The influence of the image of Russia on the development of philosophical and religious views of Rainer Maria Rilke in the collection “Book of hours”

One of the most important works of Rainer Maria Rilke, reflecting the formation and development of the poet’s philosophical and poetic views at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, is the cycle of poems “Book of Hours” (1899-1903), created under the influence of the image of Russia that the author developed during his travels around the country. The aim of this work is to analyse Rilke’s “Book of Hours” in the context of the influence of this image on the dynamics of the poet’s philosophical and religious views in a certain period of his work. The hermeneutical approach was chosen as the main research method, within the framework of which the texts of R.M. Rilke’s works were interpreted taking into account the socio-historical conditions existing at the time of their writing. Systematisation and generalization of the obtained data made it possible to evaluate the author’s experience of Russia as a deep religious experience, expressed in a rethinking of Rilke’s attitude towards God, and to identify the contradictions of his philosophical and religious views. On the one hand, the concept of God, which occupies a central place in Rilke’s “Book of Hours”, represents an artistic refraction of the key ideas of the biblical tradition; on the other hand, God, according to the poet, manifests himself as a human creation, or more precisely, as a work of art: in the process of self-knowledge it must be discovered as the hidden “treasure” of one’s own soul. Consequently, this is not so much God the creator as a kind of internal resource, “God in man”, the idea of creation, which man must allow to arise within himself. The image of Russia as a country seeking God sets the vector for a “revaluation of values” modulated by the “Russian experience”, bringing Rilke closer to the point of view according to which spiritual journey requires a reorientation from orthodox ways of thinking and faith to an understanding of God as a path, as a “kingdom of God” that matures in the soul of an inner person.