ABSTRACT
Youth, the promise of a coming generation, was clearly the driving force of the contemporary aesthetic as it looked to a new century. The 1898 story Ewald Tragy, a largely autobiographical portrait of a young man with artistic inclinations seeking his place in society hovers similarly between a serious exploration of Rainer Maria Rilke's own dilemmas and moments of (self-) satire. Rilke at times implies that Friedrich Nietzsche's legacy was too powerful, that his whole generation were struggling under a weight of Epigonentum, warning friends away from reading him in his correspondence: Lesen Sie wenig Deutsches, liebste Helene: lassen Sie Nietzsche sein, bitte. The utopianism inherent in Jugendstil, and implicit in much of Rilke's early verse, descends from Nietzschean definitions of the artist's obligations, conflated with the axiom of youth. Emerson's idiom of becoming seems to anticipate what Mason terms the young Rilke's 'religious ideas', as here in one of his most famous essays 'Self-Reliance': Life only avails, not the having lived.
