Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about eleven thousand letters in his life. He published almost none of them. His estate, after his death in 1926, began the slow work of editing the surviving correspondence, which now runs to dozens of volumes in German.
A new edition from Hanser Verlag, edited by the Tübingen scholar Beatrice Lendl, collects something more interesting than the sent letters. It collects, for the first time, four hundred and ten letters that Rilke drafted and did not send.
The book is titled, in German, Briefe ohne Empfänger: letters without a recipient. It runs to seven hundred and ninety pages. Lendl has spent eleven years on it.
An English edition is scheduled for 2027 from Pushkin Press, in translation by Karen Leeder.
The letters in the volume fall into three categories. There are letters Rilke began and abandoned in mid-paragraph. There are letters he completed but did not post. There are letters he completed, sealed, addressed, and then opened and destroyed, of which only the drafts survive in his notebooks.
The third category is the most affecting.
Rilke kept drafts of nearly everything. He wrote slowly. He often wrote a paragraph two or three times before he was satisfied. The notebooks are full of these stages. Lendl's editorial achievement is to have separated the drafts of sent letters from the drafts of unsent ones, a task that involved cross-referencing every recipient's archive across Europe.
What emerges is a slightly different Rilke than the one constructed by the published correspondence.
The sent letters are, famously, mannered. The Rilke who wrote to young poets, to widows, to admirers, is the Rilke of careful elevation. The persona is consistent. It is the persona of a man who has decided how to be perceived in writing and who almost never breaks character.
The unsent letters break character.
There is, for example, a letter dated October 1912 and addressed to a publisher in Leipzig. The sent version, which has been in print for ninety years, is a polite refusal of a project. The unsent draft, from the same evening, is a furious nine-page complaint about money, about the publisher's previous behaviour, and about the literary climate in Germany.
Rilke wrote the furious letter first and the polite one second. He destroyed the furious one. The draft survives because he wrote it in a notebook he kept.
There is a longer pattern. Lendl identifies twenty-three pairs in the archive in which Rilke wrote an angry letter, set it aside, and then wrote a different letter to the same recipient that was sent. In every case, the sent letter is the one we have always known.
The book raises a question that letter scholarship has not adequately addressed: which letter is the real one?
The conservative answer is that the sent letter is the real one, because it is the one that entered the world. The unsent letter is a private document, not meant for anyone but Rilke.
Lendl, in her introduction, takes a different view. She argues that for a writer who composed as slowly and as deliberately as Rilke, the unsent letter is a deliberate compositional act. He wrote it. He read it. He decided not to send it. The decision is part of the writing.
By that logic, the sent letter is the version Rilke wanted his recipients to have. The unsent letter is the version he wanted to write.
This is uncomfortable, because it suggests that the public correspondence is less honest than the private one. It suggests, more uncomfortably, that all collected letter editions are partial — that we have been reading, in every case, only what the writer chose to show.
The objection is obvious. Of course we have. Letters are addressed to someone. The choice of what to send is the writing of the letter.
Still, the volume changes the figure of Rilke. He emerges as a man who edited himself in real time, who knew what he wanted to say and who knew, often, that he could not say it.
The most painful letter in the book is undated, addressed to no one specifically, and may not be a letter at all. It is two pages long. It begins Liebe, the word for dear, and then a name has been written and crossed out so heavily that even infrared analysis at the Marbach archive cannot recover it.
The body of the letter is short. It says, in Lendl's literal English: I have not been honest with you in any letter I have written you in the last eight years. I am not going to begin now. Forgive me.
Rilke did not send it. He kept it. He died with it among his papers.
Whether it changes what we think of his letters is a question the reader will have to answer alone.
The book is large and expensive and will not, probably, find a wide readership. It deserves one anyway.