Auf Rilkes Wegen by Barbara L. Surowska (review)

Rainer Maria Rilke spent most of his life unterwegs. Barbara Surowska, in Auf Rilkes Wegen, refers to him as “der unermüdlich reisende Rilke” (290). Rilke’s natural habitat was the Bahnhof, waiting for a train to Paris, or Venice, or Vienna, or Prague. Fortunately for Rilke, his many friends were happy to host him for weeks or months, but sooner rather than later he would be off again. His personal relationships were most often unterwegs. In love with Lou Andreas-Salomé, he married Clara Westhoff; he and Westhoff had a daughter, Ruth. Rilke and Westhoff, though, had a distanced marriage, and even when they chanced to live in the same city they lived in different places. In a sense, Rilke’s art, too, was unterwegs. A lyric poet, he was also a novelist, essayist, and critic; a neo-Romantic, he was also a Modernist. His mature art is concrete, objective, almost sculptural but also deeply sensual; a religious nonbeliever, he is often described as a mystic. No wonder, then, that Rilke scholar, Barbara L. Surowska, entitles her collection of essays Auf Rilkes Wegen.

Auf Rilkes Wegen is volume three of the Warschauer Studien zur Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaft; Karol Sauerland is the series general editor. Auf Rilkes Wegen is a collection of sixteen of Barbara Surowska’s Rilke essays. The collection includes a brief afterword but no foreword. The essays are arranged in an approximate biographical order, from a consideration of Rilke’s troubled childhood titled “Literarische Bewältigung der Kindheit” to his thoughts on mortality in “Auffassung vom Tode.” Still, a foreword that related the essays to each other and to the wider project of the Warschauer Studien would have been helpful.

Two of the sixteen essays, “Erste Bildungsreisen” and “Reise nach Nordafrika,” deal explicitly with Rilke’s incessant traveling. Several essays are biographical and consider his childhood, his years in Prague, and his relationship with Marie von Thurn und Taxis. Surowska’s chief interests, though, are formal and thematic.

Rilke’s poetic voice is notoriously difficult to describe. Rilke’s voice changed both over time and from work to work. Surowska avoids any final judgments about Rilke’s style and instead, in a series of essays such as “Die Idee vom Festcharakter des Schaffens” and “Die Kunst, einfach zu sein,” considers specific facets of his multifaceted work.

Surowska’s greater interest is comparative. “Rilke und Dostojewski” and “Bobrowski und Rilke” are especially interesting. In the former, Surowska insightfully compares Dostoyevsky’s Poor Folk with Rilke’s Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. In the latter, Surowska traces surprising parallels between Rilke’s experience of Russia and that of Johannes Bobrowski, a poet of the next generation.

Surowska’s comparison of Rilke and Bobrowski highlights her greatest concern, the themes that shape Rilke’s art. Russia is what Rilke and Bobrowski share, she writes, and in several other essays, Surowska examines Rilke’s fascination with Russian culture. Surowska demonstrates that Russia is as central to Rilke’s art as Bohemia, France, or Austria. Though fluent in Russian, Rilke had no interest in or understanding of Russian society or politics. Instead, as Rilke traveled eastward from Prague and Vienna, he moved both backward in his biography, to his childhood, and deeper, into his soul. Often, his was a Tolstoyan Russia, peopled with pious “muzhiks” who were at one with nature and close to God. It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss Rilke’s Russian obsessions as mere orientalism; his understanding of Russian culture was both deep and wide.

However important, though, Russia was only one of Rilke’s many destinations, and Surowska’s essays follow him to Paris, to Worpswede, to Vienna, to Venice, and across Europe. Her three concluding essays follow Rilke farthest afield. In “Die Weite und das Weltganze,” Surowska considers the impact of nature on this very urban poet, especially his experience of dazzling starry nights in Spain and Egypt. In the penultimate essay, “Ringen mit Christus,” Surowska considers the vexed question of Rilke’s faith. Raised...