The Beginning of Terror. David Kleinbard
alive at the center of our being. In our fear of it we repress this sense of it and project death into the world around us, where it seems to threaten us from a multitude of sources. We find external means to defend ourselves against it: science, in particular, medical science, with its increasing capacity for controlling nature; religion, which Rilke attacks for glossing over death with its notion of an afterlife (Letters 2:316), and the distractions and narcotics of modern urban life, which Rilke describes in the tenth Duino Elegy, including a bitter beer named “Deathless” (“Todlos”). As we all know, these stratagems produce emptiness and numbness.
Rilke found an alternative to such defensiveness in Tolstoy, whom he met twice during his travels in Russia with Salomé (April 1899 and May 1900). Both Salomé and Rilke have left accounts of those two visits. When they met Tolstoy in Moscow in the spring of 1899, the travelers were full of excitement about the religious fervor of the crowds celebrating Easter in the city’s chapels and churches. The old man expressed his indignation against Russian Orthodoxy, urging them not to be taken in by “the superstitions of the people.”4 A year later, visiting Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana, they found him in a dreadful mood, arguing loudly with his wife, who was equally inhospitable. After encountering him briefly, they were kept waiting for hours, until at last he offered them a choice between having lunch with his family and walking with him on his estate. They accompanied him while he talked about the landscape, Russia, God, and death, picking flowers, savoring their fragrance, then tossing them away. Rilke’s accounts of this walk differ. According to one, the poet understood everything their host was saying, except, occasionally, when the wind interfered. Elsewhere he recalls that much of what Tolstoy said was inaudible in the windy meadows, among the birches.5
Rilke’s reactions to the author of War and Peace were complex and varied. Among the most fertile was his image of Tolstoy as an artist exceptionally gifted with “a feeling for life,” a responsiveness which did not deny or repress the multifarious forms of death that pervade it, “contained everywhere in it as an odd spice in the strong flavor of life” (Letters 2:150). He had opened himself to the full intensity of his fear of death; yet, at the same time, because of “his natural composure,” he was a perceptive observer of even his most emotional states of mind. Rilke’s conception of such a division in consciousness resembles the psychoanalytic notion of splitting the ego. “One thinks, feels, and acts subjectively, but at the same time observes such behavior in a quasi-objective manner.”6 Tolstoy’s openness to his own fear of death and his gift of selfobservation enabled him to infuse that terror with “grandeur” in his works, to transform it into “a gigantic structure ... with corridors and flights of stairs and railless projections and sheer edges on all sides” (Letters 2: 150-51). His freedom from ordinary defensiveness against the dread of death and his ability to create and sustain the combination of the feeling man and the introspective observer helped to make it possible for him to write his strongest works, including “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” This story, like his great novels, reveals the force with which he felt his fear as well as his ability to transform it into “unapproachable reality” (Letters 2: 151).
For Rilke, the creative process leading to the achievement of great work places the artist “in danger” because he must be open to his “personal madness” and must go all the way through an experience which that “madness” makes increasingly “private,” “personal,” “singular,” and lonely. The unsupported isolation of his striving is necessary because discussing one’s “personal madness” with someone else would deflate its energy and force. Rilke’s letters reveal that this sense of the creative process originated in his own experience. Describing his work on The Notebooks, he says, “[I]n it I seemed to be clutching all my tasks together and running them into me, like that single man who in hand-to-hand fighting takes on all the lances opposed to him” (Letters 2:25). He was also clearly aware of the motives that led him to place himself in such danger. The work of art, he wrote, brings “enormous aid” to the artist, because it provides evidence of his integrity and authenticity. If he seems close to insanity at times, the completed work reveals the internal “law[s]” which have remained invisible in his disordered thoughts, like the form of an organism contained in genetic codes in the first fetal stages, affording the artist ample “justification” of his deviations from accepted norms.7
To the great poet his poems can reveal what for the ordinary person it might take years of analysis to disclose—the unconscious (“invisible”) laws which govern one’s experience, are at least partly responsible for one’s misery and happiness, and, once known, are open to change. In June 1907, when Rilke explored these ideas, such revelations, coming from his own art, did not seem to threaten the efficacy of the “secret [inner] powers” which in 1912 and 1913 the temptations of psychoanalytic therapy made him anxious to protect against exposure by some disciple of Freud.
Writing to his wife on June 7, 1907, Rilke named another motive for subjecting himself to the inner “violence” which makes great art possible (Letters 2:17, 41, and 19). Because he felt such a need for solitude, his communion with his poems, fiction, and nonfiction prose was often far more satisfying and fulfilling than his contacts with other people (see Letters 1:121). He also observed that the artist’s accomplished works make possible a deeply satisfying kind of communication in which people show one another what they have become through their work and in this way offer mutual help and support (Letters on Cézanne, 5). Aspiring to an extraordinary degree of self-sufficiency which would sustain the long periods of solitude he required to do his work, he nonetheless understood that he needed other people’s responses to confirm the sense of his own reality, of his “unity and genuineness,” and the self-esteem which his poems and fiction nurtured.
Rilke indicates another way in which his work was a form of “selftreatment” (Letters 2:42). In one of his Letters to a Young Poet he supposes that emotional illness “is the means by which an organism frees itself of foreign matter,” and he urges the young poet not to try to suppress his neurosis, but to encourage it, to “have [the] whole sickness and break out with it” (LYP, 70). Perhaps, in The Notebooks, more than in any of his other works, Rilke felt that his writing could help him free himself from alien thoughts and feelings brought to consciousness by his fears. When his anxieties had flourished to the point of threatening to destroy his sanity, he projected them into the mind and life of his fictional surrogate. The process of exorcising “foreign matter” would be complete only when Malte could be detached from himself and given a separate existence. On finishing the novel, he felt he had managed to do this (see Letters 1:362).
Earlier interpreters of The Notebooks have argued that Malte served as a kind of psychological scapegoat for his author, taking upon himself the illness that plagued Rilke, carrying it away.8 This line of thought recalls Freud’s observations about Dostoevsky’s characters in his essay “Dostoevsky and Parricide.” Freud argues that some of the characters in Dostoevsky’s works enact the crimes which the author and his readers unconsciously would like to commit, and thus bring fulfillment of forbidden desires through the author’s and the reader’s unconscious identification with them. Then they satisfy the demands of the author’s and the reader’s superegos by going through punishment for these crimes.9 Rilke himself encourages the “scapegoat” interpretation in a letter to Salomé in which he asks whether Malte, “who is of course in part made out of my dangers, goes under in it, in a sense to spare me the going under” (Letters 2:32).
By externalizing and objectifying his sickness in a novel, a writer may be able to distance and detach himself from it. Seeing it more clearly in the images and language of his novel, he may gain a better understanding of the illness and thus achieve a larger degree of control over it. The imposition of literary form and style on the raw material of the novel deriving from his illness may help to give him the confidence that he can master it.
But Rilke’s letters also express the belief that the writing of The