Sonnets to Orpheus – a ‘Hurricane of the Spirit’
RILKE, Rainer Maria. Sonette an Orpheus. Leipzig: [W. Drugulin for] Insel Verlag. 1923.
8vo. Original marbled boards, inlaid green paper label to upper board lettered in gilt and with gilt Greek key border, original olive green printed dust-jacket, fore-edge uncut, top-edge gilt; pp. 63, [1]; woodcut printer’s device to p. [1]; extremities lightly rubbed, dust-jacket slightly frayed at head of front cover, endpapers renewed; mild spotting and staining throughout as usual (heavier to last 6 pp.); else a very good copy; contemporary pencilled inscription to part I half-title ‘In memoriam Hiddensee. | A.B. | September 1923’ (see below).
First edition of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, his powerful memorial to the nineteen-year-old dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop (1900–1919), our copy retaining the scarce dust-jacket and with an intriguing contemporary inscription.
Rilke’s sequence of fifty-five sonnets came as a late and unexpected flowering after a period during which the poet was unable to write. He had begun writing the Duino Elegies in 1912, but a combination of private and personal circumstance (the approaching war uppermost) led to a depressive illness which postponed their completion for nearly a decade.
Wera Ouckama Knoop, a childhood friend of Rilke’s daughter Ruth, was the daughter of his friends Gertrud and Gerhard Ouckama Knoop. In 1921, Werner Reinhart invited Rilke to stay at the Château de Muzot near Veyras in the Rhone Valley.
There, Rilke wrote his Sonette an Orpheus, galvanised by a long letter from her mother, Gertrud, ‘with whom he maintained a correspondence … in which she recounted the details of Wera’s incapacitating illness and how when Wera was no longer able to dance, she turned to music, and finally to drawing. Rilke was deeply affected by Gertrud’s accounts, and a month later Wera’s death coalesced in his mind with Orphic legends … Rilke completed twenty-five sonnets in the first four days, almost the entirety of the first part of the two-part cycle.
This burst of productivity carried over to the long-unfinished Elegies, and within a few weeks (February 2–26) both the Elegies and the Sonnets were completed’ (Vandegrift Eldridge and Fischer, p. 13). Rilke described this burst of creative energy as a ‘boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit’ (trans.); only three years after the publication of the Sonnets, he would die of leukaemia – the cause of Wera Knoop’s death. Famously allusive (and elusive), the figures of Orpheus and Eurydice permeate rather than dictate the sequence, the titular Orpheus acting “as an agent of transition and transformation” (Görner) in poems where instability, metamorphosis, and the connection of seeming opposites – life/death; nature/culture – are paramount.
The inscription to our title, ‘In memoriam Hiddensee’, is dated only a few months after the work’s publication. The Baltic island resort of Hiddensee was frequented by the likes of Einstein, Kafka, Wilder, Brecht, Freud, Fallada, Kästner, Mann, Trier, and by some accounts Rilke himself.
Hünich, p. 92; Ritzer E46; Sarkowski 1357; Wilpert/Gühring 39. See Leeder and Vilain (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke (2010); Vandegrift and Fischer (eds.), Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (2019).
SKU: 2122306