" Rainer Maria Rilke." Austrian Fiction Writers, 1875-1913, edited by James N. These tales and sketches, some seventy of them, fall into the beginning of his career, before the changes that took place in his life and production in the years from 1902 to 1905.
Of all Rilke's works, the large body of stories he wrote has received the least attention as a mature artist he himself grew condescending when he occasionally mentioned them in his letters-in striking contrast to Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, which he continued to praise and explicate until his death. His novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910 translated as The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1930) was initially received as a belated product of European decadence or as an autobiographical document (neither opinion is wholly off the mark) later it was identified as a striking example of the "crisis of subjectivity and its influences on the traditional possibilities of narration," in Judith Ryan's formulation. Long the prey of cultists and often obscure exegetes and regarded as the bearer of a "message" or "messages," he has more recently been seen as a brilliant verse tactician whose visions may be more original in their manner of perception than in their philosophical core. Because of statements in Duineser Elegien (1923 translated as Elegies from the Castle of Duino, 1931) and Die Sonette an Orpheus (1923 translated as Sonnets to Orpheus, 1936) on the limitations and possibilities of the human condition, he has become something of a teacher and consoler to readers aware of the fragility and the potential of man. With the poems of his middle years, Neue Gedichte (1907-1908 translated as New Poems, 1964), he is an expert instructor in the art of "seeing" as well as a guide through Europe's cultural sites just before the onslaught of general war and, subsequently, mass tourism.
In the collections with which his early verse culminates, Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Pictures, 1902 enlarged, 1906) and Das Stunden-Buch enthaltend die drei Bücher: Vom mönchischen Leben: Von der Pilgerschaft: Von der Armuth und vom Tode (1905 translated as The Book of Hours Comprising the Three Books: Of the Monastic Life, Of Pilgrimage, Of Poverty and Death, 1961), he appears as a creator or discoverer of legends-his own and history's-and, particularly in the latter work, as a special brand of mystic. Rainer Maria Rilke is one of the major poets of twentieth-century literature.
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