Rainer Rilke

The Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was born in Prague to a father who was a former military officer and a mother who was a socialite from a wealthy family of industrialists, the daughter of an imperial counselor. As a child and teenager, he was not particularly happy. His education was disorganized and fragmented. Initially, he pursued military training but was unable to adapt and eventually abandoned it due to his fragile constitution. He enrolled in the Commercial School of Linz, but after a year, he returned to Prague and focused on his studies. In 1895, he enrolled at Charles University, where he studied literature, art history, philosophy, and for one semester, law. He continued his studies in Munich and Berlin. Rilke traveled extensively throughout Europe. His visits to Russia, which became a milestone in his life, resulted in "The Book of Hours" (1905). In 1901, he married sculptor Clara Westhoff, and in the same year, their daughter was born. He settled in Paris, which became his geographical and artistic center for about twelve years, where he formed a close association with Rodin and developed a new style of extreme linguistic and lyrical refinement, reflected in "New Poems" (1907-1908) and "The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge" (1910). He experienced a creative crisis and deep depression until 1922, when, in a burst of creativity, he completed the "Duino Elegies" (1923), conceived during a moment of clarity in 1912 in Italy, and composed the "Sonnets to Orpheus" (1923) in just a few days, inspired by the death of a young girl; these two works are considered his poetic masterpieces and brought him international fame. Rilke spent the last years of his life in Muzot, near Lake Geneva, in the Rhone Valley, and died on December 29, 1926, at the Valmont sanatorium in Switzerland from leukemia. According to legend, Rilke fell ill after being pricked by a rose thorn while tending to his garden.