once found in my most solitary hours'.[3] Rilke's love affairs were marked by the familiar patterns of fascination and flight, of drawing near to the beloved and an escape back into the self. Rilke seemed fated never to find an enduring erotic relationship. Yet, as Princess Marie commented, Rilke 'cannot live without the atmosphere of a woman around him'.[4] Maybe Rilke was unwilling or even incapable of committing himself to one person for decades. Princess Marie told Hugo von Hofmannstahl that Rilke was 'incapable of feeling either friendship or love, and knew it, and suffered endlessly thereby'.[5]
    Rilke was an incredibly inventive creator of poetry, who could forge the myriad states and images of love, from the delicate, detailed and subtle, to the passionate, illuminating and ecstatic. Rilke was adept at inflecting language with blissful emotions. but while he could describe the many experiences of love, he found it difficult to turn them into realities, to act on his words. For Rilke, love could be a transitory, fragile state between two people. 'Why do people who love each other separate before there is any need? Because it is after all so very temporary a thing, to be together and to love one another'. Rilke saw life as a 'continuous flow of vicissitudes', change following change, so that parting was inevitable, and people should become used to it ('at any moment be ready to give each other up, let be and not hold each other back'.[6]
    Rilke gives the impression of being a childless, bachelor type, quietly going about his life of sublime interiority and brilliant poetry. The sense of being childless accords so well with one's impressions of poets such as Thomas Hardy, Novalis, D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Rimbaud. Yet it is surprising to realize that Rilke did have children - as did Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarch, André Gide and John Cowper Powys. In Rilke's case, he had a child early on. But there is no sense that Rilke would become the stereotypical 'family man'. Magda von Hattingberg, one of Rilke's many women admirers, could not believe that Rilke was married with children. Indeed, this fact was one of the reasons she did not become a long-term lover in the traditional, heterosexual, bourgeois sense. Much of his life was spent in exile from his family. 'My family is not a home, and is not to be one' Rilke wrote to Gustaf af Geijerstam on 7th February, 1907.[7] This is surprising, perhaps, seen from the outside. For clearly Rilke was a highly emotional man who seemed to crave affection, discussion, contact with other people. Surprising, then, to find his attitude to his wife Clara and his child so apparently off-hand and distanced. The needs of the artist in him consistently triumphed. Rilke, though a father early on, kept escaping from the family situation, to lead a restless bachelor life. One biographer claims that if Rilke had stayed in his marriage with Clara Westoff he 'could never have found himself' (Prater, 85). Rilke said he wanted Clara to 'reach the greatest heights as an artist', in order that she might succeed artistically, he left her, 'not to disturb her and turn her into a "housewife"'.[8] In a letter to his wife, of 5 September, 1902, Rilke said that one must choose life or art: '[e]ither happiness of art'. Artists such as Tolstoy and Rodin, Rilke said to Clara, let their lives go to ruin, while their work thrived.
    Rilke found patrons, many of them, throughout his life. People seemed to want to help the intellectual poet. People gave him money, offered him accommodation, helped him out when he was in trouble. The list of people who helped him is long, including Anton Kippenberg, his publisher at Insel-Verlag, and also many female admirers: Eva Cassirer, Princess Marie, Magda Richling, Lou Andreas-Salomé, Clara Westoff and Sidonie Nádherny.
    Lou Andreas-Salomé, one of the key women in Rilke's life, was an extraordinary personality, by any standards. Of course, much of her glamour derives from her associations with three great European minds: Nietzsche, Freud and Rilke. However, she was a talented writer and psychoanalyst in her own right, as demonstrated by her novels (Ruth, Fenitschka, Ma), her short stories (Im Zwischenland), studies of Rilke and Nietzsche (Rainer Maria Rilke, 1929, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, 1894), and her psychoanalytic texts. Rilke had been interested in Nietzsche's philosophy before he met Salomé: not only had Nietzsche stated God was dead, he also said that art's goal was God-making.[9]
    Nietzsche, Rilke and Freud - it's an incredible trio of minds, and Lou Andreas-Salomé knew them well. She was born Louise von Salomé in 1861, in St Petersburg, of a Russian general and a German mother. She studied philosophy and theology at Zurich university (she was one of the first female students). She had an infamous affair with both Paul Rée and Nietzsche, and married Friedrich Carl Andreas in 1887. Paul Rée and Nietzsche would take long walks with Andreas-Salomé, discussing philosophy. The men in their thirties were deeply enamoured of Andreas-Salomé, and it appears that she was largely in control of the love triangle. Nietzsche made the mistake of asking Rée to convey his proposal of marriage to Andreas-Salomé. She was an inspiring woman, quite brilliant, who ignited Rilke poetically as well as sexually. She also knew Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler, Wassermann, Wagner, Count Eduard Keyserling, Conrad, Franz Wedekind, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Brandes. 'Europe's cultural élite paid homage to Lou Salomé' wrote H.F. Peters.[10] Nietzsche was besotted with her, calling her 'sharp-sighted as an eagle and courageous as a lion'.[11] For Freud, Andreas-Salomé was someone who displayed 'all the peaceful and playful charm of true egoism'. Andreas-Salomé's beauty led Freud to compare her to a cat.[12] Salomé took Rilke in 1913 to a Psychoanalytic Congress, and introduced him to Freud. Lou Andreas-Salomé was the only erotic/ philosophic focus in Nietzsche's otherwise celibate experience of women.[13] Her refusal of him, so legend had it, led to his insanity. In a letter to Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell wrote: 'Anaïs [Nin] just sent me a biography of Lou [Andreas-Salomé] by [H.F.] Peters which is marvellous, it was Lou who started off this whole thing in Geneva - her wicked sexy spirit - the spirit of the Great Instigators, like that of Anaïs herself!'[14] In the novel Livia, Lawrence Durrell depicted Andreas-Salomé as 'a dramatic and beautiful Slav whose extravagant and fleshy ampleur was somehow wholly sexy and composed'.[15] French feminist Sarah Kofman has wondered whether Lou Andreas-Salomé was a model for that narcissistic woman which men love, the type that demands to be loved. Kofman considers this narcissistic woman in relation to Nietzsche, and wonders whether Lou Andreas-Salomé was the mediator of the theory of narcissism between Nietzsche and Freud.[16] Andreas-Salomé's notion of the narcissistic woman, and her thoughts on the artist, influenced Nietzsche. She was an independent thinker, quite the equal of any of the intellectual minds with which she came into contact. 'She was strikingly beautiful,' writes Rilke's biographer, Donald Prater, 'although thoroughly 'liberated' in ideas and scornful of convention, had led a life in which, despite appearances, heterosexual love played no part' (37). One of Andreas-Salomé's biographers (Rudolph Binion) was not so convinced by her liberal views. He saw her as suffering from an infantile father complex, which manifested itself in her relation to Freud in her mid-life. According to Binion, Andreas-Salomé exhibited penis envy, felt inferior to men and apparently even wished to 'make herself master' over Freud (Binion, 240-1, 349, 354, 397).
    The Rilke-Andreas-Salomé romance appeared to be spiritual, idealistic, Platonic - Rilke and Andreas-Salomé went about Russia hand in hand. They were, Andreas-Salomé said later, 'like brother and sister, but from primeval times before incest became a sacrilege';17 they were, she said, a Neoplatonic unity: 'body and soul indivisibly one' (ib., 9). For Lou Andreas-Salomé, she achieved with Rilke a 'kneeling-together', not sex but a suprasexual sacrament, a holy love. His experience of her was bound up with his time in Russia, his child-like notions of motherhood, his love of the Madonnas of Italian Renaissance painting, and his creative hunger.
    Rainer Maria Rilke's early poetry includes work such as Leben und Lieder (1894), Traumgekrönt (1897), the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Advent (1897), and Buch der Bilder (The Book of Pictures), The Book of Hours and Cornet (1899). These are the books of the early period, which is usually dated from the middle 1890s to the time of the breakthrough New Poems (1906). Rilke's early poetry is often mannered, precious, derivative, trite, banal and self-conscious. Like Mallarmé and Valéry - with Trakl the poets whom he resembles in many ways - Rilke was a precise poet, who dreamt of the perfect form for the perfect poetic expression. Few poets are as exact as Rilke. It is partly this poetic brilliance that makes him so highly regarded. 'Rarely has a European poet stirred so many minds and inspired so many pens' wrote F.W. von Heerikhuizen. As Frank Wood put it, '[t]he craft aspect of his work, the creativity of the "word", is the very key to his aesthetic, thought, and "message"' (Wood, 218). Rilke was not a vague, dithering personality, as his sometimes wispy poetry might indicate. He was though short in stature a solid, very sensual character. He wasn't a wispy character, said the artist Hermann Burte, but rational, orderly and down-to-earth.[18] He actually enjoyed the whole craft of writing, the very physicality of it. One must love not only the work itself, but 'also the manual labour that goes with it' Rilke said.[19] Rilke enshrined the act of writing itself - not only the cerebral and emotional pleasure of putting words together, but also the feel of the pen scratching over the surface of the paper. This love of writing by hand in itself is shown by the abundance of letters he wrote. He was fastidious too about the physical quality of his books. Working on the publication of The Book of Images, Rilke was much concerned with the binding, paper and type. He wanted even the smallest word to be 'like a monument'. Every word must be printed exactly right.[20]
    Much of Rilke's life centred around his desk, working at a table, or his favoured standing desk. For hours and days on end, Rilke, like most writers, would have sat at his desk and worked. One of the primary tasks he did was to write a huge amount of letters. He is one of literature's great letter-writers. He would conduct love affairs through the post (as with Magda von Hattingberg). He worked, day by day, on projects such as translating Dante's Vita Nuova, André Gide and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese; essays such as "On the Young Poet", "Primal Sound" and "Some Reflections on Dolls"; The Rodin-Book; and of course poems. Among other projects he considered were translations from Petrarch and Augustine's Confessions; a paean for the dancer Nijinsky. Then there was his reading - his love of poets such as Heinrich von Kleist, Claudel, Hölderlin and Werfel - Gide, Early Renaissance painters, Rodin.
    Rilke's poetry is marked by passion, distance, synaethesia, ambivalence, openness, and formal elegance. Though his stanza forms, for example, are meticulously organized, he is describing often violent and disturbing states of consciousness, which slip into prophetic magic on the one hand, and anguish on the other. In his poems Rilke asks questions such as 'have you ever really looked at a bowl of roses before?', questions which poets have been asking since the birth of poetry. Rilke shows these things - an iris, panther, a statue of Apollo - as if they were new. Rilke's technique of synaesthesia makes him as much a tactile poet or an aural poet as a visual poet. Synthaesthesia is one of the poet's goals, Rilke says in his short essay "Primal Sound". Too many modern poems employ only one or two of the five senses, Rilke says in The Rodin-Book (130). In The Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 14) he speaks of the rainbow of the senses, and the language of flowers and fruits. In sonnet I, 16 he asks 'who can point a finger at a smell?'. He often spoke of the soundscape or aural geography of places - the way a spring would be quiet though it was flowing speedily, or the way the roaring of a river might carve out the walls of a valley. 'Reine Spannung. O Musik der Kräfte!' he wrote in the twelfth Sonnet to Orpheus ('electric tension. Music of energy!')[21] Rilke's acute sensitivity to sound is obvious in his heavily musical verse, but also in his fastidiousness about his living quarters. He longed for peace, and at times loathed the prospect of small talk. Rilke's poetic world, with its dark spaces in which haunted sounds echo, recalls the dark worlds of touch that occur in stories of blindness (such as D.H. Lawrence's The Blind Man). It is a world of the sixth sense, the magical sense, the 'supersense', the occult faculties that everyone possesses but which society suppresses. Like most great poets, Rilke is a supremely synaethetic poet, speaking to all of the senses, and the sixth, praeternatural sense. The link here, historically, is Symbolism, with its emphasis (in poets such as Paul Verlaine and Stéphane Mallarmé) on the musicality, materiality and 'thingness' of poetry. In his essay "Prmal Sound" Rilke voiced the common claim that modern European art over-emphasizes the visual sense while neglecting the others.
    Rilke's technique, in emphasizing the materiality of the word, which goes far beyond T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is to work from within. In Rilkean poetics, poetic language must be made rich and full, but without being over-indulgent or pretentious. 'A poem enters into language from within,' Rilke wrote, 'in an aspect forever averted from us. It fills the language wondrously, rising to its very brim - but it never again thrusts towards us'.[22] The best poets create this sense of fullness, like a glass of water filled up to the brim, the meniscus poised to break, balanced on the point of flooding. Rilke's poems operate at this balancing point between openness and closure, between centripedal and centrifugal motion, the poem being all symbol and being all object. Rilke developed the inwardness of poetry begun in Baudelaire and refined in Mallarmé into new depths of self-referentiality. Verinnerlichung was the term for this transmutation from outer to inner, while instead of 'work of art' Rilke used the term Kunstding ('thing of art'). There is conflict between the 'in-seeing' of the Neue Gedichte period and the Orphic philosophy of the late works. The fundamental innerness remains consistent.
    Rilke was a cosmopolitan poet, at home in many different places but still forever in search of his 'spiritual home'. Indeed, one of the main Rilke critics, Eudo C. Mason, said that Rilke 'gives the impression of being one of the completely culturally cosmopolitan beings that has ever existed' (1963, 2). There was no single place in Rilke's cosmology that was the mythic centre - as Dorset was for Thomas Hardy, or Paris for Gertrude Stein. Rilke's is a poetry not so much of exile and displacement, like so much of post-18th century poetry, as people migrated en masse; rather, Rilke's is a poetry of no particular place (even though it is distinctly made in Europe, with a slant now termed white Eurocentric). Rilke does not, for example, exalt particular places, or write eulogies to particular landscapes. There are references in his work to sites such as the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, or the Tuscan countryside. But Rilke is not a 'landscape' poet, a 'nature' poet in the traditional sense. He is not provincial, nor slangy or colloquial. His poetry is, rather, deliberately Orphic, purely lyrical, a poetry of everyplace, everytime.
    With the Duino Elegies and the New Poems, the Sonnets to Orpheus are Rilke's greatest poetic achievement. Each poet invents poetic forms anew, and Rilke reclaims the sonnet from its traditional use as a short lyric, usually treating experiences associated with love. Rilke's sonnets have little to do with the great European sonnet tradition - of Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Remember, though, that Rilke had translated Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets From the Portuguese. Baudelaire is probably another reference point, in his modernization of the sonnet. Rilke takes the sonnet form and, like Petrarch, bends it into all sorts of shapes. He will, like Shakespeare, construct a sonnet from a single sentence, with many clauses and intervals. Or he will, like Baudelaire, create a series of short, punchy phrases which break up each line. Rilke's sonnets do not follow but modulate the old rules of the octave and sestet. Rilke does usually stick to one important tradition in the sonnet, the rhyme (which's partly why he is so difficult to translate). Rilke packs a lot into the fourteen-line space of the sonnet. He evokes night, space, breath, presence, transformation, loss, suffering, sensuality (sound: ringing like a bell, taste: wine, sight: night, and so on), mystery, magic, personification (earth, water, wine, night), philosophy.
    After the struggle of the Duino Elegies comes the relative calm of the Sonnets to Orpheus (in fact, most of the Sonnets were written before the Elegies were completed). The conventional view is that Rilke struggled for years between the beginning and completion of the Duino Elegies, hardly writing anything in between. In fact, he was working for much of that time, and had creative periods as rich (or nearly as rich) as that of February, 1922. Rilke had many beginnings throughout that time. In 1914 he wrote to Sidie Nadherny:
 

I'm stuck in the pressure of the new beginning, which I want to do well, well (it can easily be ruined), what I want is a pure spiritual life, every day the same, no distractions, no claims on me, all expectation turned inward toward the heart where my next task must emerge.

Just think! I have been allowed to survive to this point. Through everything. Miracle. Grace... Now I know myself again. My heart was as though truncated while the Elegies were not done. Now they are. They exist.
 

Sei - und wisse zugleich des Nicht-Seins Bedingung,
den unendlichen Grund deiner innigen Schwingung,
daß du die völlig vollziehst dieses einzige Mal.
(Be - and at the same time know Non-Being, the infinite ground for the harmonic of your heart, so you sound it perfectly once, and only once.)[29]

REFERENCES
 

Rudolph Binion. Frau Lou: Nietzcheís Wayward Disciple, Princeton University Press, 1968
Sarah Kofman. The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freudís Writings, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1985
Eudo C. Mason. Rilke, Oliver & Boyd, 1963
Donald Prater. A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, Clarendon Press, 1994
Rainer Maria Rilke. Duino Elegies, tr. J.B. Leishman & Stephen Spender, Hogarth Press, 1957
-. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell, Picador, 1987
-. Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. Leslie Norris & Alan Keele, Skoob Books, 1991
-. Rilke On Love and Other Difficulties: Translations and Considerations of Rainer Maria Rilke, John J.L. Mood, W.W. Norton, 1993
Frank Wood. Rainer Maria Rilke: The Ring of Forms, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1958
 
 
 

NOTES

(In square brackets)
 

1. Eudo C. Mason reckons that Rilke could have been a great novelist, a first rate critic and perhaps also a great dramatist - but his sense of lyrical interiority eventually became dominant (Mason, 12).
2. E. Sewell: The Orphic Voice: Poetry and Natural History, Routledge, 1961, 310.
3. Rilke, Briefwechsel Rainer Maria Rilke und Lou Andreas-Salomé, Insel Verlag, 1975, 305.
4. Fürstin Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe: Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke, Insel-Bücherei, Frankfurt, 1966, 107.
5. Hofmanstahl, 1929, in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 6 Oct, 1982.
6. Rilke, letter to E.S. zu Schweinsberg, 4 November, 1909, in Briefe 1907-1914, 80-81.
7. Quoted in Prater, 141.
8. Quoted in Prater, 86.
9. The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. S. Mitchell, xvii.
10. See Angela Livingstone: Lou Andreas-Salomé: Her Life and Works, Moyer Bell, New York, 1984; H.F. Peters. Rainer Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1960, 52.
11. Nietzsche: Briefe an Peter Gast, Leipzig, 1924, 89-90.
12. See Freud: "On Narcissism", Complete Works, vol. 14, 88f; Kofman, 50f; Mary Jacobus: Reading Woman: essays in feminist criticism, Methuen, 1986, 135.
13. Janet Lungstrum: "Nietzsche Writing Woman/ Woman Writing Nietzsche", in P.J. Burgard, ed. Nietzsche and the Feminine, University Press of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1994, 144.
14. Lawrence Durrell: The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980, Faber, 1988, 466.
15. Lawrence Durrell: Livia, Faber, 1978, 187.
16. Sarah Kofman, 1985; see also Biddy Martin: Woman and Modernity: The (Life)Styles of Lou Andreas-Salomé, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991.
17. Lou Andreas-Salomé: Lebenstrückblick, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer, Insel-Taschenbuch, Frankfurt 1974, 138.
18. Quoted in Prater, 263.
19. Rilke, letter to Dora Herzheimer, 14 July, 1907, in Paul Obermuller et al, eds. Katalog der Rilke - Sammlung von Richard von Mises, Frankfurt, 1966.
20. Rilke, Briefe an Axel Juncker, Insel Verlag, Leipzig, 1979, 35.
21. The Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 12. 9, in Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. Leslie Norris & Alan Keele, 12.
22. Letters to Benvenuta, tr. Heinz Norden, Hogarth Press, 1953, 51.
23. Duino Elegies, tr. J.B. Leishman, 120.
24. Julia Kristeva. The Kristeva Reader, ed. T. Moi, Blackwell, 1986, 192.
25. Briefe an Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, Insel Verlag, Leipzig, 1977, 668f.
26. Rilke, letter, 20 April, 1923, in The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. S. Mitchell, 336.
27. Rilke, Rilke On Love and Other Difficulties, 25.
28. Rilke, in The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. S. Mitchell, 214-5.
29. Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. Leslie Norris & Alan Keele, 40.
 
 

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