Stories of God, Rainer Maria Rilke [with Stellardrone, from Vilnius, Lithuania]

Eternity - Stellardrone

Stories of God
(Tr. Spa-Eng from a Shvoong review)

  
Rainer Maria Rilke is defined as a popular romantic. This work is particularly full of spirituality where, in the form of ingenious parables, the author finds that mysterious certainty of feeling himself Russian not being such really. Rilke was a Czechoslovak writer though he did not speak Czech but German and was a German writer without having that nationality; he was also a little Slavic and Jewish although the double-headed eagle that sometimes tucked him in had the inheritance of the Holy Roman Empire and the Christian and Latin tradition. It is said that Rilke was European, which means cosmopolitan and citizen of the world, as many disembedded writers, perhaps close to Kafka.
 His stories are full of simplicity and spirituality, the naivety of childhood and the notion that each of our actions is important, is transcendental at a mystical level. God is the common thread of these stories, it is there as a comforting, complacent, observant presence. These stories speak of justice, of the pursuit of happiness, of people's morale, poverty, the relationship we have with our own conscience. The stories reveal a popular tradition, forged in the winter talks in a dacha, beside the warmth of home and the samovar at night in some ghetto. Rilke also uses his childhood memories to weave his stories, the family talks, the stories told by the grandparents.

 There is also the oral tradition of the Russian people with their deep religiosity and their distrust for civilization and foreign costums. There it is their sense of defeat and the pain of poverty in that deep and rural Russia which inhabits the wheat fields and suffer the rigour of winter storms with stoicism and resignation.  

 Rilke was a somewhat mystical poet who believed in spiritualism and saw himself as a kind of go-between for higher voices from which revelation was obtained. In this sense, he was very religious. Rilke conceives the poet as a kind of "enlightened".