Ethical Code

Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa

Rilke’s Florentine Diary, the document of a rather short stay in Tuscany
(April/May 1898), demonstrates how the young, but aspiring poet has experienced Florence as the promise of his own future as an accomplished artist. He is, therefore, less interested in the all too perfect masterpieces of Raphael and Michelangelo than in the very springtime of the Renaissance movement, and sees in Giuliano de’ Medici (killed in 1478) the ideal symbol of a new kind of beauty he himself wants to affiliate to in modern times, because obviously it has not been brought to perfection during the sixteenth century.

Rilke’s dialogue with Italian art is still a chapter to be written within the history of his poetry. Since his verses do not explicitly refer to the masterpieces of Italian art with that frequency and visionary depth characterizing their attention to French and German and Spanish art, very few critical attempts have been devoted to the secret presence of Italian art in Rilke’s poetry, most of them merely focusing on the early poetic experience of Das Florenzer Tagebuch. After reconsidering the classical studies on Rilke and Italy, this article aims at demonstrating that not only his poetic memory is rich of references to Italian art, but brief encounters with the works of Italian painters such as Segantini and Magnasco as well as a lifelong passion for Monna Lisa were no less important to his poetic diction than his more famous dialogue with Rodin, Cézanne, El Greco…

Rilke’s capital cities were Prague, Berlin, Paris, Munich. Other cities and places left their mark on his life and works, such as Rome, Capri,
Borgeby Gård, Duino, Muzot, and Venice as well. Rilke’s Venetian poems show the typical landscape of his early lyrics, made of impressionistic and neo-romantic atmospheres but also, in his later collections Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907-1908), the traits of his more mature “poetry of things”, Dinggedicht. Rilke’s artistry developed along a poetic line that was traversed by various crises, each of which
occasionally deep changed his philosophy and style. Rilke’s Venetian poems are a small but exemplary corpus that allows the reader to observe the transition from a poetic approach to the next, therefore the coming to perfection of his reflection on the raison d’être of artistic expression. If in Rilke’s early poems Venice was the prototypical subject of an aestheticizing approach (“beauty in decay”), in the later years it became surprisingly the perfect “thing” (Ding) of his “objective” poetry. In these poems, indeed, Venice is no longer a misty maze evoking hazy feelings. What in his early poems was the site of rotten palaces reflecting their shapes on dead waters and of an ancient aristocracy suffering and - at the same time - enjoying its decadence, in the Neue Gedichte Venice has become a warrior: a place symbolized by its wooden foundations taken from whole Italian forests and by its dockyards and warehouses that showed the dominion and will-topower of the city. Through the “objective saying”, sachliches Sagen, of his later poetry Rilke gets rid of the hackneyed, though fascinating, idea of Venice as the place of a bygone aristocratic glory, and dares overturn it into the severe and forceful image of the historical and powerful Republic of the Dogi.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s first encounter with the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca came rather late, at the age of thirty-five. In 1911 he set about translating Petrarch’s letter to Dionigi di San Sepolcro from 26 April 1336 regarding the ascent of Mount Ventoux, of which only fragments have survived. This particular letter piqued his interest because of its ‘conversio’ theme, as Rilke tells us in his correspondence. The ‘conversio’ bears a strong thematic relation to his Duino Elegies (written from 1912 to 1922), which deal with life as the expectation of death. The aesthetic affinity to Petrarch intensified during Rilke’s stay in Duino, where the princess Marie Thurn und Taxis encouraged him to occupy himself with Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Rilke’s aesthetic interest was not only incited by his reading, but also by a joint visit to Petrarch’s house in Arquà, which is documented in the previously unpublished guestbook. This affinity is condensed in three translations from the Canzoniere in 1918: Canz. 278, 289 and 294. This selection is not arbitrary: Rilke’s translations of the sonnets, which shall be analyzed here in a comparative survey, anticipate both formally and in terms of the content in nuce Rilke’s own late poetic work, the Sonnets to Orpheus. The apotheosis of the dead beloved Laura, whom even Petrarch had already cross-faded with the myth of Apollo and Daphnis, serves as a pattern for the reactualization of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Hence, Petrarch’s poetry provides a model for Rilke’s two important aesthetic reorientations of this time, for the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

This essay aims to investigate how the dialogue with Kassner has been for Rilke an essential instrument while dealing with some issues of his poetics which he maturated during his stay in Capri. In particular, it intends to focus the attention on how the theoretical nuclei of Kassner’s Physiognomy – such as his view of the world as an unlimited metamorphic “whole” and his idea of a “rhythmic accord” between vision and visage – are used by Rilke to rethink the sensory experience and to consider it as a way to perceive the continuous flow of things.

Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa

France was Rilke’s second home-country, but Italy has also been a reference point throughout Rilke’s life. This was the case since his youth, when he dwelled at length in Venice, Rome, Naples, Capri and ---obviously--- Duino. Significant was also Rilke’s acquaintance with Italian poetry. During the last months of his life he got in touch with Marguerite Caetani, princess of Bassiano, with whom he was linked by sympathy and mutual appreciation. They met in February 1925 when Hofmannsthal visited Paris and was invited by the princess to Versailles. After this meeting the princess invited Rilke to join the journal “Commerce”, which was published “unter dem Protektorat von der Fürstin Bassiano” and on which also Paul Valéry collaborated. Rilke was again a guest of the princess on May the 23rd, together with Hofmannsthal, Valéry, Claudel, Schlözer and the prince himself. In June 1926 Rilke wrote about him in an extremely positive way: “He is a man of the purest nature, who deserves his noble origin”. If he had not died so early, in December 1926, Rilke’s connection to the Caetani would have meant a new chapter in his relation to Italy within the framework of his cosmopolitan exchanges. Last, it is noteworthy that
Rilke’s connection to his aristocratic patrons (Alice Faehndrich, Maria
Thurm und Taxis and the Caetani princess) favoured his contact to Italy but did not lead him any closer to the Italian people, unlike what had  happened with Goethe and Hesse. In this sense, Rilke remained consistent with his poetical mission of detachment and loneliness, completely dedicated to his life’s vocation.

Rilke was in Capri between December 1906 and May 1907. This Italian journey was the occasion for developing a new insight in nature and history, landscape and memory, through a series of experiences that may be recognized as ‘mystery’ in the ancient esoteric sense of the eleusine rituals studied by Karl Kerenyi a few years after Rilke’s more orphic or mystery works. The “figura” of this experience is “Kore”, the young girl, daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades, and her different “Erscheinungen”. Basing on his classical memories, animated by his aesthetic and poetic pursuit of a dynamic trace that may express the Unspeakable, pervaded by the strong impressions due to nature, the people, the myths and rituals of the Island of Capri, Rilke develops a metamorphic image of Kore-Nymph with a series of mystery attributes that will flourish in the later phase of Duino.

Rilke is in Naples between 1906 and 1907, while he writes the New Poems (Neue Gedichte), among which three of them contemplate the Neapolitan subject. In Easter Preparations (Vor-Ostern) the chaotic street life does not encourage aesthetic staring, and so it undermines the paradigm of Dinggedicht. The fact that this crisis begins in Naples is confirmed by a short prose Rilke writes on fish exposed by a Neapolitan fishmonger. Here Rilke proposes the outline of a theory of vision, suggesting a relationship between the perceiving subject and perceived object, that is now incompatible with the one that supports the procedures of Dinggedicht: the images dissolved in the liquid medium are not focused by the fish with perceptual operations, but they flow up to their eyes, functioning—as we would put it today—as digital devices. Consequently, this is how the intransitive mode of the ‘Open’, and the animal as a model to overcome the intentional consciousness come now into play. These themes turn out to be central in the Duino Elegies (Duineser Elegien).

Università degli Studi di Salerno

This essay intends to show how the isle of Capri has played a role for Rilke in the experience of how things get away from their usual daily appearances due to the sudden incursion of an excess which is not before or beyond the nature but in the nature itself. This experience involves first of all the sphere of the senses by producing the collapse of the perceptive habits: sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste are overcome by an intransitive and irreducible excess which cannot be seized or grabbed. What Rilke experiences in Capri is therefore a sensorial trauma which implies a re-education of the senses. It is a matter of reaching a neutral sensoriality, non-invasive, but movable, widespread, flexible and thus capable of a new form of hospitality of things which never turns into possession.

This paper discusses the source of Herder’s refutation of the example of the statue that was proposed by Buffon, Condillac and Bonnet during the eighteenth century. Herder criticized the example in his most famous work devoted to language, i.e. the Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. Probably, Herder had not a first-hand knowledge of the Buffon, Condillac and Bonnet’s essays. Indeed, some scholars have suggested that Herder’s source could be d’Holbach’s Systéme de la nature. However, the cross-check of following evidences certainly proves that d’Holbach cannot be the source: 1) a letter written by Herder to Johann Heinrich Merck in the same period; 2) the arguments raised against the example of the statue. Our purpose here is that the source can be a today almost unknown French philosopher’s work, i.e. Jean-Baptiste-Claude de Lisle de Sales’s De la philosophie de la nature. This research is relevant because Herder’s rebuttal of the “statue” is a key factor in the argumentation about the origin of human language exposed in the Abhandlung.

The aim of the current study is to analyze the dynamics that influenced the consolidation of the Männerbünde and the homosocial desire in the soldiers during First World War. Indeed, in the wake of the war enthusiasm all over Europe the hostility of the young people towards the familiar institutions was put into practice through the shared interventionist feeling. Therefore, the war itself became the production of Männerbünde, communities within which male individuals were linked by male bonds corresponding to a new homosocial sense of comradeship, that is a real Gesellschaftstrieb, shared by every member. The male bond – that is apparently unproblematic and established within the stillness of the trenches – is always linked to a mentor and implements the same social and hierarchical mechanisms of the society.

Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa