The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  7. Will anyone believe that there are buildings… it is at home in me: This paragraph was famously quoted in its entirety by Martin Heidegger in Part One, Section 15, of Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1975; translated into English by Albert Hofstadter as The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). As Heidegger observes: ‘Poetry, creative literature, is nothing but the elementary emergence into words, the becoming-uncovered, of existence as being-in-the-world. For the others who before it were blind, the world first becomes visible by what is thus spoken.’ After quoting Rilke's paragraph, Heidegger comments:

  Notice here in how elemental a way the world, being-in-the-world – Rilke calls it life – leaps toward us from the things. What Rilke reads here in his sentences from the exposed wall is not imagined into the wall, but, quite to the contrary, the description is possible only as an interpretation and elucidation of what is ‘actually’ in this wall, which leaps forth from it in our natural comportmental relationship to it. Not only is the writer able to see this original world, even though it has been unconsidered and not at all theoretically discovered, but Rilke also understands the philosophical content of the concept of life […]

  While it is true that a demolished building such as that described by Malte might have been seen in any city, it is worth pointing out that the famous paragraph does in fact refer to a Parisian scene, since it has not been unknown for Heidegger scholars to cite ‘Rilke's evocation of the world of the urban squalor of late nineteenth-century Prague’ (Julian Young, Heidegger's Philosophy of Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  8. têtes-de-moineau: A cheap coal burned in stoves (literally, ‘sparrow-heads’).

  9. Duval: This restaurant chain of Rilke's day existed until the middle of the twentieth century.

  10. not one word will be left upon another: Compare Mark 13: 2: ‘there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down’.

  11. Mécontent de tous… méprise: The passage is from Charles Baudelaire's Poèmes en prose (1869; also known as Le Spleen de Paris), a favourite with Rilke:

  Dissatisfied with everyone and dissatisfied with myself, I should like to redeem myself and take some pride in myself, in the silence and solitude of the night. Souls of those I have loved, souls of those I have sung, fortify me, lend me support, keep far from me the lying and the corrupting vapours of the world; and you, my Lord God! grant me the grace to produce some beautiful verses that will prove to me that I am not the least of men, that I am not inferior to those whom I despise.

  12. They were children of fools… weep: Job 30: 8–9, 12–13, 16–18, 27, 31. In his letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 18 July 1903 (see Introduction), Rilke described himself as often reading the thirtieth chapter of Job before sleeping, in his darkest early days in Paris, and finding every word of it true of himself.

  13. a tall, lean man in a dark greatcoat: Rilke first set down his observation of the man with St Vitus's dance in the same letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 18 July 1903 (see Introduction).

  14. the saint in the Panthéon: Rilke was an admirer of Puvis de Chavannes's mural of Ste Geneviève, patron saint of Paris, in the Panthéon, where many great figures of the French nation are buried.

  15. Do you remember… come of such an action: The poem ‘Une Charogne’ (A Carcass) is in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) and describes a putrefying, maggot-infested carcass beside a path. In a letter Rilke wrote to his wife, Clara, on 19 October 1907, he took the poem to be the key to ‘the whole evolution towards objectivity in expression’ which he saw as having come to fruition in the art of Paul Cézanne (who, Rilke noted with satisfaction, could still recite ‘Une Charogne’ word perfect at the end of his life). Those who are creative must consider all things that exist equally, even the seemingly repellent, and allow them an equal validity. The ability to do this, he felt, was the secret of Gustave Flaubert's success in ‘The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller’, one of his Trois Contes (Three Tales) of 1877. Rilke went on to write that it was now, for the first time, that he grasped the fate of Malte Laurids Brigge, who understood the necessity for this totality of scrutiny but was himself unequal to its demands when he confronted reality, and failed the test. ‘Or did he perhaps pass it,’ added Rilke, ‘for he described the death of the Chamberlain; like a Raskolnikov, however, he remained behind, used up by what he had done, unable to go on at the very moment when action had to begin, with the result that his newly won freedom turned against him and tore him apart, defenceless as he was.’

  16. mouleur: A mouleur is a moulder of masks. Malte refers in this passage to a well-known death mask of a woman who had drowned herself in the Seine, and then to the death mask of Beethoven, who became deaf later in life.

  17. Hammerklavier: In this passage addressed to Beethoven, this word points not only to the instrument (the piano) but also to the composer's Grosse Sonate für das Hammerklavier (Great Hammerklavier Sonata), his Piano Sonata no. 29 in B flat major, opus 106 (1817–18). The Theban desert is the location to which early Christian hermits in Egypt retreated, most especially St Paul the Hermit (died c.347), and, by extension, the seclusion to which the early ‘desert fathers’ of the church, including Antony and Athanasius, withdrew. Rilke's unusual juxtaposition of courtesans and anchorites later in the sentence may suggest he had been reading Anatole France's Thaïs (1890), in which St Paphnutius emerges from a hermit life in the desert to convert the courtesan Thaïs to Christian living.

  18. the seed of Onan: See Genesis 38: 9.

  19. like ships' figureheads in small gardens back home: In a letter of 1925 to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, Rilke explained that he had seen painted figureheads set up in precisely this way in the gardens of Danish sea-captains.

  20. headstrong man: Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906). Incidents and details in several of Ibsen's plays are referred to in this section. The refusal to quit the window, in the final paragraph of the passage, was characteristic of Ibsen in the last days of his life.

  21. Admiral Juel: Nils Juel (1629–97), a Danish national hero, celebrated for a naval victory over the Swedes in 1677.

  22. bautta: A Venetian carnival mask.

  23. his modest, faithful Rebekka… Lavater: Rebekka was the wife of the poet and journalist Matthias Claudius (1740–1815). Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) was a Swiss writer and theologian. The quoted words are from his diary of a journey through Denmark in 1792.

  24. There was Christian IV… in old portfolios: Christian IV was King of Denmark and Norway for sixty years, from his accession at the age of eleven in 1588 till his death in 1648. Others in this formidable portrait gallery of the Danish seventeenth century were close to the King. Kirstine Munk was his second, morganatic wife; Ellen Marsvin was Kirstine Munk's mother; ‘the “incomparable” Eleonore’ was Christian IV's daughter Leonora Christina, one of the monarch's twelve children by Kirstine Munk (her ‘ordeal’ was imprisonment for more than twenty years in the royal castle at Copenhagen). These are followed in this paragraph by the Gyldenløves (Golden Lions), illegitimate offspring of Christian IV; the Ulfelds were the children of Leonora Christina. Others named in this paragraph (Holck, Brahe, Daa, Rosen-sparre) were officers in the Danish army and navy. The Grubbes, Billes and Rosenkrantzes in the following paragraph were Danish aristocratic families. Rilke took an apparently random selection of names from a compendious study of Danish historical portraits, E. F. S. Lund's Danske Malede Portræter (1895–1903).

  25. an Erik Brahe who was executed: An army officer executed in 1756 for his part in a monarchist plot aimed at increasing royal power.

  26. Prince Felix Lichnowski… cruelly lost his life in Frankfurt: A conservative member of the National Assembly in Frankfurt in 1848, Lichnowski (1814–48) was killed by the mob during one of the uprisings that took place that year throughout the German states.

  27. There are tapestries here: Rilke became interested in t
he celebrated Dame à la licorne (Lady with the Unicorn) tapestries, which he saw in the Musée de Cluny in Paris in 1906. The tapestries were woven in Flanders in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and bear the arms of a nobleman, Jean le Viste; they were perhaps commissioned as an engagement gift to his fiancée, Claude. There are six in all, five illustrating the five senses and the sixth, which bears the motto Rilke quotes, ‘A mon seul désir’ (To my sole desire), the understanding of the heart. Rilke's description does not follow the order in which they are conventionally arranged: after the sixth, bearing the motto, he continues with the fourth (the sense of touch) before concluding with the first (the sense of sight). Rediscovered at Boussac (see the following note) in 1841 by Prosper Mérimée, the tapestries have held an unbroken fascination for writers since then, from George Sand to Cees Nooteboom and Tracy Chevalier.

  28. château of Boussac… Pierre d'Aubusson, great grand master from an ancient house: Pierre d'Aubusson (1423–1503), grand master of the Order of St John (i.e. the Knights of Malta), owned the château of Boussac where the tapestries were kept until their purchase by the Musée de Cluny in 1882.

  29. Gaspara Stampa or the Portuguese woman: The Italian Gaspara Stampa (1523–54), sometimes described as a courtesan, was one of a number of women who stood in Rilke's mind for the sublime purity of love which endured in unreciprocated adversity; she is mentioned in the first of the Duino Elegies (see Introduction). Stampa had recorded her unhappy love for a Venetian count, Collaltino di Collato, in a cycle of more than two hundred sonnets. Rilke frequently wrote in letters of Stampa's enforced renunciation; to Mimi Romanelli, for example, who fell in love with him when they met in Venice in November 1907 and whom he kept at arm's length for several years, he offered the suggestion, in a letter of August 1908, that they might study Gaspara Stampa's works together one day, while to another of his unattached women correspondents, the Bohemian aristocrat Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, he wrote in October 1908 of Stampa's ‘heroic and angelic’ early death, describing her fate as ‘clear and crystalline’. The ‘Portuguese woman’ (Rilke's word ‘Portugiesin’, often translated as ‘Portuguese nun’, means only that) was Mariana Alcoforado (1640–1723), who at the age of twelve entered a nunnery, where she met her lover, the Marquis de Chamilly. The letters attributed to her, now generally considered fiction, served Rilke as another example of the sublimity of love in renunciation; he wrote an article on them in 1908, and published a translation in 1913.

  30. Maman unrolled the little pieces of lace… snowy thicket of Binche: Rilke took a real interest in lace, and would have watched women making it in Bruges and Venice. A poem on the subject in the first volume of the New Poems (see Introduction) emphasizes the self-abnegation in the women's work, a quality which associates them with the self-denying great lovers of whom he has just been writing. William Small's Rilke-Kommentar zu den ‘Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge’ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983) contains illustrations (pp. 129–30) which reveal the stylistic characteristics of Alençon, Valenciennes and Binche lace.

  31. Saint-Germain… the Marquis of Belmare: Both names were used by the same man, an eighteenth-century adventurer who engaged in court intrigues and diplomatic missions for the French, Russians and Germans, was musically gifted and claimed alchemical powers. He died at Eckernförde, the place in Schleswig-Holstein that Abelone has just had difficulty spelling (though the Count's reason for mentioning the place may have been that it was the scene of a naval battle in 1849, in which the Prussians defeated the Danes).

  32. the Bernstorff circle: Count Johann Hartwig Ernst von Bernstorff (1712–72) and his nephew Count Andreas Peter von Bernstorff (1735–97), originally from a Hanoverian family, were in the service of the Danish crown, and at the centre of an influential intellectual and political circle.

  33. Julie Reventlow… She had the stigmata: Friederike Juliane, Countess von Reventlow (1762–1816), daughter of a Danish privy councillor, was the moving spirit of a circle of writers and intellectuals. Rilke read about her in Lavater's diary (see note 23 above); the notion that she was a ‘saint’ and bore the ‘stigmata’ was Rilke's elaboration of a passage in Lavater that was not intended literally, according to Small's Rilke-Kommentar, cited in note 30.

  34. to pierce his heart: Rilke told his French translator, Maurice Betz, that he had witnessed the same procedure performed on his own father. Perforation of the heart was not infrequently undertaken, in much of Europe, apparently as a guarantee against being buried alive.

  35. It was about Christian IV… all that was written on the sheet of paper: Rilke took the account of the death of Christian IV (see note 24 above) almost verbatim from the memoirs of the King's doctor, Otto Sperling (1602–73).

  36. Félix Arvers… Then he died: The anecdote about the death of the French poet Félix Arvers (1806–50) has often been told; while in Paris in 1906, Rilke would have had ample opportunity to come across it in publications marking the centenary of Arvers's birth.

  37. Jean de Dieu: Portuguese-born saint (1495–1550) who founded a hospital in Granada and in 1886 was denominated patron saint of hospitals by Pope Leo XIII. An order bearing his name was founded shortly after his death.

  38. those wondrous pictures… points to her like a finger: Malte is thinking of Flemish paintings, such as The Temptation of St Anthony (c.1500) by Hieronymus Bosch, which present vice and sin in a style of grotesque exaggeration.

  39. Grisha Otrepyov: A pretender to the Russian tsarist throne, Otrepyov claimed to be Ivan the Terrible's (Ivan Grozny's) youngest son, Dmitri, who had died in mysterious circumstances in 1591. At the head of a mixed Polish and Cossack army, he was made tsar in 1605 after the death of Boris Godunov, but was killed in an uprising in the following year (led by Prince Vasily Ivanovich Shuisky, who succeeded him as tsar). Maria Nagoi, seventh wife of Ivan the Terrible and mother of the dead Dmitri, had entered a nunnery after her son's death. Marina Mniszech, daughter of a Polish nobleman, married Otrepyov and was crowned Tsarina. Rilke took the story, and details of his phrasing, from an encyclopedia published in 1835.

  40. Charles the Bold: Rilke follows the story of Otrepyov with that of Charles, Duke of Burgundy (1433–77), who conquered Lorraine in 1475 but suffered a defeat at Granson in the following year. In an attempt to retake Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, Charles lost his life on 5 January 1477 in a battle against conjoined forces of Lorraine and Switzerland (Uri, whose horns are referred to in Malte's account, is a Swiss canton); the search for his body was made on the feast of the Epiphany (6 January), and the corpse was found on 7 January. Gian-Battista Colonna, one of Charles's pages, came from Rome and was known as ‘the Roman’; King Louis XI of France was the implacable enemy of Charles, and in Malte's telling (this appears to be Rilke's invention) it amused Charles's retinue to give his name (‘Louis-Onze’) to the Duke's ‘fool’.

  41. Baggesen, Oehlenschläger and Schack-Staffeldt: Jens Baggesen (1764–1826), celebrated Danish satirical poet; Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger (1779–1859), pre-eminent Danish Romantic poet and dramatist; Adolf Wilhelm Schack von Staffeldt (1769–826), Danish poet. In his Rilke-Kommentar (see note 30 above), William Small observes that Schack von Staffeldt, who failed to achieve a national reputation on a par with that of his fellow Danes, is conspicuously the obscure odd man out in a list which also includes internationally famous names of the order of Friedrich Schiller, Walter Scott and Pedro Calderón de la Barca; the explanation seems to be that Rilke knew of his work only at second hand, from the critic Georg Brandes.

  42. Bettina's letters: Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859), wife of one German Romantic poet, Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781–1831), and sister of another, Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe when she was twenty-two, exchanged letters with the much older writer, and in 1835, three years after his death, published the somewhat fictionalized Briefwechsel Goethes mit einem Kind (Goethe's Correspondence with a Child). Rilke read this book in 190
8 and wrote to his wife, Clara, on 4 September that year: ‘I am reading Goethe's Correspondence with a Child, this most powerful and pressing of testimonies against him.’ Abelone's aversion to Goethe's side of the correspondence (‘No, not the replies’) was plainly shared by Rilke: in a letter to Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin of the following day, 5 September, he wrote:

  I am reading […] the letters of Bettina Arnim to Goethe; I mention only hers; for his woeful, embarrassed answers worry and trouble me greatly. How constrained he must have been as a man, how unfocused and conventional as a lover, to have responded to this magnificent fire with such loth and paltry scraps! […] There was his sea: it surged and pounded at him and he hesitated, and was circumspect, and did not pour himself forth into it. Not even on reflection did he see that he had nothing to fear from a love that was growing so heroically over and above him, and that one nighttime smile would have showed her the way onward to where, without knowing it, she wanted to go: beyond herself.

  43. your greatest of poets: That is, Goethe (see previous note).

  44. the chariot of his fiery ascension: cf. the ‘chariot of fire’ in 2 Kings 2: 11.

  45. Héloïse… Sappho: The twelfth-century lovers Abelard and Héloïse, teacher and abbess respectively, have had a special place for centuries among the great lovers in Western literature. For the Portuguese nun, see note 29 above. The great Greek poet Sappho, of the seventh to sixth centuries BC, similarly has her secure place in the pantheon of love.

  46. as with a lamp grown cold: Malte's thought is probably of the foolish virgins, who declare, at Matthew 25: 8, ‘our lamps are gone out’.