ABSTRACT
The modern novel has undergone a new birth at the start of the twentieth century in a manner that could not have been at the same time more concrete and more symbolic. The works of the great novelists of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Goethe, Dickens and Dostoevsky, emblematic figures of their respective countries and easily the greatest novelists of all times culminated, in an ever more pronounced manner, in a striking re-evocation of the Resurrection. In Goethe, this theme is still quite hesitant, timid, appearing at the moment when Faust contemplated suicide and only implicit in the ending of Faust II about the Virgin, Queen of Heaven and the eternal feminine. It is explicitly present in Dickens, in A Tale of Two Cities, though recognising its centrality requires an interpretive effort. Finally, it is omnipresent in Dostoevsky, culminating in the last scene of his last novel, the Karamazov Brothers. In an even more striking and clearly epoch-marking manner, the last great novel of the nineteenth century was Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy, who wrote this novel about twenty years after his two milestone works, published it in 1899 and died in 1910. This was the year when a strange book marking the rise of the modern novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke was published – a novel (and only novel) by a poet; a work that was not novelistic by any classical standards; a novel much gestated by Rilke’s two visits in Russia. In 1899 and 1900, thus the moment the century was closing and he published his first major set of poems, containing the milestone ‘I Live My Life in Expanding Rings’, Rilke met Tolstoy twice. He planned to close Malte by a section on Tolstoy, even drafted two different versions (Rilke 1966: 967-78), but took it out in the last minute, almost at proof stage, closing the novel instead with the parable of the Prodigal Son.
