Correspondence

[RMR to LAS in Munich, sent by messenger]

[Letterhead:] Wegwarten

René Maria Rilke

Munich, Blütenstrasse 8/1

May 13, 1897

Most gracious lady,

Yesterday was not the first twilight hour I have spent with you. There is another in my memory, one that made me want to look into your eyes. It was winter, and all the thoughts and aspirations that the spring wind scatters into a thousand faraway places were crowded into my narrow study and my quiet work. Then suddenly a gift arrived from Dr. Conrad: the April 1896 issue of Neue Deutsche Rundschau. A letter from Conrad referred me to an essay in it titled “Jesus the Jew.” Why? Dr. Conrad had recently read a few sections of my Visions of Christ (five will soon appear in his journal Gesellschaft), and he thought I might find this sage treatise interesting. He was wrong. It was not interest that drew me deeper and deeper into this revelation; a devout fellow-feeling walked ahead of me along this solemn path—and then at last it was like a great rejoicing in me to find expressed in such supremely clear words, with the tremendous force of a religious conviction, what my Visions present in dreamlike epics. That was the mysterious twilight hour I could not but be reminded of yesterday.

You see, gracious lady, through this unsparing severity, through the uncompromising strength of your words, I felt that my own work was receiving a blessing, a sanction. I was like someone for whom great dreams, with all their good and evil, were coming true; for your essay was to my poems as reality is to dream, as fulfillment is to a desire.

Can you imagine, then, the feelings with which I looked forward to yesterday afternoon? And I could have told you all this yesterday as we talked—over a cup of tea, casually, with a few well-chosen, heartfelt words of admiration. But nothing could have been farther from my thoughts. In that twilight hour I was alone with you and alone I had to be with you—now, as my heart was overflowing with thanks for such a blessing.

I always feel: when one person is indebted to another for something very special, that indebtedness should remain a secret between just the two of them.

Perhaps someday I’ll be granted the privilege of reading to you one or another of my own Visions of Christ, from the ones I have kept copies of here. I can think of no deeper joy.

Should I arrange tomorrow, Friday, to come to the Gärtner Theater, I hope I will find you there, gracious lady.

But these are the words of an old, long-harbored gratitude; to be allowed to express them now feels like

an honor awarded

to your:

René Maria Rilke

[RMR to LAS in Munich, inscribed in a copy of Traumgekrönt, Neue Gedichte von Réne Maria Rilke (Leipzig, 1897)]

This is an old medieval lie: that the nuns

Who cocooned themselves in hollow cells

In the hottest frenzy of their hidden raptures

Seared Christ’s stigmata on their bodies,

In which Love lay sick, like that waiting well

From which no weary one drank heart and coolness.

This is an old medieval lie. But those others,

Unshielded from the everyday, stride through all times

And everything they do is like a preparation—

Those strangers who blaze the paths of what is new,

Who lead the way through struggles into peace

And out of death into eternities—

Those strangers truly bear unbeknownst

Jesus’ burning wounds on their bodies:

Feet walked raw, hands blistered by travail

And that wild bleeding in their breast . . .

For Frau Lou Andreas-Salomé

In gratitude for being allowed to meet her!

René Maria Rilke

Munich, in May 1897

[RMR to LAS in Munich]

[Munich, May 31, 1897]

Monday Morning

Songs of Longing

V.

Longing sings:

I am a way of preparing you

And I smile gently when you stray;

I know that out of loneliness

you will emerge into that greatest happiness

And will take my hands.

I walk with you through all prose

And obliquely teach you

the deep lesson in every fate.

Which is: to see in each small rose

The great Spring’s unfolding.

Yesterday at noon there was sun so lavish that one could have gilded a kingdom—even if it had not been a small and very poor one. But gold alone is not enough. I was very sad. I had been wandering about the city near the entrance to the Englische Garten with a small bouquet of roses in my hand, intending to present them to you. Yes, instead of going directly to the door with the golden key, I carried them around with me, trembling with sheer determination to meet up with you somewhere. In that I was not unlike someone who casts a letter into the ocean so that the waves will carry it to the shore of the friend for whom it is meant. The letter, of course, will merely float out into the boundless sea and finally sink. Thus also my roses. When after all my rushing about I finally stopped at noon and looked down at the sad faces of the faded flowers, a melancholy, fear-filled loneliness came over me:

Found on far-off pathways:

Sprigs of roses. With stems in hand,

Unsure of how to hold them,

I want to meet you.

As with pale orphaned

children I look for you,—

And to my poor roses

You would be a mother.

In the afternoon I found Frau Rütling in the Englische Garten. She had been looking for you at Fräulein Goudstikker’s and was also disappointed at not being able to find you. So I could at least talk to someone about you. —She sympathized at once when she heard that I had been called up to register for military service. She even wanted to go see an ambassador about it. How kind she is!

The induction notice, however, even when I think of all the possible consequences, frightens me less at this moment than the prospect of having to leave here.

About that I am full of dread.—

I’ll probably have to leave Wednesday evening or early Thursday, and until then I stretch out both my hands for every second you will give

Your

René Maria

About plans for this afternoon you will let me know?

May 31/June 1: RMR and LAS make a two-day excursion to the village of Wolfratshausen, south of Munich near Lake Starnberg, in search of a retreat near the mountains for a longer sojourn. During this trip they almost certainly become lovers.

[RMR to LAS in Munich]

[Munich, June 3, 1897]

*Tomorrow morning, as soon as the verdict regarding the military business has been reached, you shall receive a telegram that will tell you how it all came out and whether I can get back immediately and many another thing that will not be put in words but that you will nevertheless be able to read there.

Songs of longing!

And they will resound in my letters, just as they always have, sometimes loudly and sometimes secretly so that you alone can hear them . . . But they will also be different—different from how they used to be, these songs. For I have turned and found longing at my side, and I have looked into her eyes, and now she leads me with a sure hand.

I can become quieter in every phrase.

For I believe that in our conversation yesterday evening you hinted to me of what it means to have this word at one’s core, preserved in all its greatness and depth: “simplicity.” This utterance of yours shall be the key to my secret writing. Touch my every sentence with the pure gold of its power, and as from a Gothic reliquary there will flow toward you: the sparkling stream of my thousand coinages of tenderness.

And every fleeting thought, every wish, every dream will be veiled in my words. You will recognize them all.

Last night I entered my room smiling. I know: always, except for this, there would have

[approximately seven lines missing]

so much, that if it were spread smoothly and evenly throughout my quotidian days, there would be enough for a very long life. —At last I have a home.—

Are you fond of roses? It feels to me: as if all the roses in the world bloom for you and by means of you, —and that only through an act of royal condescension do you maintain the pretense that they aren’t really yours and allow the Spring to keep them.

Now I am closing my manuscript folder: the Visions are in it, the 12 novellas, many of which I will some day read to you, letters, pages filled with notes, and Ruth.

Did not I myself write these lines once in some dream filled with presentiments?

“. . . until the whole world dropped away from me

And nothing of all that life remained

Except a boundless gratitude

And a love stretching on forever! . . . .”

If they had not existed, I would have written them now. How wonderful that they do exist. For hence this strange exchange: I can express my happiness in your words. —And thus you in turn will understand my happiness. Is it not so?

Goodbye for now,

René.

Here is the Prague address: Wenzelsplatz 66. Rear Building. III. Floor. —But I am confident that I’ll be back before a letter can reach me.

[RMR to LAS in Munich, telegram]

Prague, June 4, 1897, 11:10 A.M.

Free and soon also full of joy

R.

[RMR to LAS in Munich]

[Munich, June 6, 1897]

Whitsunday

Whitsun Greetings!

With bells pealing everywhere

And life on holiday in town and farm,

Today I greet the Feast of Roses

With open heart, and greet also the One

Who handed me this Spring

That shall determine all my days;

She received the poor, tired, homeless wanderer

And relieved him of his staff.

*

Kindest One,

In your great splendor

Humble

All my soul for you.

Deliver it

From its dark spell

And chain it

To your compassion.

And imagine:

It blooms in your May,

And you grant it

Your sweet slavery.

*

In no other May have I felt

How richly the world can fill with sound;

Spring touches all the hours

And all the hours send forth chords.

They sing far out into the twilight gleam

Their loudest joy, their softest joy,

And like desire lured, in dance-like waves

The echo backbeats through the night.

*

It’s so good to know you aren’t in Syrgenstein. Throughout that whole oppressive trip I kept dreading the possibility that after so late a return home yesterday, there would be a stretch of days when you lived so far away from me in a lonely mountain chateau that I would not be able to reach you without watching the sun die several times. —But now you are here and I only have to wait until six o’clock to see you.

Then let us be together again.

It is good of you to give the little novellas a hearing. But what I feel when I read them is, strangely: none of this is part of me any longer. It all seems so remote, as if from an earlier existence.

In the old garden that I have abandoned.

There is my old unhappiness

Like an abandoned garden

Where I had once sown wishes;

I couldn’t linger

until they came to bloom;

perhaps now they flower too late.

What a great revolutionary you are. —You didn’t overthrow thrones inside me. But the one throne that waited there: you strode past it gently smiling.

Ever upward.

And my desires, which before had crowded and become tangled around the vacant throne like wild roses, now rise as white columns around the space from whose temple friezes you smile down into my soul and bless my longing.

René

[RMR to LAS in Munich]

[Munich, June 8, 1897]

Tuesday

The wildflowers I brought home from that fairy-tale morning a week ago have been nestled ever since between two wide sheets of soft blotting paper; but today as I gaze at them, they smile back at me a blissful memory and all try to look as happy as they were back then. —

—

That was one of those rare hours. Such hours are like an island with flowers blooming thickly all around it: the waves breathe very quietly on the other side of the spring walls and no barge approaches out of the past and none waits to move on into the future.

—

The inevitable return to the everyday means nothing to these island hours. They remain detached from all the rest, as if lived in a second, higher existence.

—

A heightened island existence such as this, it seems to me, is the privileged future of the very few. —

A bliss peals out, blooms from far away

And wraps round my solitude

And attempts like a golden bracelet

to ring my dreams.

And though my poor small life

is hoarfrost frightened and snowdrift sad

A holy season will present to it

The blesséd Spring . . .

I wish I were in Dorfen already. The city is full of noises of every kind and completely foreign to me. And during the most important periods of inner development nothing that is foreign should disturb the widening circles. —

One day many years from now you will fully grasp what you are to me.

What the mountain spring is to someone dying of thirst.

And if the person whose life it saves is thankful enough and just, he won’t simply drink in its clarity to become cool and strong again and then move on into the new sun. No: he will build a hut in its shelter, build so close that he can hear its singing, and will remain in the flowery meadow until his eyes are suntired and his heart overflows with riches and clarity. I will build huts and—remain.

My clear fountain! What thankfulness I want to feel toward you. I want to see no flower, no sky, no sun—except in you. How much more beautiful and like a fairy tale is everything gazed at through your eyes: the flower at your edge, which (as I know from before, when I had to look at things without you) shivers alone and lifeless in the gray moss, then brightens in the mirror of your kindness, stirs lightly and with its little head almost touches the sky that reflects back out of your depths. And the sunbeam that arrives dusty and unfaceted at your borders grows clear and multiplies itself a thousandfold to become radiant splendor in the waves of your luminous soul. My clear fountain. I want to see the world through you; for then I will see not the world but always and only you, you, you!

You are my saint’s day. And when I walk toward you in a dream, I shall always wear flowers in my hair.

—

I want to put flowers in your hair. But what flowers? There are none with touching enough simplicity. And from what May would I fetch them? But I’m convinced now that you always have a wreath in your hair . . . or a crown. . . . I’ve never seen you any other way.

I’ve never seen you without wanting to pray to you. I’ve never heard you without wanting to place my faith in you. I’ve never longed for you without wanting to suffer for your sake. I’ve never desired you without wanting to be able to kneel before you.

I am yours as the staff is the pilgrim’s—only I don’t support you. I am yours as the scepter is the queen’s—only I don’t enrich you. I am yours as the last little star is the night’s, even though the night may be scarcely aware of it and have no knowledge of its glimmer.

René

[RMR to LAS in Munich]

[Munich, June 9, 1897]

Wednesday evening

Leaving you, through rain-dark streets

I steal quickly and feel

That everyone whose eyes meet mine

Can see blazing in them

My blissful, resurrected soul.

And on this road I try furtively

To hide my joy from the horde.

I bear it home with me in hurried steps;

Not till deep in night do I

Unlock it quietly, like a golden chest.

Then I lift its golden treasures

Out of deepest darkness, slowly, piece by piece,

And don’t know what to gaze on first;

For all the places in my room

Are overflowing, are overflowing.

It is a richness beyond compare—

Such as the night has never gazed on,

Such as the night has never dewed;

More precious even than any royal dowry

Bestowed on a young king’s bride.

Among it are rich crown-imperials,

And all the jewels set in them are stars.

And no one suspects. My dearest:

I am among my treasures like an emperor

Who knows he has an empress.

And after the recent wild thunderstorm the sun now pours in so richly that a solid-gold happiness really does seem to have covered all the places in my room. I am rich and free and re-dream each second of the afternoon in deep breaths of contentment. I don’t want to go out again today. I want to dream gentle dreams and with their splendor deck my room as with vines of flowers to receive you. I want to enter my night with your hands’ blessing on my hands and in my hair. I don’t want to talk to anyone, lest I squander your words’ echo, which ripples like a sheen over mine and lends their sound a richness. And after the evening sun I don’t want to gaze into any more light, so that I may kindle a thousand gentle sacrifices at the fire of your eyes. . . . I want to rise in you, like a child’s prayer in a loud, jubilant morning, like a rocket among the solitary stars. I want to be you. I want to have no dreams that don’t know you, and no desires that you will not or cannot fulfill. I want to perform no deed that does not praise you and tend no flower that does not adorn you. I want to greet no bird that does not know the way to your window and drink from no brook that has not once tasted your image. I want to go to no country in which your dreams have not roamed like strange miracle-workers and dwell in no huts in which you have never taken refuge. I want to know nothing of the days that preceded you in my life or of the people who dwell in those days. As I pass by them I want to place a rare faded wreath of remembering on the grave of these people, if they deserve it, since I am too happy not to be thankful. But the language in which they speak to me now is the language of tombstones, and when they say a word I grope about and touch only cold, rigid letters. I want to praise these deceased with a happy heart; for they disappointed me and misunderstood me and mistreated me and down this long road of woes led me to you. —Now I want to be you. And my heart flames before your grace like the eternal lamp before the image of the Virgin Mary. You.

Thursday morning.—

I’d like to spread out purple blankets,

Then fill the myriad flower-lamps

With oil of balsam from golden cruses

Until they’re brimming everywhere.

So should they burn and burn

Till we, blinded by the red days,

In the pale night come to know each other

And our souls—are stars

How rich you are. You give dreams to my night, songs to my morning, aims to my day, and sun-wishes to my red dusk. You give without end. And I kneel and hold my arms up to receive your grace. How rich you are! I am everything you want. And I shall be slave or king as you grow angry or smile. But what makes me exist—is you.

I shall tell you this often, very often. My confessing shall ripen into something humbler and humbler, simpler and simpler. And when at last I tell it to you with perfect simplicity, you will understand it simply and our Summer shall have arrived. And it will extend out over all the days of your

René.—

You will come today!?

[RMR to LAS in Munich]

[Munich, June 1897]

. . . I ask myself so many things these days, as is always the case in times of great upheaval. I am in the first dawn of a new epoch. — I have left the garden in which I paced wearily for so long. . . .*

June 14: LAS and F. von Bülow move to Wolfratshausen, where they rent a small house (Lutzhäuschen); RMR first lives in nearby Dorfen, a village about twenty miles south of Munich, before he joins them. Toward the end of July they move to a different house they call Loufried, probably alluding ironically to Wagner’s house Wahnfried in Bayreuth. During this “bohemian” period of rustic simplicity RMR, at LAS’s urging, changes his name from René to Rainer. When LAS’s husband visits them (July 23–August 29), RMR leaves for Munich but returns after a week’s absence on August 1.

[RMR to LAS in Kufstein]

[Wolfratshausen, July 17, 1897]

Saturday morning

I am alone and before me on the table

Stands, soft and pale, your little childhood picture;

And what I now know as dream and longing

I recognize in it: the gentle wistful

Far-off smile, and, in the vaulted niche

beneath the brow, the eye watching tenderly,

And even then seeking far out into life

And even then with a hundred graces to bestow!

I love this little picture. There is so much more of you in it than in the most recent one from Elvira. This pure simplicity in the features, this dark seeking of the eye, which at every moment is being soothed and countered by the sense of calm discovery in your smiling lips—this isn’t in the new one. And yet it is one of your greatest miracles: your eyes find an enigma and pause above it for a few moments, shading it as if with outspread wings. And then suddenly, without your thoughtful eyes yet suspecting it, a smile awakens and blooms about your mouth, spreads its tendrils over your cheeks and finally reaches up to your dark eyes, so that they blaze in hot redemption. And then the glow of this smile exceeds you and surrounds your body like a transfiguration. And this isn’t in the new picture. There you appear the way Puck sees you. You: if there existed a picture of you that was exactly like you, all the children who pass by it would fall on their knees before it. And I would mingle with those children and kneel down in their midst.

You, my love.

Come back, oh come back. It was so sad when to my “good night” no answer came. As I was falling asleep I said it aloud a few more times—and waited . . . waited . . .

Today it is raining. No doubt also on Kufstein and Pushkin.

[RMR to LAS in Kufstein]

[Wolfratshausen, July 1897]

Then your letter brought me its gentle benediction

And I knew: there are no distant places:

From all that’s beautiful you come toward me,

You, my spring breeze, my summer rain,

My June night with its many thousand paths

None before me was blessed to tread:

I am alive in you!

September 3: LAS leaves for a trip to Hallein, south of Salzburg; RMR returns to Munich six days later to await her there on September 15.

[RMR to LAS in Hallein]

Wolfratshausen near Munich

Sunday, September 5, 1897

Today is only the second day of my solitude—and I must confess to you: when I take inventory of that small store of courage I call my own, I scarcely know how I shall survive on it for eight days more. Yesterday was long, and I accomplished just about what I had hoped. First I wrote my father, without mentioning as yet that I will scarcely have any time to spend in Prague. Between now and then I will write him a few more letters so that he will gradually understand and not be taken unawares. Next I wrote to the publisher of Le rire, ordered a subscription, wrote a few words to Paul Bornstein, at the editorial office of Moderní Revue, concerning that article about avant-garde Czech literature, and finally sent a few words to the “illustrated women’s journal.” That took me until noon; after lunch I sank more and more sleepily into my weariness, read through bits of Rembrandt and Velasquez, and around six o’clock, even though there was a steady rain, went for a walk along the edge of the village, past the Kasten mill, on the road to Dorfen. Lost in thought I walked on beyond the little church with its brooding cemetery toward the studio of the woods-and-rhythms people, which is now ramshackle and desolate, and suddenly found myself on the meadow path we took that first evening when we entered golden Dorfen. Today it was autumnal and unoutlined and the pearl-gray rain lay thickly over it. I thought about how many bright lovely flowers we had found here and how long ago that was and how plowed and empty the meadows are. And I said goodbye to this land as to someone dying. And behind the last dark bushes there awakened a pale monotonous red—and it flowed softly and evenly across the western edge of the sky. It blended with the vague gray of the autumn sky in a high half-circle, and out beyond its edges delicate white clouds emerged from the glow and drifted toward night like birds with soundless silver wings. It only lasted a moment: then the landscape was extinguished and grew even more melancholy and desolate and furrowed than before; and I said goodbye as to someone dying. And I will say goodbye to something each impending day. To Lutzhäuschen and that spot above it from which we greeted for the first time the pale, nocturnal valley with its veil of light; to those gentle rolling meadows with the islands of beech trees in them; to the path to Ammerland. I have come to cherish all this like a homeland . . . and after I have said goodbye to it all (and that will be in three or four days), I will return to Munich. Why should I remain here? Once in the city I will visit diligently the two Pinacothecas, the Collection of Prints, and the Schack Gallery and peruse many beautiful things. And there will be more happiness and hope in this because it will be the setting for what during these ten days has been and will continue to be my longing and my faith—“the joyous moment of your return.” I feel more strongly now that I am preparing something for you, —and will thus be calmer. I will also be better informed when we go through the museums together; perhaps I can even add a bit of warmth and festiveness to your rooms. To that end I am writing the Brümmers today to see if I can rent a suitable room with board near your apartment for the three weeks from the ninth of September through the thirtieth. The ninth is Thursday and after that there will be only two more days to survive—until Sunday. No Sunday in my life can have been as festive as the one to which I am now looking forward!

I think of you every moment of the day and my thoughts and cares are with you wherever you go. Every breath of wind you feel on your brow kisses you with my lips and every dream speaks to you with my voice. My love surrounds you like a cloak, warming and protecting you!

My day also wishes me to tell you: it is poor because you are not near it; it is rich because your goodness spreads light over all its things. I talk to you often and speak of you with all that is mine. Live, sad to say, among people who interrupt my dreams with their loudness, and know, of course, not a single one of them. They are people who talk about trips, rainy days, and raising children, who bow deeply to each other, smiling and rubbing their hands, and greet each other with “Good Morning” ten times a day in loud, disagreeable voices. And so I associate only with Stauffer-Bern, who, though unpleasant in many respects, still seems an interesting and remarkable man. I look forward to telling you about this strange Bernburger, who is a mixture of daring and cowardice, of quiet, pellucid feeling and brutal, callous assertion, and who seems to express these inner contradictions (always magnifying them awkwardly) whenever he is in the presence of a woman. But the real tragedy of Stauffer’s life lies not in the self-doubt that again and again subjects his hope to bitterness and leads him away from one branch of art off toward some other, before he can ever really flourish in any one: but rather in the fact that neither he nor Frau Escher recognized early enough (or wished to recognize?) what really attracted them to each other; and that then, when such recognition did belatedly arrive, in the sacred day of their having at last found each other, such violent storms erupted that all the young sprouting seeds could not but be destroyed. It is not enough for two people to find each other, it is also very important that they find each other at the right moment and hold deep, quiet festivals in which their desires merge so that they can fight as one against storms. How many people have parted ways because they did not find the time slowly to grow close to each other? Before two people can experience unhappiness together, they have to have been blissful together and possess a sacred memory of that time, which evokes a kindred smile on their lips and a kindred longing in their souls. They become like children who have lived through the festivities of a Christmas night together; when they find a few minutes to catch their breath during the pale, drawn-out days, they will sit down together and tell each other with glowing cheeks about that pinetree-scented nighttime full of sparkling lights . . .

Such people will weather all storms together.

I am convinced of it!

Rainer.

[RMR to LAS in Wolfratshausen]

Put my eyes out: I can see you

Slam my ears shut: I can hear you

And without feet I can still walk to you

And without a mouth I can still beseech you.

Break off my arms: I will grasp you

With my heart as with a hand

Tear out my heart: and my brain will beat

And if you throw a torch in my brain

I will bear you on my blood

[RMR to LAS in Hallein]

[Wolfratshausen]

Eight at night on September 8 [1897]

Love, I am drunk from so much gazing. As you know, I went to say goodbye. First to Frau Wildenauer. Kathi met me on the way and showed me into their living room. We exchanged regards and wished each other well and I went on up the path to see old lady Reissler. That’s when it all began. The whole day had been cold and gray, but when I stepped out of the last stand of spruces, I beheld a clear, warm twilight casting golden tenderness on the bright house and its garden full of red. A serene happiness lay over it, and my thankful memory made me a confidant of this bliss of flowers. And her large, solemn living room struck me as all the more dark, all the more mystery-filled, with a soft, deep-red little fire flickering at the center of its hearth and everything empty and silent, as in a fairy tale. I found the old woman surrounded by cool meadow-scents, turning hay. She seemed so happy to see me, was touched that I had come to find her, enthused like a child over the group picture and spoke of you full of awkward, helpless love, spoke of the winter and of our returning and of the weather and of a carpet I had forgotten to take with me. And all this almost in a single breath, so that I was deeply moved. I managed to break away from this tireless old lady with a few polite, sincere words, and later found myself thinking: if only I had had a mother who was so simple and direct, as alive deep down in her heart with cheerfulness and piety as this old lady . . . but I took the path toward Ammerland and forgot everything I had been thinking; for the deeper I penetrated into the beech trees’ secrecy, and the farther the flowers and tall gray thistles in the pale meadows beckoned me with their waving, the clearer it became to me: all this is a festival. There was nothing of the everyday up here; only the few times we had walked alone, up above, our souls silent and oh so close, had it been like this. I followed the quiet path and it led me to a place where squirrels darted through moss and morass and everything around had its own serene, intimate stillness and stirring. And today there was no sudden flight in this sanctum, even though the brittle leaves cracked and shattered under my timid steps. A woodpecker tapped contentedly at his spruce tree like a prudent doctor, and seemed to find it in good health. Large birds stood unfrightened on mossy tree stumps and tolerated my stare; the squirrels slipped unconcerned through the thick branches with their customary cheerful haste. They had all decided: “It’s all right; he’s not an intruder, he won’t betray us, and besides: he’s come to say goodbye.” No, I won’t betray you, nor your holy secrecies, because my soul is in love with you. I stood as if praying in this blessed solitude which began far back behind rows and rows of tree trunks, and I felt—there are a hundred walls between me and all that is loud. Only your soul was with me in this quiet hour, for it is only through you that I can take this deep a pleasure, only through your grace that I am this rich, only through your love that I am this happy. —I felt: this has been a beautiful goodbye—and greeted the larger world once more. It was festive and suffused in a thousand colors. And as I walked home through this splendor, I myself must have been as if in Sunday clothes, and with the sun like jewelry on my shoulders. And I must have become brighter and better, for children who encountered me greeted me almost reverently with bright little voices and one of them even allowed me to place my hand on her blond hair. And had I been able to bless at that moment? What do you think?

Munich, September 9, 1897 [Thursday]. Afternoon. —So now I am in Munich, have already eaten in my room and after a cup of coffee will go visit the Schack Gallery. Your rooms are also ready now; if only they didn’t have to wait for your arrival! Spend not one second longer there than those weightiest reasons (whatever they are) require. —I know, I must go on being patient for days, for days . . . The sun was shining when I left Wolfratshausen and now it is beginning to rain again in that dear old way it has of falling lightly, almost inadvertently. And with the sun scarcely vanished, it is already cool. Take good care of yourself and come back sound and—soon—to

Your

Rainer.

October 1: LAS returns to Berlin, accompanied by RMR, who takes up residence there (Berlin-Wilmersdorf, Im Rheingau 8). He enrolls in art history courses at the university, studies Italian, and makes the acquaintance of various poets and writers, among them Stefan George, Carl Hauptmann, and Richard Dehmel. He continues to write poems, novellas, and short plays.

February–March 1898: RMR and LAS decide he should visit Florence to study Renaissance art firsthand. LAS will join him there later after she sees to family affairs. (Some biographers speculate that LAS arranged this separation in order to terminate a pregnancy secretly.) They plan the trip elaborately together, and LAS instructs RMR to keep a diary, which she will read on their reunion.

April–May: Traveling via Arco, RMR arrives in Florence during the first weeek of April. There the Swiss art collector Gustav Scheeli introduces him to Heinrich Vogeler, a Jugendstil artist who will later illustrate RMR’s Stories of God. He also meets the poets Stefan George and Rudolf Borchardt. In the middle of May RMR departs abruptly for Viareggio, a seaside resort town directly west of Florence, where he stays until the first of June.

June: RMR travels via Vienna and Prague (where he visits his parents) to Wilmersdorf (June 8) and almost immediately on to Zoppot (Baltic Sea), where LAS joins him after visiting Johanna Niemann in Danzig. Their stay together in Zoppot, fraught with tension and frequently interrupted by LAS’s trips to friends as far away as St. Petersburg, lasts until the end of July.

[RMR, The Florence Diary, concerning LAS]

FLORENCE, APRIL 19, 1898 [FIRST ENTRY]. Whether I have come far enough yet and possess the calm to begin this diary I want to bring home to you—I cannot say. But I know that my joy will feel far-off and unfestive as long as you—at least through some honest and deep-felt inscription of it into a book meant for you—do not share in it. And so I begin; and I take it as a good omen that I commence this testament of my longing in these days that by a year’s length follow those when, with kindred longing, I walked toward something vague and uncertain and didn’t know yet that you are the fulfillment for which I was preparing myself in songs of intense listening.

VIAREGGIO, MAY 17. How I have admired that in you, love: this unworried trust in all things, this kindness impervious to fear. Now it is approaching me also, on a different path. I am like a child who was hanging from a precipice. It is reassured when its mother grasps it in dear, quiet strength, even if the chasm is still below it and thorns splay between its cheek and her breast. It feels itself held, lifted—and is reassured. . . .

This day a mother writes me, a mother who was deep in many a fear before she experienced the miracle. She writes: “Now spring has come to us also, albeit amid storms and tears; but I feel now as though I had never seen a spring before. . . . Today I sat all afternoon in the garden with Rolf, and out in the air I felt him opening like a rose; he has become so much more beautiful since you last saw him, his hair is thicker and he still has those big eyes.”

I read this like a hymn, Lou. And I long for the moment when I shall read it before YOU; then it will become melody.

All I need is strength. Everything else that would make me a prophet I feel within me. I don’t want to journey through all countries and try to spread my teaching. Above all I don’t want to let it petrify into a doctrine. I want to live it. And only into your soul, love, do I want to pilgrimage, deep, deep inside, where it opens up into a temple. And there I want to raise my longing like a monstrance in YOUR splendor. That is my desire.

You have seen me suffer and have consoled me. Upon your consolation I want to build my church—in which joy has bright altars.

[VIAREGGIO] It was a strange Sunday, this May 22. A deep day. I was even able to record in these pages what I have long felt burning in me, a confession and a clarity and a courage. On a long walk in the festive pinetum the three Mädchenlieder . . . came to me along with YOUR high hymn that concluded the new notebook. Everything seemed so ripe for celebration: yet there can be no festival without YOU. And so I moved my high armchair close, dreamed YOU into it, sat down across from you and, as evening deepened outside, read one song after the other and sang the first and wept the second and was pure blissfulness and woe: a toy in the hands of these delicate pale songs that now did to me as I had done with them. All the longing and tenderness I had locked inside them came over me and surrounded me like a wild springtime and lifted me up as if with white, gentle, unseen hands—into what realm, I don’t know. But so high that the days were like little villages with red roofs and tiny church steeples and memories were like people standing small and silently in their doorways, waiting for something . . . .

[VIAREGGIO] After a day of prayer, a day of penance—as is so often the case. I found your letter after dinner and was dismayed and then afraid. Now I am still full of sadness. I have been anticipating the summer with such joy and felt it like a dear bright promise over everything. And now doubts arrive and worries, and all the paths grow tangled . . . and lead where?—

Suddenly it is so dark around me. I don’t know where I am. I only feel that I must sit among strangers and travel one day and then another and then a third in order to be with you at last—in order perhaps: to say goodbye to you.

And yet I feel something else in me saying: Wait. There is so much newness crowded before me, I cannot name it nor sort it out. But gaze for a while into forest and ocean, into the great beneficence of this splendor, and wait: clarity will come.

And clarity arrived.

Today there is no more fear in me, only bright joy: to have you again in six to seven days, love.

Why should a dreary beach in East Prussia concern me! For two whole months I have been scooping beauty with blissful hands; I have enough of it to tower up treasures before the both of us so that we will disappear from sight, no matter what others happen to be there.

[VIAREGGIO] . . . with a flickering candle at my side I thought: Lou, how magnificent you are, how much space you have opened up inside me. For if these Italian days showered me with treasures, it was you who created room for them in my soul—where the dreams once crowded, and the many timidities. It was you who made me festive. To return to you so clear, my love: it’s the best of what I’ll bring you.

[ZOPPOT, JULY 6, 1898 (FINAL ENTRY).] Here at the edge of a cooler sea I bring to an end this book, which I have denied more than three times; for much fear and poverty lie between back then and right now: days like flat country roads with poor leafless chestnut trees on either side, thoughts like endless villages passing by with dull lifeless doorways and windows ruined by rain. And yet all this had to come, and I am like this not because it came but because it happened now, at a moment when I wished nothing more than to bring you so much festiveness, unspoiled and holy, and surround you with it as with a dark niche that is receiving its statue. But I was like the child who for love of his desperately ill little sister runs to the city from the dark farmstead through night and need to fetch her medicine, and in the light of morning, enticed by childish games, forgets the very purpose of the trip and cheerfully returns without the longed-for cure. . . . This cheerfulness will become a weeping, and a despair stands behind it: I know too well.

And furthermore: the circumstances under which we first saw each other again were such that I perceived in you only various things from the world of yesterday; something past, something overcome, something narrow that had been hurtful for both of us crowded in on me and blocked the memory of our solitary happiness that is timeless and not tied to any “once.” I know only that you patiently listened to my innumerable small complaints, and suddenly I noticed that I was complaining again and you were listening again, just as before. That made me so ashamed, it almost embittered me. It was much like the people of Prague, who for their entire lives live their own past. They are like corpses who cannot find peace and therefore in the dark of night live their dying again and again and pass one another by across the hard graves. They have nothing left: the smile has wilted on their lips, and their eyes have drifted off with their last crying as if they were floating on twilight rivers. All progress in them amounts only to this: their coffin rots and their clothes disintegrate and they themselves crumble and grow wearier and lose their fingers like old recollections. And they tell each other the story of this in their long-dead voices: that’s how the people of Prague are.

Now I came to you full of future. And from habit we began to live our past. How could I observe that you became free and festive through the confidence in this book, since I did not see YOU, but only your forbearance and gentleness and the endeavor to give me courage and raise my spirits. Nothing at this moment could more incense me than this. I hated you like something too big. I wanted this time to be the rich one, the giver, the host, the master, and you were supposed to come and be guided by my care and love and stroll about in my hospitality. And now in your presence I was again only the smallest beggar at the outermost threshold of your being—which rests on such broad and certain columns. What help was it that I put on my accustomed holiday words? I felt myself becoming more and more ridiculous in my masquerade, and the dark wish awakened in me a desire to creep away into a deep Nowhere. Shame, shame was all there was in me. Every reunion with you made me ashamed. Can you understand that? Invariably I said to myself: “I can give you nothing, nothing at all; my gold turns to coal when I hand it to you, and I become poor in the process.” Once I came to you in such poverty. Almost as a child I came to the rich woman. And you took my soul in your arms and rocked it. That was good. Back then you kissed my forehead and had to bend far down to do so. Do you understand that at your side I grew up until it was only a short distance from your eyes to my eyes? But that I wanted finally, strong of stem, to bend down toward your lips exactly as your soul once bent down to my forehead? I didn’t want to be embraced by you, I wanted you to be able to lean against me when you are tired. I didn’t want to feel your consolation, I wanted to feel the power inside me to console you, should you ever need consoling. I didn’t want to find the memory of our Berlin winter days still inside you, I wanted you to be more than ever my future, since I had the faith for happiness and the confidence for fulfillment. And meanwhile this book told you what happened to me down below, and you lived through it like a deep dream and became the future. But then I no longer believed in it. I was blind and bitter, full of helpless and hateful thoughts and day in, day out tormented by the fear: that now you, with the riches that I had brought you and that you had so quickly raised and made your own possession, could begin presenting me with gifts, and already I felt in the best hours how I was beginning to accept as alms of your untiring goodness what I had fetched in blessed victories. I had brought golden bowls to you, bright vessels of festiveness, and then I had compelled you with my neediness to mint from this noble treasure small coins for everyday use, and thus slowly pay me back the gift. I felt myself becoming so pitiful and wretched as this happened that I threw away or lost the last of my own wealth and in my desperation felt only the vague imperative to flee the environs of this goodness that was humiliating me.

But during that time, in the very midst of this convulsion, I realized that were I to shake off my paralysis and gather myself in a resolve: each of my deeds, all movement in me, would strive toward you; then, when for the first time after this dull sadness I was forced to think about tomorrow, when behind your figure Fate stood and through your estranged voice put to me the iron question: “What to do?” —then everything inside me was as if freed from the ice; the wave sprang from the floe and cast itself with all its might toward the shore—without delaying and without doubt. When you asked me about the future and I lay helplessly and remained awake that whole night wracked by this worry, then I knew, when in the morning I found you again, that you are the ever new, the ever young, the eternal goal, and that for me there is one fulfillment that includes everything: to move toward YOU. . . .

Your strings are rich; and however far I may go—You are always there before me. My struggles have in your case long become victories, and therefore I am sometimes so very small in your presence; but my new victories are yours also, and I may present them to you. I have traveled across Italy on the long path toward the summit, which this book represents. You flew to it in swift hours and stood, before I was all the way up, on its clearest peak. I was far up, but still surrounded by clouds; you waited above them in the eternal light. Receive me, love.

Be always there before me, you dear, peerless, sacred one. Let us go upward together, you and I—as if up to the great star, each leaning on the other, each resting in the other. And if sometimes I have to let my arm drop from your shoulders for a while, I will fear nothing: on the next height you will smilingly greet the tired one. You are not a goal for me; you are a thousand goals. You are everything, and I know you in everything, and I am everything and direct everything your way in my moving toward you.

I needn’t say: Forgive! For I ask that from you in every silence. I needn’t ask: Forget! For we want to remember these hours also, in which I tried to flee from you in shame; and on my blind flight I was always running toward you. Nor do I want to say: Trust! For I know that this is the language with which we recognized and greeted each other in these new sanctified mornings after a long distantness and an estranged closeness that was our last separation and my last peril. . . .

As for ourselves: we are the ancestors of a god and with our deepest solitudes reach forward through the centuries to his very beginning. I feel this with all my heart!

July 31: RMR and LAS return from Zoppot to LAS’s and her husband’s residence in Schmargendorf, on the outskirts of Berlin. RMR moves into a rented room nearby (in the villa Waldfrieden, in Hundekehlstrasse 11). He is a frequent visitor, at times almost a member of the Andreas household, sharing their barefoot walks, adopting their peasant dress and vegetarian diet, helping with daily chores.

December 19: Heinrich Vogeler invites RMR to visit him in Worpswede, a small artists’ colony near Bremen. After stops in Hamburg and in Bremen (to celebrate Christmas Eve with Vogeler’s parents), they proceed to Worpswede on December 25. RMR stays there briefly before returning to Schmargendorf.

March 18, 1899: Returning from a visit with his mother at Arco, RMR stops in Vienna, where, accompanied by Arthur Schnitzler, he attends premières of two verse plays by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, both of which leave a strong impression on him.

[Postcard from RMR to LAS from Vienna, March 18, 1899]

Greetings from the Vienna of Schnitzler and Loris! Rainer.

RMR travels on to see his father in Prague, where an attack of flu keeps him in bed for approximately two weeks. He arrives back in Schmargendorf on April 17.

April 24: RMR, LAS, and F. C. Andreas leave for their long-planned trip to Russia. They arrive in Moscow on Thursday, April 27. On Good Friday (at RMR’s insistence) they visit Leo Tolstoy at the Tolstoys’ winter residence in Moscow. On Easter at midnight they experience the bells and the jostling crowds of the Kremlin. After a week they move to St. Petersburg, where RMR more or less has to fend for himself. LAS and RMR spend a last weekend together in Moscow (they take the night train both ways) before returning to Schmargendorf on June 28.

July 29: RMR and LAS join Frieda von Bülow in a small country house she has rented on the Bibersberg (Thuringia). There they spend six weeks happily immersed in Russian studies, already preparing for an eventual second Russian trip. News that Lotte, LAS’s pet dog, is gravely ill prompts her abrupt return to Schmargendorf on September 12. RMR follows a day later. Lotte dies two days later and is buried ceremoniously with RMR in attendance.

[RMR to LAS in Schmargendorf]

[Schmargendorf, September 13, 1899]

How glad I am that Lottchen is recovering. Let her know that I’ve returned too. I rummaged about and was in the city despite the bad weather. Until the fifteenth nothing can be done in my rooms. I long to read something Russian; but I don’t have Bласть T[ь] мы with me here; so if you are able to send me something tomorrow, include a Russian book—the first volume of Lermontov, perhaps, or anything in prose, no matter what. Kindest regards.

Rainer

Wednesday evening at 6:30

[RMR to LAS in Schmargendorf; postcard: Prague, Altstädter Ring, 1780]

Prague, December 23 [1899]

[Imprint:] Greetings from Prague

For Christmas Eve 1899!

from Rainer

May 7 through August 24, 1900: LAS’s and RMR’s second Russia journey, this time alone. They travel from Berlin via Warsaw to Moscow; from Moscow south to Tula to visit Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana (June 1); then to Kiev and Kremenchug on the lower Dnieper, through the Poltava region by train to Kharkov, Vorenezh, and Saratov; by steamship up the Volga to Kazan, Nizhni Novgorod (now Gorki), and Yaroslavl. From Moscow to the village of Nisovka to meet the peasant poet Spiridon Droshin, and to nearby Novinki to meet the poet Nikolai Tolstoy. Via Novgorod Velikiye to St. Petersburg, where after one day together (July 26) LAS departs for Rongas (Finland) to visit her family. She remains there for almost a month, leaving RMR behind in their St. Petersburg rooming house, without his knowing when she plans to come back. LAS returns August 21; they leave only days later, arrive back in Berlin August 26; on August 27 RMR accepts Vogeler’s invitation to stay with him and leaves for Worpswede, where he will remain until October 5.

[RMR, “from a letter. St. Petersburg, July 31,” entry in the Schmargendorf Diary]

On the Volga, on this restfully rolling ocean, to be days and nights, many days and many nights: a broad, broad stream, tall, tall woods along one shore, along the other a deep moorland in which even big cities only stand like shacks and tents. One sees: land is big, water is something big, and above all the sky is big. What I have seen until now was no more than an image of land and river and world. Here, however, everything is itself. — I feel as if I had been witness to the Creation; a few words for all existences, things in the measure of God the Father. . . .

[RMR in St. Petersburg to LAS in Rongas, first week of August 1900]*

[LAS in Rongas to RMR in St. Petersburg, end of first week of August 1900]

[LAS, Looking Back, “With Rainer, Epilogue [1934],” addressing RMR posthumously]

We were already discussing to what extent the world and people needed to absorb you now into their midst, in place of that symbolic realm in which you had thought to grasp and celebrate the dream of the ineffable alone and directly. But only toward the end of our second stay in Russia did it become fully clear to me what an urgent necessity that was. I had gone—very briefly—to visit my family on their [current] summer estate in Finland, when I received your letter that characterized you as almost depraved on account of the presumption and arrogance of your Prayers. Granted, a second followed very quickly in a different key: yet it in turn was in that excessive, egregious mode you had long since smilingly called “pre-Wolfratshausen,” and seemed to me like an incomprehensible reversion.

[RMR to LAS in Rongas]

Cт-Пeтeрбyргь, yгoль Heвcкаг и Фонтанки, Meбл, Комн. “Цeнтраль.”

[St. Petersburg, August 11, 1900]

Saturday, late morning

I have your letter, your precious letter that comforts me with every word, that caresses me as with a strong, surging wave, that surrounds me as with gardens and builds up heavens over me, that makes me happy and able to say to you what in my previous, burdensome letter struggled so vainly: that I long for you, and that unutterable fears took hold of me as I lived these last few days without any news whatsoever, following that unexpected and swift farewell, alone among the almost hostile impressions of this difficult city, where there was not any one thing through which you might speak to me from far off. And this is what brought about that ugly letter of a few days ago, which could scarcely find its way out of my inner isolation, out of the unaccustomed and terrible aloneness of my experiences, and was only a clamoring, a confusion and a bafflement, jagged things that must be incomprehensible to you in the rich, rounded beauty to which your life has so quickly returned amid the new circumstances.

Now I cringe to think that in the great chorus that surrounds you, and in which you are again finding small children’s voices, my voice should have been the alien one, the single banal one, the voice of the world amid these holy words and silences from which the days around you are woven. Was it not so? I fear it must have been. What shall I do? Can I silence with this letter the other one? In this one your words resound, the other one was predicated on your faraway life, of which I could find out nothing at all, and now that I do have news, its right to exist has ended. . . . but it does still exist, doesn’t it?

Will you tell me one thing? That in spite of that letter everything is as you write in yours; that no squirrel has died on account of it, and that nothing, nothing has darkened under it or even remained in shadow behind it.

Remember the squirrels I told you about that I raised in Italy when I was a child—how I bought long, long chains so that their freedom might come to an end only high up in the trees? Doubtless it was very wrong to intrude upon their light lives at all, especially as an authority (when they had already grown up, that is, and no longer needed me), but in some small measure they themselves strove to preserve their link with me, for they often came running after me, so that at the time it seemed to me as if they were actually wishing for chains.

How they will miss you, the little ones. And will they be grown-up enough to go without you into wood and world? High up in the firs of Rongas their childhood will sometimes come back to them, and on a bough that is still swaying from the weight of their leap, you will be remembered. And though they are only three little squirrels in whose small eyes you don’t have room, somewhere inside them it is so immense that you can exist there in their lives. Dearest!

Come back soon, come back as soon as you can leave them. Lead them out into the forest, tell them in your voice how lovely it is, and they will be the happiest squirrels in the most beautiful wood.

Yes, please, be here by Sunday. You can’t imagine how long the days in St. Petersburg can be. Nor in spite of that, how little goes into them. Life here is a continuous being on one’s way, and, due to this, all destinations suffer. One walks, walks, rides, rides, and regardless of where one arrives, the first impression is of one’s own weariness. One almost always, moreover, takes the longest trips in vain. Nevertheless: I know now that we still have many beautiful things to see when you come. It must be that every sentence I have thought for the past two weeks has ended with those same words: when you come.—

I also cherish the moonlit night between last Wednesday and Thursday’s dawn. I walked along the Neva quite late, out to my favorite spot, across from St. Isaac’s Cathedral, where the city is at its simplest and greatest. There I also (and quite unexpectedly) felt peaceful and happy and solemn—as I do now, having received your letter. I am hurrying to send off these lines so that what you send me Monday (and you will surely send me a few words by way of your brother? Only a few words, I shall understand them all!) will already be an answer to this. An answer to the one question: are you happy? I am, behind all that torments me, so fundamentally, so very confidently, so invincibly happy. And I have you to thank for it. Come soon!

Your

Rainer.

[In the margin:] Vogeler has written very warmly, and is expecting me. And I am already needed for my beautiful book. The first proofsheets are waiting. So it will be out in October!

[RMR to LAS in Schmargendorf, written on the cover of a special issue of the Catalan periodical Juventut devoted to Heinrich Vogeler]

[Worpswede, probably September 1900]

Warmest greetings and thanks for card and printed material!

[RMR to LAS, entry in the Schmargendorf Diary]

Worpswede, September 1, 1900

Moscow, Stshukin Museum: across from the Japanese painting in the room with the translucent ceiling (inserted from May 1900):

Goddess of Grace

She stands in deep-blue ocean depths

into which many rivers pour

from distances on high.

A gray fish carries her along,

delighted by her weight’s lissomness,

which trickles over his fins.

Out of his gills spews excited

spraying—bubbling rush of breath.

But into her beauty rises,

coolly, ushered along in waves,

his forever level feeling.

When I read this to you in the Amerika house, do you remember my saying: Yes, everything that has truly been seen must become a poem! Oh, I felt such happiness saying that. And I still can’t really believe I was wrong then—although . . .

Both possibilities are equally disheartening: either I have not seen anything since then, have not truly, with my entire being seen, or else my seeing is not so intimately bound up with my creating as I once thought.

For back then there was only pure sound in me: once in Poltava, at evening, when the huts were so pale and solitary in the coming on of night, once in Saratov among the Cossack houses of the eastern districts, later in the midst of the Volga waters, then again when through a long night we felt ourselves journeying farther and farther into the light . . . but I can extract no word from the fabric of these sounds, indeed I don’t even know if words accompanied them.

Nonetheless, just outside Kazan, late at evening, a song did come forth, it began, I think:

. . . From all others I will absent myself,

I will build my life stone by stone,

not from the rubbleheap of rich housefronts,

from ashlars that still bathe in rivers,

from mountains that still stand in meadows . . .

But it seemed wrong to express my inner happiness, which was independent of everything external, in these words, which had just lost their meaning in the face of mundane reality. So I was glad when my sound died out, and its sense only flared up in me again much later in Moscow, as landscape . . . evening:

The horses saunter over with their red yokes

as if passing under many gateways,

the evening glows, called to by bell-chimes,

and all huts stand as by the sea . . .

This may have been an echo of Yaroslavl-Kresta. — Then came Droshin, then Novgorod, where on that one morning I felt the potential for something in me . . .

I made nothing of it, as was the case with so many potentialities on this trip. Countless poems I failed to hear. I passed over a spring; what wonder now that there is no true summer. Everything that arrived found me locked up. And now, when I open the doors, the roads are long and empty . . .

But this is not the journey’s sum. The tremendous is still in me somewhere. I did experience it all, I was surely not just dreaming. If only it would somehow come back to me. I have such longing for what has passed. I don’t want to hold onto it and think about it. But I wish I could feel its presence half-intuitively in the things that are around me now. I will never cease to mourn these losses. Why did I forget that not dying is not the same as being alive, and that not sleeping is still a long way from being awake. To be awake and to be alive are deeds, not states. And I did not do them!

[RMR to LAS, around September 15, entry in the Schmargendorf Diary]

You have written me just now: “Tolstoy has fallen seriously ill in Yasnaya Polyana.” Perhaps we did bid him farewell. How clearly I see every moment of that day before me! What elation I felt as we drove through the wavy meadow with its trembling bells, journeying through the Russian landscape for the first time, the same way that Gogol and Pushkin journeyed, loudly with jangling harnesses and galloping steeds. And thus into the startled hamlet with eyes peering from all its weather-beaten doors. And thus out of the hamlet and down the road and up to the two white gate-towers that mark the entrance to the tall park. Our passage into its shadows is silent; we’re anxious, we feel the weight of what’s to come, and wish we could have this park and this day to ourselves without the old man toward whom all this is heading. And then we stand for a while in front of the white house inside of which everything remains silent, go around past the green oval bench and at last find someone in the courtyard next to the well. He takes our cards. We wait again. A dog, trusting and friendly, comes right up to us as we stand there in front of the small glass door. I bend down to the white dog and as I straighten up again I see behind the glass, vague and distorted by the flaws in the pane, a pair of searching eyes in a small grizzled face. The door opens, lets you in and slams sharply against me, so that I, only after the Count has already greeted you, come in and now also stand before him, feeling clumsily big beside his slim bright figure.

He leaves us alone with Lev Levovich and withdraws again into his study after this reception. Then I climb the wooden stairs behind you and step into the light-filled room where only the old oil paintings are dark. The table is long, narrow, covered in white, and a large silver-white samovar stands at its upper end. We sit down. There is very little in this large hall whose three windows receive shimmering reflections from the rich green of mighty trees. We inquire about the ancestral paintings. The oldest one is especially interesting. A nun from the time of Alexei Mikhailovich. Apparently painted by an icon maker, she all but replicates the character of St. Sophia in posture, integument, and the strongly conventional expression of her face. Only with her hands did the painter, the observer, come to life in the craftsman, and he painted these exactly, with realistic attention to his subject; in doing so he lost sight of the overall proportions, painted the hands accordingly bigger, and now this saintly woman bears the heavy weight of her earthly hands, with which she must be able to raise a very big prayer indeed. And yes, I remember, there was one of those fine “portraits” there. A powdered nobleman from the end of the eighteenth century, his clothes and the area around his face—with its black eyebrows and the witty mouth of that talkative era—turned completely dark. The frame made of old, grayed, silver-coated wood, oval and unornamented. This painting was oddly beautiful on the bright, cheerful wall of the long hall. Modern works were there as well: a sculpture by Ginsburg and the “Tolstoy” of Prince Trubetskoy. We spoke occasionally, drank coffee, and gazed out often into the sun-drenched day, where strangely nearby a bird snarled and called out knarr-knarr with a fierce r. We chatted about this bird for a while and finally followed it out into the park. So much was in bloom there. The avenue of old birch trees was shadowy and beautiful, and at the end of it there was a balcony that shook strongly under our steps. We gazed out fondly onto the landscape, which with its meadows of forget-me-nots was rippling calmly and ripely as if with waves. Far off the train went past, much too distant for the ear, and for the eye no more than a toy. Then we came back slowly along the path, carrying flowers and asking the names of many trees that were old and stately. From the back we walked up to the house again. In the entrance hall the Countess was busily putting books back into a window case, and we had to endure her annoyed welcome and all the displeasure she expressed out loud to someone invisible. What a harrowing half-hour that was in the small room with the walnut furniture! We examined books that lay behind glass and on top of cases, tried to concentrate on various portraits, but were really only listening for the footsteps of the Count, who walked into the entrance-hall. Something had happened: voices grew agitated, a girl wept, the Count consoled, in the midst of it all with complete indifference the Countess’s voice going on . . . the sound of footsteps on the stairs, all doors in motion, and the Count walks in. Coldly and courteously he asks you something, his gaze is not really there with us, but its glance comes toward me and I hear the question: “What do you do?” I’m no longer sure, I seem to recall answering “I’ve written some things . . .”

August 27 until October 5: RMR in Worpswede, where he lives in Vogeler’s Barkenhoff, a farmhouse with garden V. purchased and remodeled to his own art-nouveau designs. RMR quickly falls under the spell of the life there, and grows increasingly enamored of two artists his own age, Paula Becker (painter) and Clara Westhoff (sculptor), whom he elaborately “poetizes” (to use LAS’s later word of warning) in his diaries. September 27: RMR, writing in his diary of a previous night’s culminating moment: “It was then that I decided to stay in Worpswede.” October 5: RMR abruptly departs from Worpswede in early dawn, without explanation or goodbyes, leaving behind for Paula Becker an evasive note and one of his pocket notebooks. He will not return until 1901, after his marriage to Clara. Back in Schmargendorf RMR moves into a new flat (Misdroyerstrasse 1) and renews his bond with LAS under strained circumstances.

November 12: Paula Becker informs RMR of her engagement to the much older Otto Modersohn, one of the original group of Worpswede painters.

December 19: RMR and LAS attend alone the dress rehearsal of Gerhart Hauptmann’s Michael Kramer.

January 13: Paula Becker arrives in Berlin to take (at her father’s insistence) a cooking class. She seeks RMR out and they begin to see each other regularly, especially on Sundays, which they reserve for one another.

February 3: Clara Westhoff arrives in Schmargendorf. The three play at being reunited, while RMR continues to see LAS, who increasingly feels him as an impediment to her own creative work.

February 16: RMR and Clara declare their engagement to Paula.

Late February: RMR informs LAS of his decision to marry Clara. LAS insists on a complete break, proposes that they destroy all letters they have exchanged. RMR fully complies.

[RMR, December 1, 1900, Entry in the Worpswede Diary]

Today I saw Gerhart Hauptmann for the first time. He and Vogeler were invited to Lou’s. Grete M[arschalk] was with Hauptmann. It was a beautiful evening. . . . There was a conversation about the deaths of animals, about the ailing of some small defenseless rabbit or bird that one doesn’t know how to help. I remarked that I always thought it unfair to accustom an animal to oneself, to persuade it, as it were, to enter into exchanges and friendship. It gradually gives in to trust, and the very moment it lacks the smallest something, we cannot but betray this trust, since we have no way of knowing the reason for the animal’s distress or the meaning of its desires. What can we give it? We can train it to be close to us, coddle it with our own habits, i.e., play with it. The truly serious things that happen to it are beyond our help and involvement—has anyone really managed to share in the fate of his favorite pet like its friend and brother? We incur a guilt, a host of unredeemed pledges, and a perpetual failure: that is our portion in this exchange. And with people: there both parties bear equally this incapacity, and that makes their relationships more serious and deeper perhaps than a complete understanding of each other would allow.

[LAS, Diary, passages concerning RMR]

NEW YEAR’S EVE, 1900. Almost the only thing I want from the coming year, the thing I need, is quiet, —more being by myself, the way it was until four years ago. That will, that must, come back. For the rest, I look back today only on the one experience of 1900 for me, on Russia.

JANUARY 3, 1901. In the afternoon Rainer came and after lunch we walked out to the “Volga” on our forest path, which was already in moonlight on the way back. The evening hours upstairs in the blue garret, beside the lighted Christmas tree, the Songs of the Monk and the other Songs. After dinner downstairs, amidst table talk, the Nikolai Tolstoy material surged up irresistibly in me, —for the first time as a compelling whole: he had been slumbering there since the days of Novinki. Now it was as if after the last dying sounds of Christmas . . . Nikolai Tolstoy had appeared for a New Year’s visit, with hat in hand, in order to fill me with pure New Year’s happiness through the dawning of this material.

JANUARY 5. And today I waited for Rainer in the afternoon beside the lighted Christmas tree downstairs, next to which the red carnations are blooming today in their Christmas basket, almost as red as the early morning sun when it shines through the icy window panes.

JANUARY 9. Very early, after just the most pressing necessities had been taken care of, I began, proceeded as if I had neither the novella nor Michael Kramer around my neck, wrote grandly and freely and indulgently both title and beginning, pages long. Rainer came by in the light of morning, just as I was starting; outdoors an incredibly soft frost full of sun was everywhere, I ran into the woods, then in the dark of evening ran once again down the street. Now I shall sleep—with a bad conscience and a still completely unquenched desire for that wicked band [of characters in her novel Rodinka] on the other side of the wall. . . .

JANUARY 10. Yesterday morning late, Rainer and I out walking in the Grunewald amid soft, wondrous sun-frost; we encountered Gerhart Hauptmann and Grete, strolled on with them a long way. Day after tomorrow we’ll be at Gerhart’s. And this evening I’ll begin the Michael Kramer piece.

But in the struggles with my work these days I’ve certainly been horrid sometimes at home. Afterwards I always feel terrible about it. I’d like to have oceans of love with which to extinguish it all. I’m a monster. (I was mean to Rainer too, but that never bothers me.)

JANUARY 17. Yesterday afternoon the door quietly opened again on my new year’s gift: full of happiness the first episode written, am proceeding today from that. In the afternoon Rainer and I walked for over two hours in the woods; in the evening looked at “Russian Monuments.”

JANUARY 20. Yesterday and today celebrated gloriously. Today toward evening everything for the most part blocked out and accomplished in large rapid strokes. Just as with a few dabs a painter marks the colors that have come to him. Later it all must run back together into the original nuances and thousand shadings, —if it does not die: when that happens one dabs paint on paint and it becomes a dead mosaic. But woe unto him who now would kill it for me. Outside rainy weather. To make Rainer go away, go completely away, I would be capable of brutality. (He must go!)

JANUARY 21. All day until evening still relished the breakthrough; then in the evening began to write the second chapter. Lied to R. when I had him told I wasn’t home . . .

JANUARY 23. Yesterday, when Rainer was with us, read a section from Dostoevsky’s “Poor Folk.”

JANUARY 24. Yesterday Rainer said quite rightly of the great unconsummated work that defines Ivanov’s life as an artist, the painting for which he created so many vivid, vigorous sketches: “this painting was like an epidemic; whoever happened to enter it died, no matter how radiantly he may have lived in the sketches.” Ivanov was, like Gogol, one of those extraordinary beings about whom R. today came up with a wonderful phrase to explain why this kind of true Russian moves us so deeply: they must hold their ground “without weapons and without mimicry.”

JANUARY 26. Yesterday finished the second chapter. Rainer and I took a long walk in the woods, two and a half hours long. . . . As we walked on, barefoot, quietly, we found deep in the overgrown forest an open place whose tangles of light-brown shriveled fern lay all about, like embers that had wafted down between the tree trunks, sun-embers. —About painters and Paula Becker’s Worpswede diary: painters and sculptors must experience the same creative rushes of poetic, inspiriting emotions: but then, in order to create, they must fix rigorously and coldly and precisely on the “guilty object” that produced the rapture,—they must become like judges, like physicians, like craftsmen (this is what Rainer criticizes in women who paint and sculpt). . . .Toward evening further in our discussion of Benua: Victor Vasnetsov. His love (for Russian legend and religion) didn’t help him, the way it helped Polyenova: “just as one can ruin a child by apishly dressing it up out of pure love for it.” (R.) In the religious paintings I feel this so strongly that his paintings, which so want to be like icons, don’t seem to have the icon at their roots at all, —rather on their surface as a kind of weak embellishment. R. said aptly: “he was a man already well along in years and with an old manner of loving, which he now simply clothed with new material.” Thus he expressed this new material not in a new way, but in whatever way came to hand; had he attempted to wait, in order to give it just expression, then he would probably never have been able to give it to us at all. . . . Thus it is probably a mistake to follow Benua in considering Vasnetsov a highly complex intellect, when in reality his naiveté and a lack of critical discrimination have made him weak in confronting the dominant influences of his time.

[There is a gap in the diary here: LAS at some later date destroyed the pages that cover the period from January 26 to March 21, 1901. The next existing page begins with the concluding fragment of an observation about Tolstoy, followed by: “21.3. A few black days because even the ‘holidays’ didn’t bring back the rapture for work. Now the thing to do is at least get the last few hundred pages down on paper, in order to be able to come back to them later.”]

[LAS to RMR in Berlin]

[Schmargendorf, Tuesday, February 26, 1901]

Last Appeal.

Now that everything around me stands in pure sun and stillness and the fruit of life has grown perfectly round and full, a last responsibility devolves on me from that memory, which surely both of us must still cherish, of how in Wolfratshausen I entered your life like a mother. Let me then discharge as a mother the responsibility I incurred several years ago as the result of a long conversation with Zemek. As long as you are roaming about unattached in the realm of the uncertain, you are answerable to no one but yourself; but if you intend to commit yourself to another, then you must hear why I so tirelessly kept pointing you toward so precisely delineated a path to health: it was Zemek’s fear of a fate that would be like Garshin’s. What you and I called “the other one” in you—this now depressed, now overexcited, first much too fearful, then utterly carried-away You—to Zemek this was an all too familiar, sinister fellow who can take an ailing soul and prolong its sickness until it infects the spine’s marrow or becomes insanity. But this need not happen! In your “Songs of the Monk,” at certain earlier times, the past winter, this winter, you stood before me sound! Do you understand now my fear and my intense distress when you slipped back and I could see forming again the old clinical picture? Again the sluggish resolve alongside the sudden, nervous eruptions of will that tore through your organic being, gave in to every suggestion, and did not descend into the fullness of the past in order to assimilate things healthily, to digest them, to build up from the ground! Again the wavering uncertainty alongside the loud accents and strong words and protestations, manic compulsions without the compensating drive for truth! Gradually I myself became contorted, tortured, overstrained, only continued to walk by your side automatically, mechanically, could not put forth any vital warmth, expended only my own nervous energy! More and more often I would finally push you away—only to let you draw me back to your side again and again. For I kept remembering Zemek’s dire words. I felt: you would recover, if only you could stand firm! But then another element entered—entered almost like a tragic culpability toward you: namely, the way that I, despite the difference in our ages, since Wolfratshausen have had to continue growing, —growing on and on, into what I told you about so joyously at our parting, —yes, strange as it sounds: into my youth! For only now am I young, only now may I be what others become at their eighteenth birthday: completely myself. And thus your figure—in Wolfratshausen still so cherished and close and clearly before me, —kept fading and fading from me like a small separate piece in an overall landscape, —in a vast Volga landscape, as it were, and the one tiny hut in it was not yours. I was obeying without realizing it the great plan of life, which was smiling and already holding in readiness for me a gift beyond all understanding and expectation. With deep humility I accept it: and know now with a seer’s clarity, and call to you: take the same path toward your dark god! He can provide what I can no longer provide for you, —and for so long have not been able to provide with full dedication: the grace to reach sun and ripeness. Across the farthest distances I send this appeal to you, I can do no more than this to protect you from that “worst hour” of which Zemek spoke. That is why I was so moved when as we parted I wrote down the last words on a scrap of your paper, because I couldn’t make myself say them to you out loud: I meant every one of those words.*

May 1901: LAS renews her relationship with the Viennese neurologist Friedrich Pineles (“Zemek” in her “Last Appeal”), who watches over her slow recovery from an almost traumatic exhaustion and its lingering psychological consequences. They openly become lovers, and for nearly a decade he remains devoted to her, as her “therapist” and her companion on frequent, often extended trips—their last and longest one in August 1908 through the Balkans to Turkey. For the next half-decade LAS also travels widely on her own, including trips to St. Petersburg to see her aging mother.

October 1903: Andreas is appointed to an “extraordinary” professorship for West Asian languages at the University of Göttingen. He and LAS move into a large house on the Hainberg overlooking the city. She christens it Loufried; it will remain her permanent home for the rest of her life.

April 18, 1901: RMR and Clara Westhoff marry in Bremen. They spend their honeymoon in the Weisser Hirsch, an exclusive sanitarium near Dresden (RMR was still recovering from an illness, either influenza or scarlet fever), then (end of May 1901) move into a farmhouse in Westerwede, near Worpswede, where they will live, with only brief trips elsewhere, through the summer of 1902.

December 12, 1901: Their daughter Ruth is born.

June 1902: Unable to make ends meet in Westerwede, RMR secures a commission to write a monograph on Rodin and departs for Paris. After a five-week stopover in Haseldorf Castle, he arrives in Paris on August 28, 1902. Clara remains behind to dissolve their Westerwede estate, then leaves Ruth with her parents in Oberneuland near Bremen and joins RMR in Paris in early October.

End of March 1903: RMR leaves Paris for a brief stay in Viareggio, where he had previously gone to “recuperate” from Florence; Clara remains in Paris, at work on a commission. RMR returns toward the end of April; he and Clara remain in Paris until the end of June 1903, when they accept an invitation from Heinrich Vogeler to visit him and his wife in Westerwede.

July 1, 1903: Clara and RMR leave Paris; their residence alternates between the Vogelers at Westerwede and Clara’s parents at Oberneuland until the end of August, when they depart for Italy.

September 1903 through the first half of June 1904: Clara and RMR together in Rome.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Paris

3, rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée

June 23, 1903

For weeks I have wanted to write these words and dared not for fear that it might still be much too soon; but who knows if in the worst hour I will be able to come.

This summer I will be in Germany during July and August (most likely in Worpswede).

If sometime during this period I might once, just for a single day, seek refuge with you two! I don’t know if this is possible.

But if it cannot be, then may I ask this favor: will you have delivered to me (perhaps by Johanna Niemann) the address of Dr. Pineles? I will be in Paris until July 1, and will receive either news with equal gratitude.

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Paris]

Westend near Berlin

Rüsternallee 36

June 27, 1903

Dear Rainer,

You may stay with us any time, in difficult as in good hours. And yet I propose: let us in this case first reunite in writing. For two old scribblers like us there would be nothing artificial in proceeding this way; and whatever you want to talk to me about, it will come to me exactly as it came once before to

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Paris, 3 rue de l’Abbé de l’Epée

last day of June, 1903

I thank you, Lou, for this little letter that I can read for hours as I would a very long one. A soothing power issues from it, and I take it in with all my senses. There is also in it that kindness by which I would recognize you among thousands.

I thank you.

So I may write to you now, and there is so much I would like to tell you: for so much has happened. When I look back, my life seems to me to have lengthened by so many more years than have actually passed. And yet I have not become older, not more adept at daily life and certainly not more proficient. I am still in the kindergarten of life and find it difficult.

I won’t complain, and it’s really no great effort not to. Many things have had me in their grip, and their instruction has at least simplified me a bit and made me more patient.

And that a young person who has allied her life with mine matures next to me and along with me in her work—this also is part of my learning. And that Ruth lives, our little child—amidst separation and foreignness this gives me a sense of home, brings me closer to all that happens with spontaneous directness, closer to the trees and the things and the animals about which I know so much more now.

Once upon a time the three of us lived in a very solitary house in the moors, and the winds circled around its walls and the night came like a world. Then we had to leave all that and go to the big city where Rodin lived: for we wanted to learn from him how to work. We wanted to have nothing but work, and wanted to be two people who stood by their work and felt peaceful and didn’t fret about their life in common.

About that time I wrote a book on Rodin, a good book. And then I resolved to be hard on myself, resolved to immerse myself in work for long, silent stretches; and I felt such exasperation each time I failed in that.

The city was against me, in revolt against my life and like a test I didn’t pass. Its unrelenting scream broke into my silence, its fearsomeness followed me all the way into my sad room, and my eyes lay pressed beneath the images of its days. And then came illness: three attacks of influenza with long feverish nights and great dread: and my strength and my courage had dwindled to practically nothing and I went away with the last vestige of them, went through many heavy mountains, went for the length of a lifetime and arrived one evening in Viareggio.

And it was quiet there. And the girls in those songs I call “Mädchenlieder” walked through the narrow streets, singing and silent, and were as they had always been. And the sea was vast and the forest was solitary and the people recognized me and said to me with friendly smiles: “Signorino, young gentleman.”

But I recovered slowly. And when I did feel better and even began to chime a little, various painful conditions came which I attributed to my imagination, to a perverse ingenuity flitting about my body like a will-o’-the-wisp, and I fought against them with all my will. And I partially overcame them. But then something so fearful came, came once and came back and never completely left again, and I am at a loss to say what it was.

Long ago in my childhood, during the great fevers of my illnesses, huge indescribable fears arose, fears as of something too big, too hard, too close, deep unspeakable fears that I can still remember, and now these same fears were suddenly there again, but they didn’t need night and fever as a pretext, they gripped me in the midst of day when I thought I was healthy and full of courage, and took my heart and held it over nothingness. Can you understand what that is like? Everything changes, melts away from my senses and I feel thrust out of a world where everything is familiar and close and meaningful into another vague, inexpressibly fearful world. Where am I? Then it was as if I wouldn’t recognize anyone who might enter my room and as if I in turn would be a stranger to everyone who might see me, like someone who had died in foreign lands, alone, superfluous, a fragment of different connections.

And my apprehension was very great.

And the fear arose in me that my worst hour might lie in that other world from which I can come to no one.

In the days just after I had come back from Italy, this strange condition returned frequently and I had no resistance against it. Then there was a longer interval, a new attack of influenza from which I recovered only very slowly, a brief happier period of convalescence, all kinds of fresh starts with my work, —until it came back again the other night. (When it comes, I would like to cling to some one, most real thing; but nothing is real enough, everything withdraws, gives me up, goes away . . . )

The next morning I wrote you that letter by way of Johanna Niemann. Forgive me for coming into your clear days with my worries. But I can’t ask anyone for advice but you; you alone know who I am. Only you can help me, and I feel already from your first letter what power your calm words have over me. You can make me understand what baffles me, you can tell me what I need to do; you know what I should be afraid of and what I shouldn’t—: Should I be afraid?—

Perhaps I am exaggerating: perhaps the occasion is too slight and I shouldn’t have bothered you with my distress. Perhaps it is only a consequence of this fearsome and difficult city for which I was too weak and self-pitying: perhaps it is a reflection of those fears that arose from our poverty: there were so many of them, during our stay in Westerwede and here, where poverty and perishing are so much alike . . . You will be able to judge. Perhaps not from this letter, which is confused and hurried (my hand is shaking from the joy of being able to write you—), but from other letters that I want to write you out of a greater quietness, when I am away from Paris and have green in front of my windows and a bird’s voice that gathers up the distances outside.

I am writing as I pack, and that itself is an arduous task, since I have lived here almost a year. But in three or four days we’ll be in Worpswede, as guests of Heinrich Vogeler, who has prepared a few rooms for us and with whom we plan to stay for two months. We would have preferred to go elsewhere, into an entirely unfamiliar quietness that evokes no memories; but we had no choice and had to accept what offered itself. And this offered itself in a friendly, heartfelt manner.

And there, where a quiet garden exists and gentle, unvarying days, I will write you occasionally and tell you of many things and ask you whenever I don’t understand something. And then, when you gaze into my life again, tell me if it is good.

Don’t be afraid that I’ll come too often with unimportant matters. And at any rate you must tell me if you think I am writing too much. And every word from you will mean much to me and echo and live with me for a long time.

And now I send many greetings to you both and much, much gratitude.

Is it quiet out there in the new avenues of Westend? I remember them. I saw them once in the spring—many things were blooming, and the green was bright and clear and let the sun through. It will be that way again now. Here, though, all the trees are old and black already, and even though they drink water all day from long tubular roots their leaves are sick and rotten as if hanging there from a previous year. And all of that inspires fear if one does not actively refuse it.

And refusing is hard.

Goodbye, Lou. Thank you. I know that everything will be better now that I can talk to you and you will hear me. Thank you.

Rainer.

(Does Schimmel recognize this letter’s smell? —My next address will be the German one; simply: Worpswede near Bremen.)

[LAS to RMR in Paris]

Westend, Rüsternallee 36

July 5, 1903

Dear Rainer,

No need to fear. The recurrence of influenza may be entirely to blame for these latest attacks: children as well as adults have been known to suffer afterwards the most severe depressions and the strangest mental states.

Here’s my suggestion: every time it happens, write about how you feel and what’s tormenting you—write it out of your system, as it were; this in itself may generate some curative strength. And perhaps also the thought: that your letters come to a person who is at home in happiness. For even I, Rainer, never possessed any strength other than the one that resides in all happiness.

In your letter I could see much of your old self.

My husband sends you his greetings and wants you to know: I alone will read and keep whatever you write me.

Schimmelchen got to sniff the inside of your envelope, but it was impossible to judge from his reaction, since at the same time he was preoccupied with a bluebottle. He and the two of us live in a house with garden, both quite small; our avenue, the last one here, connects us with the rest of the village and its avenues but then leads straight into the forest that surrounds us on three sides and is much wilder than the woods in Schmargendorf.

One request, one piece of advice: break off your relation with Johanna Niemann. It’s a mistake.

I have only just returned from Russia!

Lou

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Worpswede near Bremen

July 13, 1903

Monday

You, dear Lou, say that I need not fear and therefore I will try not to fear.

We have been in Worpswede for a week; but I have not had a chance yet to thank you for your good letter that was such a joy; for it was an evil week.

I have been constantly beset by pain and dwell always in adversity. My physical afflictions may have the same cause as my fears. Both are probably due to irregularities in the circulation of my blood, which can cause abnormal mental states or send pain toward one or another part of the body. Most recently the torment was in my head: first it was an unbearable toothache that lasted for days, then it turned into a stabbing pain in my eyes, and finally settled in as pharyngitis with dull feverish feeling (much like the attacks of influenza last spring); and my time was spent in a continual struggle to resist. I tried steam baths, took up walking barefoot again, which I had missed so much in Paris, and in this way dragged myself from one day into the next. And they were long rainy days, and at first I had a damp, cold room behind tall trees and I hated staying in it and when I went out and saw things and people, that proved difficult too and everything was cause for melancholy. Today I feel a little better; and if I can remain like this I shall be content, especially since Heinrich Vogeler has now given me the little red room too, the one with a bright window facing south. In all these years I’ve scarcely ever had a quiet room, and I feel this room that no one enters as what I’ve been looking for: solitude. But Barkenhoff is no longer as quiet as it once was. Vogeler’s blond wife is due to give birth to their second child and pale little Marie-Luise Vogeler twitters about in the garden. She is the same age as Ruth but much frailer and more prone to sickness.

We will also be seeing Ruth again. She lives two hours from here on a country estate with my wife’s parents. As soon as I am a little better we are going to visit Oberneuland for a week—with great trepidation, for the circumstances there are such that all sorts of tension and agitation are bound to arise, and that is precisely what I am afraid of right now. But I am convinced that only there is a good reunion with our child possible. Seeing her there will allow us to blend in (even if only for a few days) with the quiet good life she has there without the risk of frightening her or otherwise displeasing her. If she has any recollection of us, she will recognize us and feel affection for us most quickly if she finds us, like something lost, among her everyday and familiar things. I don’t want to leave again without this reunion, even if it is virtually simultaneous with a new farewell. I need a happiness and I want to experience and hold onto this as happiness; and where else should I seek a happiness that is mine.

But perhaps above all I need quiet. I will sit here for long stretches in my room and walk barefoot up and down in the garden in my blue Russian shirt. And try my hand at some work. A translation of Слово о Покy Игоря was begun back in Paris; perhaps it will grow here. Right now writing is hard for me, as you can see from this letter, which wished to bring you much and is unable to bear anything. And I want so much to write you about many things and ask you about many things. Well, I must wait patiently for an hour when words will be easier to write. Then I’ll try to give you a better account of myself, if you’ll allow it. And thank you, dear Lou, for writing me and telling me about the little house and about the little garden and about Russia; and in all of that about you.

Rainer.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Worpswede near Bremen

July 18, 1903

I must tell you, dear Lou, that Paris was an experience for me not unlike that of the military school: for just as then a great fearful astonishment had seized me, so now I was gripped by terror at everything that, as if in some unspeakable confusion, is called life. Back then, as a boy among boys, I was alone among them; and now how alone I was among these people, how perpetually denied by all I encountered; the carriages drove straight through me, and those in a rush made no detour around me and ran over me full of disdain, as over a bad place in which stale water has collected. And often before going to sleep I read the thirtieth chapter of the Book of Job, and it was all true of me, word for word. And at night I got up and looked for my favorite volume of Baudelaire, the petits poèmes en prose, and read aloud the most beautiful poem, the one titled À une heure du matin. Do you know it? It begins: Enfin! seul! On n’entend plus que le roulement de quelques fiacres attardés et éreintés. Pendant quelques heures, nous posséderons le silence, sinon le repos. Enfin! la tyrannie de la face humaine a disparu, et je ne souffrirai plus que par moi-même. . . . And it ends magnificently: rises, stands, and strides off like a prayer. A prayer of Baudelaire’s; a real, unpolished prayer, shaped by the hands, artless and beautiful like the prayer of a Russian. —He had to go a long way to reach that poem, did Baudelaire, and he went there on his knees and crawling. How far away from me he was in everything: of all my forebears perhaps the most alien; often I can barely understand him and yet sometimes deep at night, when I said his words after him like a child, he was the person closest to me and lived next to me and stood palely on the other side of the thin wall and listened to my voice falling. What a strange unity existed between us then, a sharing of everything, the same poverty and perhaps the same fear.

Oh a thousand hands have been building at my fear and it has grown from a remote village into a city a huge sprawling city in which unutterable things happen. It has been growing the entire time and has taken the quiet green out of my feeling, which no longer bears anything. Even in Westerwede it was growing and whole houses and streets arose from the fearful circumstances and hours that passed there. And when Paris came, it quickly took on huge proportions. In August of last year I arrived there. It was the time when the trees in the city are withered without autumn, when the burning streets, stretched by the heat, go on and on and one walks through smells as through many melancholy rooms. Then I walked past the long hospitals whose gates stood wide open with a gesture of impatient and greedy compassion. The first time I passed by the Hotel Dieu an open carriage was just entering, with a person dangling limply inside it, jostled by every movement, askew like a broken marionette, and with a terrible abscess on his long, gray, dangling neck. And what people I have encountered since then, almost daily! Ruins of caryatids upon which an entire suffering still rested, an entire edifice of suffering, beneath which they lived slowly like tortoises. And they were passers-by among passers-by, ignored and undisturbed in their fate. At most one caught them as momentary impressions and observed them with calm, detached curiosity like some new species of animal in which abjectness had developed special organs, organs for starving and dying. And they wore the comfortless, discolored mimicry of cities grown too large, and they endured under the foot of each day that stepped on them, like tough beetles—endured as if there was still something to wait for, twitched like pieces of a large chopped-up fish that is already rotting but still alive. They lived, lived on nothing, on dust, on soot and on the filth smeared on their surfaces, on what falls from the teeth of dogs, on any senselessly broken thing for which some buyer might still have some inexplicable use. O what kind of world is this! Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, remnants of things that once functioned, and all of it still astir, as though they were being driven about in an uncanny wind, carried and carrying, falling and overtaking one another in their fall.

There were old women who set a heavy basket down on some ledge in a wall (short little women whose eyes were drying up like puddles), and when they were ready to pick it back up, there slid slowly and ceremoniously out of their sleeve a long rusty hook, not a hand, and it reached inexorably for the handle of the basket. And there were other old women who walked about with a drawer from some old night-table in their hands and showed everyone that rolling around inside it were twenty rusty pins they had to sell. And once late in autumn a little old woman stood beside me one evening in the light of a shop window. She stood very still, and I thought that like me she was busy looking at the things displayed for sale, and so I scarcely paid her any mind. Finally, though, her presence began to make me uneasy, and, I don’t know why, I suddenly looked down at her oddly clasped, worn-away hands. Very, very slowly an old, long, thin pencil emerged from those hands, it grew taller and taller and took a very long time to become completely visible, visible in all its wretchedness. I can’t say exactly what it was that made this scene so terrible, but it seemed to me as if a whole destiny were being played out before me, a long destiny, a catastrophe that was building up fearfully to the moment when the pencil would cease growing and, trembling ever so slightly, topple out of the loneliness of those empty hands. Finally I understood that I was supposed to buy it . . .

And then those women who hurry past one in long velvet cloaks from the eighties, with paper roses on obsolescent hats beneath which their hair hangs down as if melted together into a single mass. And all those people, men and women, who are undergoing some transition, perhaps from madness toward healing, but perhaps also toward complete insanity; all of them with something infinitely sensitive in their faces, with a love, a knowledge, a joy, as with a light that burns only the slightest bit dimly and restlessly and could so easily be restored to full clarity if only someone would notice and help. . . . But there is no one to help. No one to help those who as yet are only the tiniest bit perplexed, frightened, intimidated; those who are only just beginning to read things differently from the way they are meant; those who are still dwelling in the very same world as always, except that they walk a bit crookedly and thus sometimes think that things are hanging over them; those who aren’t at home in cities and get lost in them as in an evil forest that goes on forever—; all those whom affliction visits every day, all those who cannot hear their wills working in the noise, all those over whom fear has grown, —why does no one help them in the big cities?

Where are they going when they come so quickly through the streets? Where do they sleep, and when they cannot sleep, what transpires before their melancholy eyes? What do they think about when they sit all day long in the open gardens with their heads sunk over their clasped hands which have come together as if from far away in order to hide in each other? And what kind of words do they say to themselves when their lips summon up the strength to work? Do they still weave real words? . . . Are they still speaking sentences, or is everything crowding and shoving out of them now in total confusion as out of a burning theater, everything in them that was spectator and player, hero and audience? Do none of them realize that inside them a childhood is getting lost, a strength is beginning to sicken, a love is falling?

Oh, Lou, I have tormented myself like this day after day. For I understood all those people, and though I detoured around them in a wide arc, they had no secret from me. I was wrenched out of myself into their lives, right through all their lives, through all their heavy laden lives. I often had to say to myself out loud, “I am not one of them, eventually I am going to leave this horrible city where they will die”; I said it to myself and felt that there was no deception in it. And yet when I noticed how my clothes were becoming dirtier and heavier from week to week and saw how they had become frayed in many places, I grew frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passerby were merely to look at me and half unconsciously count me among their number. The slightest disapproving glance could sentence me to life down among them. And wasn’t I really one of them, since I was poor like them and full of protest against everything that occupied and uplifted and deceived and deluded the other people? Didn’t I deny everything around me that was valued, —and wasn’t I actually homeless, despite the semblance of a room in which I was as much a stranger as if I had been sharing it with someone totally unknown? Didn’t I go hungry, just like them, at tables laden with food that I couldn’t bring myself to touch, because it wasn’t pure and simple like the food I preferred? And wasn’t I set apart, just like them, from the majority around me by the simple fact that I didn’t have any wine in me or any other deluding drink? Wasn’t I clear just like those solitary ones who are dimmed only on the outside by the haze and the heaviness of the city and the laughter that comes like thick smoke from the evil fires that it keeps stoking? Nothing was so little like laughter as the laughter of those estranged creatures: when they laughed, it sounded as though something were falling inside them, falling and smashing to bits and filling them up with shattered fragments. They were not funny but deep; and their depth reached out for me like the force of gravity and drew me down toward the center of their misery.

What good was it that some mornings I got up happier and went out in higher spirits and felt capable of a quiet productive day? . . . Once (it was quite early in the morning) I came down the Boulevard St. Michel feeling this way, my destination the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I used to spend a great deal of time. I walked along delighting in all the freshness, clarity, and courage that the morning and the beginning of a new day scatter about even in a city. The red on the carriage wheels was as moist and cool as it is on flower petals, and somewhere at the end of the street someone was carrying something—I didn’t ask myself what—that was a wonderful bright green. The water wagons drove slowly uphill and the water leapt out of their pipes young and clear and made the street dark so that it didn’t blind one anymore. Horses came by in shimmering harnesses, and their hooves clattered like a hundred hammers. The cries of the vendors had a different ring: they rose more lightly and echoed high above. And the vegetables on their handcarts were stirring like a little field and had a free morning all their own above them and within them darkness, greenness, and dew. And when it was quiet for a moment, one heard overhead the sound of windows being pushed open . . .

Then I was suddenly struck by the odd behavior of the people coming toward me: most of them walked for a while with their heads turned backward, so that I had to be careful not to collide with them; there were also some who had stopped, and by following their gazes I came upon a slender man in black among the people walking ahead of me. As he strode along he kept grabbing his overcoat collar—which apparently, to his great annoyance, insisted on standing up—and folding it back down with both hands. Absorbed in this effort, which was causing him visible strain, he repeatedly forgot to watch where he was walking and stumbled or hopped hastily over some small obstacle. When this had happened a few times in quick succession he turned his attention back to walking, but it was strange when after two or three steps he tripped again and hopped over something. I had quickened my pace without realizing it and now found myself close enough behind the man to see that the movements of his feet had nothing at all to do with the sidewalk, which was smooth and even, and that he was only trying to deceive those coming toward him when he turned around after each stumble as if to cast blame on some guilty object. In reality there was nothing to be seen. Meanwhile, the clumsiness in his gait slowly abated, and he hurried on quite quickly now and for a time went unnoticed. But suddenly the disquiet began again in his shoulders, it drew them up twice and then dropped them so that they hung down from him crooked and awry as he walked on. Then I could scarcely believe what my eyes had seen: his left hand shot up to his collar with indescribable speed, seized it almost imperceptibly and flipped it up, after which he expended much visible effort trying with both hands to get the collar to lie down again—a task he accomplished, as before, only with great difficulty. All the while he kept nodding to the front and to the left, stretching his neck and nodding, nodding, nodding behind his busy upraised hands, as if now his shirt collar were also starting to cause him trouble and there were work to be done up there for a long time yet. Finally everything seemed to be in order again. He walked some ten steps completely unobserved when all of a sudden his shoulders began twitching up and down again; at the same moment a waiter who was cleaning up in front of a café stopped and gazed curiously at this passer-by, who unexpectedly shook himself, halted, and then resumed his walking in little hops. The waiter laughed and shouted something into the shop, so that several more faces became visible behind the windowpanes. But in the meantime the strange man had hooked his cane onto his shirt collar from behind, and now, as he walked on, he kept it that way, so that it hung straight down, directly over his spine; it was relatively inconspicuous, and seemed to support him. The new position calmed him considerably, and for a moment he walked on relieved. No one paid any attention to him except for me—and I couldn’t take my eyes off him for a second. I knew how the disquiet was returning bit by bit, how it was growing stronger and stronger, how it was trying first in one place, then in another to find expression, how it shook at his shoulders, how it grasped at his head in order to jerk it out of kilter, and how it suddenly descended without warning on his stride and destroyed it. As yet this was scarcely noticeable; it took place in short intervals, silently and almost secretly, but it was there already, and it was growing. I felt this whole man filling up with disquiet, felt this pent-up disquiet increasing, felt it mounting, and I saw his will, his fear, and the desperate expression of his convulsive hands pressing the cane against his spine as though trying to make it a part of his helpless body, in which lay the incitement to a thousand dances. And I witnessed how this cane grew into something crucial, something upon which a great deal depended: all the strength of this man and his entire will entered it and made it into a Power, into a Being which could perhaps come to his aid and to which the sick man clung with wild belief. A god came into being here and his world rose up against him. But while this war was being waged, the man who had to bear it was trying to walk casually on, and for a few moments he succeeded in looking harmless and ordinary. Now he was crossing the Place St. Michel, and though weaving through the rush of carriages and pedestrians would have been ample excuse for the most contorted movements, he remained utterly composed, and there was even a strangely rigid calm throughout his body when he stepped onto the sidewalk of the bridge beyond. By now I was close behind him, without a will of my own, drawn along by his fear that was no longer distinguishable from my own. Suddenly the cane gave way, right in the middle of the bridge. The man stood: stood there extraordinarily still and rigid and didn’t move. Now he was waiting; but it was as if the enemy inside him didn’t yet trust this surrender. He hesitated—but only for a moment. Then he erupted like a fire, out of all the windows at once. And a dance began. . . . A dense circle of people that had quickly formed started pushing me gradually back, until I could no longer see him. My knees shook, and I was emptied of everything. I stood for a while leaning against the railing of the bridge, and then finally went back to my room; there was no longer any reason to go to the Bibliothèque. What book could have been strong enough to help me get past what was inside me? I was as if consumed, utterly used up; as if another person’s fear had fed on me and exhausted me—that’s how I felt.

And there were many mornings like that—and many evenings too. Had I been able to make these fears I underwent, had I been able to shape things out of them, real, steadfast things that are bliss and freedom to create and that, once created, stand there quietly and exude reassurance, then nothing would have befallen me. But these fears that were my daily portion stirred a hundred other fears, and they arose in me and against me and banded together and I could not get beyond them. In striving to form them I became creative for them; instead of making them into things of my will I gave them a life of their own, and they turned that life against me and used it to pursue me far into the night. Had it been better with me, been quieter and friendlier, had my room stood by me, and if I had remained in better health, then I might have succeeded even so: succeeded in making things out of fear.

Once I did succeed, if only for a short time. When I was in Viareggio—yes, the fears broke loose there too, even more so than before, overwhelmingly so. And the sea that was never silent was too much for me and buried me under the crashing of its spring waves. And yet it came. Prayers came into being there, Lou, a Book of Prayers. I have to tell you this, because my first Prayers rest in your hands—those Prayers I have so often thought of and clung to from afar. Because they resound so deeply and because they are so much at peace with you [in the margin: and because only you and I know of them]—that is why I could cling to them. And perhaps one day I might be allowed to come and place the new ones, the Prayers that have since come into being, with the others, with you, in your hands, in your quiet house.

For I am a stranger and a pauper. And I shall pass. But your hands shall hold everything that once might have been my home, had I only been stronger.

Rainer.

Lou, have you seen my two books yet, the one about Worpswede and the one on Rodin’s work? Would you like to leaf through them? And is there a new book by you? May I read it?

[LAS to RMR in Worpswede]

[Westend near Berlin,] Rüsternallee 36

July 22, 1903

Dear Rainer,

As I read your last letter there were moments when what you described made such an impact on me, came alive through the smallest physical detail and yet grew beyond it into the tremendously human, that I forgot about you completely. And I felt that odd process of “ensouling” that can emanate even from impressions of misery when they come not just straight from life but channeled through the life of that person creating them, transmuting them. For you are wrong when you say that you merely suffered through all these things as a helpless accessory without repeating them in some higher process. They are all there: no longer only in you, now also in me, and external to both of us as living things with a voice all their own, —no different from any Song that ever came to you.

Those “who labor and are heavy laden”: now they have you as their poet. How I wish I could express adequately the twofold impression this reunion with you makes on me! On the one hand it reminds me of those impressions of you from the farthest past—those from the days even before Wolfratshausen, for instance, and from those first years when you were still suffering so much physical pain; I can well understand that you yourself, in the context of Paris, found yourself thinking all the way back to your time in the military school: to those most faraway moods. On the other hand it feels to me just the opposite: as though you were now standing already where even in the best subsequent times you have only occasionally stood: undivided from yourself. That something could so continually oppose you without eventually breaking you down is testimony to the heightened resistance of a united, concentrated sensibility. In previous times of recuperation, of transition and inner strengthening, you were repeatedly at risk of being carried away by your own sense of power, and squandering yourself on more trivial enthusiasms, on things of pure chance. As your strength grew, it lost track, so to speak, of its deepest object, —rather than bending down, like an adult to a child, toward the impressions arising from the earlier, more helpless world of experience, in order to lead them all upward into the light, clothed in its most difficult memories as in genius for everything that has ever suffered.

It was at heart only this one feeling I was expressing—simplistically and awkwardly, to be sure—when I sometimes told you: out of those terrible times in the military school one day your work shall come. Now it has come: the poet in you creates poetry out of man’s fears. Don’t imagine that this might just as easily have been possible at some other place or time! It takes so much courage and humility; you would have let more superficial things distract you, and you would have seen misery in a falsified way. To take an example: the man in Paris, the one walking about struggling against St. Vitus’s dance—you would have taken on something of him, poetically and psychologically speaking, by being in his company, and you would have observed things in the manner of a St. Vitus’s dancer: now you describe him. But only in your doing so does the martyrdom of his condition open up in you, seize you with the clarity of insight, —and what then truly distinguishes you from him is the very power with which you experience it along with him, a power that is without any of the mitigating self-deceptions of the primary sufferer. In this respect one may speak of a “justificatory suffering” of the artist, while all the other sufferers around him, whom he helps to resurrection, “know not what they do.”

That one “most real thing” which in your recent letter you said you wished you could cling to when inner fears drive everything away from you and seem to leave you abandoned to an alien world, —you already have it inside you, that one real thing, planted there like a hidden seed and thus not yet present to you. You possess it now in this sense: you have become like a little plot of earth into which all that falls—and be it even things mangled and broken, things thrown away in disgust—must enter an alchemy and become food to nourish the buried seed. No matter if at first it looks like a pile of sweepings thrown out over the soul: it all turns to loam, becomes you. You have never been closer to the health you wish for than now!

Here it is very quiet and peaceful: a little squirrel that has strayed out of the forest is sitting on an old tall linden tree in our garden, and beneath him sits Schimmel, staring up perfectly still, as if hypnotized. Yes, do send me the “Worpswedians” and Rodin!

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

currently Oberneuland near Bremen

July 25, 1903.

Your letter, Lou, has followed me here from Worpswede. I received it yesterday morning, and little Ruth was with me when I first read it. I have read it often since, walking up and down in the garden, and each time I received it again, absorbed it like something new, unhoped-for, like a thing good beyond all measure. To those who were in the desert, this is how the birds came and brought bread; perhaps they found food in themselves, in the depths of their own anguish and solitude, but they didn’t know it until the strange bird arrived with the little loaf of bread, as with the outward sign of the inner sustenance on which they had been living . . . In the same way your voice comes to me with its great approbation, which I may not deserve; for, Lou, all that experience from the time before Wolfratshausen, as you also sense, is strong in me, and I fear I am not master over it yet. The great daily encounter with so much suffering, the revelation of downfall and ruin that I received in Paris, was perhaps still too much for me and swept over my will like a wave. I could write about it to you, because I have so strong a desire to spread myself out before you, that you might survey me and better know me. But it was only a letter. And as yet nothing has taken shape from it, as yet no one thing stands there and testifies on my behalf; will it ever come? It is as if whatever I truly receive falls too deeply into me, falls, falls for years, and in the end I lack the strength to lift it out of me and I walk about fearfully with my heavily laden depths and never reach them. Yes, I know that impatience warps all those processes and transformations that take their course in darkness as in heart-chambers; and I know that in patience lies everything: humility, strength, measure. But life moves on and is like a day, and whoever wished to be patient would need a thousand such days, though perhaps not even one is given him. Life moves on, and it strides past many in the distance, and around those waiting it makes a detour. And thus my wish to be someone working rather than waiting, someone standing at the center of his work’s workshop far into every day’s dawn. And yet I cannot be, because almost nothing in me has reached fruition, or else I am not aware of it and let my faraway harvests grow old and outlive their time. There is still nothing but confusion in me; what I experience is like pain and what I truly perceive hurts. I don’t seize the image: it presses into my hand with its pointed tips and sharp edges, presses deep into my hand and almost against my will: and whatever else I would grasp slides off me, is like water and flows elsewhere once it has mirrored me absent-mindedly. What should he do, Lou, who grasps so little about life, who must let it happen to him and comes to realize that his own willing is always slighter than another great will into whose current he oftentimes chances like a thing drifting downstream? What should he do, Lou, for whom the books in which he wants to read only draw open like heavy doors which the next wind will slam shut again? What should he do for whom people are just as difficult as books, just as superfluous and strange, because he cannot derive from them what he needs, because he cannot select from them and thus takes from them what is crucial and incidental and burdens himself with both? What should such a person do, Lou? Should he remain utterly alone and accustom himself to a life lived among things, which are more like him and place no burden on him?

Yes, Lou, I too believe that the experiences of the past few years have been good for me, that whatever came to me pressed me more firmly into myself and no longer scattered me as so often before; I am now more tightly knit, and there are fewer pores in me, fewer interstices that fill up and swell when things not my own penetrate.

And yet no one can depend on me: my little child must live with strangers, my young wife, who also has her work, needs others to provide for her instruction, and I myself am of no use anywhere and acquire nothing. And even though those closest to me, who are directly affected, never reproach me for this, the reproach is there nonetheless and the house in which I am just now staying is filled with it everywhere. And thus resistance becomes necessary again and self-control and fending-off, and strength dissipates and fear issues from all things.

And then I often feel as if this were true in every sense—as if, being as I am, I can neither provide for nor protect the two people (the little child and the adult) who are joined with me in this life. For I know so little and have learned badly how to care and scarcely at all how to help. And as far as I myself am concerned, I have so much work day and night that I am sometimes almost hostile toward those close to me when they intrude on me, even though they have a perfect right to me. And from one person to another everything is so difficult and untested and without precedent and example, and one would have to live in every relationship with full attention, poised to be creative at any instant that requires a new response and imposes tasks and questions and demands . . .

At least now we have seen our little girl again. She lives here in Oberneuland with my wife’s parents, who for many years have rented a large old farmstead. A tall white house with a thatched roof stands there in a garden, or more precisely in a section of the park with very tall trees, stretches of meadow, and paths that curve slowly into the dark. And the wind enters from the broad meadows and brings distance and scent and makes the garden larger than it is. Ruth is growing up there. And is outside almost all the time and without clothes and, like a child from some savage tribe, secure in her uninhibited nakedness. And when she does put clothes on they are very simple ones, like those the children in Millet’s paintings wear, work clothes, appropriate for the things she does, the continuous small labor of going about and grasping that fills her days from one end to the other.

When we arrived here, we at first tried to be very quiet and like inanimate things, and Ruth would sit and gaze at us for long spells. Her serious, dark-blue eyes would not let go of us and we waited for an hour almost without moving, the way one waits for a small bird to come closer when the slightest movement might frighten it away. And finally she did come closer, all on her own, and tried out single words to see if we would understand them; later, when she had come all the way up to us, she recognized in our eyes her own small, shining image. And spoke her own name and smiled. That was her first intimacy.

And then she allowed with almost aloof forbearance our shy attempts to get close to her and share everything with her. And all at once it seemed natural to her to say “mother,” and not long after that she spread her arms, as if from remembering, and came up to us as to someone she loved. Now she is being consciously polite to us; and she calls me “man” and “good man,” and seems pleased that I am still here.

We will stay for another three or four days. Then we will return to the Vogelers in Worpswede and from there I will send you the books at once; the one about Worpswede and the one on Rodin; read them then as you read these letters; for there is much in them that I wrote to you and with rich awareness of your existence.

Rainer.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Worpswede near Bremen

the first of August 1903

You see, dear Lou, it is not getting any calmer around me. I keep waiting in vain for the quiet hour when I can write you a substantial letter again: but it doesn’t come. The light of day is like a flickering lamp, like a candle in the wind, and the nights usher in a great unrest from things past or yet to be. And there is never any hospitable room around me and I find no window through which I can gaze on something calm. The house in Oberneuland is surrounded, it’s true, by tall, old, branched-out trees that have an equipoise in them even when they toss and sway; but I have no undisturbed place of my own from which I might observe their rich, commotion-filled lives. There is a heavy and fearful mood in this house on account of its master, who with the unpredictable confused impulses of a man who has aged badly holds everyone in a state of anxious suspense. Earlier it was his irrational anger with its sudden outbursts that everyone had to fear; now it is a feeble plaintive melancholy with which he torments those around him, as with a new stage in a nervous disorder that increasingly possesses him and his still far from exhausted strength. In a way that frightens me the drama of this old man has intertwined with the impressions I received from our little girl, so that the memory of the one almost invariably evokes thoughts of the other. What havoc life plays with human beings if they must age this way with disfigured faces, with restlessly grabbing hands, with eyes that no longer hold onto anything and no longer find anything new. The laughter of old people like this has become worn out and bad and brittle, and their gestures fall away from them like old leaves in the wind and it doesn’t matter where they land. And the house gradually dies out around them and shuns them and everything they do is dead. It was hard then to keep one’s spirits up in this house and listen to the little child’s voice, which is so eerily unsuspecting and so infinitely alone among all the noises.

And so after eight days in Oberneuland, which passed agreeably, thanks to the circumspection with which we lived them, I returned here and was looking forward to a few quiet weeks in Vogeler’s house, in the red room that I had already furnished for peaceful retreats with a few of my things and books. But now it turns out that I can’t stay here either, because the fast approaching confinement of the young Frau Vogeler is going to fill, configure, and constrict the entire house, more so than they themselves had originally thought, so that nothing superfluous can remain in it; and since it is impossible for us to stay at the inn and too expensive and complicated to arrange to live in Worpswede, we will have to go back to Oberneuland as soon as the delivery here takes place.

I do not anticipate much peace of mind during this new stay at the house of my wife’s parents, and I am a little afraid of continuing any longer an experiment that has run its course as expected; but since my plans for winter demand frugality, I can’t even think of leaving for somewhere else and must be patient and see how all this will turn out. But now that our summer has gone so badly and borne so little fruit, we want to try to leave before the end of August. First a reunion with my father is to take place in Leipzig, and then we will journey via Munich, Venice, and Florence to Rome, where my wife (at Rodin’s wish) is to work during the next year. I myself will stay on a month or two in Rome, for I am very anxious to see antiquity and its works, about which I still know nothing at all, especially its small objects that achieve such a mature beauty. I have become drawn to them and to Gothic sculpture through Rodin’s work, which I delved into at such length and so patiently, and I feel that an Italian sojourn now would be the natural continuation of the best that Paris taught me. But I don’t want to stay in Rome too long and after a while I will go on alone to some remote place that has a good winter. Where I shall live then, I don’t yet know. The Tuscan countryside is dear to me and I would love to be where St. Francis opened up his radiant poverty like a cloak into which all the animals came: in Subiaco, or in Assisi; but it is a mountainous country and perhaps too wild in winter. I may have to go southward from Rome, perhaps to the little town of Ravello that lies near Amalfi, high above the blue gulfs of that happy coast. Perhaps there solitude will descend on me along with the great stillness that everything in me longs for; then I will live quietly among things and be grateful for all that keeps the clamor of daily life away from me. And I will write you occasionally and put into words for you much that now shrinks from all this disquiet. There are still many Parisian things I want to relate to you; and you must hear about Mont St. Michel, the archangel’s gothic church-fortress that towers up on the north coast of Normandy, almost entirely surrounded by the ocean; and you must have at least some small token of so many other things that gripped me.

The little book on Rodin’s work that I am sending you today will also tell you much; it is pure personal experience, all of it, a testament to that first time in Paris when in the shelter of an overwhelming impression I felt somewhat protected from the thousandfold fear that came later.

I am also sending you the Worpswede book,* which was written in Westerwede in the spring of 1902. You must show it lenience; for me it remains, much more than the Rodin book, a “commission,” just as it felt while I was writing it. In the material itself there was too much that was unpleasant and restricting; the painters with whom it had to deal are one-dimensional as artists and as human beings small and drawn to unimportant things. To criticize them seemed to me a betrayal, and when I tried to appreciate them they ran through my hands like water; all that remained was the countryside and whatever greatness emanates from it. Back then I was able to see it greatly, and that helped me. (Today, on the occasion of this return, I found it small, German, and full of settlements.) It also helped that the given subject compelled me to be the sounding board for many different things, and material that had been forced back by confused days into the oblivion of the unformed approached again and entered easily into the lines I wrote.

I am glad that now, at a time when my writing is so inconstant and piecemeal, I may at least give you these two books, from which you will recognize what about me has grown. And don’t, Lou, let yourself grow weary as these trivial letters keep arriving; it means so infinitely much to me that I may tell you about my everyday life as well, which is so full of confusion since I have no overview of it; before you it assumes a shape and order and becomes an entirely different thing. And knowing this helps me more than I can say.

Rainer.

(My address is still the same: Worpswede near Bremen, since I don’t know yet precisely what day we will have to travel back to Oberneuland; when we are gone, everything will be forwarded to me from here to there.)

[LAS to RMR in Worpswede]

[Westend near Berlin,] Rüsternallee 36

August 7, 1903

Dear Rainer,

When your Rodin arrived and I gradually realized what was in it, I felt: it will be a long time now before I can write you! I wanted to retreat into long, uninterrupted stretches of calm and take my fill of this little book, which has the greatness of many thousand pages. It is unbelievably valuable to me, perhaps—no, beyond doubt—the most valuable of all your published books.

But now it turns out that I must write you, and do so without delay, on the old graph paper that happens to lie at hand. As the Paris letter nearly caused me to forget you yourself, as though I were reading an independent work, so now this book forces its way into my most immediate feelings, into the most intimate weave of my being, as though it were one of your letters.

After you had tried to dissuade me from believing that the Paris letter was more than just that, I had vainly pursued the question of why it spoke to you only of impotence, of things that had been stronger than you, but spoke to me of the positive, of the new resources of strength that had gone into their depiction. Or, what amounts to the same thing: how to explain the dual impression you make in that letter, namely: of being at the same time dejected and newly resilient. And now I understand, understand everything. Through your Rodin.

During the Rodin period you felt “somewhat protected in the shelter of an overwhelming impression” to which you sacrificed yourself creatively in order to give further, reflective form to what someone else had shaped. When you then emerged from that shelter, you were still under the influence of the sensibility you had taken in and transposed and in so doing made part of yourself. Everything you looked at you saw with incredible Rodin-eyes, saw with a view toward the corporeal-psychic detail, became a sounding board for whatever spoke of bodily existence, even though in your tools, the tools of the poet, the bodily does not find adequate means for its expression. And so the sheer optical aspect, all these unaccustomed experiences of the eyes, could have produced a state of overexcitement. Had you been a sculptor, this would have coursed through you with a powerful creative jolt, but instead it transported you into the uncanny dimensions of a foreign world, and drove a wedge between your mind and your senses. If you had been a mere copier or commentator, you would have experienced the calm satisfaction and pleasant exhaustion that follow a successful task; but as it was, your work stood on the borderline between what was yours and what was someone else’s, held something passionately suppressed and also something of your own under infinite arousal, something that could not completely ring out in you and now kept echoing into an emptiness, as it were, because it was external to your work and yet under its spell. It is understandable that the symptoms of anxiety—surely the result of this—only increased in Viareggio, even though there you “began to chime.” For the two different realms of art must have locked together there indistinguishably for a time, before they could separate out again and achieve equilibrium, and during that time the sculptural urges, i.e., those stamped by the corporeal, unable to find satisfaction through the poet’s means, had to turn their energy against your own self, had, as it were, to hold in thrall your own body like a vampire.

You have undergone such severe after-shocks, and yet only because so much that is completely new has been born in you. Therefore you suffer, and I rejoice: for how should I not rejoice when you reveal even in the expression of your suffering who you have become. This happiness that lies over your letters has not yet filtered down to you yourself: but it is indeed yours, and in its shade you will yet find sanctuary from everything that would cause you harm.

Lou.

[LAS to RMR in Worpswede]

[Westend near Berlin,] Rüsternallee 36

August 8, 1903

Continuing what I couldn’t finish yesterday:

The artistic and objective value the Rodin book received through your creative commitment is indeed great and worth the cost no matter what; yet that is not its only nor perhaps even its greatest strength: its most mysterious value and charm may lie in the fact that the commitment itself is not only to an objective and artistic achievement but to pure human intimacy. That you gave yourself to your opposite, your complement, to a longed-for exemplar, —gave yourself the way one gives oneself in marriage—. I don’t know how else to express it, —there is for me a feeling of betrothal in this book, —of a sacred dialogue, of being admitted into what one was not but now, in a mystery, has become. Herein lies the centeredness and strength, fully confident, of which the second epigraph speaks, and it is a book made of words such as have deeds waiting behind them, —as if it wished, in order to be sufficiently close to its material, to make the first epigraph apply equally to itself. The suggestibility that is contained in your mixture of powers and frustrations is here like a strength that has grown beyond itself by committing you for long, deep, patient stretches to what was hard for you and contrary to your nature. Everything assailing you during that work, along with all the after-effects attendant on it, seem as nothing compared to the psychic reorientation it entailed. For as far as the work was concerned, this book lay here finished and uncontested, —something was behind you, something you could hold in your hands and reach for; but with regard to your state of mind, there were only expectations and intensifications pointing into a future—everything lay before you, and the awakened longing was no more able to envision its realization than after a wedding night the child-to-be can visibly approach its parents. I believe that in such experiences one touches the very limits of human possibility, one provides oneself evidence of who one is—. Perhaps only after many years will some of the most sublime truths about yourself arise in you as if in memory of these very hours, and reveal to you the deep logic that holds the man and the artist, life and dream together. I for my part am certain now of what you are: and this is the most personal thing about this book for me, that I believe us to be allies in the difficult mysteries of living and dying, two people united in that sense of the eternal which binds human beings together. From this moment on you can count on me.

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Oberneuland near Bremen

August 8, 1903

At the Vogelers now there is another tiny little child, a girl; and she is to have a pale old-fashioned name, Helene Bettina, and if she does not struggle against it she will grow up into a life that seems to have ended long ago. And things are becoming smaller and smaller around Heinrich Vogeler, his house is contracting around him and filling up with everyday life, with contentedness, with roteness and with lethargy, so that no longer can anything unexpected happen. The petite woman who was so delicate and fairytale-quiet is taking on with each birth the strength and thickness of a peasant woman, and soon she will be the very image of her mother, who for years has given birth to dull, pale children in damp, shadowy rooms. And Heinrich Vogeler’s art is becoming vague, is losing more and more of its brightness and confidence and is entirely at the whims of a frivolous invention that has lost connection with the world of things. In houses like these even the children no longer represent growth; they aren’t birthed out into the world and no new possibilities arrive with them. Over and over again the past commences, and life and death repeat themselves and nothing about them is new. And no art can come of this, for art cannot repeat itself. And I, who have returned here from a foreign place, am filled with unease amid this life’s casual unthinkingness and recall the stanzas I wrote in Viareggio this April:

Like one who has voyaged over foreign oceans

am I among those forever fixed at home;

The full days stand dumbly about their tables,

But to me the far-off is full of dream.

Deep inside my face a world reaches,

which perhaps is uninhabited like a moon, —

but they leave no star to itself,

and all their words have long been lived in.

And all the things I took with me

appear bizarre—compared to theirs—:

in their vast homeland they are wild animals,

now they hold their breaths for shame . . .

Heinrich Vogeler required a firm, steady house; but now that he actually has one, full and finished, it keeps on extending into the workaday world; and he fails to sense that it is growing heavy. Kramskoy felt it when the children arrived and with them the immediate present and the concern with the near future instead of the most distant one. When that happens all priorities reverse: the remote ceases to be important, only yesterday counts; and Tomorrow looms larger than Eternity.

When I first came to Rodin and had breakfast at his house out in Meudon with people to whom one was never introduced, with strangers seated at the same table, I knew that his house was nothing to him, a small wretched necessity perhaps, a roof for times of rain and sleep; and that it was no source of worry for him and no burden on his solitude and concentration. Deep in himself he bore the darkness and refuge and quietness of a house, and he himself had become the sky above it and the forest around it and the distance and the great river that always flowed past. Oh what a solitary this old man is: sunk in himself, he stands full of sap like an ancient tree in autumn. He has grown deep; he has dug out a deep place for his heart and its beating comes from far away as if from the core of a mountain range. His thoughts course through him and fill him with weight and sweetness and don’t get lost on the surface. He has become blunt and hard toward the unimportant and stands among people as though closed in by a sheath of old bark. But he bares his heart to what is important, and is all openness when he is among things or where animals and people touch him quietly, the way things do. Here he is student and apprentice and observer and imitator of beauties that otherwise have always merely passed on among those who sleep, among the distracted and the indifferent. Here he is the watchful one who misses nothing, the loving one who constantly welcomes, the patient one who keeps no track of time and would never think to desire even what is next at hand. What he gazes at and surrounds with gazing is always for him the only thing, the present thing, the one world in which everything happens. When he sculpts a hand it is alone in space and there is nothing but a hand; and in six days God made just a single hand and poured the waters around it and arched the heavens over it; and he rested when all was finished, and there was something glorious and a hand.

And this way of looking and of living is ingrained so firmly in him because he attained it as a craftsman; as he was achieving in his art that element of infinite simplicity, of total indifference to subject matter, he was achieving in himself that great justice, that equilibrium in the face of the world that no name can shake. Since he had been granted the gift of seeing things in everything, he had also acquired the ability to construct things; and therein lies the greatness of his art. No longer now can any movement confound him, for he knows that there is movement even in the contours of a placid surface, and he sees only surfaces and systems of surfaces that define forms clearly and exactly. Nothing he chooses to sculpt has for him even the slightest hint of vagueness: it is a region where thousands of tiny surface elements have been fitted into space, and his task, when he creates an artwork after it, is to fit the thing even more tightly, even more passionately, a thousand times more adroitly than before, into the breadth of space around it—so that it wouldn’t move even if one shook it. The thing is definite; the art-thing must be even more definite; removed from all accident, torn away from every uncertainty, lifted out of time and given to space, it has become enduring, capable of eternity. The model seems, the art-thing is. Thus the latter is that inexpressible advance over the former, the calm and mounting realization of the desire to be that emanates from everything in nature. By this is banished that error which would view art as the vainest and most capricious of vocations; art is the humblest service and founded absolutely on law. But all artists and all the arts are infected by this error, and so a very powerful man had to rise up against it; and he had to be someone whose pronouncements are deeds, someone who doesn’t talk and incessantly creates things. From the beginning art for Rodin was realization (and as such the very opposite of music, which transforms the seeming realities of the everyday world, and de-realizes them even further by absorbing them into the easy glissando of appearances. Which is why this opposite of the art-work, this vague act of non-condensing, this temptation toward diffuseness, has so many friends and advocates and addicts, so many who are unfree, who are chained to pleasure, who have no inner powers of intensification and must be enraptured from without. . . . ). Rodin, born in poverty and with no social standing, saw better than anyone that all beauty in human beings and animals and things is menaced by time and circumstance, that it is but a moment, a youthfulness that comes and goes in all ages but does not endure. What troubled him was precisely the appearance of that which he considered indispensable, necessary, and good: the appearance of beauty. He wanted it to be, and he saw his task as fitting things (for things endured) into the less threatened, more peaceful, more eternal world of space, and he instinctively applied to his work all the laws of adaptation, so that it might evolve organically and grow capable of life. From early on he had tried to make nothing by reference to “how it would look”: there was no stepping back for him, only a perpetual leaning over and remaining close to what was about to come into being. And today this characteristic has become so strong in him that one could almost say that the way his things look is a matter of indifference to him: so intensely does he experience their being, their reality, their release on all sides from the vague and uncertain, their completedness and goodness, their independence; they do not stand on the earth, they orbit it.

And since his great work arose from handcraft, from the humble and almost unmotivated will to make perpetually better things, he stands today, still free and unspoiled by theme and abstract conception, as one of the simplest creatures among his fully evolved things. The great thoughts, the sublime meanings came to them like laws that find fulfillment in things of goodness and perfection; he did not summon them. He did not desire them; bowed deep, he went his way like a servant and made an earth, a hundred earths. Yet each of these living earths radiates its own heaven and casts star-filled nights into eternity.

He simply set to work: that is what gives his work this ravishing directness and purity; the groups of figures, the larger combinations of forms, he did not constellate beforehand, while they were still ideas (for the idea is one thing—and almost nothing, while the realization is something else and everything). Before anything else he made things, many things, and from these alone did he create the new unity or let it grow of its own accord; and thus his relationships became both intense and according to law, since it was not ideas but things that formed bonds. And this work could only come from a workman, and he who constructed it can calmly deny inspiration; it doesn’t come upon him, because it is in him, day and night, provoked by each act of gazing, a warmth produced by every gesture of his hand. And as the things around him grew more numerous, the disturbances that reached him became less frequent; for all noises broke off when they came in contact with the realities that surrounded him. His very work has sheltered him: he has lived in it as in a wood, and his life must have lasted for a long time already, since what he himself planted has become a tall forest. And when one strolls among the things with which he dwells and shares space, which he sees again each day and each day completes, then his house with all its constant noises seems something trivial and irrelevant, and one sees it only as in a dream, strangely distorted and filled with an assortment of pale memories. His daily life and the people who are part of it lie there like an empty riverbed through which he no longer flows; but there is nothing sad in that: for nearby one hears the great roar and the powerful flow of the stream that would not divide into two arms . . .

And I believe, Lou, that it must be so; this is one life and the other is a different one, and we are not made to have two lives; back when I was always pining for a reality, for a house, for people who visibly belonged to me, for the everyday world—: how wrong I was then. For now that it is mine it keeps falling away from me, piece by piece. What was my house other than a stranger for whom I was expected to work, and what are those close to me other than a guest who doesn’t want to leave? How I lose myself every time I try to be something for them; I depart so far from myself and yet I cannot arrive at them and remain in transit between them and myself and so lost in journeying that I don’t know where I am nor how much of mine is with me and reachable. For whom can I be something, when the truth is that I have no talent for people and no claim on them? What sort of life would a man actually have to live in order to call his child his? Would he not have to work night and day trying to earn that right? Tasks arise out of every relationship, every connection issues demands and laws, and one can channel life’s goodness and greatness into them and grow through them toward oneself. There are people who can do this. But others are fundamentally solitaries, it is not in them to be continually sociable; they see lurking in every relationship a danger and an enmity; the house they build rests on such feelings, since they have no sense of home to provide its foundation; and along with the very people they are fond of, the people who are close, things all too close crowd into them and what is wide and free stays out.

O Lou, in one poem of mine that succeeds there is much more reality than in every relationship and affection I feel; where I create I am true, and I would like to find the strength to base my life entirely on this truth, on this infinite simplicity and joy that is sometimes granted me. Even when I went to Rodin I was seeking that; for years already I had somehow sensed the infinite example and model his work afforded. Now, having come from him, I know that I too should seek and ask for no other realizations than those of my work; there my house is, there the figures are who are truly close to me, there the women are whom I need, there the children are who will grow up and live long lives. But how am I to start out on this road—where is the handcraft of my art, its least and deepest place where I might begin to acquire true mastery? I want to take every road back, all the way back to that beginning, and everything that I have made shall have been as nothing, less than the sweeping of a threshold to which the next visitor will again bring the dust of the road. I have patience for centuries in me and want to live as though my time were very great. I want to gather myself up out of all distractions, and from everything too quickly applied fetch back what is mine and invest it. But I hear voices that mean well, and steps that are coming closer, and my doors open . . . And when I seek people out they have no advice and don’t understand what I mean. And with books I am just the same (just as clumsy and inarticulate) and they do not help me either, as though even they were still too human . . . Only things speak to me. Rodin’s things, the things on the Gothic cathedrals, the things of antiquity, —all those perfect, absolute things. They showed me the way to the great prototypes; to the animate, living world, seen simply and without interpretation as the occasion for things. And I am beginning to see differently and anew: flowers sometimes now take on infinite value for me, and from animals come stirrings and strange intimations. And even people I occasionally experience this way: hands somewhere come alive, mouths speak, and I gaze on everything more calmly and with greater justice.

But I still lack discipline, the capacity and compulsion to work for which I have yearned so long. Do I lack the strength? Is there something wrong with my will? Does the dream in me hamper all action? Days pass and I sometimes hear life going by. And still nothing has happened, still nothing real surrounds me; and I keep dividing and flowing off in all directions, —and would like so much to course through one riverbed and become great. For that’s how it’s meant to be, isn’t it, Lou: we should be like a river and not enter canals and guide water to the pastures. Aren’t we to hold ourselves together and surge on? Perhaps, if we grow to a very old age, perhaps, at the very end, there comes a moment when we can let go, allow ourselves to spread, and empty into a wide delta. . . . dear Lou!

Rainer.

(On July 25 a letter left for you; another on August 1; and two books on that same day. This only to check if they arrived safely, since nothing was sent by registered mail. Our address now may be: Oberneuland near Bremen (c/o Herr Fr. Th. Westhoff); for we will probably stay here until our departure and only fleetingly return to Worpswede for one last short visit. [In the margin: Because we feel so estranged from everything there.]

[LAS to RMR in Oberneuland]

[Westend near Berlin,] Rüsternallee 36

August 10, 1903

Your letter arrived like a postscript to the Rodin book; but I feel somewhat differently about it than I do about the book. Perhaps because I’m convinced that art and life don’t make their farthest advances when they remain two different things, but when they find, not just some compromise (which, by the way, they can never avoid, since artists are human beings), but that point of fusion where one serves as spur to the other’s productivity. Rodin, especially, by your account, has found that point, but the sculptor’s art is such that he came to locate it entirely within the area of his work: the purely practical style of one’s hands in action, the hard quiet devotion to one’s material, this stance of “leaning over it” instead of stepping back to check effects, —and finally to give over from one’s hands a thing, and to have its reality be fully visible and fully contained in itself, —all this is like something done in the service of real life or that for which Life prepares its people. But the moment one considers a different art—that of the poet, for instance—none of this applies. With him the “artistic” dimension does not coincide with the sculptor’s handcraft; the point where art and life become one has moved out far beyond that, into the soul, where he obtains his material. For words surely don’t build like stones, literally and concretely; they are rather signs for indirectly conveyed suggestions, and in and of themselves are far poorer, of far less material substance than a stone. One can even conceive of art continuing along this path all the way past music, that art of the wordless which nevertheless provides just as strict a reality, in that it allows the rhythmic laws of material things to ring out immaterially (—you are doing it an injustice now, just as earlier you overburdened it with metaphysical raptures). And finally one could imagine the existence of an art in which life absorbs handcraft to the same degree that in sculpture handcraft grasps life. These, then, would be the two opposites between which we all fluctuate, and we must all seek our own combination, our own personal balance point between art’s life and life’s art. I believe as deeply as you that this requires much standing apart, much solitude, —and indeed I could say of myself that I (although no artist) have denied myself motherhood in response to the demands of both. For the more artistically one views life, the more urgently does each thing’s perfection cry out for release, and of each thing one feels: it is worth an entire lifetime’s creative strength. But each of us must also experience how little possible it is to maintain complete apartness, and once one has wrenched things of life into one’s own destiny, one can no longer disregard them: because now they have become braided into the whole texture of our being, we are lodged in them, they in us. If they remain in us unassimilated, they will murder as nothing else all the quietness of the soul, and prevent the artist from descending into the depths and mineshafts of his being like a treasure-hunter, will drive him instead to the surface, toward forgetting and stupefaction. He has no choice then but to persist here, in the midst of life—where, for better or worse, he has documented himself as a human being—concentrated on that point over which he now leans in order to begin to work. This is a labor performed not merely as a human being but in the purest sense as an artist: exactly in the way that Rodin had to keep struggling with difficulties whenever his material was recalcitrant. As strange as it sounds: the technical aspect, understood as that creative command of things, depends for the poet most of all on the state of his inner being, which is to say the state of his soul’s workshop and the tools of its trade. If he really and truly gives his life to art, —then he worked to imbue many figures with life for the sake of those figures of his art. Then he worked day and night on that space within him, so that nothing would pace around in it any longer like a phantom, restless and demanding, and it would become a stillness and quietness for the existence of his things. Perhaps when he succeeds in that he will then create just the one hand of which you speak in your words about Rodin, but “around it [will be] pure splendor”; for only then will it be the hand, the hand that exists as if it were all there is.

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Oberneuland near Bremen

August 10, 1903 (Monday)

To learn that my little Rodin book had such an effect on you, Lou, was an inexpressible joy to me. Nothing could so fill me with self-confidence and hope as your enthusiasm for this the most fully matured of my works. Only now do I feel that it stands, only now is it completed, acknowledged by reality, upright and good.

And all those other insights your letter contained have been a beacon of quiet light to me, infinitely bright and helpful. My letter of Saturday (which you must have received by now) tried to find similar ways to explain the event Rodin was for me. He is one of the great ones who truly matter, a sign towering high over our times, an extraordinary example, a marvel visible from far away—and yet nothing but an inexpressibly solitary, old man, alone in a vast old age. And look: he has lost nothing, he has amassed and gathered things around him his whole incredible life long: he has left nothing in vagueness and has given everything reality: from the flight of a frightened feeling, from a dream’s debris, from the stirrings of a presentiment, he has made things, and has arranged them around himself, thing upon thing: so that there grew up around him a reality, a wide, calm kinship of things that united him with other and older things, until he himself seemed to stem from a dynasty of great things: that is the source of his quietness and his patience, his fearless, ongoing old age, his superiority to those who move about so much, who vacillate, who keep shifting the balances in which, almost unconsciously, he rests. You are so wonderfully right, dear Lou; I was suffering from the huge example which my own art gave me no means of following directly: the impossibility of creating physically turned to pain in my own body, and even my fears (whose material content was the perpetual crowding in on me of something too hard, too stone-like, too big) arose from the irreconcilability of the two worlds of art: how keenly you feel it and illumine it with your great insight into human nature: you soothsayer. . . .

But precisely in the light of your explanation, your immensely helpful, receptive understanding, it becomes clear to me that I must follow him, Rodin: not by a “sculptural” alteration of my work, but by an inward ordering of the creative process; it is not shaping things that I must learn from him, but a deep collectedness for shaping’s sake. I must learn to work, Lou, to work, that is where I fall so short! Il faut toujours travailler—toujours—he said to me one day when I spoke to him of the frightening abysses that open up between my good days; he could scarcely understand what I was talking about; he, who by now has become all work (so much so that even his gestures are simple movements that derive from his handcraft!) —Perhaps it is only a kind of ineptness that prevents me from working, that is, from choosing amongst everything that happens; for I am equally baffled when it comes to culling what pertains to me from books or from encounters; I barely recognize the important thing: external circumstances distort it and conceal it from me until I no longer know how to distinguish it from what is superfluous and become confused and intimidated by the sheer volume of everything. For weeks I sat in Paris in the Bibliothèque Nationale and read books I had long wished for; but the notes I made then are of no use at all; for while I read, everything seemed to me extraordinarily new and important, and I was tempted to copy out the whole book since I could not take it with me; inexperienced in books I roam about in them in perpetual dumb peasant-wonderment and emerge perplexed and burdened with things that are completely irrelevant. And I am similarly clumsy with events that come and go—without the talent for selection, without the composure for reception, a constantly shifting mirror out of which all images fall.

And how much it costs me to hold on to what is important! The perpetual interruption by all the trifles the day brings, the worries about money, the chance occurrences and useless complaints, the doors, the smells, the hours that toll over and over and forever summon one to something, —all of that has a voice and talks loudly without regard for me in the incessant gossipy prattle of the everyday world. Granted, it was like that in the past as well; but it has become much worse in these more anxious, unsheltered years: everything races straight through me, what is vital along with what is least significant, and no core can form in me, no firm, unassailable place: I am merely the scene for a series of inner encounters, a passageway instead of a house! And I would like somehow to withdraw more deeply into myself, into the monastery inside me that is replete with the great bells. I would like to forget everyone, forget my wife and my child, forget all, all those names and relations and interests and hopes that are bound up with others. But what good would it do to journey far from everything, since voices are everywhere and nowhere a refuge watched over by some quiet beneficence that might receive me. Nowhere the place where pettiness grows less insistent and less harsh. If I were to go into the desert, I would perish from sun and hunger; for the birds have ceased coming to the hermit: they toss their bread into the crowd and the crowd scuffles for it. . . .

But for this reason it is so frightfully necessary for me to find the tool of my art, the hammer, my hammer, so that it might become master and grow beyond all noise. There must be a handcraft in this art also: a faithful, daily labor that utilizes everything—surely it must be possible even here! If only I had days of work, Lou, if only the most secret chamber of my heart were a workshop and cell and refuge for me; if only all this monkishness in me might channel itself into monastery-building for the sake of my work and worship. If only I might lose nothing more and establish everything around me according to kinship and importance. If only I might rise again, Lou! For I am scattered like some dead man in an old grave . . .

Somehow I too must find some way to make things; written, not sculpted things, —realities that stem from handcraft.

Somehow I too must discover that smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of representation for everything. Then the clear strong consciousness of the enormous task that lay before me would drive me and bend me toward it; then I would have so infinitely much to do that one workday would resemble another, and the work I had would always succeed because it would start out with things attainable and small and yet all along be involved in things great. Then everything would suddenly be far away, voices and vexations, and even what was set against me would weave its way into this work as loud sounds enter a dream and gently guide it toward the unexpected. My subject-matter would lose even more of its importance and weight and become nothing but pretext; but just this apparent indifference to it would enable me to shape it, to form and to find pretexts for everything with more exact, unprejudiced means.

Might this handcraft lie in language itself, in a better acquaintance with its inner life and will, its evolution and its distant past? (The big Grimms’ Dictionary, which I once saw in Paris, led me to consider this. . . . ) Might it lie in some specific study, in the more exact knowledge of one area? (For many this is certainly the case without their knowing it, and this area of expertise is for them their daily labor, their handcraft.) Or might it lie in a certain well-inherited and well-augmented culture? (Hofmannsthal would be an argument for this; a short essay in the Neue Freie Presse that I happened upon recently and that I am enclosing with this letter would also be an argument for it; it is beautiful, a beautiful piece of handcraft that belongs to its own beautiful art.) But with me it is different; everything I’ve inherited I must fight against, and what I’ve acquired on my own is so slight; I am almost without culture. My continually renewed attempts to begin some specific course of study broke off pitifully—owing to external factors and to the strange feeling that always sooner or later overtook me: as if I had to return to an inborn knowledge along a wearisome road that only in many windings leads back to it again. Perhaps the academic disciplines I attempted were too abstract, and perhaps new things will emerge from different studies . . . ? But for all that I lack books and guides for using them. —But my knowing so little often torments me; perhaps only my knowing so little about flowers and about animals and about the simple processes through which life evolves like folksong. And thus I always resolve now to gaze more closely, more observantly, to stand before inconspicuous things with more patience, with more prolonged attention, as if they were dramas or spectacles, and not pass them by as I had so often done before. The laws move about most guilelessly in what is unapparent, since they believe themselves unobserved there, sequestered in the realm of things. The law is great in what is small and looks out from it on all sides and breaks forth from it. And if I could only discipline myself to gaze daily, then the daily work for which I so ineffably yearn would no longer be so distant . . .

Have patience, Lou, have patience with me. It must seem to you that I am much too old to be indulging so youthfully in searching; but I am, after all, a child in your presence, and I don’t try to hide that fact and I talk to you as children talk in the night: my face pressed up against you and my eyes closed, feeling your nearness, your safety, your presence:

Rainer.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Oberneuland near Bremen

August 11, 1903

(Tuesday)

Dear Lou,

During a long walk barefoot through the cool early morning grass I read your two letters and now, before I begin the day, I want to thank you for them. Your letter of August 8 that continues with the Rodin book fills me with a great happiness, and a calmness and confidence comes to me from my faith in all your words. How impatient (despite my assurances to the contrary) I must seem to you in my letters, in Saturday’s and then again in yesterday’s. But don’t be misled by either them or me. I am where you found me and am as you see me. Even if I don’t know it yet; perhaps the joys I’ve invoked are already on their way here, and your letters precede them as harbingers.

And try to understand: I don’t want to sunder art and life; I know that sometime, somewhere, they must agree. But I am all thumbs at life, and that is why, when it knits together around me, it so often turns out to be a stopover for me, a delay that causes me to lose so much; as when sometimes in a dream one can’t finish getting dressed and because of two obstinate shoe-buttons misses something vital that will never come again. And in truth life does go by and leaves no second chances for things missed and the many losses; especially in the case of someone who wants to have an art. For art is something much too big and too difficult and too long for one life, and those who have entered a great old age are only beginners at it. “C’est à l’âge de soixante-treize ans que j’ai compris à peu près la forme et la nature vraie des oiseaux, des poissons et des plantes”—wrote Hokusai, and Rodin feels the same way, and Leonardo, who lived to a very old age, also comes to mind. And they have always lived in their art and have, concentrated on that one thing, let everything else grow untended. But how should one not be afraid, Lou, when one only rarely enters art’s sanctum because outside in recalcitrant life one gets caught in all traps and bumps stupidly into all obstacles. Therefore I want so desperately and so impatiently to find the realm of work, the workday, because life, once it has become work, can become art. I know that I can’t cut my life free of the destinies with which it is intertwined; but I must find the strength to lift it up, just as it is, all of it, into a peacefulness, into a solitude, into the quiet of deep days of labor: only there will everything that you have prophesied for me find me; and you as well, Lou, will seek me there. Be patient with me, if I keep you waiting; you have gone ahead like a sage, but I move the way the animals move when the hunting season is upon them.

Rainer.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Oberneuland near Bremen

August 15, 1903

Dear Lou,

Behind the park that surrounds this house the express trains from Hamburg pass by, and their clatter drowns out all the wind in the trees; and each day that noise assumes more meaning, for already the little bit of quiet that enclosed us is losing its leaves, and one can see through it the impending journey and can feel, along with all the approaching difficulty, the promise of distant cities and the spirit of new things and faraway places. Next Friday perhaps or Saturday we embark on our journey; our first stop is Marienbad (where a meeting with my father has been arranged), and then we will make a brief pause in Munich to see a marvelous painting by a friend we made in Paris. It is the Bullfighter’s Family by Ignacio Zuloaga, who made such an impression on us with his presence and simple modesty that we look forward to viewing this picture into which he has put so much of himself. It will be as if we had the pleasure of seeing him again in person. In Venice also (which is our next stop) we shall see paintings of his; perhaps they will be the only reality in that dreamlike city whose existence is like an image suspended in a mirror. Then after a short stay we travel on to Florence, to that bright, beautiful country that has inspired so much joy, reverence, and praise. Even there we will be granted only a few days’ respite, for: Rome is imminent, that great summoning Rome which for us is still only a name but will soon be a thing made of a hundred things, a great shattered vessel out of which so much past seeped into the ground. Rome the ruin, which we want to build up again. Not the way it once may have been, but as seekers of the inner future in this past, the trove of eternity locked up inside it. We want to feel ourselves intimate descendants of these isolated, time-lost things, which scholarship misconceives when it burdens them with names and periods, and admiration misjudges when it perceives in them a specific and determinate beauty. For they held their faces into the earth and shed all name and meaning; and when they were found they rose, lightly, above the earth, and almost passed on among the birds, so very much creatures of space and standing like stars above inconstant time. Herein, I think, rests the incomparable value of these rediscovered things: one can respond to them so entirely as unknown. One doesn’t know what purpose they were meant to serve and nothing in the way of content or subject matter (at least for the non-scholarly) attaches to them, no irrelevant voice breaks the stillness of their concentrated existence, and their enduring is without looking-back and fear. The masters from whom they derive are nonexistent, no misunderstood fame colors their forms, which are pure, and no history casts shadows on their unveiled clarity—: they exist. And that is everything. That is how I imagine the art of antiquity. The little tiger in Rodin’s studio is like that, and the many fragments and shattered remains in the museums (which one inattentively passes by for a long time, until one day one of them reveals itself, becomes visible, shines like a first star beside which suddenly, when one notices it, hundreds arrive, breathless, from out of the depths of the sky—) have the same quality, as does the magnificent Nike, standing on its driving ship’s fragment in the Louvre like a sail filled with propitious winds, —and much else that seems worthless to those who still misguidedly seek the sculptural in subject matter, in motif, lives in this same sublime perfection among humans, piecemeal and crudely formed as the latter are. Equally great are those Gothic sculptures which, though they stand much closer to us in time, are just as remote, just as anonymous, just as self-contained in their solitude: without origin like the things in nature. These, and what issued from the hands of Rodin, led us to the most distant art-objects, to pre-Grecian art, whose very nature seems to harbor a sculptural ruthlessness, an insistent thingness, heavy as lead, mountain-like and hard. Kinships were disclosed such as no one had ever felt before, connections formed and joined the currents that flow through the ages, and the history of endless generations of things could be sensed beneath the history of mankind, like a stratum of slower, quieter developments that take their course more deeply, more intensely, more unswervingly than ours. In this history, Lou, the people of Russia may someday find themselves a place; for they inhabit time the way Rodin does when he creates; avatars of patience and endurance, they trace their descent from things and are kin to them, kin by blood. That biding quality in the Russian character (which the German, with his busy, self-important zeal for trifles, calls indolence—) would thus appear in a new, more revealing light: perhaps the Russian was meant to let the history of human beings pass him by, so that he might later enter with his singing heart into the harmony of things. He has only to endure, to persevere and, like the violinist to whom no signal has yet been given, to sit in the orchestra, holding his instrument carefully so that nothing may befall it before its time. . . . More and more, and filled with an ever increasing feeling of assent, I bear within me my love for this vast, holy land: as a new ground for solitude, and as a high barrier against the masses.

Did I tell you that in Paris (especially during my early days there) I was often with Eugène M. de Vogüé? But how disillusioned I became with him and Louis Léger and all those whose names, in connection with Russia, had taken on such an aura for me. Vogüé is nothing like his books, is a little nobleman who has become vain and easily offended in his old age, reminding me a little of Professor Parlandt yet suffering even in this comparison, since in some comical way he has remained a bachelor, even though he has a portly, infinitely trivial lady as wife and four conceited young gentlemen as progeny. Good Lord, the consternation I felt before this person from whom I had hoped and expected to learn so much about Russia, the inability to gain anything from him at all, even though for a time he was more than willing to help. And thus it is always the same story: I have too few facts and practical information, too few dates regarding the object of my enthusiasm, to tread water in a casual conversation and, making slow diving ventures with my interlocutor, gradually descend into the deeper regions—: I always plunge straight down with the full weight of my passion to the bottom of any sort of water and frighten people, as with a too sudden (almost illicit) confiding, when I begin at once to tell of what is deepest and most secret; toward people that is a mistake, a rudeness almost, which leaves them gaping; and in me it is a lack, a mania, that makes real (that is, fruitful and useful) interaction with people impossible; it is hard for me—almost impossibly so—to conceive that a conversation that begins casually amid insignificant things can end in the realm of the important; some accident or distraction is sure to interrupt, or else a misunderstanding trivial in itself will end all wish to continue on: thus everything in me constantly plunges toward the final, the ultimate, the most important, and whoever happens to be my interlocutor no longer even tries to keep pace; tacitly marking my incivility, he remains behind, and when I reach the end of my course and look back breathless, I see him far away, very small but with a friendly smile and wholly occupied with acting as if nothing untoward had happened. . . .

But it is not from any wisdom in me that this economy of the important springs. It is a defect of my nature to forget all paths taken, yes, even all arrivals, right up to whatever happens to be the very last and most recent arrival, —of which alone then I am able to speak. Is this perhaps because I fly straight to so many destinations (or reach them walking blindfolded), so that I am given the end but not the way that led there? Or is it simply a negligence of my memory, which retains only the results and lets slip the complex path of reckonings that led to them? This defect is the source of my continual poverty, the paucity (in proportion to the daily intake) of my possessions, the emptiness and inactivity of many days: for since I carry nothing in me but some last-acquired product, while the reckoning itself, of which this product is merely an element, takes place illegibly inside me, —waiting period after waiting period appears to intervene between one result and another. Then too: that I seem so often to open excessively to people I barely know is not just a weakness of my soul’s sphincter, as I long believed; there is always only one thing in me, and I must remain locked up (that is, keep silent or prattle) or else open myself and make visible the single thing that inhabits me. This inner disposition of mine is an affliction, and actually excludes me from all legitimate exchange, since it leads only to disjunctions and misunderstandings and pushes me into unwanted relationships amid which I suffer and from which many dangerous reversals can occur. It is typical that I have acquired all my “friends” by such illicit means and for this reason possess them badly and in poor conscience. Only thus is it possible (as for example in the Worpswede period three years ago) that I should have acquired a whole crowd of friends who could give nothing in return for my continual expenditure, and that at any rate no one can reciprocate me, since I give ruthlessly and brutally, without regard to others, unloading everything now at one place, now at another, instead of offering, of showing and bestowing things chosen considerately from an ordered store. During these past years I have gained increasing insight into my afflictions, including this one; and now I reach out to people with greater caution and make it a point to be the one to wait, whenever possible the one to respond and not the one to initiate. On this new basis a few relationships have been formed in which I can more honestly take pleasure than before: a correspondence with Ellen Key (who wants to help me in some practical way), a warm exchange with Gerhart Hauptmann which has brought me beautiful letters from the heart of his creative life, the contact with Zuloaga, and the great attainment of Rodin; in the two latter cases it was a great good fortune that no impetuous and blind opening-up on my part was able to create misunderstandings; language prevented that. With both only laborious communication in French was possible, yes, even my books (to which I would have gladly entrusted this task) were deprived the chance to speak for me and about me; —and that in spite of all resistances, which are inevitable in such circumstances, quiet relationships with these solitary people nevertheless did evolve, relationships that could perhaps forego preliminaries since they rested on an already secured knowledge of a few great shared experiences, makes me a bit more confident in my dealings with people. But a tendency like mine is a perpetual danger, especially when one is inept in the pragmatics of human affairs and always intimidated by the feeling of being amid people who are by contrast experts at life; such tendencies are impossible to defeat; the best one can achieve is to turn them to a higher purpose and use them more modestly, to grow more mature in them and apply them with greater experience. All my creative work, even that which issues from the very core of my being, bears traces of this tendency, which shows in the extremely unscientific developments any material or cause for work undergoes in me—since without fail the synthesis, the last and most distant thing appears as the point of origin, from which, proceeding backward, I must invent paths and chains of preceding events, utterly unsure of their course and initiated only into the goal, into the final concluding summation and apotheosis.

And this ignorance of the path, this certainty only of the last and most distant thing, of the point at the end of it all, makes all proceeding difficult for me and scatters over me all the sadness characteristic of those who have become lost, even if I am on the way to finding myself. That Russia is my homeland is one of the great and mysterious certainties in which I live, —but my attempts to proceed there, through journeys, through books, through people, are as nothing, are more a turning away than a coming closer. My exertions are like the crawling of a snail and yet there are moments when the inexpressibly distant goal is repeated in me as in a nearby mirror. I live and learn amid so much distraction that often I cannot imagine to what purpose it will all some day have been. In Paris I didn’t really come any closer to Russia, and yet somehow I think that even now in Rome, in the presence of these ancient things, I am preparing for things Russian and for returning to them. If I did not know that all developments trace circular paths I should grow fearful, knowing myself again sent out into the temptation of a foreign country that speaks to me of what is native to it in an alluring and intoxicating language. More than once already Italian life has enthralled me and lured me into steep ascents from which I fell painfully; perhaps then it is good that this young artist will be beside me now, this woman who neither as creator nor for the sake of life has ever longed for this southern land, because her northern temperament mistrusted the overly open quality of its radiant splendor, and her powers of reception, already determined by the taciturn accent of the solemn moors, had no need of more voluble persuasion. Now, at a mature point in her art, she is undertaking this journey on Rodin’s advice, after contact with antique remains in Paris has instilled in her a certain need to see Italy, not the Italy that crowds around an idle pleasure-seeker, nor around an art student indiscriminately given over to all impressions, but Italy as it exists around a woman quietly attempting to pursue her work there, so that during the periods of free time she might raise her eyes to the new world that surrounds her. During these periods we will see many things together; but for my own part, I will devote myself entirely to observing and to taking in as many things as possible; for I plan to hold out in Rome (where Clara Rilke will work the entire winter) only a short time and then, before I feel the press of the city, find a secluded little place (perhaps by the sea) which has both a mild winter and an early spring. If only the days would come there, Lou, in which I might learn to work deeply and collectedly; if only I might find a high room, a terrace, an avenue in which no one walks, and nights without a neighbor, and if the worry about everyday needs would grant me only briefly this life for which I cry out, —if that happens I will never again let a complaint issue from me, no matter what may come later.

Out of this stillness, if it is given to me, I will sometimes lift myself to you, as to the saint of that far-off homeland that I cannot attain, moved that you, bright star, stand exactly over the place where I am darkest and most afraid.

Rainer.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

currently: Oberneuland near Bremen

August 21, 1903

In a few hours we leave on our trip, Lou. I will be far from you again, much farther than during these strange summer days in which your letters took so little time to reach me. How often I have longed to take that path myself.

But now as I set out again for a distant land, I ask you, Lou, this one favor: take the new book with Prayers and keep it with you, put it with the first one and read it and feel the same fondness for it.

I am taking with me separate copies of the poems it contains, since I feel sure the desire to read them will come to me in the days and nights that lie ahead: but I will read these fragments differently if I know that all of it rests in your hands, in your equilibrium, —protected, looked over, unified by you.

I am sending you the book along with this letter (as manuscript, registered mail) and if you wish to acknowledge its receipt with a note, my address from today until the 25th will be: general delivery Marienbad, and after that: poste restante Florence Central.

Goodbye, dear Lou: my thoughts find rest by imagining, on the other side of this journey, a return when I might come to you and read to you from my Prayers, which by then will have long been in your possession:

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Oberneuland]

Bohemian Riesengebirge

August 22, 1903

Dear Rainer,

At Zemek’s request, I’ve left for a few weeks of mountain hiking; and since I didn’t want to make a long journey he came here to meet me. Your three letters have been forwarded to me but I reply to them only in my thoughts: I carry these thoughts across the mountains undisturbed, but they can be written down only when I am back home in quiet concentration. Cordial greetings to you until then

Lou.

[LAS to RMR in Florence]

Bohemian Riesengebirge

[August 25, 1903]

Dear Rainer,

am out hiking, and writing this against a tree trunk. My husband forwarded your letter of August 21 with the news that a manuscript of yours has arrived. It will be waiting for me in my room and will greet me there as the most secret part of your self.

Zemek wants to have me under his supervision for a few weeks more; I have been a bit ill. Postal address unchanged: Westend.

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Berlin-Westend]

Rome, Via del Campidoglio 5

November 3, 1903

Do you still have memories of Rome, dear Lou? What are they? Mine will be only of its waters, these clear, exquisite, vivacious waters that enliven its squares; its steps, built on the pattern of falling water, each stair flowing so wondrously from the other, like wave issuing from wave; of the festiveness of its gardens and the splendor of its great terraces; of its nights that last so long, quiet and filled to overflowing with great constellations.

About its past, which so laboriously struggles to hold itself erect, I may well remember nothing at all; nothing of its museums full of meaningless statues, and little of its paintings; the bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Square I will remember, one beautiful marble piece in the Ludovisi Museum (the Throne of Aphrodite), a column in some small, forgotten church, a few utterly obscure pieces, a view out over the sparse Campagna, a lonely road leading into evening, and all the melancholy in which I lived.

In which I live.

For I am unhappy with myself, because I am without regular daily work, exhausted though not ill, but deep in anxiety. When, Lou, when will this pitiable life reverse itself and become productive, when will it grow beyond incompetence, lethargy, and cheerlessness into the simple reverent joy for which it longs? Is it growing at all? I scarcely dare question the steps in my “progress,” for fear of discovering (like that man in Tolstoy) that they trace a circle, that they keep returning to that one notorious disconsolate place from which I have already started out so often.

From which even now I am planning to start out again, amid unspeakable difficulty and with so little courage.

So begins my Roman winter. I shall try to see many things, shall go to the libraries and read; and then, when things begin to grow a little lighter inside me, I shall be at home as much as possible and gather myself around the best that I have not yet lost. For my time and my strength, as things stand with me, can have but one task, this task: to find the road that will lead me to quiet, daily work, in which I can live with more certainty and support than in this vague sickly world that is collapsing behind me and does not exist before me. The question of whether I will find such a road is not new—but the years are passing and it has become urgent now and I must be able to answer . . . But you know from my Oberneuland letters how things stand. They are not good.

After the middle of November I will have a very quiet place to live: the last house deep in an old spacious garden before Porta del Popolo, next to the Villa Borghese; built as a summerhouse, it contains only a single simple high-windowed room, and from its flat roof one gazes out over the garden toward landscape and mountains. There I will try to arrange my life on the pattern of my Waldfrieden days; to be as quiet, as patient, as turned away from everything external, as I was in that good, joyous, always expectant time: so that they may become days of garden-peace. . . .

But now I’m utterly without books and, owing to my ineptness in dealing with libraries, it isn’t easy to get on; so could I ask of you one favor: do you recall once mentioning a modern, scholarly German translation of the Bible, and if you do, can you give me the names of the translator and publisher, so that I can try to find the book here? And if I am not asking too much: perhaps give me the name of some other new book you’ve read: it might help me very much right now.

But above all I need a letter from you, Lou.

I have thought about you so often during the trip and since we have been here, and I have wished many times and with all my will that you return from the mountains in good health. Because, of all my thoughts, that one of you is the single one in which I find repose, and sometimes I lie down in it and sleep in it and rise from it . . .

Now where you are it is autumn, and you walk in the forest, in the great forest into which one can already see so far, in the wind that is transforming the world. I think of that little pond—the one on the left of the road to Dahlem—which always grew so large and solitary around this time. I think of the evenings which precede the stormy night that strips everything withered from the trees, and think of the storm itself, of the night which flies past the stars into morning. Into the empty, fresh, transparent, storm-cleared morning . . . Here, though, nothing alters; only a few trees are changing, as if they were sprouting yellow blossoms. And the laurel is always green.

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Rome]

Loufried on the Hainberg near Göttingen

November 9, 1903

Dear Rainer,

How do I remember Rome, you ask: as a backdrop indistinctly painted with all sorts of old ruins and in the foreground an experiencing of nothing but future and youthful things, the true onset of my youth, after my early years, though dear to me, had become almost tragically difficult. Rome was window-dressing, and as window-dressing, almost the opposite of what Russia was later when it soaked up everything that happened to me so completely that even now I don’t know: where do I begin, where does it leave off—. The thing I remember most distinctly about Rome is its sun.

What will Rome be for you at winter’s end? Might it be the place where something like your Prayers becomes possible?

Write me from there, I’ll read it in a Loufried, as you can see; much of yours too that resides with me has only now come home. Ever since the Loufried of Wolfratshausen, I have been wandering step by step toward the new one here; each successive year has had to play its part in the building of it, perhaps beginning with the most inessential chambers, with a few festive chambers suspended in midair, and only then working down deep into its foundation. According to laws of construction that are beyond all comprehension.

And now it stands here. In a spacious landscape with beech tree forests and long stretches of hills somewhere behind which the Harz Mountains rise. At our feet, in the valley below, the city. And around us orchards, gardens full of old trees, and vegetable fields. We even have a chicken yard!

Here I have become a peasant woman and my husband a professor.

That this letter provides nothing now but an elaborate address, attribute to the following: yours arrived here by a series of detours, and mine rushes to catch you before you have changed lodgings. Write if it succeeded.

The two books are entitled:

Die Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments. translated and edited by E. Kautzsch. (Freiburg i/B. and Leipzig: Mohr.)

Das Neue Testament. (transl. by Carl Weizsäcker; same publ.)

Books you want me to mention, some that I have read recently—, give me more time, Rainer; I am ashamed to say: I haven’t been reading.

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]

Rome, Via del Campidoglio 5

[November 13, 1903]

Dear Lou,

It touches me wondrously that now a home surrounds you—a house filled with your being, a garden that has its life from you, a wide space that belongs to you; and yes, I understand that all of this has and had to come about slowly; for the world that has its life from you wants reality and has the strength to will it. That first, faraway Loufried: wasn’t it almost like a dream, fragile and full of anticipated things; yet it drew substance from you, and whenever you arrived, the house was big and the garden endless. I felt it back then, and now, so much later, I know: that the infinite reality surrounding you was the deepest event for me out of all that inexpressibly good, expansive, generous time; the life-changing force that would seize me in a hundred places at once—it came from you, you who were real beyond words. Never had I, in my groping timidity, felt existence, believed in presence, and recognized the imminent with such intensity; you were the opposite of all doubt and irrefutable proof for me of the existence of everything that you touched, reached, and perceived. The world lost its cloudiness for me, that fluidity of self-shaping and self-dissolving that was the pose and poverty of my first verses; things came to be, one could distinguish between animals, flowers existed; I learned simplicity, learned slowly and with difficulty how unassuming everything is, and became mature enough to put simplicity into words.

And this all happened because I was able to meet you, back then when for the first time I was in danger of surrendering myself to formlessness. And if this danger always finds a way to return and always returns larger and stronger, it is also true that the memory of you grows in me, the awareness of you, and it too keeps strengthening. In Paris, in those most difficult days when all things were withdrawing from me as from someone going blind, when I trembled with the fear of no longer being able to recognize the face of the person closest to me, I held on tightly to the assurance that I still recognized you inside me, that your image had not become alien to me, that it had not deserted me like everything else, but had alone remained with me in that foreign emptiness where I was forced to live.

And even here, when, feeling torn so many ways, I made yet a new start, you were the calm place on which I fixed my gaze.

How well I understand: that the things come to you as birds do to their nests—from far away, as evening darkens. Thousands of great and thousands of small laws fulfilled themselves as this house took shape around you. And I am so glad that it is standing now, and I feel as though its goodness extends from there even here to me.

My struggle, Lou, and my danger lie in the fact that I cannot become real, that there are always things that deny me, events that go straight through me, more real than I am and as if I didn’t exist. Earlier I believed this condition would improve once I had a house, a wife, and a child, had something real and undeniable; believed that this would make me more visible, more tangible, more factual. But lo, Westerwede existed, it was real: for I built the house myself and made everything in it. And yet it was a reality outside me, I was not part of it and was not taken up with it. And now, when the little house and its quiet beautiful rooms exist no longer: that I know there is still a person who belongs to me and somewhere a little child in whose life nothing is so close as she and I—this gives me a certain security and the experience of many simple and deep things, —but it doesn’t help me achieve that feeling of reality, of being equal to it, for which I yearn so strongly:

To be a real person among real things.

Only in the (ever so rare) days of work do I become real, exist, take up space like a thing, have weight, lie in place, fall—and, when I do, a hand comes and lifts me up. Fitted into the edifice of a great reality, I experience myself then as a support on a deep foundation, touched right and left by other supports. But always, after such hours of existing as a close-fitting part of it, I am again the discarded stone which lies there so pointlessly that the grass of idleness has time to grow tall over it. And that these hours of being discarded don’t grow less frequent but now last almost forever—, should that not make me afraid? If I keep lying there like that and become overgrown, who will find me beneath everything that flourishes on top of me? And have I perhaps not been crumbled up already long ago, spread almost even with the land, almost mixed in with it, so that any one of the sad paths that go back and forth across it might lead over me?

And so this perpetually is the one task before me, which I forever fail to begin and which nevertheless must be begun: the task of finding the road, the possibility of daily reality . . .

I write this, dear Lou, as in a diary, all of this, because I am not able to write a letter now and yet wanted to talk to you. I have almost grown unused to writing and so forgive me if this letter is crude and chaotic. Perhaps one cannot even see that it is full of joy for your house and enters it bringing many wishes. Many. Each and all.

Rainer.

Please, extend my warmest greetings to your husband; may my good wishes include him also and his new more public life!

Enclosure: This is a picture from Westerwedian days—in it one can see a portion of the room I built for myself back then. All the pieces of furniture were old, being Rilkean family property. I am sending it to you because it was at least a portion of house, not more than the broken shell of a snail, but a shell nonetheless. And because I want so much to give you something, in spite of the fact that this letter brings nothing at all.

[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]

(November 9, 1903)

Rome, Villa Strohl-Fern, January 15, 1904

Lou, dear Lou,

I am writing the date of your last letter above that of mine, —only because I want to make sure that nothing you wrote has been lost; the Italian postal service inspires such mistrust continually and in all possible ways.

Now, dear Lou, I am in my little garden-house, and after much disturbance this is the first quiet hour in it; now everything has its place in this simple room, dwells and lives and lets day and night come and go as they please; and outside, where so much rain has fallen, there is a spring afternoon, the hours of some spring which may be gone by tomorrow but which now seems to exist from eternity: so perfectly balanced is the light slender wind which is stirring the leaves, the laurel’s shining leaves and the more retiring clusters on the bushes of evergreen oak, so confident are the small reddish buds on the newly barren trees, so intense is the fragrance that rises from the light gray-green narcissus field in my quiet garden valley which the arch of an old bridge spans deep in thought. I have swept the heavy pools of rain from my flat rooftop and raked withered oak leaves off to the side and that has made me warm and now, after this little burst of real work, my blood is singing as in a tree. And for the first time in so long I feel the tiniest bit free and festive and as if you might walk into my life . . .

This moment of bliss too will pass, and who knows if behind the distant mountains there is not already brewing a rainy night that will drench my roof again and a tearing wind that will fill my paths again with wilted things—

But I feel this hour mustn’t go by without my having written you; for I can’t afford to lose those few moments when I am able to write you, when I am calm, clear, and solitary enough to draw near you, —especially since I have so much to tell you. Once last spring in Paris there was an exhibition of paintings from antiquity at Durand-Ruel’s, murals from a villa near Boscoreale which were being shown one last time in their ruined, fragmented unity before the hazards of auction dispersed them forever; they were the first antique paintings I had seen and I have seen none more beautiful here and they say that even the museum in Naples has no better paintings from that almost completely vanished time which must have had such great painters. Among these fragments one had survived whole and undisturbed, even though it was the largest and perhaps the most fragile; on it was portrayed a woman who sat quietly and with her grave, regal countenance listened to a man speaking softly and lost in thought, speaking to himself and to her with that dark voice in which past destinies are mirrored like shores at dusk; this man, if I remember correctly, had placed his hands on a staff, folded them together on the staff with which he had traveled for so long through distant lands; they were resting while he spoke (the way dogs lie down to sleep when their master begins to tell his story and they can hear in his voice that it will go on a long time—); yet even though this man was a good way into his story and probably still had a great stretch of memory before him (level memory in which, however, the path often veered unexpectedly), one knew, even at first glance, that he was the one who had come, the traveler to this quiet, stately woman, the prodigal to this majestic woman whose very essence radiates home: so infused he was with coming, the way waves on the beach are, always, even when they are already withdrawing in flat, glass-like sheets; he had not yet completely shed the haste which clings to even a more seasoned wanderer; his feelings were still attuned to unexpectedness and change, and his blood was still on the move in his feet—which, less relaxed than his hands, were unable to sleep. And so repose and movement were placed side by side in this painting, not as contrasts, more as complements, as a final unity that was slowly closing now like a healing wound; for even movement was already repose, it was settling as the snow settles when it quietly falls, was becoming landscape as snow does when it spreads over the shapes in the distance, and the past, having returned, took on the aspect of the eternal, and resembled those events that were the substance and magic of the woman’s life.

I will always remember how this great, simple painting seized me, how absolutely it was painting because it showed only two figures, and how pregnant it was with meaning because these two figures were filled with themselves, heavy with themselves, and held together by some ultimate necessity. Just as the content of native legends can be intuited in good paintings, so I understood at first glance the meaning of this painting. In that so thoroughly confused Paris time, when every hurtful and heavy impression fell into my soul as from a great height, the encounter with this beautiful painting acquired its decisive note; as if, beyond all that was yet to happen, I had been permitted to view something achieved, final—that is how the sight of it moved me and upheld me. Just after that was when I had the courage to write you, dear Lou; for it seemed to me as if every path, even the most confused, could gain meaning through a final return to such a woman, to the one woman dwelling in ripeness and restfulness, who is great and, like a summer night, knows how to hear everything: the little noises frightened of themselves and loud calls and bells. . . .

But I, Lou, somehow your prodigal son, cannot for a long, long time yet be a storyteller, a soothsayer of my path, a describer of my past fortune; what you hear is only the sound of my step, still going forward, still on uncertain paths retreating, I know not from what; and whether it is approaching someone—I know not. Only that my mouth, when it has become a great river, may one day flow into you, into your listening and the great stillness of your opened depths—that is the prayer I recite to every hour that is mighty, to every apprehension or longing or joy that can guard and grant anything. Even if my life is insignificant now and often seems to me like an untilled field on which the weeds are master and on which birds of chance pick through its untended seed, —it will be only when I can tell it to you, and will be as you hear it!

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Rome]

[Göttingen,] Loufried, January 18, 1904.

Dear Rainer,

The white carnations with their hint of color came in the very last mail on New Year’s Eve, and for ten days into the new year, into my first one here, they opened into bloom one bud after another! On New Year’s they stood in the living room, which is about the same as the one you remember, but after that they stayed upstairs with me, where the two rooms in which I sleep and work are located, both of them done in gray-blue and with a wide balcony connecting them. I wanted to return your greetings on the very last night of the old year and thank you, but water had soaked through your address on the box of carnations, and it wasn’t on your last letter, so that I couldn’t even write you when your picture came: this picture very closely resembles you at certain hours, —but not you as a whole; I would say: shortly before bad hours, then you can look this way. I imagine that you have already changed since then. Would you like to have a little picture of me?

The few spring-like days your letter mentions have turned into the first real snowstorm here for us, it looks wonderful, up in the mountain forest one’s whole heart opens. Until winter there were two views: above (to the east and north), this steep mountain forest against which we border (so closely that from the road one enters directly into our second floor), and into the distance, across hills and valleys; now it is almost the reverse: the winter days often cover the distant view with curtains of fog and snow flurries, while the mountain forest suddenly opens on trails in the leafless woods leading up and down and far away! And from far off one can see farmers’ wives with wicker baskets on their backs as they come trudging over from the small village that lies in its little hollow somewhere on the other side. A peasant woman there makes my dresses and aprons and brings them in her panier along with kale and potatoes.

On New Year’s Eve we hiked up to the top in order to hear the bells when they rang out in Göttingen. An indescribable peace over everything, a bit of moon, and Schimmel nibbled at the snow and sneezed. But the wind, coming from the east, blew the sound of the bells away from us and brought us instead, as if it were quite near, the pealing of the village bell. It made a very deep impression: below us the flickering festive city, which labored with all its churches and people and remained mute, —and rising up over and over again out of the dark the one loud festive bell—. It was my Иванъ Bеликій for 1904.

Since Christmas we have been putting up eggs for hatching; before then the chickens were still molting; in the spring we will add a goat, and from then on the garden will provide all our diet. Are you still a vegetarian? We both are, strictly now. I’ve also adopted my husband’s passion for Roman baths, and take them once or twice every week.

My husband sends his regards, as does Schimmel, even though he does it by giving you his paw. And I think that one should tackle the new year with good courage: believe me, it will make a difference. If you could read your letters with my eyes, that’s what you’d read there.

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]

Rome, Villa Strohl-Fern

January 21, 1904

Now, dear Lou, I have your letter, which I had so longed to receive. I thank you for its dear news about you and your quiet, spacious world; that I might see it again and have it around me, if only for a single day: see it again: for I feel as though I knew it, as though all of it had been around you forever and had received life from your life; it has merely grown simpler now, grown quieter and more inward, because reality always makes everything simpler and every natural fulfillment only fulfills things of weight and importance. Such things are around you, and even as far away as I am I can feel their peace and happiness. And I know, Lou, that all of this grounds life, grounds my life too; it’s just that I am separated from this good ground by a murky surface and a restless depth; it’s just that I don’t know how to hold myself without churning up my water and can’t find the place where the ground remains steady beneath the current, like a picture beneath the safehold of glass.

But I love everything you write about, and my awkward, blundering life is forever striving toward such modest days, and whenever it manages, with great quietness and however briefly, to come close to actual things as it passes them, I can feel it grow. Here much is just as it was in Schmargendorf; often I don’t go into the city for days, and live on what I myself prepare: on groats, eggs, canned vegetables and milk; Sanatogen has replaced Tropon (which seems to have disappeared), because some supplement seems to me necessary as long as one can follow a vegetarian diet only in such unbalanced, piecemeal fashion. At the inn (a sad little trattoria) I even have to eat a meat dish now and then, much as I would rather not; for vegetarian life appeals to me more and more, and I still avoid any drink with alcohol in it, preferring instead herbal tea and coffee I brew myself, which have become great pleasures.

My wife brought with her a device for making steam baths (she had grown used to them), and we have reassembled it here in the garden, where one can enjoy it along with sunbathing without fear of being disturbed. Days and nights I am often in this garden (it is quite overgrown but one section of it is specifically designated as part of my little house), where, wearing my old Russian shirt, I clear and trim, plant and pull weeds, and end up fretting because even work such as this I perform badly and awkwardly and feel at every moment that my strength or knowledge will fail me. Walking barefoot is the only thing I miss here; the ground is too hazardous and thorny for it, the meadows have been neglected too long and in the warmer months all sorts of unfriendly creatures go about in the grass; recently I took a two-hour trip to the sea, and, at a spot near Anzio where Nero’s summer villas once stood, gave my feet a holiday in soft, wet sand; from now on they shall enjoy this occasionally.

On that trip I discovered that an old villa owned by the Borghese family stands on this nearby seacoast (the whole thing is up for rent, each room separately); with its grand halls, stairs, and terraces it looks out over its lush orange groves onto the sea so beautifully that “The White Princess” could have even more plausibly been conceived here than in that house in Viareggio. None of the house had been rented yet, and I walked through its many echoing rooms, whose windows opened at every turn onto always new vistas and surprises.

Perhaps, had I found this place earlier, before I had rented the place where I am, I would have wanted to live by the sea in this great eloquent house; but then again, it is doubtless best that I am where I am and thus all alone; soon other people would have arrived there, it would have become loud with voices and footsteps and I would have been only one among many, one who has the lowliest room in a disdainful house: while here I am everything to my little house, its entire life and heart and heartbeat; also “no one’s master and no one’s slave,” since I do everything that I require myself—at least as far as my strength and knowledge permit. At first I wanted very badly to have a dog, and since my little house sits alone at the edge of this extensive garden, the owner of the villa himself encouraged me; but in the end I chose not to increase my family status this way: there had been expenses enough, disruptions as well, and for a long time it would have meant more of both, since one would have had to buy a very small dog (I thought of Wolff in Wolfratshausen); and then another new destiny would have arisen from this bringing together and imperfectly joining two lives—, unexpected things, difficult things, things at any rate much too complicated for a beginner like me.

(So Schimmel then remains my “closest” dog or better yet my dog-confidant and as such I send him my greetings.—)

My two windows are tall; I can see the park rising and widening and also much sky, and thus also much night. In front of the one is my desk; and the writing stand, where I spend most of my time, is placed in the middle of the room where the views from both windows can be enjoyed.— Each morning the translation of Слово о Полку ИҐоря proceeds there slowly, since I have returned to it after a long interruption; and the most recent evenings have been taken up with the book Ellen Olestjerne, in which Franziska Reventlow has finally set down all the events of her life in the form of a novel. I am supposed to write a short review of this book for Zukunft, but I read and read and the right words just won’t come. This life, whose principal value lies simply in its having been lived without disaster befalling it, may lose too much of its urgency when it is told by the one who steered it and underwent it without in the process becoming an artist. Suddenly it appears as if the person in question had not been the most important thing in this life and in its connections, —as if there, out beyond her, life had arisen that she didn’t grasp at all . . . But perhaps I am biased and can’t see clearly because the book itself turned out to be so much less remarkable than the fate through which its author lived; perhaps, on the other hand, this fate, crowded into a small, sickly countenance, heaped on a strange young woman and borne by her every day of her life [in the margin: as I once knew it], could not but appear larger, more imposing, and more extraordinary than it actually was; this book is so full of that frivolousness which always seemed to me only a mask, a form of mimicry behind which she could hide amid so many difficulties; but now, in this book, it seems almost a natural facility for what is easiest and most superficial, for what is perpetually amusing—and hence a kind of empty vanity. And when I call in my memories to check, I realize that as many of them will support this view as the earlier one, and her letters also from all these years can be read first one way, then another—so that the only way to say something about the book will be to read it free of all personal feelings and recollections, just as it is.

But evening is here and I must get to work on this task that has been waiting for me all this time. Just one more thing. You read my picture well: it actually is from the beginning of bad days; I am fond of it only because it has in it something of the room that was a fragment of home and restfulness, a small quiet spot for us, even if only for a moment; it lacked reality to the same extent that this little house about which I’ve written you various things today possesses reality; and I’ve told you about it so you’ll know where and into what life your little picture will arrive; for yes, Lou, please, do send me one. I want to keep it with my fondest things and accomplish my days before its eyes; feelings analogous to those in your dear letter will be visible in it along with all the other things that I remember so often and that seem to me to reach all the way back into my childhood, —and I shall read in it as one reads in the Bible, never knowing what new realization will dawn and fade.

Rainer.

Many, many greetings to your husband and to your wonderful house beside the mountain forest.

[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]

Villa Strohl-Fern, March 17, 1904

Dear Lou,

It was January 22. That’s when I wrote you. I told you about many mundane things in my life; I thanked you for your letter; I asked you for a little picture.

Since then I have not heard from you and circumstances are such that this worries me. Every day I must wonder if the Russian War has not brought terror and danger to your family—to your nephews, your mother, and yourself. That this disaster had to come, this heavy burden, this suffering for thousands who all feel the war the way Garshin felt it: as agony inflicted.

God, had one but strength, reserves of strength—did one not live, as I do even in this quiet, remote life, meagerly and anxiously on the daily bread of one’s strength, —had one become something real (a doctor, which ultimately is what one should have been—), there would be only one place or calling now for someone who would put himself to use or bend to the task: those dressing-stations where Russian people are dying grievous and horrible deaths.

I think of young Smirnoff, one of the workmen we met at Schillchen’s. Later I received two letters from him; he was a soldier in Warsaw. Perhaps he too is out there among the conscripted, suffering and thinking, thinking, trying to understand . . .

What is it like now for all those people who have been sent so suddenly to the East from their quiet snow-covered villages and suburbs?—

But finding out about you is of utmost urgency to me now. Are you at home, are you in Russia?—

Here (yes, here) the Roman spring is beginning; the city is filling up with tourists seeking out all the traditional enchantments; now and then a group of them comes through our park, and from behind the bushes one can hear approaching that terrible sound of German voices waxing enthusiastic. Then I creep deeper into my tiny red house I almost never leave. I am reading Soeren Kierkegaard. This summer I shall learn Danish so I can read him and Jacobsen in their own language.

The Слово translation is finished. Back in February I began a larger work, a kind of second part to the Book of God [Liebe-Gott-Buch]; right now I am stuck somewhere in the middle of it without knowing if and when it will continue and where it will lead. All sorts of troubles arrived—disruptions, chance happenings, everything that always distracts me so thoroughly no matter how involved in my work I am. But now I must return to it; its very difficulty persuades me that some day it actually will become something, something good.

It still appears that the Book of God will be published this spring in a shorter, simple, unadorned edition under its intended old title: Stories of God [Geschichten vom lieben Gott]. In May I will be able to send them to you, dear Lou.

I hope you are peacefully at home with your garden, which should be beginning to stir; the little migratory birds that are tuning their voices here now will soon be on their way to you.

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Rome]

[Göttingen,] Loufried, March 20, 1904

Dear Rainer,

What a comfort it is to hear you speak of our war this way! In Germany no one understands that Russia, however involuntarily, stands in for Europe against Asia in this conflict, —always forced into this middle position where it must endure the collision of East and West on behalf of all, as it did earlier in the time of the Mongols. All its fates have been shaped by this fact. But what is truly tragic seems to me: that its own deepest destiny—may it fulfill itself through the course of centuries (дай Богъ!)—is almost directly the opposite: namely, to fight through toward a synthesis, toward a spiritually fruitful union of Eastern and Western culture, instead of prolonging that fierce uncomprehending split which for the rest of Europe will probably last forever—and for good reason, since, you see, they pursue their mission elsewhere. And so this war that is murdering our people, however it ends, even if in victory, can only signify regression and delay. Up till now—and this seems so characteristic—Russia has proceeded in its unstoppable expansions into Asia with tolerance and as a force of direct cultural enrichment, in contrast to the other nations, which colonize only to unload their people and whose culture wreaks havoc and destruction as upon some totally alien region to which it is completely indifferent. It is true that these very virtues are now causing Russia to engage in a certain intolerance and cultural repression in her Western members such as Finland and the Baltic provinces, since in the end all the horses do have to pull together if they are to get the cart moving. But who is concerned with all this, who speaks of it? No one but the religious and reactionary slavophiles who for the most part regard these issues from a narrow and again one-sidedly anti-European perspective.

Especially in the case of this war, everything pointed in the opposite direction: the innate disposition of the people, the czar’s love of peace (about which, at such horrific cost now, he was so sincere that he didn’t even make preparations), the cultural endeavors of the progressives, all the most influential political voices; and yet against all this, Russia nevertheless had to want this war, had to want it because—England wanted it. Ah, how can one not hate and rage against this? The mere thought of it makes one want to scream! And so often it seems to me that only a single human being is marching off to war: Russia, like some one person, an intimate acquaintance whose soul one feels as one’s own. —One knows only a few scraps of this vast country, and yet one has this overwhelming feeling of a direct human connection.

Among my two brothers’ sons, three are waiting for their marching orders; my old mama, who turned 80 in January but is amazingly vigorous and alert, sits and sews for the wounded. I was supposed to visit her last month, but was ill for a long time. Which also explains my silence. Not that this prevented my selfishness from anticipating a letter from you, sometimes. Our winter this year was almost Russian, less by its coldness than by its whiteness and splendor, and there was constantly the most perfect weather for sleigh-riding; such magical jangling of bells all through the mountain woods! We ourselves bundled into a sleigh hung with strings of little chimes and took a wonderful ride toward the mountains, through silvery woods that stood there like tall, very quiet fairy tales. Now the snowdrops in the garden are coming up, but snow flurries are still gusting around them, and the hills remain white. My balcony has become like a giant birdcage extending all the way to the sky! Every day new little birds and new little sounds are added; and if one listens carefully, one can eventually hear everything that thrills the heart and makes life beautiful! So, early as it is, a greeting today from spring to spring, dear Rainer,

from

Lou.

[LAS to RMR in Rome]

[Göttingen, Wednesday, March 25, 1904]

Христосъ воскресъ!

[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]

Rome, Villa Strohl-Fern

last day of March, 1904

Христосъ воскресъ!

Dear Lou,

Ивановъ [Ivanov] and Гоголъ [Gogol] once wrote these words from here and many are writing them even today from here to their Easter homeland. But alas, this is not an Easter City and not a country that knows how to lie quietly beneath the pealing of great bells. It is all display without devoutness, charade rather than true festival.

For me Easter was one single time: back in that long, extraordinary, incomparable, excited night when everyone was out in the streets and amidst all the jostling Иванъ Великій struck me in the darkness, blow after blow. That was my Easter, and I believe it will suffice for an entire life; the Good News was given to me writ strangely large in that Moscow night, was given into my blood and into my heart, I know this now:

Христосъ воскресъ!

Yesterday they sang Palestrina in Saint Peter’s. But it was nothing! Everything dissolves in the vanity of that huge empty house, which is like a hollow pupa from which some dark giant butterfly has crept. Today, though, I spent many hours in a small Greek church; a patriarch was there in grand vestments, and through the imperial gate of the Iconostass in a long file they brought him his ornations: his great crown, his staff of ivory, gold, and mother-of-pearl, a pyx with the host, and a golden chalice. And he accepted everything from their hands and kissed the bearers, and they were all old men who brought him these things. And later one could see them, these old men with their golden cloaks and their beards, standing around the large, simple stone table in the Holy of Holies, reading long and deeply. And outside, before the wall of icons, young monastic pupils stood in facing lines, right and left, and sang to each other with heads uplifted and throats outstretched, like black birds on spring nights.

Then, dear Lou, I said Христосъ воскресъ to you.

And then, immediately after that when I came home, waiting there was your card, on which those same words were written. Thank you, Lou.

And thank you also for the letter and the dear picture. They have fulfilled so much more for me than my request: things past that were irretrievably lost cling to them, and things future that were unable to come rise through their power, dear Lou.

The war—our war—is almost like a visceral unrest inside me, —but I read little about it since I loathe newspapers and do my best to avoid them; they only twist and distort everything. A few days ago in the “Zeit” (daily sheet of Die Zeit) there was a Russian officer’s letter, which I am enclosing; needless to say, they couldn’t resist prefacing this simple, tremulous piece of news with an annoying introduction. I also read somewhere that the war would probably last for years; Kuropatkin was supposed to have said that; but surely it can’t be possible!

It is good that you are in your house, with the flowers that are about to sprout; and good too that you are so close to your family and yet are at home and are having the spring of the winter you’ve just passed. But to hear that you are ill . . . ?

Be in good health, Lou, —for yourself and for those who need you.

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Rome, color postcard depicting a horseman in armor—son of a czar—halted in front of a gravestone whose image depicts a scene from the Russian fairy tale of Ivan the Czar’s son, the firebird, and the gray wolf]

[Göttingen, Monday, April 11, 1904]

Thank you, dear Rainer, for the words and flowers! The snowdrops have remained standing until today. I wanted to thank you more graciously, so I have waited until today, but can’t: bedridden! You write in my place, tell me about yourself, won’t you? Here winter has returned.

Lou.

[RMR to LAS in Göttingen]

Rome, Villa Strohl-Fern

April 15, 1904

Dear Lou,

When—as so often happens—you are in a dream of mine, this dream and its echo in the following day are more real than all daily reality, are world and happening. I am thinking about this because the night before the eleventh and all that day (the same day you wrote your card) passed thus: in your presence, which makes me calm, patient, good.

There have been endless interruptions these last few days, and I had a presentiment that they would come one after another when I began my new work back on the eighth of February; it became apparent then that my mode of working (as well as my more receptive way of looking) had changed, so that I would probably never again be able to write a book in ten days (or evenings), would need for each new one a long and uncalculated time; this is a good thing, it is an advance toward that state of continual work I want to achieve whatever the cost; perhaps a first preliminary step. But this change brings with it a new danger; fending off all external disturbances for eight or ten days is possible—: but for weeks, for months? This fear oppressed me, and may be to blame for my work faltering and breaking off around the first of March. And what I took for a brief hiatus has become, against my will, a burdensome vacation that goes on and on.

My mother came to Rome and is still here. I see her only rarely, but—as you know—every meeting with her is a kind of relapse. When I have to see this lost, unreal woman unconnected to anything and unable to grow old, I feel how even as a child I struggled to escape her, and I fear deep inside that after years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough away from her, that somewhere inwardly I still make movements that are supplements of her stunted gestures, pieces of memories she carries around broken inside her; then I feel a horror of her mindless piety, of her obstinate religiosity, of all those distorted and deformed things to which she has clung, herself an empty dress, ghostly and terrible. And that still I am her child; that some scarcely discernable concealed door in this faded wall that is not part of any structure was my entrance into the world— (if indeed such an entrance can lead into the world at all . . . )!

That is difficult and confusing enough for someone like me who has so much to make up and whose courage keeps failing. But there were other things too. People who were planning to visit Rome and (even though I have no social contacts at all) expressed their desire to see me or make my acquaintance. Some even tried to come with written introductions, and it cost me letters and excuses on all sides to keep them away. And Rome began to swell, became fat and German and enthusiastic through and through. At the same time the spring advanced in abrupt shifts of wind, and each day rose steeply from its chilly morning to its sun-scorched noon, so that of course a cold and the feeling of flu were soon upon me. Swarms of ants broke out of all the walls of my little house and attempted invasion after invasion. The first scorpions appeared, uncommonly large and early. And on top of everything, the painter who had loaned us furniture last fall (with the agreement, unfortunately verbal only and insufficiently explicit, that we could purchase it later if necessary) returned to Rome and, forgetting all previous arrangements, demanded that his property be returned posthaste, so that now, at a single stroke, my little house is almost empty. And I had taken care of these things all winter long, they were my closest connections, and I already had little roots in them. Now I console myself by remarking that for the time being I have been allowed to keep a bookcase and a bed, that my standing desk belongs to me, and that during the summer it is fitting anyway not to have many things around me.

For the season here, God knows, has for the last three or four days ceased to be spring and become dense, young summer. The hyacinths in my little flowerbed, which had long been hesitating, have now flung open their blossom-eyes like someone jolted awake by an alarm clock, and they are already standing there tall and erect. The elms and oaks next to my house are full of leaves, the Judas tree has shed its blooms, and all its leaves will be ready by tomorrow morning; and a syringa tree that only three days ago was stretching out its clusters is fading already and becoming scorched; the nights are scarcely cool any longer, and their voice is the busy croaking of frogs. The owls call less often, and the nightingale still hasn’t begun. Will she now sing at all, since it is summer?

Summer in Rome. Another new affliction. I thought it was still far off and was looking forward, now that my mother will have gone again, to one or two temperate months of work. And I still hope that it is possible, still hope that spring will return after a few rehearsal-days for summer. (Moreover, I will probably have to stay on here throughout the summer, for there is scarcely any possibility of my traveling elsewhere, and, at any rate, I wouldn’t know where to go. But that will only be the question after next; the next one is the question of work and self-concentration, and I want to see it soon decided.)

It is beautiful in the large garden, even if not much is blooming there, and even if what is distinctly Roman is perhaps too loud, too insistent to be called Spring. Even these meadows full of anemones and daisies are too thick, too heavy, too close-meshed; and in the sky there are none of those gray days behind yet empty trees, none of those vast, transforming winds and the softly falling rains that are for me the essence of all springs. It is, alas, a spring for foreigners who have only a little time—obvious and garish and exaggerated. But there is one tree in the garden that could stand in Tuscany, in an ancient cloister there: a tall old cypress, full of wisteria-trails whose light blue-violet pendants are now falling and rising everywhere, even all the way up out of the tree’s darkness; —an emblem of happiness. And along with it the glorious fig trees, which with their upcurving branches stand there like altar candlesticks out of the Old Testament and slowly open their light-green leaves.

And that I am able to observe all this now and take it in calmly and patiently does seem to me a kind of progress and preparation; but, as you know, my “progresses” are somehow like the faint steps of a convalescent, improbably weightless, tottering, and beyond measure needing help. And there is no help. It would be a help to talk to you about many things and see you listening silently; to read to you sometime. . . . But writing you is also a help, dear Lou; I know that when I think of the years when I did not have this refuge.

Please: And now you must get well!

Rainer.

[LAS to RMR in Rome]

[Göttingen, Loufried, beginning of May 1904]

Dear Rainer,

Thank you for your letter. Perhaps by now your compulsory vacation days are already over, but of course one can’t know about these things, any more than one can know whether a nighttime dream will recur. If this deep anxiety had not been made an ingredient of all creative work, the latter would probably be too undiluted a blessing for human beings; I always think of this and a few other sensations as requiring such additives to prevent them from working like concentrated and swiftly fatal poisons; they can only be life-enhancing if they are bound up with our inner inhibitions or with some other person (which is inhibition enough!). That’s why one finds in all that has ever succeeded at life the processing of an almost infinite profusion, equally rich in truths and errors, triumphs and failures; from case to case ever anew an enigma; because life. At any rate it made the deepest impression on me when I read somewhere that chickens would grow sick and die if their feed were completely free of bacteria, and that overly pure water will cause stomach-trouble.

As different as it seems, you might try looking at your mother from a similar perspective: even if she were nothing more than a single thick bacillus in your meal of life or in your most personal makeup, her presence there might just as easily be enabling as disabling. Bacteria only bring to ferment what is already inside oneself and what, given that opportunity (illness), one expels. Many a perfect, most blessed mother is for her child sterile (germ-free nourishment!!). We know so little that we needn’t entwine ourselves in imaginary arguments; a fig tree in bloom where you are, the blue violet-clusters here with us that are everywhere pushing out of the mossy cracks in the old stone wall around our garden: these are still the most factual things, the things most worth knowing, the true things one must experience.

But an entire summer in Rome would be gruesomely unhealthy. Most years Rome has already become a strain on one’s nerves and a nest of fevers by early May. Are you settled in so firmly there that you can’t take advantage of the inexpensive refreshments of the Italian mountains and sea? And the many beautiful things that lie beyond Rome?

Even we had a few days of summer heat; now a fragrance and freshness again that are intoxicating. One can’t even look at the little leaves and the budding flowers without knowing: we are kin to them, it’s just that we forget it over and over, but Spring says it so loudly that we too are Springs. For this at heart is why it so delights us.

The fruit-trees are starting to flower. And there are 43 fruit trees in our garden!

And as for myself, during the days of my illness I let slip from me a piece of work, a big, cherished work of which the larger half, 300 pages when printed, had fully developed, and it caused me to walk around week after week in a state of heady bliss. One must have patience.

Lou.