Rilke’s method : spiritual exercises for modernists in the crisis of early maturity

The article is a commentary on the Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters written to his wife in the years 1907-1908 from Paris, where he describes his spiritual transformation that occurred under the influence of his prolonged contact with the paintings of Paul Cezanne. This is a crucial period in the life of the German poet and thoughts expressed in those, intentionally composed, letters concern not only the essence of creativity, but they also present the project of modernist spiritual formation. The crisis of European culture is applied to them on a personal biography of the poet who finally finds a remedy for the condition of his spiritual exhaustion in humility to the unmediated experience of the materiality of the world and in practicing moral exercises on himself. The essay describes Rilke’s spiritual adventure in the mystery of initiation into maturity in terms of allegory illustrating the relationship between emotions left behind the extinct religion and the newborn aesthetic sensitivity. Modernism appears as an unfulfilled desire for self-determination