‘The Country Bordering God’: The Importance of Trips to Russia in Rilke’s Work

Abstract

When he was very young, Rilke left Prague and moved to Munich, where in 1897 he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, a Russian immigrant who helped the young poet discover the Russian cultural and spiritual heritage, igniting his passion for the great country to the east of Europe. In April 1899, Rilke embarked on his fi rst trip to Russia, where he met Tolstoy, Leonid Pasternak, and the sculptor Pavel Trubetskoy. He felt forever changed by the experience of the Russian Easter night on Red Square in Moscow. In his later letters, he writes that he found his homeland in Russia and that, for the fi rst time, he felt truly at home. Upon returning to Germany, he wrote the essay Russian Art, he began writing the “Stunden-Buch”, a poem about the spiritual experience of a monk-iconographer, and immersed himself in studying the Russian language and literature. In 1900, he embarked on his second trip to Russia, now recognized as his true homeland. There would be no third journey, but Russia — real, literary, and imagined — would forever remain in Rilke’s works and in his personal identity. In this article, I aim to analyze the impact of his Russian travels on Rilke’s work, paying special attention to how these travels infl uenced the development of Rilke’s personality and his understanding of himself, his creativity, and his vocation as a poet — an aspect often overlooked in the literature on this subject.