- ". . . wie ein dunkler sprung durch eine helle tasse . . ." Rainer Maria Rilkes Poetik des Blinden. Eine ukrainische Spur
The impact of Rilke's journeys to Russia on his poetic development has been the subject of many studies. As Adrianna Hlukhovych points out, however, most of those studies are less geographically astute than was Rilke himself: although at the time the Ukraine formed part of the Romanov Empire, Rilke was well aware that on 1 June 1900 he had crossed a cultural border and entered what he himself called "die Ukraine" (and not, as was common at the time, "Kleinrussland"). Hlukhovych's book, originally a dissertation, attempts to distinguish this experience from the wider context of the Russian journeys and isolate a particular "ukrainische Spur" in Rilke's poetics.
This is no forced attempt to link a little-studied literary tradition to a canonical modernist poet or to co-opt Rilke as a supporter of Ukrainian cultural identity. First of all, Hlukhovych does not spare Rilke criticism for what she terms "der zweifache koloniale Blick" (38), i.e., viewing the Ukraine through the lens of west European preconceptions as well as "aus der russischen Perspektive" (39). Second, and more importantly, Rilke's Ukrainian journey serves Hlukhovych as a starting point for a detailed examination of Rilke's "Poetik der Blindheit." The connection here is the traditional Ukrainian figure of the kobzar, or blind minstrel—a figure that fascinated Rilke both from his reading and from his travel experiences, and which left explicit traces in some of the texts written in the aftermath of this journey. Hlukhovych expands on these traces by drawing a connection between the Ukrainian kobzar from Rilke's early texts and the figure of Orpheus from the later period; in this manner she creates a framework for the study of blindness as well as a series of related themes over the course of Rilke's poetic career.
This double methodological approach—combining historical examination of an overlooked context with theoretical analysis of a fundamental poetic and aesthetic motif—is particularly intriguing. Yet the relation between these two approaches remains [End Page 437] unresolved. The book is divided into two parts (oddly enough, a division not indicated in the table of contents): Part One describes Rilke's experiences in the Ukraine and provides an overview of the cultural history of the Ukrainian kobzar; Part Two (which makes up the bulk of the book) follows Rilke's poetics of blindness through its various incarnations at different stages of his development and draws connections between blindness and other Rilkean themes such as Schauen, night, closing of eyes, even rhythm, music and dance, as well as the other senses of touch, smell, and taste. Here Hlukhovych quite rightly emphasizes that any phonocentric turn in Rilke's late works should not be understood reductively as establishing a hierarchy or privileging one sense over the other: "die phonozentrische Wende findet in Rilkes Dichtung statt,—man darf aber nicht von ihrer Linearität, sondern eher von ihrer Reversibilität ausgehen und sie nur in dem Sinne und Maße gelten lassen, in dem die anderen Sinnesbereiche untereinander korrespondieren und ineinander übersetzt, 'verwandelt' werden" (17).
While this awareness of dialectical interconnections among senses and poetic themes, or between a particular concept (such as Schauen) and its opposite (blindness), produces some interesting insights, following this chain of correspondences leads Hlukhovych quite far from her starting point: the postulate of correspondence means that blindness can be related to almost anything else. Thus the logical structure of this book becomes murkier as it goes on, and at times the corresponding themes seem simply to come one after the other like beads on a rosary. Further, while the "synaesthetic" aspect of Rilke's late poetry is indeed crucial, it is perhaps not as hidden or ignored as Hlukhovych implies: indeed, Rilke's well-known text "Ur-Geräusch" (which occupies a key place in the final pages of this book) has the dialectical interconnection between senses as...