Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague in 1875; his father was a railway official, and his mother, grieving for a daughter she had lost, dressed him as a girl when he was small. At eleven he was sent to a military school, where he spent five miserable years before leaving because of illness. He studied at the universities of Prague, Munich and Berlin, and at twenty-two met the writer Lou Andreas-Salomé, fourteen years his senior, with whom he travelled twice in Russia, deeply moved. At twenty-seven he went to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Rodin, later became Rodin's secretary, and learned from him to 'look' and to work with the patience of a craftsman. He wandered all his life without a settled home, staying in castles and with friends across Europe, and at last settled at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland, where he completed the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. He died of leukaemia at fifty-one.