ABSTRACT
Rainer Maria Rilke’s encounter with Kierkegaard occurred in the context of the general fascination with all things Scandinavian that prevailed in Europe at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.1 Like contemporaries of his such as Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), Franz Kafka (1883-1924), or Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) later in the century, Rilke read Kierkegaard extensively and felt a strong attraction to him. Unlike most of such other figures, however, Rilke did not leave behind a detailed record of his reception of the Danish thinker. On the contrary, not a single mention of Kierkegaard can be found in any of the poetry or prose published during Rilke’s own lifetime, and only a few sporadic references exist in his otherwise voluminous private correspondence. The combination of these two factors-on the one hand Rilke’s obvious admiration for Kierkegaard and on the other the lack of information about the form this admiration took-has meant that the secondary literature on the relation between these figures has tended to focus primarily on similarities at the level of abstract concepts such as “death,” “shame,” or “existence.”2 While this approach has made it possible for an influential figure such as Otto Bollnow to go so far as to claim that, “no thinker ever exercised an influence of even approximately similar importance on [Rilke],”3 such abstract conceptual correspondences could equally well be traced to other writers and artists close to Rilke’s heart, like Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), or Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-85), and accordingly do little to define his understanding of Kierkegaard more specifically.
