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Born in Prague in 1875, celebrated poet Rainer Maria Rilke was twenty-two when he began to keep a diary—a practice encouraged by his lover and mentor, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who was fifteen years his senior. That diary, titled Florence, would be the first of three that he kept between 1898 to 1900, each written in a different part of the world as a one-sided dialogue between Rilke and Andreas-Salomé. Intimate and revealing, they offer a glimpse into Rilke’s evolving thoughts on life and the nature of creativity at a particularly crucial stage of his development. This entry came in December of 1900 when Rilke was in Worpswede, Germany.
The Diary Entry
2 December 1900
On sculptures. There are sculptures that bear within themselves, that have inhaled and radiate, the surroundings in which they were conceived or the region from which they were raised. The space in which a statue stands is its foreign country—its own surroundings it bears within itself, and its eye and the expression on its face pertain to these surroundings hidden and folded up within its form. There are figures that radiate crampedness, crowdedness, close interiors, and others that have doubtless been conceived and imagined in open vistas, in a plain, before the sky. Viewed rightly, such works always have this realm of “ownness” around them, this inner homeland—not the chance space in which they have been set down, and not the blank wall against which they stand out.
Sculptures that have no such milieu within themselves, though, actually do stand among the people, cordoned off by no holy circle and not differentiated from things of usage and everyday—are paperweights, no matter how hard they strain to be a thousand times life-size and past even that.
Further Reading
Rilke’s three early diaries are held at the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Poland. In 1942 they were edited and published by his daughter, Ruth, and her husband, Carl Sieber, with the title, Tagebücher aus der Frühzeit (‘Diaries from the early years’). An English language edition, Diaries of a Young Poet, arrived in 1999, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler and published by W. W. Norton & Co. The entry above is reprinted with permission.
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