Angels keep entering my reading these days. Or maybe I find wings in things and look for a flock, a pattern of migration, an auspice of threshold or revelation.
Enter Letters Summer 1926: Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke (NYRB Classics). With excerpts and small attentions.
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Pasternak saved the two light blue sheets of notebook paper which carried Rilke's embrace. After Pasternak's death, in the summer of 1960, the papers were found in an envelope marked most precious, which he carried in a leather wallet in his jacket pocket.
The view from Duino Castle looking at the ruins of 11th century Duino castle below. Photo credit: Iliana Gutierrez
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Within yodeling distance of Trieste, the Duino Castle rests atop a karst headland buffeted by Adriatic winds. It is a space where the winds and waves own the landscape — they create and shape it, anchor it within and outside time. Rainer Maria Rilke lived in the Duino Castle from October 1911- May 1912. This is where he began his Duino Elegies (which took a decade to finish).
According to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Rilke kept having dreams of angels speaking, or an angel trying to find him. She described this in her memoirs:
Rilke later told me how these Elegies arose. He had felt no premonition of what was being prepared deep inside him; though there may be a hint of it in a letter he wrote: “The nightingale is approaching—” Had he perhaps felt what was to come? But once again it fell silent. A great sadness came over him; he began to think that this winter too would be without result.
Then, on January 12, something appeared:
Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted to take care of it quickly, and had to deal with numbers and other such tedious matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the water gleamed with silver. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, judging to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought.... Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm voice had called to him: "Who,if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?"
He stood still, listening. “What is that?” he whispered. “What is coming?”
Taking out the notebook that he always carried with him, he wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed by themselves without his intervention. He knew that the god had spoken.
Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and answered the difficult letter.
By the evening the whole First Elegy had been written.
In the final five years of his life, Rilke wrote from Chateau de Muzot, Switzerland, where he finished the Elegies. We know this from his correspondence with Anton Kippenberg on February 9, 1922:
I have climbed the mountain!
At last! The Elegies are here, they exist….
Dear friend, now I can breathe again and, calmly, go on to something manageable. For this was larger than life—during these days and nights I have howled as I did that time in Duino—but, even after that struggle there, I didn’t know that such a storm out of mind and heart could come over a person! That one has endured it! that which one has endured.
Enough. They are here.
I went out into the cold moonlight and stroked the little tower of Muzot as if it were a large animal—the ancient walls that granted this to me. And the ruined Duino.
The whole shall be called: The Duino Elegies.
They will get used to the name. I think.
Today, Duino Castle belongs to Italy, owned by the Thurn und Taxis (Torre e Tassis) family. Alessandro, Princess Marie’s son, serves as its steward. Princess Marie had another abode in Venice named Palazzo Valmarana, but it is boarded up, abandoned to ruin.
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When Pasternak published his memoir of poetic influence, Safe Conduct, the critics in Soviet Russia got excited. His affinity with Rilke's immaterialism and transcendence were taken as implicit critiques of Marxist materialism (as interpreted by the Soviet CP). Pasternak was accused of subjective idealism, a form of counter-revolutionary activity. The book was published in censored form in 1931, and later removed from libraries, and reprints were forbidden.
