The book of hours
The Book of Hours is the title of a cycle of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke . The 1899 to 1903 resulting in three parts, first in 1905 Insel Verlag in Leipzig published collection belongs with its dreamy and melodic expression and the neo-romantic mood next to the Cornet the most important part of his early work.
The work, dedicated to Lou Andreas-Salomé , is his first fully composed cycle, which established his reputation as a religious poet, through which it is linked to the Duinese elegies .
Rilke presented a wide range of his poetic instruments in a language still caught up in the Art Nouveau aesthetics of the turn of the century. The suggestive musicality of his verses became the hallmark of his poetry and was received in a diverse and controversial manner.
The work comprises the parts: The Book of Monastic Life , The Book of Pilgrimage and The Book of Poverty and Death .
Emergence
The first book, initially titled Die Gebete , was written from September 20 to October 14, 1899 in Berlin-Schmargendorf , where Rilke had also written the Cornet . He wrote the middle part of the cycle (after marrying Clara Westhoff ) from September 18 to 25, 1901 in Westerwede , while the last book from April 13 to 20, 1903 was no longer written in Germany, but in Viareggio , Italy .
Two years later, now in Worpswede , he revised the text, which was published in December 1905 as his first book introducing the collaboration with Insel-Verlag and which appeared in four editions with around 60,000 copies while he was still alive.
The biographical background of the work includes Rilke's trips to Russia, which he undertook in the summer of 1899 and 1900 with the dedicatee Lou Andreas-Salome, after which he began working on the cycle. The vastness of Russia , its culture, which has not yet been touched by Western civilization, and the orthodox religiosity of the peasants formed a background that over the course of time developed into a spiritual home through personal encounters with Leonid Pasternak and the admired Leo Tolstoy . As he wrote twenty years later, looking back, this land had opened up to him and given him “the brotherhood and the darkness of God”, “in which there is community alone.” In this dark distance, the ancient and eternal God, to whom always to “ build ”was to stay for him later.
In Wolfgang Braungart's opinion , the sentimental journeys into the pre-modern and primal areas brought him closer to what was supposedly socially successful; he found a “human like-minded, brotherly” part of the peasant world. In this way, the religion of a country was conveyed to him, the expression of which was the Urussian icon or icon wall .
Rilke shared the culturally critical idealization of Russia with intellectuals like Thomas Mann and Oswald Spengler , who shaped this into a conservative myth based on Friedrich Nietzsche , whose literary star witness Dostoyevsky was.
He himself used a poetics of inspiration for the creation of the verses, which would later shape his work. In the morning when he woke up or in the evening he would have received words like prayers, by which he would orient himself and which he would have written down according to an inner dictation.
Title and Background
The title of the cycle goes back to the books of hours in use since the late Middle Ages and already indicates the religious reference. These prayer and devotional books were often decorated with book illumination , thus combining religious edification with art. They contained prayers for different times of the day and were meant to structure the day by turning to God regularly .
The work is under the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and thoughts of contemporary philosophy of life and shows Rilke's search for a meaningful source of life, which he pantheistically called God. He found him "in all these things / which I am good and like a brother" and addressed him as a "neighbor of God", whom he "sometimes / in a long night disturbs with hard knocking" and of whom only "a narrow wall “Separate.
Rilke reacts to this situation with an incomplete dialogue between I and God and in doing so repeatedly annuls any (preliminary) determination of God, a movement that affects both sides: not only does the lyrical I dissociate , but also the "interlocutor", the is conjured up in different forms and appears once as "the darkest", then again as "the prince in the land of light".
In addition to the search for the ego and self-discovery, problems of linguistic expression also arise in the God dialogue. Although there is still no fundamental skepticism of language in his book of hours , as Hugo von Hofmannsthal articulated in his Chandos letter , there is, however, the problem of grasping the essence of God linguistically alongside one's own self. In front of him people would build up pictures “... like walls; so that there are already a thousand walls around you. / For our pious hands cover you, / as often as our hearts see you open. "
For Meinhard Prill, Rilke describes the image of a “God becoming”, who is conceivable as the creator of meaning in the world, but ultimately remains unspeakable.
Form and lyric variety
The form of the collection with its loosely arranged poems, the extent of which is very different, corresponds to the provisional nature of religious poetic speech. Rilke played with a great variety of stanzas and used numerous, virtuoso lyric means: enjambement and internal rhyme , suggestive images, forced rhyming sounds and rhythms , alliterations and assonances . Other characteristic peculiarities include the popular, often polysyndetically used conjunction “and” as well as frequent nouns that were sometimes classified as mannerist.
Poems included
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wolfgang Braungart in: Rilke manual, Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Ed. Manfred Engel, Stuttgart 2013, p. 216
- ↑ Meinhard Prill, Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch, in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 14, Munich, 1991, p. 151
- ^ Rilke, Rainer Maria, in: Killy Literaturlexikon, Volume 9, pp. 468–469
- ↑ Quoted from: Wolfgang Braungart in: Rilke-Handbuch, Leben - Werk --ffekt, Metzler, Ed. Manfred Engel, Stuttgart 2013, p. 216
- ↑ Wolfgang Braungart in: Rilke manual, Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Ed. Manfred Engel, Stuttgart 2013, p. 217
- ↑ Wolfgang Braungart in: Rilke manual, Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Ed. Manfred Engel, Stuttgart 2013, p. 218
- ↑ Meinhard Prill, Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch, in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 14, Munich, 1991, p. 150
- ^ Rainer Maria Rilke, in: Complete Works, Volume One, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955, p. 266
- ^ Rainer Maria Rilke, in: Complete Works, Volume One, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955, p. 255
- ^ Rainer Maria Rilke, in: Complete Works, Volume One, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955, p. 255
- ↑ Meinhard Prill, Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch, in: Kindlers Neues Literatur-Lexikon, Vol. 14, Munich, 1991, p. 151
- ↑ Wolfgang Braungart, in: Rilke manual, Life - Work - Effect, Metzler, Ed. Manfred Engel, Stuttgart 2013, p. 219
