Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875. His father worked for the railroad after a failed stint in the military. Rilke had a somewhat strained relationship with his mother, who was in mourning during his childhood because her daughter had died in infancy before Rilke was born. As a result, she often treated Rilke as if he were the little girl she’d lost. In 1886, at the age of 11, Rilke attended a military academy in the Austrian city of Sankt Pölten. He detested his time there, as he was brutally bullied for his sensitivity. In fact, he had such a hard time at military school that he later suggested that it was necessary for him to completely block out the memory of his experience there in order to make anything of himself as an artist. He lasted for five years at the school before leaving to attend trade school, from which he was expelled in 1892. He was then tutored at home until 1895. It was during this period that he wrote his first collection of poetry, Life and Songs, which was published in 1894. He spent a brief period attending the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, but he soon left school and moved to Munich, where he became acquainted with other writers and started working seriously on his own writing. He published a number of poetry collections in the ensuing years, including The Book of Hours, a three-part book that he worked on between 1899 and 1903. He also wrote several plays and short stories, though none of them are considered his finest work. However, his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is one of his best-known pieces of writing and explores themes he constantly struggled with in both his poetry and his life—themes having to do with God, solitude, and life’s incomprehensibility. For the majority of his life, Rilke faced illness and was often unwell, eventually dying of leukemia in 1926.