Chapter 2 2. The recipient's introduction

Late autumn of 1902 - I was sitting under an old chestnut tree on the campus of the Vienna Neustadt Army School, reading a book.I was so absorbed in my reading that I hardly noticed how the only professor in our school who was not an officer, the learned and kind chaplain Horacek, approached me.He took the book from my hand, looked at the cover, and shook his head. "A poem by Rene Maria Rilke?" he asked thoughtfully.Then he turned a few pages, read a few lines, and stared into the distance.At last he nodded and said: "René Rilke has gone from army cadet to poet." Then I knew something about this thin, pale boy whose parents had sent him to the army junior school in Sankt-Polten fifteen years ago, hoping that he would become an officer.Horatik was a priest there at the time, and he could still clearly recall the army cadet.He said he was a calm, serious, highly gifted boy who liked solitude and endured the oppressiveness of dormitory life, and after four years he was promoted with other students to the army at Mabrisch-Weisskirchen high school.But his body couldn't bear it, so his parents recalled him from school and taught him to continue studying in his hometown of Prague.

How his life developed after that, Horatik did not know. It is easy to understand from all this that I immediately decided to send a sample of my poem to René Maria Rilke for criticism.Before I was twenty years old, I was approaching the threshold of a profession. I just felt that this profession was contrary to my interests. I hope that if I seek understanding from others, it is better to ask the author of "Self-Celebration"② to seek.Inadvertently, when I sent the poem, I also attached a letter, which stated that I confessed that I had never done it to a second person before or after this.

A few weeks passed and the reply came.It was stamped in Paris, and heavy in the hand; it was written throughout in the same clear, beautiful, and fixed hand as on the envelope.So I started a constant correspondence with Rene Maria Rilke, which continued until 1908, when life drove me into situations where the poet's warm, genial and affectionate care protected me. These things are not important.What matters is that the following ten letters are important for understanding the world Rilke lived in and created, and for the many growers and completers of today and tomorrow.Where a great man, a once-in-a-lifetime man speaks, the little man must be silent.

Franz Xaver Kappus June 1929; Berlin ①Rilke was named Rene Rilke when he was a teenager. ② "Mir zur Feier" (Mir zur Feier), Rilke's early poetry collection, published in 1899.