Short answers, pulled from the story.
Rainer Maria Rilke was born on the 4th of December 1875 in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia. His mother Sophie Entz treated him as a substitute for a lost daughter, dressing him in fine clothes and denying his masculine identity during his earliest years.
Rainer Maria Rilke changed his first name from René to Rainer at the urging of the intellectual woman Lou Andreas-Salomé. She believed the new name was more masculine, forceful, and Germanic, helping him reinvent himself after a childhood where his identity was denied.
Rainer Maria Rilke completed the Duino Elegies in just a few weeks in February 1922 while staying at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland. This sudden outpouring of genius followed a decade of silence caused by the First World War and his subsequent military conscription.
Rainer Maria Rilke held complex and contradictory political views, shifting from support for the Russian Revolution in 1917 to a surprising admiration for Benito Mussolini in the final years of his life. In January and February 1926, he wrote letters praising the Italian dictator and describing fascism as a healing agent.
Rainer Maria Rilke died on the 29th of December 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland after suffering from leukemia and a non-healing wound from a rose thorn. He was buried on the 2nd of January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp.
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the letters that became Letters to a Young Poet to Franz Xaver Kappus, a 19-year-old officer cadet studying at the Theresian Military Academy in Wiener Neustadt. These letters were written between 1902 and 1908 and offer insight into the inner life of the artist and the necessity of solitude.